Star Science Fiction No 6 by Frederik Pohl (ed.)

Author:Frederik Pohl (ed.)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci-Fi., Science Fiction, Anthology
Publisher: Ballentine Books
Published: 1959-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

* * * *

Potariskov came back to the Pentagon, this time accompanied by a Russian civilian. The new man’s English was a little more than perfect. The English was so good that it was desperately irritating.

Potariskov himself looked like a rather horsey, brown-faced schoolboy, with chestnut hair and brown eyes. I got to see him because they had me sitting in the back of Plugg’s office pretending just to wait for somebody else.

The conversation was very simple. Potariskov brought out a recording tape. It was standard American tape.

Plugg looked at it and said, “Do you want to play it right now?”

Potariskov agreed.

The stenographer got a tape recorder in. By that time three or four other officers wandered in and none of them happened to leave. As a matter of fact one of them wasn’t even an officer but he happened to have a uniform on that very day.

They played the tape and I listened to it. It was buzz, buzz, buzz. And there was some hissing, then it went clickety, clickety, clickety. Then it was buzz, buzz, buzz again. It was the kind of sound in which you turn on a radio and you don’t even get static. You just get funny buzzing sounds which indicates that somebody has some sort of radio transmission somewhere but it is not consistent enough to be the loud whee, wheeeee kind of static which one often hears.

All of us stood there rather solemnly. Plugg thoroughly a soldier, listened at rigid attention, moving his eyes back and forth from the tape recorder to Potariskov’s face. Potariskov looked at. Plugg and then ran his eyes around the group.

The little Russian civilian, who was as poisonous as a snake, glanced at every single one of us. He was obviously taking our measure and he was anxious to find out if any of us could hear anything he couldn’t hear. None of us heard anything.

At the end of the tape Plugg reached out to turn off the machine.

“Don’t stop it,” Potariskov said.

The other Russian interjected, “Didn’t you hear it?”

All of us shook our heads. We had heard nothing.

With that, Potariskov said with singular politeness, “Please play it again.”

We played it again. Nothing happened, except for the buzzing and clicking.

After the fifteen-minute point it was beginning to get pretty stale for some of us. One or two of the men actually wandered out. They happened to be the bona fide visitors. The non-bona fide visitors slouched down in the room.

Colonel Plugg offered Potariskov a cigarette which Potariskov took. They both smoked and we played it a third time. Then the third time Potariskov said, “Turn it off.”

“Didn’t you hear it?” said Potariskov.

“Hear what?” said Plugg.

“Hear the name and the address.”

At that the funniest feeling came over me. I knew that I had heard something and I turned to the Colonel and said, “Funny, I don’t know where I heard it or how I heard it but I do know something that I didn’t know.”

“What is that?” said the little Russian civilian, his face lighting up.

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