Time Travel Omnibus, page 675
“So what’s the problem?” I asked.
“Personally, no problem at all. Professionally, many problems. Professionally, I must know where he gets his information. Two months ago, for example, he recommended buying shares of an obscure regional oil producer. Two weeks later, my own company announced an offer for outstanding shares of that company. Naturally, anyone who followed the advice of the Reeve One Thousand made a killing. The point is, he could not have known that. Even my wife didn’t know that.”
“He’s always right?”
“No,” Staefler said. “But he’s right about 90% of the time. I had an analysis made of a number of leading market letters, testing out the accuracy of specific predictions. Most are no better than chance. The really good ones run between 60 and 70%. And then there’s Reeve.”
“He’s on a hot streak,” I said.
“He’s on an impossible streak,” Staefler said. “No one could predict the behavior of so many different stocks and commodities in so many markets with such precision. It’s just impossible. And then there are the errors. There’s something very strange about the errors. They’re not random. My analysts could explain this better to you, but they seem to form a pattern. As though they were deliberate. As though he’s just throwing in a few mistakes to make himself look occasionally fallible.
“And then, there’s no method behind all this. No consistent method, anyway. Sometimes it seems to be technical, other times it’s earnings and dividends, and other times again it just seems to come out of a clear blue sky.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Technical?”
“Technical analysts look at broad movements in the market, repetitive patterns. They use the past to predict the future. They don’t care about inflation or interest rates or profits, just those patterns. The technical analyst won’t tell you to buy or sell a particular share. He’ll just tell you to buy or sell, period. Like Wilks. On the theory that a rising market raises all boats and a declining one sinks them all. Reeve has given a couple of general buy or sell signals. But he also makes recommendations about individual shares, and he waffles a little about price-earnings ratio, although his heart doesn’t really seem to be in it. Which is very strange, because usually you’re either a technical guy or a price-earnings guy. You’re not likely to be both, and to be right on both fronts.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” I said.
I looked at the letter in front of me. “Expect an upswing in the Dow by mid February, led by oil and gas shares. Look for gains in Gulf, City Services, Texas International . . . Expect silver to test its 1980 high by early spring . . . Examination of transportation and mining indexes indicated no support for a broad-based advance . . . Interest rates will remain in the 18 to 20% range . . . High tech shares are heading for a fall . . . Sincerely yours, Reeve.”
“How are high tech shares doing?” I asked.
“On the skids,” Staefler said. “Off another five points this morning.”
“Did he call it, or create it?”
“A thousand subscribers won’t have that much impact,” Staefler said. “Even though illegal duplication puts this in the hands of four or five thousand people, and even though most of those will be big investors. It’s still pretty low-profile, compared to someone like Wilks. It’s getting more influential all the time, but for the moment it’s probably safe to say that he called it.”
“Who is this guy?” I asked. “And how does he do it?”
“Nobody knows who he is. No one has even seen him. And no one had heard of him before he started this letter. All we know about him is his post office box number. In Burlington, Vermont.”
“It’s a small town.”
“We don’t even know if he lives there. We don’t know one single thing about him. As far as we can tell, the man has no organization, no outside advisors, no research staff. Zip. As for how he does it, that’s for you to find out.”
“Maybe he’s a genius,” I said. “The Albert Einstein of the market. Maybe he’s discovered the philosopher’s stone. Maybe he’s psychic, and maybe he just has good inside information.”
“Yes, but inside information on so many stocks? So many accurate tips? That goes beyond a few loose lips. There would have to be espionage on a massive scale.”
“That would require a vast organization,” I objected. “Practically a CIA.”
“Maybe not,” Staefler said. “Maybe one guy could do it. One guy and a computer. Tapping into commercial data traffic on the coaxial cables. Getting advance information on oil discoveries, stock splits, mergers, maybe even government fiscal policy.”
“How easy would that be?”
“I would have said absolutely impossible. All sensitive data like these are encrypted these days, mostly using the DES—the Data Encryption Standard. That’s a 56-bit key.—Seventy-two quadrillion possibilities. Breaking it should be impossible—unless you had the biggest and fastest computer in the world. Bigger and faster than any computer anyone has ever built before. And who could build a computer like that? The Russians? The Mob? Who has resources on that kind of scale? And why piddle around with a newsletter when you could take over the entire economy?”
“Maybe to set us up,” I suggested. “Maybe the Russians are just setting us up to feed us some information that will destabilize the economy. In which case this would be a job for the government.”
“Not yet,” Staefler said. “We have nothing to go on. Only suspicions. That’s why I want you to find Reeve. Find out how he does it. How he operates. Who’s behind him. I’ll take it from there.”
Tracking down Reeve through his post office box was not especially difficult, only very tiresome. I flew into Burlington and rented a car. I made arrangements with a local investigative firm for surveillance. Then I checked into a hotel near the post office and waited, staying as close to the phone as possible.
I waited four days. I amused myself in the interim by watching a lot of soap operas and catching up on my back issues of the Journal of Social and Personal Psychology. Interesting things were happening in the cognitive-behavioral area, but I was no longer a part of them. Five years and four nontenure track appointments grinding out introductory psychology courses had been enough of the academic life for me. These days I was investigating other phenomena.
Finally the call came.
“It’s a couple of kids,” said my local operative. “Emptied the box and then crossed the street and went into the diner. They’re in there right now.”
“I’ll be right there,” I said.
My operative was sitting at a table near the door. I sat down opposite him. He waved his hand towards the window. They were kids all right, maybe eighteen or nineteen, casually dressed, one male and one female. There was a large mail bag at their feet underneath the table.
“I can recommend the clam roll,” my operative said. He was middle-aged and comfortably plump. He didn’t have the slightest idea what this assignment was about and probably didn’t care.
“Locals?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Ten to one they’re Canadians. You get to recognize them around here after awhile. There’s a Rabbit with Montreal plates at the meter outside. Could be theirs. Of course, Montreal plates are a dime a dozen round here, even mid week.”
The waitress came to take my order. I took my operative’s advice, and didn’t regret it.
I wrote a check for his services. It made only a small dent in Staefler’s advance.
The kids finished up and strolled out and got into the Rabbit. I strolled after them and got into my rented Dodge which was parked across the street. I followed them out to the highway. It was an easy tracking job. They didn’t have the slightest notion that anyone was following them.
I lost them at the Canadian border when an overzealous customs officer insisted on going through my luggage. I picked them up again ten miles down the road and stayed on their tail all the way into Montreal.
We reached journey’s end at a small and rather unprepossessing detached brick house in what looked like a lower-middle-class suburb in the north end of the city. One kid stayed in the car, and the other carried the bag up to the porch and rang the bell. The door opened, but it was too dark to see who was inside. A few minutes later the door opened again and the kid came out, holding an empty bag in one hand and an envelope in the other. The kid got back in the car and the car drove away.
I watched the house for a few hours. Lights went on, lights went off. Nobody went in or came out.
I locked my car and strolled over to the main street to get a bit to eat. I noted that my suspect’s street was called Gracey. Just for the hell of it, I looked in a phone book to see if there was a Reeve listed on Gracey. There wasn’t.
I walked back to my car and got inside and sat there shivering for a couple of hours. Montreal in February was colder than Burlington, which was colder than New York. But I didn’t want to run the motor. Stake-outs had never been among my favorite activities.
I wrote a brief report for Staefler giving the suspect’s address and put it in an envelope. I realized that I didn’t have any Canadian stamps. I didn’t have any American stamps for that matter. I left the envelope on top of the dashboard.
It was getting very late, and very cold. My feet were numb, and I was trying to remember the symptoms of frostbite. All of the lights in the house were out now. So were most of the lights on the street.
I sighed to myself. It was very dear to me what I had to do. I didn’t like the idea that much, but I couldn’t think of a better one. I got out of my car and stamped my feet a little until the circulation started to come back. Then I walked around to the side of the house and found a convenient basement window. I didn’t have to break the glass. The interior frame was so rotten the inside catch came away with just a little pressure from a screwdriver.
The basement was low and damp. At one end the furnace rumbled away. At the other end was a stairway to the main floor. I followed the stairs up into a hallway, closing the door quietly behind me.
Kitchen, living room, dining room, office. No giant computers, just a desk and a couple of filing cabinets and a typewriter and a microfilm viewer. Upstairs was one more floor, presumably bedrooms. I didn’t check it out.
I played my flashlight over the papers on the desk. Next month’s issue of the Reeve One Thousand. Gold was about to go through its 1981 ceiling. I wondered if I should leave right now and call my broker. Then I remembered that I didn’t have a broker.
I opened the top drawer of one of the filing cabinets. Files. Names of subscribers, statements, payments due. A regular little businessman.
I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking for, or whether I would know what it was when I found it. Bottom drawer, more files. Second cabinet, top drawer . . . no files. Boxes. Little cardboard boxes. I opened one. A spool of film, presumably microfilm. I looked at the title on the box. I blinked. I looked at it again. I shook my head. I looked at it still a third time.
And then the lights went on and a man came through the door carrying a gun.
“Why not?” I asked. “Why wouldn’t you call the police?”
He sighed.
“This is all very messy, you know,” he said. “I expected to arouse interest eventually. I expected that someone would track me down. But I didn’t expect anything quite so crude as this. I expected that I would be able to explain matters in a civilized manner.”
“Go ahead,” I said. “Explain away.
I’m reasonably civilized.”
He sighed again.
“I had it all worked out you know. What I was going to say. I was going to say that it was all a matter of computers.”
I nodded my head. “Well that sounds reasonable,” I said. “I can certainly buy that. Using computers to decode data traffic. We suspected something of the sort.”
“Oh no,” he said. He looked positively shocked. “That would be quite illegal, not to mention impossible. I was going to say that I was using computers to generate my predictions, using a highly sophisticated economic modelling software package of my own device.
“And if they didn’t buy that,” he continued. “I was simply going to claim that I was psychic. That I could read the future like an open book.”
“I prefer the computers,” I said. “You can do wonderful things with computers these days. But I suppose I could buy that too. In fact, you must be psychic. What other explanation could there be?”
“Mr. Hendricks,” he said. “You are still holding the other explanation in your hand. As we both very well know.”
I looked again at the impossible title on the microfilm box.
NEW YORK TIMES, March 6th-21st, 1985
“And that,” he said, “is why I obviously cannot call the police.”
“I see it,” I said. “But I’m still not quite sure I believe it. Where did you get this?”
“From the library,” he said. “You can take my word for it that no one will miss it.”
“What library?” I asked. “Where?”
“I think you mean, when, don’t you?” he asked. “The where of it doesn’t make a great deal of difference, but I’ll tell you anyway. From the UCLA library, circa January 1993.”
“You’re claiming that you traveled to the future?”
“It’s the other way around, Mr. Hendricks. I traveled from the future—bringing with me a microfilm run of the New York Times 1981 to 1991. The paper ceased publication in 1991, but then you wouldn’t know that.”
“Ceased publication?” I echoed.
“No newsprint, no power supply, no staff. No New York city, for all intents and purposes. And no New York Times. Let me tell you about the future, Mr. Hendricks. You wouldn’t like it.”
“War?” I asked.
“Oh, certainly a few small wars here and there. But nothing really dramatic. Not in my time, at least. I’ve no idea what happened after I left. But basically just a . . . falling apart. The same process that is going on all around us right now, but accelerated a hundredfold. A collapse of overstrained socio-economic structures. I could try to explain it to you, but it’s really not my field. This financial stuff does not come easily to me, let me tell you. I’m a physicist, not an economist. Or I was. Now I just write my little letters.”
“How did you get here?” I asked. “And why here?”
“Experimental process,” he said. “Tachyons, and so forth. We had never tried it on a human being, but the animal tests were promising. And then they closed down the university, so I figured, what the hell? How could I be any worse off? As for why here, the process only extended back twelve years. But twelve good years is better than none.”
“Why Montreal?”
“A number of reasons,” he said. “Anonymity. No danger of encountering people who knew me, or my own self of this period. Keeping a distance from curious subscribers. And then, Canada will survive the collapse a little better than the USA, up to 1993 at least. Fewer people to begin with, a more centralized banking system, a smaller underclass, greater social discipline . . . Of course, there will be trouble here, too. Quebec will attempt to separate in 1986, if I remember correctly, and there will be some bloodshed. But by then I plan to be farther west, possibly in Edmonton.”
“And the letters?” I asked. “What’s the point of the letters?”
He shrugged. “Money,” he said. “By the time things get really tough around here, I plan to be long gone. I plan to buy myself a nice little Greek island to retire on.” He laughed.
“Maybe I’ll buy all of Greece.”
“Why sell the information? Why not just play the market?”
“That’s a good question,” he said. “Initially I planned to do this just for a year. To get seed money for my own investments. But you know, there’s something a little compulsive about it—being all-knowing—that could be a hard thing to give up. And apparently I don’t want to give it up. Not for a while at least. Two years from now there will be an international currency collapse. It will be the first critical moment in the forthcoming sequence of disasters. It will be triggered by a run on the yen in the New York markets, and it will be followed by what, for want of a better word, people will call a Depression. According to news reports of the time, massive selling of the yen will be blamed upon a mysterious market letter, the Reeve One Thousand.”
“Then it will be your fault,” I said. “You’re going to make it happen.”
“That’s not true,” he said. “It’s inevitable. It’s all quite inevitable. I may be the instrument of fate, but I’m simply following script.”
“And what does the script say about me?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Of course, I don’t have copies of the Montreal Gazette. If I did, it might carry the sad story of the New York investigator found murdered in the trunk of his car. But I don’t recall any mention of your name in the Times. Of course, the story wouldn’t have mentioned me, so I might have passed right over it. I’m not that interested in crime news.”
“You don’t have to kill me,” I said. “You know that you keep on publishing the letter. I don’t stop you.”
He considered.
“What you say may be true. But I think it’s more realistic to assume that I do kill you, because that seems by far the simplest way of ensuring your silence. And therefore, I must kill you. I hope you understand that?”
What if we break the script?” I asked. “What if you don’t kill me and you stop publishing your letter and the yen doesn’t collapse and there isn’t another Depression?”
“You think I haven’t thought about that?” he asked. “You think I want things to fall apart? I’m just trying to survive the best way I can. And I just feel that things had to happen this way. I’ve tried to stop, you know. I’ve really tried. There are days when I’ve said, I’m not going to work on that letter. I’ve even left the house, gone downtown. And then it was as if this giant hand just grabbed hold of me and forced me to come back here and sit down and write the goddam letter.”
