Page 37 - Three Adventures

Deflator Mouse

slouched back to his desk. The cleaning crew knew not to enter his
office at night if the light were on; that meant he’d have to empty his
own waste-paper baskets, after separating the sensitive scraps from
the trivial or incoherent. No problem there: none of his notes made
any sense at all. In the week since the mysterious memo had
appeared, Doctor Beveledge had used every spare moment to expose
the identity of Deflator Mouse. Assuming a single person had
perpetrated all the pranks, the director had painstakingly assembled a
profile of qualifications, some quite general, that his tormentor had to
possess: college-level literacy; computer access and knowledge of
software internals; a sense of humor or absurdity; political leanings to
the left—or the very far right; and a certain bravado, a willingness to
risk all in a grand gesture. That accomplished, Oscar read carefully
through all the personnel records looking for tell-tale signs of
instability or past indiscretions. But the FBI had already done that in
issuing security clearances. Even the cleaning lady out in the hall had
been checked; nobody got onto the premises with an untested pass,
and nobody passed the test to get one without taking an oath only a
boy scout could repeat without blushing. So a superficial perusal of
the data wouldn’t cut it.
Beveledge flattered himself that he was well-acquainted with the
higher-level members of Project Salamander; after all, he had hand-
picked them himself. Thus his fear of sabotage was tinged with self-
doubt: how could he have misjudged so badly, missed the bad apple
in the barrel, taken in the Trojan horse? Given his managerial talents,
his bureaucratic savvy, his technical credentials, only one answer was
possible: a mole. Not a mouse. Somehow the Russians had
penetrated the academic pipeline feeding the military-industrial
complex with fresh blood. That meant deep cover, an identity with
roots extending down beyond the range of garden-variety digging
tools. Oscar’s mind was keen, but he had little chance of seeing
through a disguise virtually opaque to ordinary observation and
analysis. He re-copied his short-list of suspects and slipped it under
the blotter.
In three days the brass from Washington would assemble in the
refurbished dirigible hangar for a prototype demonstration of
Salamander. The model-makers had done their job well; Oscar
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