Tom Tiddler's Island, стр. 37
“Yes, but the damned thing doesn’t make sense,” Colin broke out in exasperation. “It’s just as much of a jumble as it was at the start. You haven’t solved it—or got anywhere near solving it.”
“Think so?” said Northfleet, imperturbably. “Well, we’ll take no short cuts, then, although one’s staring you in the face there. We’ll proceed logically, step by step. You see the letters I have put in italics? These are the T’s and H’s which fit into the 212-interval series I showed you a minute ago. The T in line 7 is the partner of the H in line 9; the T in line 14 is the mate of the H in line 16; the T in line 16 ought to be associated with the H in 18; and the two T’s in line 29 are the companions of the H’s in line 31. Does that suggest anything to you?”
“Not a damned thing,” Colin admitted despairingly. “This cipher business seems to need a special brand of head, like mathematics.”
“Well, look again,” Northfleet advised. “Each T is associated with an H; and that H is not in the line immediately below, but in the second lower line. There’s the T in line 9. Its mate is not in line 10 but in line 11. You skip a line before you come to the mate. See that?”
“Yes, I see that, now it’s pointed out. It holds for the lot.”
“Then look at it again, and you’ll see also that the T and its mate are either in the first group of four letters of their respective lines or in the last group of four letters. In other words, the components of the digraph always lie in the right-hand half of the column or in the left-hand half. You don’t find one in the left-hand half and the other in the right-hand half.”
“That’s so,” Colin admitted.
“That suggests that the two halves of the column are really independent, doesn’t it? And that the line intervening between the two components is out of its place proper owing to a second transposition introduced during the encipherment. Well, then. Try lines 7 and 9 together, splitting them into two groups of four letters each, and omitting line 8. You get this:
Read each section as you would read a book, and you can see the left-hand bit is ‘. . . f the last . . .’ while the right-hand bit is ‘. . . top think . . .’ That looks a bit more like English, doesn’t it?”
“I get you, Steve!” Colin ejaculated in relief. “This it? Split the big column into two columns-of-fours. Miss out all the even-numbered lines; and read the odd-numbered lines like a book, the left-hand page being the left column-of-fours and the right-hand page being the right column-of-fours But what about the even-numbered lines? Where do they come in? Or are they just duds?”
“No, they fit in all right. Here’s how it goes:
And so on. You see how they enciphered it? They wrote their message in columns-of-four. That gave eighty-four lines each of four letters. Then they split the single long column into four short columns and put them side by side, which gave the arrangement I’ve just shown you. Then they wrote la and lb as a single line, and made the next line 2a and 2b, this way:
T h e f n o f n
e a g a r t h r
And, finally, they re-wrote the thing in the order of the letters down the columns, t e, and so on. To decipher it, all the receiver had to do was to write the message in vertical lines of 84 letters, then arrange the columns as I did just now, and so read the thing straight off.”
“And how does it read?” Colin demanded impatiently.
Now, surely, he would come a step or two nearer to the key to the mysteries of Ruffa.
“Here’s the transcription. You’d have had it sooner if you hadn’t been so suspicious about its genuineness.”
He laid a final sheet of paper on the table, and Colin read the result of all this labour:
“The final lot of the last three thousand was sent off on Thursday and got through safe stop Nothing seen of Nipasgal stop Think of throwing them well off the scent by using another port next time stop Advise against landing chemicals till further notice stop Grey cloud in offing stop Will give you all clear thrice comma at nine comma, nine thirty comma and ten thirty comma on night before I expect you Ends Z.Z.”
“And this is the transcription of the second message,” said Northfleet, pointing with his pipe-stem lower down the page.
“Fishery gunboat has now left district and coast is clear comma so far as can be seen stop All ready for you to-night comma but approach cautiously stop Wait for lights at dusk before coming in stop.”
“Well,” said Northfleet, a trifle sardonically, “there’s your guaranteed decipherment. And what do you make of it?”
CHAPTER X
TOM TIDDLER’S GROUND
COLIN seemed in no haste to show his hand. He re-read the two messages with care before opening his mouth.
“Second one’s fairly straight,” he declared at last. “Taken with what we know already, it’s just directions to those artists on the yacht about coming in here. Only rum thing about it is the obvious relief they show at the Fishery gunboat clearing out. Quite evident they didn’t want her poking her nose into their affairs, eh?”
“Quite,” Northfleet agreed tersely.
From his tone it was clear that Colin’s inference was not new to him.
“Put that alongside the bit about the ‘grey cloud in the offing’ in the other message,” Colin proceeded. “That Fishery gunboat was grey painted. Think there’s anything in that?”
“I expect that was