The Guac Bug

Betsy

Alfrey squinted hard at her. He tried to say something, but his larynx was apparently temporarily paralyzed. He gurgled. Gordio stood, wide-eyed, whispered something unintelligible. Judge Grant simply sat, looked quizzical, and waited.

Thomas spoke to her quietly. “Any trouble coming up?”

“No sir, not really. A man in a black suit stopped me in the hall. I told him Mr. Gordio had ordered the pizza, and he let me on by.”

“Very good. And now perhaps you’d better leave the pizza in the hall outside. We’ll get to it later.”

“Yes sir.” She reopened the door, put the box outside.

Alfrey demanded sternly, “Mr. Thomas, you know this young woman?”

“I do.”

“Then get her out of here!”

“Gentlemen,” queried Grant, “what’s going on?”

“Your honor,” Thomas explained, “may I introduce Ms. Hatfield. She is here on official business. She is in fact my one and only witness.”

“Witness? Witness?” demanded Alfrey. “What are you talking about? What could she possibly testify to? How to make pizzas? Your honor, how can you permit this mockery? I demand that you act! Call Security!”

“Sit down, Mr. Alfrey. Ms. Hatfield, are you here to testify?”

“I am, your honor.”

“Objection!” called Alfrey.

“Your honor,” Thomas said, “I think I can throw some light on Ms. Hatfield’s presence here.”

“Please do.”

“Somewhat over a year ago my client sent a messenger to ATCC in Rockville, Maryland with a biological specimen subsequently identified as ATCC 06 327, plus details of a process for isolation, culture, and use of the material. If matters had gone as planned, the messenger would have left the process document at ATCC along with the specimen, well more than a year before Catley-Torgsen filed its patent application, and such deposit would have constituted a bar to the patent under 35 USC 102. The messenger left the biological specimen but not the document, and he has now disappeared. A replacement document was eventually sent to Rockville, but too late to invalidate the patent.” He paused and studied Gordio from the corner of his eye. The C-T executive was squinting thoughtfully at Ms. Betsy Hatfield. Yes, thought Thomas, the disguise worked, she got through, and now you’re wondering whether you ought to be worried. Yes, Big John, you ought to be worried.

He continued. “Though we had left no printed description with the specimen, for the sake of completeness and in an excess of caution a Gruen scientist had encoded the culture details in the specimen itself, and she intended that this information be readily comprehensible to one skilled in the art. We had expected to prove this readability by a witness, a virologist coming up from Atlanta. He was to have flown up last night, but we received information at the last minute that he was the victim of a hit-and-run accident on his way to the airport. He is presently in traction in an Atlanta hospital.” He looked briefly at John Gordio. The man’s face was inscrutable. You bastard, thought Thomas. Would you have killed the man?

He resumed. “While we had no reason to anticipate foul play—and indeed, we accuse no one, nevertheless we thought best to play it safe, and be ready with a back-up witness. To ensure her safe passage, Ms. Hatfield comes to us under the cover of her actual employment, a delivery girl for Checkers Pizza. If she is permitted to testify I believe we can wrap up this arbitration within the hour.”

“And we still object,” declared Alfrey. “She’s obviously not qualified. The whole thing is a farce!”

Grant rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Should youth and a uniform disqualify her? I say no. She’s eligible. A question remains, however. It’s now nearly twelve. Shall we recess for lunch, or shall we play on through?”

“Respondent can stay,” Thomas said.

Alfrey and Gordio conferred. “We too,” the lawyer said. “But Mr. Gordio wonders if he could have the pizza?”

She brought the box back in and presented it to the executive with a curtsey.

Grant said, “Will the reporter swear the witness.”

She was sworn in, then took the witness chair.

Thomas said, “State your full name and city of residence.”

“Betsy Hatfield, Columbia, Maryland.”

“Age?”

“Seventeen.”

“Are you employed?”

“Yes sir, I’m a delivery girl for Checkers Pizza.”

“Full time?”

“No sir, just certain hours. I’m going to Howard County Community College full time.”

“How did you and I meet?”

“One day the Finance Officer at the college called me into her office. You were there.”

“I told you why I was there?”

“You said you were looking for a student—male or female—who had had biology in high school and who could do some homework and then testily about it in a patent case. You gave me a sheet with a lot of letters on it. You said it was a description of a biological specimen deposited with the American Type Culture Collection, and that it was in code. You asked me if I thought I could decode it. I said I didn’t know anything about codes. The whole thing looked pretty doubtful. Also, Mr. Thomas, meaning no disrespect, I couldn’t figure you out. I thought maybe you were actually… after… oh never mind.”

Thomas smiled. “So what happened next?”

“You said, take the paper home, think about it, call you if I wanted to tackle it. You said, if I solved the code, your client would pay my college expenses.”

Alfrey was up and objecting. “Your honor! You hear this? She’s barely out of high school. This witness is obviously not a qualified cryptanalyst. She cannot be permitted to testify in this very complicated matter.”

“Overruled. This is interesting—let’s listen.”

“So you took it home?” Thomas said.

“Yes sir. I called you that night and read off the solution to you. Somebody at Gruen called the Finance Office next day. For which I thank you, Mr. Thomas.”

“The pleasure is ours, Ms. Hatfield. Now then, did I give you any help? Any tips, like try this, or try that, or try’ such and such a system?”

“No sir. You said I had to do it all on my own, no help, no coaching, or it wouldn’t count. I was even afraid to use my P.C.”

“But you solved it. So explain how.”

“Yes sir. Well, I looked at the text. There were four different letters, G, U, A, and C. And since it’s a biological material, that translates to guanine, uracil, adenine, and cytosine. The ‘U’ means we’re looking at RNA, and a string of RNA nucleides. RNA synthesizes proteins in the cell. It does this by stringing together amino acids. There are twenty amino acids in our cells. Each amino acid is called up by its own special set of nucleides in the RNA. These sets are called codons, and each codon is made up of three nucleides. For example, the codon UUU calls for phenylalanine, UCU for serine, UAU for tyrosine, and so on. There are more codons than there are amino acids, so some amino acids are coded by several different codons. Also, one codon means ‘start’, and several mean ‘stop’.”

“Ms. Hatfield,” Thomas said, where did you get this information?”

“I had biology in high school, Mr. Thomas. I was pretty good at it. Remember?”

“Yes, of course. Please go on. What did you do next?”

“Well, the next step was to write the message out as a series of codons, then translate each codon into its corresponding amino acid.”

“Why do that?”

“Well, once you have everything down as the names of the acids, you can calculate the frequency of the names, then you can assign letters of the alphabet to the names. You do this with reference to the frequencies of the letters in an English text. You follow the same procedure Poe used in solving the code The Gold Bug.”

And now The GUAC Bug, thought Thomas. “What frequencies did you use?”

“Poe’s frequency list is adequate: a, o, i, e, h, n, r, s… I forget the rest. But I used linotype frequency, e, t, a, o, i, n, s, h… Quite similar to Poe’s, but probably a bit more accurate for current English, especially as to frequencies of ‘e’ and ‘t’.”

“So you assumed it was a simple substitution code, a given amino acid meant a given letter?”

“To start, yes sir, I thought I’d try that. Actually, substitution is the only kind of code I know. We used to pass notes with it in school. Okay?”

“Of course.” We all did, thought the lawyer. “Go on.”

“After I tabulated the amino acid frequencies in the message, I called the most frequent amino acid, ‘e’. That turned out to be leucine. Also, the ‘stop’ codons, UAA, UGA, and UAG set off several three-letter words that I suspected might be ‘the’. If I was right, that confirmed ‘e’ and right away gave me ‘t’ and ‘h’. So I called proline ‘t’ and that made histidine ‘h’. It looked good. Next I went to the two-letter words. Several had a ‘t’—and pretty soon I had ‘at’, ‘it’, and ‘to’, which gave me the vowels. I filled in all the letters over the names of the respective amino acids, leaving blanks where I had yet to determine the letter. Filling in the blanks was duck soup. ‘t_is’ is of course ‘this’, and since ‘o_’ is probably ‘or’ or ‘on’, I looked ahead a little to see which would make the best sense. If it’s ‘or’, I get ‘_iter’ and then ‘liter’ right away, so ‘o_’ had to be ‘or’. Actually the only two-letter word that gave me any trouble was ‘_1’, but I finally decided the blank was ‘m’, which I got after I filled out ‘hu_an’. The easiest two-letter word of course was ‘__’.”

“Which was?”

“ ‘cc’, Mr. Thomas. What else?”

“Of course. How long did it take you to completely decode the message?”

“About an hour. I’m afraid I sort of rushed it, because I didn’t want to be late for work.”

“I now show you a page of handwritten script. Can you identify this?”

“Yes sir. This is the message as I decoded it and wrote it out.”

“Offer in evidence, your honor, photocopies to opposing counsel and Mr. Gordio.”

Alfrey walked over, snatched the sheets from Thomas’s hands, gave him a venomous scowl, walked back to Gordio. They began scrutinizing the papers.

“That completes my direct. Your witness, Mr. Alfrey.”

“Yes, just one minute, please.” He continued to study the exhibit as he carried it toward the girl. He stopped and appeared to mark something in the text. “Now, Ms. Hatfield… ah, may I call you Betsy?”

“And I’ll call you Reggie? Sure, Reggie, go ahead.”

Grant put his hand over his mouth.

“Well, perhaps on the other hand… we’d best hold off on first names. Ah, Ms. Hatfield, you said the message used only twenty different amino acids?”

“Yes sir.”

“And every letter in the message was represented by an amino acid?”

“Yes sir.”

“You’ve sworn to tell the truth, Ms. Hatfield.”

“Yes sir.”

“But not every letter in the message has its corresponding amino acid, does it?”

“I do believe it does, Mr. Alfrey. Did you have some particular letter in mind?”

“I hand you your own translation, Ms. Hatfield. Would you please read the highlighted phrase?”

“Sure. It says ‘…extracted in a flask…’ Okay?”

“Fine. What amino acid stands for the letter ‘x’, Ms. Hatfield?”

“Oh, I see your problem. Actually, there is no amino acid for ‘x’, or ‘z’, and four other letters, which I forget just now. Whoever designed the message used ‘e-k-s’ for ‘x’. There are amino acids for each of those three letters. That’s what he did. I simply smoothed out the spelling.”

“Ah! You admit you altered the text!”

“I guess you could say that. I also put a period at the end.”

“So you lied when you said—”

Thomas was on his feet, but Judge Grant beat him to it. “Knock it off, counselor,” he growled.

“Withdrawn.” The cross-examiner gave the witness a sidelong glance. “Ms. Hatfield, what arts are you skilled in?”

“Not much of anything, I guess. Except maybe cooking. I make pretty good breaded veal cutlets. And last Thanksgiving I fixed the turkey all by myself, for eleven people. I—”

Alfrey interrupted. “Biology? You had only high school biology, no biology in college?”

“Yes sir.”

“You’re not really an authority in the field of microbiology?”

“No sir.”

“Or pharmaceuticals?”

“No sir.”

“Code breaking? You never worked at Fort Meade?”

“No sir.”

“What’s the chemical name of aspirin?”

“Acetyl salicylic acid.”

That stopped him for a moment. He stood and looked at her, puzzled. “How did you know that?”

“That was the password in our girls’ club when I was in sixth grade.”

Reggie, thought Thomas, you have just dug yourself a hole you’ll never get out of. You have proved one doesn’t have to be skilled in any art to read the code.

The corporation lawyer seemed to sense that cross had not gone well. “Nothing further.”

Thomas said, “No redirect. And if Ms. Hatfield is not needed further, I think she would like to be excused. She has a class at HoCo in thirty minutes.”

“Science?” asked Grant.

She said, “No sir, ballet.” And holding her arms over her head, she twirled in a perfect pirouette, then headed for the door.

The arbitrator sighed, shook his head, looked at his watch. “It’s one o’clock. A choice again—do you want to recess for lunch, or wind it up now?”

“I have no rebuttal,” Alfrey said, “but I do have an important motion.”

“On my time?” clipped Thomas. But then he thought, you are going to shoot yourself in the foot. “Oh well, go ahead, shoot.”

Alfrey drew himself up firmly. “Move to strike Ms. Hatfield’s testimony in its entirety. By her own admission she is not skilled in any art relative to ATCC 06. By prior written agreement, the parties were each bound to offer evidence only from witnesses skilled in the art. A pizza delivery girl simply doesn’t qualify as an expert.”

“Oppose,” Thomas said quickly. “In the first place, there is nothing in our arbitration contract that limits witnesses to those skilled in the art. Second, despite lacking any special skills, our pizza lady solved the code quickly and handily. A fortiori, one actually skilled in the art of microbiology would have been able to do the same.”

“I agree,” Judge Grant said. “Motion denied. Anything further? Nothing? So let us conclude. I declare this hearing terminated.” He turned to the computer terminal on his desk and began typing slowly, hunt-and-peck. As he typed he spoke in a firm clear voice. “I… find… for… Respondent Gruen Pharmaceuticals.”

Alfrey watched this in dismay. The printer whirred in near silence, Grant pulled off the document, signed it with a ball-point pen, and handed copies to the lawyers. “Mr. Alfrey?” Claimant’s counsel looked numb. The jurist finally had to touch the man’s hand with the edge of the paper before his fingers reached out for it.

“And now,” Grant said amiably, “we are going off the record.” He nodded to the reporter. “Ms. Johnson, we thank you for your assistance here. You are excused. As you leave, would you please switch off the TV camera.” As the door closed behind her the arbitrator addressed the group. “I think I can now give you the basic rule that governs this case and all cases like it. The rule is short and simple, but nobody is required to stay.”

Nobody moved.

As he continued the trace of a smile seemed to flicker around his mouth. “The rule is this: ‘One successful pizza delivery girl beats thirteen failed experts.’ ” He rose from the desk and started toward the door. In a moment he was gone.