Worth the Candle

Chapter I

Circa 1960

Oh the hell with it, he said, for two bits I’d forget the whole damned degree and take up bricklaying. John’s eyes leveled with the rims of his coffee cup as though he were aiming a weapon at his fellow graduate student, chum, and confidant, George, who was accustomed to hearing his friend’s laments about the progress he was making on his thesis.

A person’s destiny is the sum total of many turnings, some major, some minor, and some so subtle that there is no discernable portend. Mortal danger, murder, torture, terror were all far from the minds of the unsuspecting pair who were within minutes of the first perturbation that would lead them in such directions.

This is my third false start, and I’ve about had it with my advisor, he continued, while sipping his coffee and eyeing the coeds who drifted by their table in the cafeteria of the Student Union Building.

The two were taking their customary afternoon break from their not too strenuous duties as Research Assistants at the Computer Laboratory, where such an Assistant could earn enough to keep his corporeal embodiments reasonably nourished while pursuing his Ph.D. degree.

Why don’t you switch to Professor Solbrig? offered George, knowing full well the groan he’d hear as a reply, he’s not that bad.

Why don’t you take a flying … leap at a rolling donut, was John’s retort, his last words being modified in mid articulation in deference to a passing lady professor whom they both liked.

John Butler was a well-built, swarthy complexioned young man. Not in the mold of a matinee idol by any means, but a hunk in the coed vernacular.

George Fromm was slender, and a bit on the pale side, as though he had not been out in the sun much. He was the more studious looking of the two, and that observation was not totally incorrect. While they were roughly equal in academic ability, George attained his level by thorough and planned study, while John managed on a light diet of book study and survived on the basis of intuitive leaps as well as an ability to interpolate between things he had studied.

George was slow and steady, while John was quick but erratic. George was married while John still played the field. And play he did.

In the same sense that opposites sometimes attract people of the opposite sex, George and John had become good friends because they complemented each other in so many traits.

There’s Gordy, said George, waving Gordon Mitchell over to their corner table. They often met with Gordy in the afternoons to rap over coffee and the greasy but satisfying donuts that were unique to the Union. He was older than the other two, and while ostensibly pursuing a degree like them, it was common knowledge that he had stalled out, was turning into a programming bum, and could often be found in the wee hours communing with the Computer Lab’s homegrown computer, QUADIAC.

The QUADIAC was being designed and built by the Computer Lab’s staff as a research project funded by the Office of Naval Research and the Atomic Energy Commission. The kinds of computation demanded by the projects being pursued by those agencies were increasing so rapidly in their need for raw computing power, that the commercial computer industry was unable to satisfy them.

Strictly speaking, it was primarily graduate student labor that had been expended in both the design and construction of the machine, though the credit was conferred almost exclusively upon the senior faculty members, who were even now feverishly generating papers upon the project, to be published far and wide.

Gordon had contributed mightily to the programming effort necessary to bring such a project to fruition, and his abilities were known and respected by all the graduate students and the faculty as well, but he was also known to be the software equivalent of a gadgeteer. He was forever tackling the latest wrinkle in programming, and would be enormously interested in it until he had mastered it, then he would lose that interest. It was therefore the very devil to get him to apply his prodigious knowledge and abilities to anything productive. He was always generous with his time when others needed technical advice, and his boundless enthusiasm made him a very entertaining companion.

Physically, Gordy was no woman’s ideal. He roughly approximated the less desirable of two figures on a poster popular among the coeds at that time: he had a potbelly, his hair was rarely combed, he was a trifle careless about his attire, etc. Since he showed little interest in members of the opposite sex, however, their distaste was not discernible to him.

Hi guys, he said, you turkeys ever hear of the Beale Code? As usual, he began an account of his latest interest without preamble.

George and John both knew that his latest passion was cryptography, his interest having been kindled by the growing need for computer privacy. It was typical lately for him to regale them with stories of the latest encryption techniques that he had dug up, and the two steeled themselves for the unstoppable torrent of information about to be laid upon them.

But today was different … today Gordy had an intensity in his manner that his friends immediately picked up upon, and they fell silent rather than replying with their usual good natured sarcasm.

Gordy looked from one to the other as though expecting an affirmative reply to his question, but he would actually have been surprised had they made one.

Well, it seems there was this guy, Thomas Jefferson Beale, who was chasing an enormous herd of buffalo with a group of men a couple of hundred miles south of what is now Santa Fe, New Mexico back in 1818 …

Hey, what kind of crap are you trying to feed us? asked John.

It’s not crap, said Gordy, slightly offended. Do you want to hear the story or don’t you?

Well, could you tell us where it’s going to lead? asked George.

To about twenty million dollars in gold.

So talk, said John.

Okay. So anyway, they camp for the night … there were about thirty of them, and they discover nuggets of gold … real gold … sitting right on top of the ground.

What is this, some kind of fairy tale? said John, annoyed by the feeling that this was foolish talk.

Hear me out, will you? They apparently camped on what had once been an old stream bed. It probably took a million years for the water to wash all that gold out.

Why wouldn’t someone else have found it before them? John asked with the look of a nonbeliever.

"You’ve got to realize what year we’re talking about; it was utter wilderness at that time … no white man, and probably no Indian had ever set foot there before. Have you ever flown over the Southwest? There’s an incredible amount of wasteland there, and I’ll bet a lot of it’s never been explored … I mean closely … even today.

But let me go on …

Where’s this all going? interrupted John, with slightly less sarcasm in his voice, getting interested in spite of himself.

You’ll see … be patient, said Gordy, aware that John had become oblivious to the half eaten donut on his plate.

At any rate, they stayed there for several months, gathering up a half ton in gold and almost two tons of silver, which was often found cheek-to-jowl with gold. Then they loaded it on wagons and ten of them started back East. They brought it all the way back to Virginia and buried it in large, covered iron pots.

How do you know all this? George asked, pulling out a cigarette.

It’s historically documented … let me finish the story. They made several trips … I suppose the gold got tougher to find … and brought back another nineteen hundred pounds of gold, more silver, some jewels, and buried it all with the first bunch.

Wait a minute, where did the jewels come from? asked John, you trying to tell us they found those lying on the ground too?

No, they stopped off at some fairly large town along the way to trade in some of the gold for something less heavy. It was probably risky, but gold is awfully heavy stuff to lug two-thirds of the way across the country.

Why would it be ‘risky’? asked George.

"Well, I imagine that if people got wind of someone having large quantities of gold, it might raise quite a stir, and it’s pretty clear that they didn’t want anyone to know about their find until they’d pretty well cleaned it out.

The whole business was pretty risky, if you think about it. There were still hostile Indians in the Southwest at that time, and travel was probably pretty hazardous. As a matter of fact, Indians may very well have done them all in on their last trip West.

You mean they were all killed? asked John.

Well, they disappeared, or seemed to. If they didn’t, the rest of this would be moot.

Go on, the two urged.

Apparently there was something special about their last trip, because Beale left a metal box with an innkeeper he trusted, and instructed him to open it if he didn’t return within a year.

What was in the box? asked John, stretching his six foot frame in a manner that would remind a medical man of someone in the death throes of tetanus.

Well, the innkeeper forgot about the box, and Beale never returned. Some twenty years later, the innkeeper came across it again while cleaning out a storeroom or something, and opened it … Gordy paused for effect.

So what the hell was in it? asked George with some irritation.

There was a letter and three ciphers.

You mean three coded messages? asked George.

Yes, on three separate sheets of paper. The letter instructed the innkeeper to use the cipher keys that Beale would send him to decode the ciphers, one of which described the treasure in detail, the second of which told how to find it, and the third of which was a list of the next of kin of Beale and his band of followers. He was to dig up the treasure and distribute it amongst the next of kin, taking an equal share for himself for his trouble.

Beale must have really trusted him, marveled George, shaking his head.

Yeah, so did he go ahead and do it? asked John, leaning forward in his chair.

No, he didn’t; he couldn’t … Beale never sent the cipher keys.

Did you say keys? interjected John, ever alert.

Yes, each cipher used a different key.

Was he able to break them without the keys? asked George.

No and yes … he couldn’t handle them, so he enlisted the aid of an associate who finally broke one, the others have never been broken to this day.

What did it have to say? asked John, leaning forward again.

The most frustrating thing possible … it gives a description of the treasure, and a rough idea where it was hidden, but doesn’t give enough details to actually locate it. Here’s a copy of the plaintext. Gordy brought a very wrinkled piece of paper from his pocket and spread it out on the table where it immediately began to darken in the middle as spilled coffee on the table soaked through.

Look out, you’re ruining it, John howled, snatching up the paper and trying (unsuccessfully) to brush off the moisture. He held it so George could read it too.

I have deposited in the County of Bedford about four miles from Buford’s in an excavation or vault six feet below the surface of the ground the following articles belonging jointly to the parties whose names are given in number three herewith. The first deposit consisted of ten hundred and fourteen pounds of gold and thirty eight hundred and twelve pounds of silver deposited November 1819. The second was made December 1821 and consisted of nineteen hundred and seven pounds of gold and twelve hundred and eighty pounds of silver, also jewels obtained in St. Louis in exchange to save transportation and valued at thirteen thousand dollars. The above is securely packed in iron pots with iron covers. The vault is roughly lined with stones, and the vessels rest on solid stones and are covered with others. Paper number two describes the exact locality of the vault so that no difficulty will be had in finding it.

Was it some kind of simple alphabetic substitution code, or transposition, or a combination of the two? asked John.

No, it was keyed on the original version of the Declaration of Independence; the versions you see today are sanitized.

Was it on a word count or a letter count basis? continued John, gazing dreamily at the ceiling.

Wait a minute, what does that mean? asked George, feeling left out.

Oh, you just number the words of the key document consecutively and substitute the number of a word for a letter in the plaintext … that’s the message you want to encipher … that appears, say, as the first letter of that word, explained Gordy, who loved to lecture, but did it in such an unaffected way that nobody minded.

I see, said George, and for a letter count system you number each letter in the key consecutively.

That’s right, said Gordy, "the trouble with a word count system is that the starting letters of words are a little limiting … there aren’t many words that start with ‘U’ for example. And sure enough, there are at least a couple of cases where Beale couldn’t find a word in the Declaration of Independence that started with the letter he needed, so he picked a word that contained that letter.

So that’s essentially where it stands; untold numbers of people have supposedly racked their brains since then trying to break the other ciphers, or cipher … I doubt that anyone is very interested in who the next of kin was.

Are you sure this isn’t just a bunch of crap … a hoax? asked John.

"Well, it seems to be in harmony with the family history of the Beales; one was written a few years ago, and a guy with the National Bureau of Standards performed some analyses using standard cryptographic routines and concluded that the unsolved ciphers definitely contain information, they’re not just the collection of random numbers you’d expect if someone had been trying to author a hoax.

Another thing … the analyses seemed to indicate that the unsolved ciphers were encoded on a letter count basis instead of word count.

I don’t know, said John. If it were real, surely someone would have cracked it by now, its been what … almost a hundred and forty years … even if Beale and company didn’t come back after their last trip and take all the gold, or leak it to someone else who would have taken it after they left.

Sure it’s possible, anything’s possible, but remember that all three ciphers were encoded using the only theoretically unbreakable encoding technique the ‘one-time pad’. This was said with emphasis.

You mean that you’ve absolutely got to find the key document to break the code? asked George, that’s probably impossible if no one has come across it in a hundred and forty years.

That’s true in theory, but this National Bureau of Standards guy is pursuing that tack, searching far and wide for documents of that era to try out. If you think about it, the literacy level in that era was still pretty low. Outside of the family Bible, if that, what would you expect to find in a typical 1820’s household?

Well, to begin with, Beale’s household may not have been typical, but it strikes me that this all took place less than fifty years after the Revolutionary War, and patriotic fervor may still have been high … look at the name Beale’s parents chose for him, said John.

Getting back to whether anyone else may have solved it by now, without a key that is, they would have virtually gone blind trying to keep the numbers straight, offered Gordy.

I don’t follow you, said John, every number used in a one-time pad is unique, isn’t it?

Ah, you’ve seen it too. An idealized one-time pad is just a set of random associations between numbers and letters, with a given association being used once and only once. A book is a pretty good approximation because the association is almost random, but it has to be used properly, that is a number should never be used more than once. Beale was lazy, or maybe under time pressure, because he reused quite a few numbers. In fact, if you stare at the code long enough, you’d swear you saw patterns.

Do you have a copy of the cipher? asked John, eagerly.

I thought you’d never ask, said Gordy with a smile, proffering a folded but still crisp sheet of paper with neatly formatted numbers covering a roughly square matrix.

A printout, exclaimed George, so you’ve been doing some analysis of your own.

Well, why not? said Gordy, things are always slow on campus in the summer, and I got to thinking that, while the code’s been around for a hundred and forty years, the computer has been here only about thirty, and the first decade or so doesn’t really count because the software techniques were so primitive. I figure that with the computer’s help it might just be possible to crack this thing.

Just how much is that gold worth today? asked George, gold prices have been soaring since the $35 dollar an ounce price lid was removed.

Let’s see, said John with his felt tip pen poised over the back of the Beale code listing, I think it hit around $500 the other day; for the weight Beale gave, that would come to about, he paused for effect, twenty four million dollars.

Gordy carefully spread the sheet on the table thus:

71 194 38 1701 89 76 11 83 1629 48 94 63 132 16 111 95 84 341 975 14 40 64 27 81 139 213 63 90 1120 8 15 3 126 2018 40 74 758 485 604 230 436 664 582 150 251 284 308 231 124 211 486 225 401 370 11 101 305 139 189 17 33 88 208 193 145 1 94 73 416 918 263 28 500 538 356 117 136 219 27 176 130 10 460 25 485 18 436 65 84 200 283 118 320 138 36 416 280 15 71 224 961 44 16 401 39 88 61 304 12 21 24 283 134 92 63 246 486 682 7 219 184 360 780 18 64 463 474 131 160 79 73 440 95 18 64 581 34 69 128 367 460 17 81 12 103 820 62 116 97 103 862 70 60 1317 471 540 208 121 890 346 36 150 59 568 614 13 120 63 219 812 2160 1780 99 35 18 21 136 872 15 28 170 88 4 30 44 112 18 147 436 195 320 37 122 113 6 140 8 120 305 42 50 461 44 106 301 13 408 680 93 86 116 530 82 568 9 102 38 416 89 71 216 728 965 818 2 38 121 195 14 326 148 234 18 55 131 234 361 824 5 81 623 48 961 19 26 33 10 1101 365 92 88 181 275 346 201 206 86 36 219 320 829 840 68 326 19 48 122 85 216 284 919 861 326 985 233 64 68 232 431 960 50 29 81 216 321 603 14 612 81 360 36 51 62 194 78 60 200 314 676 112 4 28 18 61 136 247 819 921 1060 464 895 10 6 66 119 38 41 49 602 423 962 302 294 875 78 14 23 111 109 62 31 501 823 216 280 34 24 150 1000 162 286 19 21 17 340 19 242 31 86 234 140 607 115 33 191 67 104 86 52 88 16 80 121 67 95 122 216 548 96 11 201 77 364 218 65 667 890 236 154 211 10 98 34 119 56 216 119 71 218 1164 1496 1817 51 39 210 36 3 19 540 232 22 141 617 84 290 80 46 207 411 150 29 38 46 172 85 194 36 261 543 897 624 18 212 416 127 931 19 4 63 96 12 101 418 16 140 230 460 538 19 27 88 612 1431 90 716 275 74 83 11 426 89 72 84 1300 1706 814 221 132 40 102 34 858 975 1101 84 16 79 23 16 81 122 324 403 912 227 936 447 55 86 34 43 212 107 96 314 264 1065 323 428 601 203 124 95 216 814 2906 654 820 2 301 112 176 213 71 87 96 202 35 10 2 41 17 84 221 736 820 214 11 60 760

In unison the three heads bent forward over the sheet of cipher numbers, and an observer (had there been one) would have concluded (with some accuracy) that the three had just reached an agreement upon something.

What kind of approach are you taking? asked John.

So far I’ve been taking a look at the statistical makeup of the code, trying to get some kind of feeling for the nature of the beast. It’s really very intriguing. I thought I might study samples of other encipherments encoded in known ways to see if I can recognize a similar statistical signature.

Where the hell is that going to lead you? At best you’ll end up with a confirmation of the conclusions of that guy from the National Bureau of Standards; at worst, you won’t learn anything. John had a way of getting at the nub of things.

Well, I thought I might gain a little insight, said Gordy, do you have any better suggestions? He was a little taken aback. Say, how would you guys like to join me on this thing?

Well, I’ll tell you, right now it sounds a hell of a lot more interesting than working on a thesis, responded John in a speculative tone of voice.

Likewise, said George, but don’t mention it to my wife. She’d like me to finish up some time this century.

I have a thought, said John, maybe everyone’s been barking up the wrong tree by concentrating on the cipher that tells where the stuff is. Maybe the cipher that lists the next of kin would be easier to break, and there might be some clues in it that would help in tackling the other cipher. Do you have a copy of the next-of-kin cipher?

Not with me of course, but I can dig one up. You may have a good idea there.

I think I’d better spend a little time boning up on cryptography, said George, then I’ll jump into the fray.

CHAPTER II

It was a week later that the trio met in the Student Union building at the same table as before (and where they would meet to discuss their progress repeatedly in the coming weeks; in the past they had chosen tables more or less at random, but they all felt drawn to the one where they had first discussed the Beale Code; somehow they felt compelled to try to recapture the same mood as that first day, complete with irrelevant atmosphere).

How’s it going guys? began Gordy, I’ve managed to wangle a pretty good block of QUADIAC’s time courtesy of the Physics Department. Fifteen minutes a day! It wasn’t easy, but a lot of those profs owe me for jams I’ve gotten them out of in the past … like Jenson when his wave equation program started spitting out garbage and he had a deadline to meet on his paper … I spent the whole weekend bailing him out. It wasn’t bragging, just explanation.

I spent most of the week grading Pottle’s final exam for him, complained John, I wish the hell he’d learn to write a decent exam with civilized solutions; not one of those problems could be solved in closed form! But I did take the trouble to get out a map of Virginia, and there is a Bedford County!

He pulled out a well-worn Rand McNally Road Atlas, and turned to a carefully dogeared page depicting the sovereign state of Virginia.

This damned Atlas has the county lines and names so poorly defined that I had to go to the encyclopedia to help trace it. The other two shifted their chairs to get a better view.

Is there any way to check to see if the boundary lines are the same now as they were a hundred and forty years ago? asked George.

Why would they shift them? asked Gordy.

They might shift themselves, answered George, if one of the boundaries is a river or stream, and the legal description of the boundary is the stream, then if it changes its course, the boundary moves with it.

Well, I don’t see any river boundary, so don’t worry about it, said John, I notice though that there’s some pretty high ground near the western border, almost four thousand feet. It seems to be slightly to the east of the Appalachians proper. I also found reference to something called Balcony Falls, at the north end, where it meets two other counties, and you can see that there’s a good size lake on the southern boundary.

It sounds like it might be pretty rugged territory; that might explain why the treasure’s never been found, offered George, I’d been thinking that Virginia is one of the oldest populated areas in the country, and old Beale’s gold might be six feet under the pavement of the parking lot of a shopping center.

I gather that there’s still a lot of untouched land there, primarily because it’s not used for agriculture, said John.

Non arable? asked George.

Non horizontal, said John. They laughed.

What’s the law say about finding someone’s treasure on someone else’s land, and trying to make off with it? asked George.

I would assume they would take a dim view of it, said Gordy, and so would the owner of the land, I imagine … then there’s the IRS, which I’m sure would have its hand out.

Well, I wouldn’t worry too much about counting broken laws before the code’s hatched, said John.

I’ve been doing some reading on cryptography, said George, and I was struck with the importance given to having some clue as to the contents of the plaintext … the message … in trying to break the code. It seems to me that we have all kinds of clues as to the verbiage in the cipher: it’s got to contain directions, distances, the names of physical markers, and it probably has the name Buford, and the words ‘vault’, ‘iron pots’, and so on.

How is that going to help you? asked John.

Well, what I had in mind was the following, George fell into the lecturing mode that he had picked up spending two years as a teaching assistant, and I should give credit to Jeanie …

Jeanie! You told her? John said in a surprised voice.

Yes, and to my amazement, she was interested, and we had a long talk about it. At any rate, suppose we use the computer primarily as a clerk, to insert hypothesized letters everywhere in the cipher that the corresponding letter occurs.

"That’s easy enough, but where do you get your hypotheses from, and what do you do when you run out of repeating letters? There are quite a few,