The Stardroppers by John Brunner

personal names could be spelled out; for every letter of the alphabet and for every number up to a hundred there were a dozen associated phrases. Next he had been made to learn the code, pumped into him under deep hypnosis. The Agency used hypnosis a great deal, having refined the traditional techniques with the aid of drugs.
    The memorizing had taken a mere three months. Now, at the Agency’s main office in New York, there was a computer—number 04—into which they would feed the tape bearing his report, and it would print out in clear.
    The method wasn’t perfect. It was fat, to begin with, running a minimum twenty percent longer than clear language and occasionally as much as sixty percent, and sometimes sentence structure survived the coding procedure. But because the equivalence depended on Dan’s personal memories and not on a process that could be attacked statistically it would probably take longer to break than it had taken to build up. Even Dan himself could not decipher a transcript of one of his own reports; it required a post-hypnotic trigger, such as the three pips he’d heard on the phone this time, to make the code accessible to his conscious mind.
    Four pips on a lower tone followed his signing off, and he instantly forgot again how to speak in the code. His sense of elation lingered, though. It was sometimes very strong, as he imagined the aftermath of a vision might be to a mystic—a feeling that he had been briefly in closertouch with reality. He’d asked the analyst who had laid the foundations for the code about this, and had been told that in fact there was a more mundane explanation. Most people, the analyst asserted, had the ability to recall in the proper context a word they hadn’t thought of for years, even decades: perhaps a technical term, perhaps a foreign name. Given the right stimulus, up it would pop. And this of itself usually made the person affected feel pleased. In the case of an Agency code, there was a reinforcement Ordinary language was a series of labels invented by other people; Agency codes were derived from remembered events that were exclusively significant to the user, so recovering the knowledge of them and knowing them to have been usefully employed was a little like the case of a composer, say, who while walking down the street heard other people, total strangers, humming a song he had made up so long ago he’d almost forgotten about it.
    Whatever explanation might account for the experience, it was a valid one. Dan felt like a cat full of cream as he lounged in his armchair after completing his report. It wasn’t until, feeling for his cigarettes, he discovered a slip of paper in his pocket that he snapped back into contact with reality.
    He’d abandoned his stardropper at the Carlton’s commune. But he’d claimed the note Lilith had left, with its single scribbled word bold and black on the narrow white page.
    Had she slipped away like a mouse into a hole, wanting perfect privacy for some reason of her own? Or had she gone as Dr. Rainshaw alleged his son had gone—“miraculously”? If so, should he pity her?
    Or envy her?
    Which?

IX
    Through the main bar of the Hunting Horn pub, up a flight of stairs, he reached the meetingplace of the Club Cosmica. At the head of the stairs a girl volunteer was taking admission fees—a student, by the look of her. She was furnished with a list of recognized guests on which she found his name, and waved him by without charging anything.
    He passed on into a large room, divided by a heavy curtain three-quarters drawn into a meeting hall with rows of chairs facing a dais and a kind of antechamber where there was a bar. It was still nearly twenty minutes before the advertised time of starting, but already there were some forty people standing around in knots of four to six.
    The people he’d met at the commune this afternoon had been—congruous? Was there such a word? The hell with it. They fitted. He recalled Redver’s wry