II

The telephone, Malone realized belatedly, had had a particularly

nasty-sounding ring. He might have known it would be bad news.

As a matter of fact, he told himself sadly, he had known.

"Nothing at all wrong?" he said into the mouthpiece. "Not with any of

the computers?" He blinked. "Not even one of them?"

"Not a thing," Mitchell said. "I'll be sending a report up to you in a

little while. You read it; we put them through every test, and it's

all detailed there."

"I'm sure you were very thorough," Malone said helplessly.

"Of course we were," Mitchell said. "Of course. And the machines

passed every single test. Every one. Malone, it was beautiful."

"Goody," Malone said at random. "But there's got to be something--"

"There is, Malone," Fred said. "There is. I think there's definitely

something odd going on. Something funny. I mean peculiar, not

humorous."

"I thought so," Malone put in.

"Right," Fred said. "Malone, try and relax. This is a hard thing to

say, and it must be even harder to hear. But--"

"Tell me," Malone said. "Who's dead? Who's been killed?"

"I know it's tough, Malone," Fred went on.

"Is everybody dead?" Malone said. "It can't be just one person, not

from that tone in your voice. Has somebody assassinated the entire

Senate? Or the President and his Cabinet? Or--"

"It's nothing like that, Malone," Fred said, in a tone that implied

that such occurrences were really rather minor. "It's the machines."

"The machines?"

"That's right," Fred said grimly. "After we checked them over and

found they were in good shape, I asked for samples of both the input

and the output of each machine. I wanted to do a thorough job."

"Congratulations," Malone said. "What happened?"

Fred took a deep breath. "They don't agree," he said.

"They don't?" Malone said. The phrase sounded as if it meant something

momentous, but he couldn't quite figure out what. In a minute, he

thought confusedly, it would come to him. But did he want it to?

"They definitely do not agree," Fred was saying. "The correlation is

erratic; it makes no statistical sense. Malone, there are two

possibilities."

"Tell me about them," Malone said. He was beginning to feel relieved.

To Fred, the malfunction of a machine was more serious than the murder

of the entire Congress. But Malone couldn't quite bring himself to

feel that way about things.

"First," Fred said in a tense tone, "it's possible that the

technicians feeding information to the machines are making all kinds

of mistakes."

Malone nodded at the phone. "That sounds possible," he said. "Which

ones?"

"All of them," Fred said. "They're all making errors--and they're all

making about the same number of errors. There don't seem to be any

real peaks or valleys, Malone; everybody's doing it."

Malone thought of the Varsity Drag and repressed the thought. "A bunch

of fumblebums," he said. "All fumbling alike. It does sound unlikely,

but I guess it's possible. We'll get after them right away, and--"

"Wait," Fred said. "There is a second possibility."

"Oh," Malone said.

"Maybe they aren't mistakes," Fred said. "Maybe the technicians are

deliberately feeding the machine with wrong answers."

Malone hated to admit, even to himself, but that answer sounded a lot

more probable. Machine technicians weren't exactly picked off the

streets at random; they were highly trained for their work, and the

idea of a whole crew of them starting to fumble at once, in a big way,

was a little hard to swallow.

The idea of all of them sabotaging the machines they worked on, Malone

thought, was a tough one to take, too. But it had the advantage of

making some sense. People, he told himself dully, will do nutty things

deliberately. It's harder to think of them doing the same nutty things

without knowing it.

"Well," he said at last, "however it turns out, we'll get to the

bottom of it. Frankly, I think it's being done on purpose."

"So do I," Fred said. "And when you find out just who's making the

technicians do such things--when you find out who gives them their

orders--you let me know."

"Let you know?" Malone said. "But--"

"Any man who would give false data to a perfectly innocent computer,"

Fred said savagely, "would ... would--" For a second he was apparently

lost for comparisons. Then he finished: "Would kill his own mother."

He paused a second and added, in an even more savage voice: "And then

lie about it!"

* * * * *

The image on the screen snapped off, and Malone sat back in his chair

and sighed. He spent a few minutes regretting that he hadn't chosen,

early in life, to be a missionary to the Fiji Islanders, or possibly

simply a drunken bum without any trouble, and then the report Mitchell

had mentioned arrived. Malone picked it up without much eagerness, and

began going through it carefully.

It was beautifully typed and arranged; somebody on Mitchell's team had

obviously been up all night at the job. Malone admired the work,

without being able to get enthusiastic about the contents. Like all

technical reports, it tended to be boring and just a trifle obscure to

someone who wasn't completely familiar with the field involved. Malone

and cybernetics were not exactly bosom buddies, and by the time he

finished reading through the report he was suffering from an extreme

case of _ennui_.

There were no new clues in the report, either; Mitchell's phone

conversation had covered all of the main points. Malone put the sheaf

of papers down on his desk and looked at them for a minute as if he

expected an answer to leap out from the pile and greet him with a glad

cry, but nothing happened. Unfortunately, he had to do some more work.

The obvious next step was to start checking on the technicians who

were working on the machines. Malone determined privately that he

would give none of his reports to Fred Mitchell; he didn't like the

idea of being responsible for murder, and that was the least Fred

would do to someone who confused his precious calculators.

He picked up the phone, punched for the Records Division, and waited

until a bald, middle-aged face appeared. He asked the face to send up

the dossiers of the technicians concerned to his office. The face

nodded.

"You want them right away?" it said in a mild, slightly scratchy

voice.

"Sooner than right away," Malone said.

"They're coming up by messenger," the voice said.

Malone nodded and broke the connection. The technicians had, of

course, been investigated by the FBI before they'd been hired, but it

wouldn't do any harm to check them out again. He felt grateful that he

wouldn't have to do all that work himself; he would just go through

the dossiers and assign field agents to the actual checking when he

had a picture of what might need to be checked.

He sighed again and leaned back in his chair. He put his feet up on

the desk, remembered that he was entirely alone, and swung them down

again. He fished in a private compartment in his top desk drawer, drew

out a cigar and unwrapped it. Putting his feet back on the desk, he

lit the cigar, drew in a cloud of smoke, and lapsed into deep thought.

Cigar smoke billowed around him, making strange, fantastic shapes in

the air of the office. Malone puffed away, frowning slightly and

trying to force the puzzle he was working on to make some sense.

It certainly looked as though something were going on, he thought.

But, for the life of him, he couldn't figure out just what it was.

After all, what could be anybody's purpose in goofing up a bunch of

calculators the way they had? Of course, the whole thing could be a

series of accidents, but the series was a pretty long one, and made

Malone suspicious to start with. It was easier to assume that the

goof-ups were being done deliberately.

Unfortunately, they didn't make much sense as sabotage, either.

Senator Deeds, for instance, had sent out a ten-thousand-copy form

letter to his constituents, blasting an Administration power bill in

extremely strong language, and asking for some comments on the

Deeds-Hartshorn Air Ownership Bill, a pending piece of legislation

that provided for private, personal ownership, based on land title, to

the upper stratosphere--with a strong hint that rights of passage no

longer applied without some recompense to the owner of the air.

Naturally, Deeds had filed the original with a computer-secretary to

turn out ten thousand duplicate copies, and the machine had done so,

folding the copies, slipping them into addressed envelopes and sending

them out under the senator's franking stamp.

The addresses on the envelopes, however, had not been those of the

senator's supporters. The letter had been sent to ten thousand

stockholders in major airline companies, and the senator's head was

still ringing from the force of the denunciatory letters, telegrams

and telephone calls he'd been getting.

* * * * *

And then there was Representative Follansbee of South Dakota. A set of

news releases on the proposed Follansbee Waterworks Bill contained the

statement that the artificial lake which Follansbee proposed in the

Black Hills country "be formed by controlled atomic power blasts, and

filled with water obtained from collecting the tears of widows and

orphans."

Newsmen who saw this release immediately checked the bill. The wording

was exactly the same. Follansbee claimed that the "widows and orphans"

phrase had appeared in his speech on the bill, and not in the proposed

bill itself. "It's completely absurd," he said, with commendable calm,

"to consider this method of filling an artificial lake."

Unfortunately, the absurdity was now contained in the bill, which

would have to go back to committee for redefinition, and probably

wouldn't come up again in the present session of Congress. Judging

from the amount of laughter that had greeted the error when it had

come to light, Malone privately doubted whether any amount of

redefinition was going to save it from a landslide defeat.

Representative Keller of Idaho had made a speech which contained so

many errors in fact that newspaper editorials, and his enemies on the

floor of Congress, cut him to pieces with ease and pleasure. Keller

complained of his innocence and said he'd gotten his facts from a

computer-secretary, but this didn't save him. His re-election was a

matter for grave concern in his own party, and the opposition was,

naturally, tickled. They would not, Malone thought, dare to be tickled

pink.

And these were not the only casualties. They were the most blatant

foul-ups, but there were others, such as the mistake in numbering of a

House Bill that resulted in a two-month delay during which the

opposition to the bill raised enough votes to defeat it on the floor.

Communications were diverted or lost or scrambled in small ways that

made for confusion--including, Malone recalled the perfectly horrible

mixup that resulted when a freshman senator, thinking he was talking

to his girlfriend on a blanked-vision circuit, discovered he was

talking to his wife.

The flow of information was being blocked by bottlenecks that suddenly

existed where there had never been bottlenecks before.

And it wasn't only the computers, Malone knew. He remembered the

reports the senators and representatives had made. Someone forgot to

send an important message here, or sent one too soon over there. Both

courses were equally disturbing, and both resulted in more snarl-ups.

Reports that should have been sent in weeks before arrived too late;

reports meant for the eyes of only one man were turned out in

triplicate and passed all over the offices of Congress.

Each snarl-up was a little one. But, together, they added up to

inefficiency of a kind and extent that hadn't been seen, Malone told

himself with some wonder, since the Harding administration fifty years

before.

And there didn't seem to be anyone to blame anything on.

Malone thought hopefully of sabotage, infiltration and mass treason,

but it didn't make him feel much better. He puffed out some more smoke

and frowned at nothing.

There was a knock at the door of his office.

Speedily and guiltily, he swung his feet off the desk and snatched the

cigar out of his mouth. He jammed it into a deep ashtray and put the

ashtray back into his desk drawer. He locked the drawer, waved

ineffectively at the clouds of smoke that surrounded him, and said in

a resigned voice: "Come in."

The door opened. A tall, solidly built man stood there, wearing a

fringe of beard and a cheerful expression. The man had an enormous

amount of muscle distributed more or less evenly over his chunky body,

and a potbelly that looked as if he had swallowed a globe of the

world. In addition, he was smoking a cigarette and letting out little

puffs of smoke, rather like a toy locomotive.

"Well, well," Malone said, brushing feebly at the smoke that still

wreathed him faintly. "If it isn't Thomas Boyd, the FBI's answer to

Nero Wolfe."

"And if the physique holds true, you're Sherlock Holmes, I suppose,"

Boyd said.

Malone shook his head, thinking sadly of his father and the cigar.

"Not exactly," he said. "Not ex--" And then it came to him. It wasn't

that he was ashamed of smoking cigars like his father, exactly--but

cigars just weren't right for a fearless, dedicated FBI agent. And he

had just thought of a way to keep Boyd from knowing what he'd been

doing. "That's a hell of a cigarette you're smoking, by the way," he

said.

Boyd looked at it. "It is?" he said.

"Sure is," Malone said, hoping he sounded sufficiently innocent.

"Smells like a cigar or something."

Boyd sniffed the air for a second, his face wrinkled. Then he looked

down at his cigarette again. "You're right, Ken. It _does_ smell like

a cigar." He came over to Malone's desk, looked around for an ashtray

and didn't find one, and finally went to the window and tossed the

cigarette out into the Washington breeze. "How are things, anyhow,

Ken?" he said.

"Things are confused," Malone said. "Aren't they always?"

Boyd came back to the desk and sat down in a chair at one side of it.

He put his elbow on the desk. "Sure they are," he said. "I'm confused

myself, as a matter of fact. Only I think I know where I can get some

help."

"Really?" Malone said.

Boyd nodded. "Burris told me I might be able to get some information

from a certain famous and highly respected person," he said.

"Well, well," Malone said. "Who?"

"You," Boyd said.

"Oh," Malone said, trying to look disappointed, flattered and modest

all at the same time. "Well," he went on after a second, "anything I

can do--"

"Burris thought you might have some answers," Boyd said.

"Burris is getting optimistic in his old age," Malone said. "I don't

even have many questions."