Occasion ... for Disaster
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."
Boyd nodded. "Well," he said, "you know this California thing?"
"Sure I do," Malone said. "You're looking into the resignation out
there, aren't you?"
"Senator Burley," Boyd said. "That's right. But Senator Burley's
resignation isn't all of it, by any means."
"It isn't?" Malone said, trying to sound interested.
"Not at all," Boyd said. "It goes a lot deeper than it looks on the
surface. In the past year, Ken, five senators have announced their
resignations from the Senate of the United States. It isn't exactly a
record--"
"It sounds like a record," Malone said.
"Well," Boyd said, "there was 1860 and the Civil War, when a whole lot
of senators and representatives resigned all at once."
"Oh," Malone said. "But there isn't any Civil War going on now. At
least," he added, "I haven't heard of any."
"That's what makes it so funny," Boyd said. "Of course, Senator Burley
said it was ill health, and so did two others, while Senator Davidson
said it was old age."
"Well," Malone said, "people do get old. And sick."
"Sure," Boyd said. "The only trouble is--" He paused. "Ken," he said,
"do you mind if I smoke? I mean, do you mind the smell of cigars?"
"Mind?" Malone said. "Not at all. Not at all." He blinked. "Besides,"
he added, "maybe this one won't smell like a cigar."
"Well, the last one did," Boyd said. He took a cigarette out of a pack
in his pocket, and lit it. He sniffed. "You know," he said, "You're
right. This one doesn't."
"I told you," Malone said. "Must have been a bad cigarette. Spoiled or
something."
"I guess so," Boyd said vaguely. "But about these retirements--the FBI
wanted me to look into it because of Burley's being mixed up with the
space program scandal last year. Remember?
"Vaguely," Malone said. "I was busy last year."
"Sure you were," Boyd said. "We were both busy getting famous and
well-known."
Malone grinned. "Go on with the story," he said.
Boyd puffed at his cigarette. "Anyhow, we couldn't find anything
really wrong," he said. "Three senators retiring because of ill
health, one because of old age. And Farnsworth, the youngest. He had a
nervous breakdown."
"I didn't hear about it," Malone said.
Boyd shrugged. "We hushed it up," he said. "But Farnsworth's got
delusions of persecution. He apparently thinks somebody's out to get
him. As a matter of fact, he thinks _everybody's_ out to get him."
"Now that," Malone said, "sounds familiar."
Boyd leaned back a little more in his chair. "Here's the funny thing,
though," he said. "The others all act as if they're suspicious of
everybody who talks to them. Not anything obvious, you understand.
Just--worried. Apprehensive. Always looking at you out of the corners
of their eyes. That kind of thing."
Malone thought of Senator Lefferts, who was also suffering from
delusions of persecution--delusions that had real evidence to back
them up. "It does sound funny," he said cautiously.
"Well, I reported everything to Burris," Boyd went on. "And he said
you were working on something similar, and we might as well pool our
resources."
"Here we go again," Malone said. He took a deep breath, filling his
nostrils with what remained of the cigar odor in the room, and felt
more peaceful. Quickly, he told Boyd about what had been happening in
Congress. "It seems pretty obvious," he finished, "that there is some
kind of a tie-up between the two cases."
"Maybe it's obvious," Boyd said, "But it is just a little bit odd. Fun
and games. You know, Ken, Burris was right."
"How?" Malone said.
"He said everything was all mixed up," Boyd went on. "He told me the
country was going to Rome in a handbasket, or something like that."
Wondering vaguely if Burris had really been predicting mass religious
conversions, Malone nodded silently.
"And he's right," Boyd said. "Look at the newspapers. Everything's
screwy lately."
"Everything always is screwy," Malone said.
"Not like now," Boyd said. "So many big-shot gangsters have been
killed lately we might as well bring back Prohibition. And the labor
unions are so busy with internal battles that they haven't had time to
go on strike for over a year."
"Is that bad?" Malone said.
Boyd shrugged. "God knows," he said. "But it's sure confusing as all
hell."
"And now," Malone said, "with all that going on--"