Supermind
tore himself away.
Malone looked after him for a second, thinking of nothing in
particular, and then turned in the opposite direction and headed back
toward the elevator. As he walked, he began to feel more and more
pleased with himself. After all, he’d gotten the investigation
started, hadn’t he?
And now all he had to do was go back to his office and read some
reports and listen to some interview tapes, and then he could go home.
The reports and the interview tapes didn’t exactly sound like fun,
Malone thought, but at the same time they seemed fairly innocent. He
would work his way through them grimly, and maybe he would even
indulge his most secret vice and smoke a cigar or two to make the work
pass more pleasantly. Soon enough, he told himself, they would be
finished.
Sometimes, though, he regretted the reputation he’d gotten. It had
been bad enough in the old days, the pre-1971 days when Malone had
thought he was just lucky. Burris had called him a Boy Wonder then,
when he’d cracked three difficult cases in a row. Being just lucky had
made it a little tough to live with the Boy Wonder label. After all,
Malone thought, it wasn’t actually as if he’d done anything.
But since 1971 and the case of the Telepathic Spy, things had gotten
worse. Much worse. Now Malone wasn’t just lucky any more. Instead, he
could teleport and he could even foretell the future a little, in a
dim sort of way. He’d caught the Telepathic Spy that way, and when the
case of the Teleporting Juvenile Delinquents had come up he’d been
assigned to that one too, and he’d cracked it. Now Burris seemed to
think of him as a kind of God, and gave him all the tough dirty jobs.
And if he wasn’t just lucky any more, Malone couldn’t think of himself
as a fearless, heroic FBI agent, either. He just wasn’t the type. He
was ... well, talented. That was the word, he told himself: talented.
He had all these talents and they made him look like something
spectacular to Burris and the other FBI men. But he wasn’t, really. He
hadn’t done anything really tough to get his talents; they’d just
happened to him.
Nobody, though, seemed to believe that. He heaved a little sigh and
stepped into the waiting elevator.
There were, after all, he thought, compensations. He’d had some good
times, and the talents did come in handy. And he did have his pick of
the vacation schedule lately. And he’d met some lovely girls....
And besides, he told himself savagely as the elevator shot upward, he
wasn’t going to do anything except return to his office and read some
reports and listen to some tapes. And then he was going to go home and
sleep all night, peacefully. And in the morning Mitchell was going to
call him up and tell him that the computer-secretaries needed nothing
more than a little repair. He’d say they were getting old, and he’d be
a little pathetic about it; but it wouldn’t be anything serious.
Malone would send out orders to get the machines repaired, and that
would be that. And then the next case would be something both normal
and exciting, like a bank robbery or a kidnapping involving a gorgeous
blonde who would be so grateful to Malone that....
He had stepped out of the elevator and gone down the corridor without
noticing it. He pushed at his own office door and walked into the
outer room. The train of thought he had been following was very nice,
and sounded very attractive indeed, he told himself.
Unfortunately, he didn’t believe it. His prescient ability,
functioning with its usual efficient aplomb, told Malone that things
would not be better, or simpler, in the morning. They would be worse,
and more complicated.
They would be quite a lot worse.
And, as usual, that prescience was perfectly accurate.
2
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 it, 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 Islands, or possibly
simply a drunken bum without any troubles, but 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