Supermind | Page 7

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