mself, 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 s