report he was suffering from an extremecase of _ennui_.
There were no new clues in the report, either; Mitchell's phoneconversation had covered all of the main points. Malone put the sheafof papers down on his desk and looked at them for a minute as if heexpected an answer to leap out from the pile and greet him with a gladcry, but nothing happened. Unfortunately, he had to do some more work.
The obvious next step was to start checking on the technicians whowere working on the machines. Malone determined privately that hewould give none of his reports to Fred Mitchell; he didn't like theidea of being responsible for murder, and that was the least Fredwould do to someone who confused his precious calculators.
He picked up the phone, punched for the Records Division, and waiteduntil a bald, middle-aged face appeared. He asked the face to send upthe dossiers of the technicians concerned to his office. The facenodded.
"You want them right away?" it said in a mild, slightly scratchyvoice.
"Sooner than right away," Malone said.
"They're coming up by messenger," the voice said.
Malone nodded and broke the connection. The technicians had, ofcourse, been investigated by the FBI before they'd been hired, but itwouldn't do any harm to check them out again. He felt grateful that hewouldn't have to do all that work himself; he would just go throughthe dossiers and assign field agents to the actual checking when hehad a picture of what might need to be checked.
He sighed again and leaned back in his chair. He put his feet up onthe desk, remembered that he was entirely alone, and swung them downagain. He fished in a private compartment in his top desk drawer, drewout a cigar and unwrapped it. Putting his feet back on the desk, helit the cigar, drew in a cloud of smoke, and lapsed into deep thought.
Cigar smoke billowed around him, making strange, fantastic shapes inthe air of the office. Malone puffed away, frowning slightly andtrying 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 ofcalculators the way they had? Of course, the whole thing could be aseries of accidents, but the series was a pretty long one, and madeMalone suspicious to start with. It was easier to assume that thegoof-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 formletter to his constituents, blasting an Administration power bill inextremely strong language, and asking for some comments on theDeeds-Hartshorn Air Ownership Bill, a pending piece of legislationthat provided for private, personal ownership, based on land title, tothe upper stratosphere--with a strong hint that rights of passage nolonger applied without some recompense to the owner of the air.Naturally, Deeds had filed the original with a computer-secretary toturn out ten thousand duplicate copies, and the machine had done so,folding the copies, slipping them into addressed envelopes and sendingthem out under the senator's franking stamp.
The addresses on the envelopes, however, had not been those of thesenator's supporters. The letter had been sent to ten thousandstockholders in major airline companies, and the senator's head wasstill ringing from the force of the denunciatory letters, telegramsand telephone calls he'd been getting.
* * * * *
And then there was Representative Follansbee of South Dakota. A set ofnews releases on the proposed Follansbee Waterworks Bill contained thestatement that the artificial lake which Follansbee proposed in theBlack Hills country "be formed by controlled atomic power blasts, andfilled with water obtained from collecting the tears of widows andorphans."
Newsmen who saw this release immediately checked the bill. The wordingwas exactly the same. Follansbee claimed that the "widows and orphans"phrase had appeared in his speech on the bill, and not in the proposedbill 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, whichwould have to go back to committee for redefinition, and probablywouldn't come up again in the present session of Congress. Judgingfrom the amount of laughter that had greeted the error when it hadcome to light, Malone privately doubted whether any amount ofredefinition was going to save it from a landslide defeat.
Representative Keller of Idaho had made a speech which contained somany errors in fact that newspaper editorials, and his enemies on thefloor of Congress, cut him to pieces with ease and pleasure. Kellercomplained of his innocence and said he'd gotten his facts from acomputer-secretary, but this didn't save him. His re-election was amatter for grave concern in his own party, and the opposition was,naturally, tickled. They would not, Malone thought, dare to be tickledpink.
And these were not the only casualties. They were the most blatantfoul-ups, but there were others, such as the mistake in numbering of aHouse Bill that resulted in a two-month delay during which theopposition to the bill raised enough votes to defeat it on the floor.Communications were diverted or lost or scrambled in small ways thatmade for confusion--including, Malone recalled the perfectly horriblemixup that resulted when a freshman senator, thinking he was talkingto his girlfriend on a blanked-vision circuit, discovered he wastalking to his wife.
The flow of information was being blocked by bottlenecks that suddenlyexisted where there had never been bottlenecks before.
And it wasn't only the computers, Malone knew. He remembered thereports the senators and representatives had made. Someone forgot tosend an important message here, or sent one too soon over there. Bothcourses 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 intriplicate and passed all over the offices of Congress.
Each snarl-up was a little one. But, together, they added up toinefficiency of a kind and extent that hadn't been seen, Malone toldhimself with some wonder, since the Harding administration fifty yearsbefore.
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 smokeand 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 thecigar out of his mouth. He jammed it into a deep ashtray and put theashtray back into his desk drawer. He locked the drawer, wavedineffectively at the clouds of smoke that surrounded him, and said ina resigned voice: "Come in."
The door opened. A tall, solidly built man stood there, wearing afringe of beard and a cheerful expression. The man had an enormousamount of muscle distributed more or less evenly over his chunky body,and a potbelly that looked as if he had swallowed a globe of theworld. In addition, he was smoking a cigarette and letting out littlepuffs of smoke, rather like a toy locomotive.
"Well, well," Malone said, brushing feebly at the smoke that stillwreathed him faintly. "If it isn't Thomas Boyd, the FBI's answer toNero 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'tthat he was ashamed of smoking cigars like his father, exactly--butcigars just weren't right for a fearless, dedicated FBI agent. And hehad just thought of a way to keep Boyd from knowing what he'd beendoing. "That's a hell of a cigarette you're smoking, by the way," hesaid.
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 lookeddown at his cigarette again. "You're right, Ken. It _does_ smell likea cigar." He came over to Malone's desk, looked around for an ashtrayand didn'
t find one, and finally went to the window and tossed thecigarette 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 confusedmyself, as a matter of fact. Only I think I know where I can get somehelp."
"Really?" Malone said.
Boyd nodded. "Burris told me I might be able to get some informationfrom a certain famous and highly respected person," he said.
"Well, well," Malone said. "Who?"
"You," Boyd said.
"Oh," Malone said, trying