A Spaceship Named: 45 Sci-Fi Novels & Stories in One Volume. Randall Garrett

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      Chapter 2

       Table of Contents

      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 СКАЧАТЬ