others, such as the mistake in numbering of a
House Bill that resulted in a two-month delay during which the
opposition to the bill raised enough votes to defeat it on the floor.
Communications were diverted or lost or scrambled in small ways that
made for confusion--including, Malone recalled the perfectly horrible
mixup that resulted when a freshman senator, thinking he was talking
to his girlfriend on a blanked-vision circuit, discovered he was
talking to his wife.

The flow of information was being blocked by bottlenecks that suddenly
existed where there had never been bottlenecks before.

And it wasn't only the computers, Malone knew. He remembered the
reports the senators and representatives had made. Someone forgot to
send an important message here, or sent one too soon over there. Both
courses 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 in
triplicate and passed all over the offices of Congress.

Each snarl-up was a little one. But, together, they added up to
inefficiency of a kind and extent that hadn't been seen, Malone told
himself with some wonder, since the Harding administration fifty years
before.

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 smoke
and 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 the
cigar out of his mouth. He jammed it into a deep ashtray and put the
ashtray back into his desk drawer. He locked the drawer, waved
ineffectively at the clouds of smoke that surrounded him, and said in
a resigned voice: "Come in."

The door opened. A tall, solidly built man stood there, wearing a
fringe of beard and a cheerful expression. The man had an enormous
amount of muscle distributed more or less evenly over his chunky body,
and a potbelly that looked as if he had swallowed a globe of the
world. In addition, he was smoking a cigarette and letting out little
puffs of smoke, rather like a toy locomotive.

"Well, well," Malone said, brushing feebly at the smoke that still
wreathed him faintly. "If it isn't Thomas Boyd, the FBI's answer to
Nero Wolfe."

"And if the physique holds true, you're Sherlock Holmes, I suppose