hem 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