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 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 some more work.

The obvious next step was to start checking on the technicians who
were working on the machines. Malone determined privately that he
would give none of his reports to Fred Mitchell; he didn't like the
idea of being responsible for murder, and that was the least Fred
would do to someone who confused his precious calculators.

He picked up the phone, punched for the Records Division, and waited
until a bald, middle-aged face appeared. He asked the face to send up
the dossiers of the technicians concerned to his office. The face
nodded.

"You want them right away?" it said in a mild, slightly scratchy
voice.

"Sooner than right away," Malone said.

"They're coming up by messenger," the voice said.

Malone nodded and broke the connection. The technicians had, of
course,