been investigated by the FBI before they'd been hired, but it
wouldn't do any harm to check them out again. He felt grateful that he
wouldn't have to do all that work himself; he would just go through
the dossiers and assign field agents to the actual checking when he
had a picture of what might need to be checked.

He sighed again and leaned back in his chair. He put his feet up on
the desk, remembered that he was entirely alone, and swung them down
again. He fished in a private compartment in his top desk drawer, drew
out a cigar and unwrapped it. Putting his feet back on the desk, he
lit the cigar, drew in a cloud of smoke, and lapsed into deep thought.

Cigar smoke billowed around him, making strange, fantastic shapes in
the air of the office. Malone puffed away, frowning slightly and
trying 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 of
calculators the way they had? Of course, the whole thing could be a
series of accidents, but the series was a pretty long one, and made
Malone suspicious to start with. It was easier to assume that the
goof-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 form
letter to his constituents, blasting an Administration power bill in
extremely strong language, and asking for some comments on the
Deeds-Hartshorn Air Ownership Bill, a pending piece of legislation
that provided for private, personal ownership, based on land title, to
the upper stratosphere, with a strong hint that rights of passage no
longer applied without some recompense to the owner of the air.
Naturally, Deeds had filed the original with a computer-secretary to
turn out ten thousand duplicate copies, and the machine had done so,
folding the copies, slipping them into addressed envelopes and sending
them out under the Senator's franking stamp.

The addresses on the envelopes, however, had not been those of the
Senator's supporters. The letter had been sent to ten thousand
stockholders in major airline companies, and the Senator's head was
still ringing from the force of the denunciatory letters, telegrams
and telephone calls he'd been getting.

And then there was Representative Follansbee of So