Reinhart grinned. “Perplexed? I suppose so. In any case, they can’t do anything with the data about this man. The variable man. No statistics at all have been thrown up—no predictions have been made. And it knocks everything else out of phase. We’re dependent on the constant showing of these odds. The whole war effort is geared around them.”
“The horse-shoe nail. Remember the old poem? ‘For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of the shoe the horse was lost. For want of the horse the rider was lost. For want—’”
“Exactly. A single factor coming along like this, one single individual, can throw everything off. It doesn’t seem possible that one person could knock an entire society out of balance—but apparently it is.”
“What are you doing about this man?”
“The Security police are organized in a mass search for him.”
“Results?”
“He escaped into the Albertine Mountain Range last night. It’ll be hard to find him. We must expect him to be loose for another forty-eight hours. It’ll take that long for us to arrange the annihilation of the range area. Perhaps a trifle longer. And meanwhile—”
“Ready, Commissioner,” Kaplan interrupted. “The new totals.”
The SRB machines had finished factoring the new data. Reinhart and Sherikov hurried to take their places before the view windows.
For a moment nothing happened. Then odds were put up, locking in place.