"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, 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."