“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.”