She caught a flash of Janet's thoughts ... lucky SSG so-and-so! She wasn't even paying attention! Rigorously Lynne forced herself to concentrate on the large indicator. It flashed a warning blue, then yellow, then red—and then showed a round single 0!
It was, Lynne thought, impossible. No team had ever, in the entire history of human-cybernetic integration, produced an answer without a single variance with the machine. The best on record was an 0.056 by Yunakazi in East-Asia Center. And he had never come close to it again.
Lynne nodded to the rest of them and unfastened her collar. She felt a little sick to her stomach. An 0-variant answer was supposed to be impossible. But she had attained one, and at a time when her mind had been wandering, thanks not only to her malaise but because of her shocking telepathic experience. She wondered dully if the two factors were integrated in her incredible result.
"... like the monkeys with fifty million typewriters composing a Shakespearean sonnet, probability ultimately favors it," Ray was saying. "Lynne, let's try another. What's the next problem, Jan?"
"Poor reaction of 11th age-group children in Honduras to gnomics during the months of July and August," Janet said promptly. "Wanted—its causes and cure."
Lynne listened in a sort of stupor. When she felt telepathic messages impinging upon her mind she forced them out. She only half-heard Janet's smooth assemblage of facts. Ray's coordination and selection of those most relevant. And then she thought quickly, Climate change to 42 per-cent lower humidity, expense contained by use in schools only and segregation of children during crucial months.
Again the flashes from the indicator—again the zero.
Janet regarded Lynne with odd speculation in her hazel eyes, Ray looked a little frightened. Lynne said, "I don't know what's going on but my head is killing me. I'm going home and rest."
"What about our date tonight?" Ray asked quickly—too quickly.
She studied him a long moment. She did love him, she did want to marry him, she did want to bear his children—or did she? She was going to have to face the problem squarely and do it soon. She said, "I guess you'd better give me a rain-check, honey."