Henderson crumpled the card and tossed it in the wastebasket. He sat down, and with a little arithmetic and some formulas tested the null hypothesis all by himself. He found that his mouse experiment carried no significance whatever. Then he made a notation that someone would have to come out in the morning for his sick machine.
In the morning when the machine's doctor came to inspect it, and percuss it, and auscult it, and give it a barium enema, it behaved very well. The "doctor" left, assuring Henderson the machine merely had the hiccups. That night Henderson asked it a question about confidence limits for a universe mean, from a mean of a sample of n observations and got back, "Uranus on Antares but conjoining Jupiter and trining the Ascendent. Yours is a strongly literary nature."
Henderson decided to turn the machine off for a few days. It emitted an almost human sigh as it ran down and came to a halt.
He had no immediate use for it as he would be injecting mice with carcinogens in liver, spleen, marrow and kidneys to find out if they were specific. In three or four days whatever virus was affecting the machine's cerebral cortex should have run its course and the methodical Henderson could run his methodical observations into the machine, which would excrete a good methodical answer to be duly filed in the medical school library, where it would be invisible to anyone looking for it, such as freshmen medical students, and always in the way for anybody else.
Henderson surveyed his laboratory with infinite pleasure, knowing that it contained within its confines all that could be known about the universe, about men and about mice. Event Y followed event X in a purely causal manner. The successful investigator needed only to attach himself to the cycle and ride along, afterwards consulting the computer to find out if what he'd observed had any significance.
In the morning when Henderson entered the laboratory he found that someone had left the computer on over-night.
It was running full blast, which is to say the lights were blinking and the little cards of omniscience were popping out of the machine like toast and falling into the wastebasket, which is just where Henderson left them. Meanwhile, Dr. Henderson's close associate, Colonel Smith in the nearby radiation laboratory, came in to visit him and asked permission to use the computer.
And so in another week it was rumored about that the machine in Henderson's laboratory was using a foreign dialect and answering questions about standard deviation with strange symbols which looked like crescent moons and archaic squiggles, with a little geometry on the side.
The machine was becoming impudent too. To Colonel Smith's question about the possibility of an "overkill" if such and such size bomb dropped on such and such enemy city the answer came back, "Rubbish. Aldebaran conjoining Saturn, Moon and Mars. Seek guidance from others, Hannibal blushed." The machine's doctor promptly installed a loudspeaker to help keep track of future aberrations.