Wald eyed the aquavit bottle owlishly. “It’s a very pretty problem,” he said. “Have I ever sung you the song we have in Sweden called ‘Nat-og-Dag?’ “
“Hoop,” Weinbaum said, to his own surprise, in a high falsetto. “Excuse me. No. Let’s hear it.”
The computer occupied an entire floor of the Security building, its seemingly identical banks laid out side by side on the floor along an advanced pathological state of Peano’s “space-filling curve.” At the current business end of the line was a master control board with a large television screen at its center, at which Dr. Wald was stationed, with Weinbaum looking, silently but anxiously, over his shoulder.
The screen itself showed a pattern which, except that it was drawn in green light against a dark gray background, strongly resembled the grain in a piece of highly polished mahogany. Photographs of similar patterns were stacked on a small table to Dr. Wald’s right; several had spilled over onto the floor.
“Well, there it is,” Wald sighed at length. “And I won’t struggle to keep myself from saying 1 told you so.’ What you’ve had me do here, Robin, is to reconfirm about half the basic postulates of particle physicswhich is why it took so long, even though it was the first project we started.” He snapped off the screen. “There are no cracks for J. Shelby to play in. That’s definite.”
“If you’d said ‘That’s flat,’ you would have made a joke,”
Weinbaum said sourly. “Look … isn’t there still a chance of error? If not on your part, Thor, then in the computer? After all, it’s set up to work only with the unit charges of modern physics; mightn’t we have to disconnect the banks that con-tain that bias before the machine will follow the fractional-charge instructions we give it?”