” ‘Disconnect,’ he says,” Wald groaned, mopping his brow reflectively. “The bias exists everywhere in the machine, my friend, because it functions everywhere on those same unit charges. It wasn’t a matter of subtracting banks; we had to add one with a bias all its own, to countercorrect the corrections the computer would otherwise apply to the instructions. The technicians thought I was crazy. Now, five months later, I’ve proved it.”
Weinbaum grinned in spite of himself. “What about the other projects?”
“All donesome time back, as a matter of fact. The staff and I checked every single Dirac tape we’ve received since you released J. Shelby from Yaphank, for any sign of inter-modulation, marginal signals, or anything else of the kind.
There’s nothing. Robin, absolutely nothing. That’s our net result, all around.”
“Which leaves us just where we started,” Weinbaum said.
“All the monitoring projects came to the same dead end; I strongly suspect that Stevens hasn’t risked any further calls from his home office to his field staff, even though he seemed confident that we’d never intercept such callsas we haven’t.
Even our local wire tapping hasn’t turned up anything but calls by Stevens’s secretary, making appointments for him with various clients, actual and potential. Any information he’s selling these days he’s passing on in personand not in his office, either, because we’ve got bugs planted all over that and haven’t heard a thing.”
‘That must limit his range of operation enormously,”
Wald objected.