sure!’
An unexplored item on one of the returns caught Manalone’s eye and he pulled it towards him, the better to examine the detail. Maurine van Holt continued to watch him as he immediately became absorbed by the new problem. Her wry, twisted grin spoke volumes, every page culled from a separate level of her complex personality.
‘I had the feeling this was going to be another of those mornings,’ she said, as she quietly left him to his work.
Manalone, however, was more aware of her leaving than she would have believed. He had become conscious this time, as never before, that she was deliberately trying to draw information out of him. Usually he felt flattered by her interest, and opened up about his worries. Had it not been for the incident of the police agent, he would probably have told her about the unreal photo-play. She, more than anyone else he knew, would have appreciated his interest in it, even if she could not comprehend the magnitude of the problem. Now, with the memory of the police tail still fresh in his mind, her probing seemed to him to be suddenly attached to his collection of impossibilities, though he could find no logic to justify the adhesion.
As soon as work permitted, he went into the computer laboratory, and there began to set up a programme which included the time and distance sequences he had culled from the film. As he already knew, the answers made no sense. With trained intuition, he inverted the problem, and made the computer derive a set of physical constants for a theoretical reality which would be consistent with the effects as observed. When the answers came he sat and stared at the tabulated sheets for a long time before he noticed that his hands were shaking.
‘Steady,Manalone! It doesn’t really mean what it seems to say. It’s just that you didn’t have sufficient data to work from.’
The reference to data took him back to his thoughts during the night, and he reached for the access code-list of the statistics and critical tables which were held for interrogation in the National Archive Computer. The Automated Mills computing complex had on-line access to the National Archive, and Manalone frequently used computer interrogation when verifying critical parameters.
As he began to set up the access code, a sudden caution stayed his hand. After a moment’s thought he brought in the fast camera he used for recording transient phenomena. He coded the health statistic he wished to receive, started the interrogation, then immediately ran in a second code which differed from the first only by one figure in the sequence. The screen lit for a mere fraction of a second before the correction was established, and then steadied on the second code which gave him the detailed structure and properties of isophorone diamine. The event would be read by the archive computer as a normal miscode, and only the second charge would be registered. Nevertheless, his camera now carried a record of the fleeting image of the few frames which had been replaced.
He set the camera on auto-develop, recovered the processed film, and ran it straight into the reader. The first six hundred frames were blank, and then a single frame displayed the current statistics for mortality during childbearing. Manalone froze as he read the impossible figure of five hundred and seven deaths per ten thousand cases sampled.
‘Five percent plus! Two orders of magnitude too high – and you owe Sandra an apology. But it’s still an impossibility. No society would tolerate that loss of life.’
The next frame completed the shock. It stated flatly:
RESTRICTED INFORMATION
NOT AVAILABLE TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC
Manalone guessedwhat had happened. The archive computer carried the full report, but its interrogation was programmed to activate a censor circuit. Only by using a fast camera had he accidentally picked up the information before the censor could trigger. The censor, of course, was designed to release the