Ben Bova - The Multiple Man

Vickie resumed. “We have access to an enormous amount of information here. This computer can tell us almost anything—”

“Except what we want to know,” I said.

“Wrong.” She had a very serious look on her face, but there was something else going on behind those sea-green eyes. She was excited, anticipating.

“Wrong?” I echoed.

“Wrong,” she confirmed. “This computer can do something more for us. It can correlate all the information we have, find the connections, pull out the key links for us…”

Hank was skeptical. “You mean a computer can go through a pile of information and find out what’s important to us and toss away th’ rest? Like a human detective?”

“Not quite,” Vickie said, “but close enough. See, this is a specialized computer. It’s programmed to serve the needs of the people who use the Library of Congress. People come here with a few scraps of information and ask the computer for help in finding more, just as they’d ask a librarian.”

“And yore sayin’ that a librarian works like a detective?” Hank didn’t believe a word of it.

Vickie answered, “Sort of. You give a librarian a few clues and she’ll usually be able to find what you’re looking for. This computer,” she tapped the screen again, “will do the same thing. Only better, faster, and with a much bigger memory than any human librarian has.”

Hank just shook his head.

I said, “So you’re saying that if we feed the computer all the information we have, it can point out the connections—”

“That’s right,” Vickie answered, bobbing her head vigorously enough to make her golden hair jounce prettily.

“I’m not sure…”

“You’re an ex-newspaper reporter,” Vickie said to me. “Your method of getting information is to grab people by the neck and fire questions at them. I’m a researcher. I find information by going through records, dealing with computers and librarians and reference books. Your way hasn’t produced very much, boss. Not yet, anyway. I want to try my method.”

“With an electronic detective,” Hank added, still skeptical.

I shrugged at her. “Okay. Let’s see what you get.”

She started with the biographical information from General Halliday and the others who had purchased North Lake Labs more than forty years ago. Vickie typed on the computer’s input key-board a request for correlations among the biographies of the nine men involved; in other words, how they were linked. The computer’s output screen showed the shorthand words she typed:

Her words glowed green on the picture tube for a few moments while the computer considered the problem. Then a list of the nine names flashed, so briefly that I’m not sure all nine of them were there. Then the screen filled with words, pica-sized green letters covering the whole screen, from top to bottom, side to side. And at the very last was a word in parentheses that I instantly recognized: (MORE). This one screenful of data wasn’t all the computer had dug up.

We got very excited, but quickly found that the correlations were nothing more than we would have expected. Four of the nine co-owners of North Lake Labs had worked for General Halliday at one time or another. Two more were relatives of the General’s, distant cousins. The remaining two men were real estate executives in Minnesota: the front men who did the actual buying.

Of the nine original buyers, only three were still alive: the General, of course; one of the real estate operators, who now lived in Sri Lanka; and the only woman in the deal, who had been the General’s secretary back when he had served in the Pentagon as a major in the Army Research Office. The computer had no information on her whereabouts.

“Not much goddamned help,” Hank muttered.

“No,” I agreed. “Except that I get the feeling that all the money involved came from the General himself. These other eight people were just strawmen, dummies to cover up the General’s intention to own the Labs himself. And control them.”

“Where’d he get that kind of money?” Vickie asked. “He couldn’t have been more than thirty years old or so at the time.”

The biographical data didn’t tell us much. General Halliday had been thirty-two when the North Lake Labs were sold to his group. He had been working in the Pentagon at that time. His hero-making defense of Denver was still nearly ten years in the future. He had married a fairly wealthy Virginia socialite, but as yet they had no children.

“Maybe his wife put up the money,” I said.

“More likely she put up th’ collateral for a bank t’ loan him th’ money,” Hank said. “Musta been at least ten million involved. Prob’ly more.”

I thought aloud, “The Government was phasing down research funding then. Lots of economic scares, the whole Vietnam fiasco and the turbulence of the sixties and seventies. Universities were pulling in their horns; money was tight, especially in scientific research…”

“But suppose a bright, ambitious young Army officer who worked in the Pentagon…” Vickie mused.

“In the Army Research Office,” I added.

“Suppose he went to a bank.”

Hank chimed in, “Or a dinner party full of bankers, set up by his purty young wife…”

I took over again, “And offered them a scheme where he attains a controlling interest in a research laboratory, which he can set up so that it can be guaranteed a steady flow of Army research money…”

“The bank would get its loan repaid in a few years,” Vickie said.

“At the highest interest rates of the century. And Halliday retires from the Army after the loan is paid off and goes to live in Colorado…”

“Where he continues to pull the strings…”

“And becomes a rich son of a bitch.”

We looked at one another. We were grinning and nodding excitedly. Proud of our terrific powers of deduction.

Hank broke the bubble “But what in hell’s all this got t’ do with th’ President? He wasn’t even born yet!”

We went back to being gloomy. Hank produced his thick wad of biographical information about the labs’ research staff scientists. With a resigned sigh, Vickie began typing the information into the computer. Most of the data had come from standard reference sources such as American Men and Women of Science, so Vickie could simply cite the reference, and the computer would know where to look. Still, it was a long job.

I ducked out to the men’s room and then volunteered to take over the typing. “Just tell me what to do,” I said.

Vickie argued at first, but finally relented and let me hammer the keys while she worked the kinks out of her hands. Hank disappeared briefly and came back with sandwiches and coffee.

“How long’s this place stay open?” I wondered.

“ ’Til ten,” Hank said. “I just checked.”

“We’ve only got—”

“We’ve got as long as we need,” Vickie said. “I commandeered this room for Senator Markley. Senators and Congresspersons and their staffs can stay all night, if they want to. The computer’s on-line twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.”

“Wonderful,” I heard myself say.

We took a brief dinner break, wolfing the sandwiches and coffee, and then Vickie took over the input typing again.

“Should’ve brought some beer,” I said to Hank.

“Didn’t even think of it,” he admitted, looking surprised at himself.

Finally the job was done. All the biographical data about every researcher we knew had worked at North Lake was in the computer’s memory bank. Vickie punched the request to correlate the data, and while the computer chewed on the problem, she stood up, put her arms over her head and stretched hard enough to pop tendons along her spine. It was a move that stirred my blood, and I could see that it did the same for Hank. Vickie didn’t seem to notice, though. Or care.