It certainly looked as though something were going on, he thought. But, for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out just what it was. After all, what could be anybody’s purpose in goofing up a bunch of calculators the way they had? Of course, the whole thing could be a series of accidents, but the series was a pretty long one, and made Malone suspicious to start with. It was easier to assume that the goof-ups were being done deliberately. Unfortunately, they didn’t make much sense as sabotage, either. Senator Deeds, for instance, had sent out a ten-thousand-copy form letter to his constituents, blasting an Administration power bill in extremely strong language, and asking for some comments on the Deeds-Hartshorn Air Ownership Bill, a pending piece of legislation that provided for private, personal ownership, based on land title, to the upper stratosphere, with a strong hint that rights of passage no longer applied without some recompense to the owner of the air. Naturally, Deeds had filed the original with a computer-secretary to turn out ten thousand duplicate copies, and the machine had done so, folding the copies, slipping them into addressed envelopes and sending them out under the Senator’s franking stamp. The addresses on the envelopes, however, had not been those of the Senator’s supporters. The letter had been sent to ten thousand stockholders in major airline companies, and the Senator’s head was still ringing from the force of the denunciatory letters, telegrams and telephone calls he’d been getting. And then there was Representative Follansbee of South Dakota. A set of news releases on the proposed Follansbee Waterworks Bill contained the statement that the artificial lake which Follansbee proposed in the Black Hills country “be formed by controlled atomic power blasts, and filled with water obtained from collecting the tears of widows and orphans.” Newsmen who saw this release immediately checked the bill. The wording was exactly the same. Follansbee claimed that the “widows and orphans” phrase had appeared in his speech on the bill, and not in the proposed bill itself. “It’s completely absurd,” he said, with commendable calm, “to consider this method of filling an artificial lake.” Unfortunately, the absurdity was now contained in the bill, which would have to go back to committee for redefinition, and probably wouldn’t come up again in the present session of Congress. Judging from the amount of laughter that had greeted the error when it had come to light, Malone privately doubted whether any amount of redefinition was going to save it from a landslide defeat.