The silly questions speeded up. I found myself just getting acquainted with the details of Ming ceramics when a message showed up in my terminal saying that someone in staff wanted to know the relationships between men's beards, women's skirts, and the price of gold. I had ceased to wonder at silly questions; around Boss anything can happen. But this one seemed supersilly. Why should there be any relationship? Men's beards did not interest me; they tickle and often are dirty. As for women's skirts, I knew even less. I have almost never worn skirts. Skirted costumes can be pretty but they aren't practical for travel and could have gotten me killed three or four timesÄand when you're home, what's wrong with skin? Or as near as local custom permits.
But I had learned not to ignore questions merely because they were obvious nonsense; I tackled this one by calling up all the data I could, including punching out some most unlikely association chains. I then told the machine to tabulate all retrieved data by categories.
Durned if I didn't begin to find connections!
As more data accumulated I found that the only way I could see all of it was to tell the computer to plot and display a three-dimensional graphÄand that looked so promising that I told it to convert to holographic in color. Beautiful! I did not know why these three variables fitted together but they did. I spent the rest of that day
changing scales, X versus Y versus Z in various combinationsÄ magnifying, shrinking, rotating, looking for minor cycloid relations under the obvious gross ones... and noticed a shallOw double sinusoidal hump that kept showing up as I rotated the holoÄand suddenly, for no reason I can assign, I decided to subtract the double sunspot curve.
Eureka! As precise and necessary as a Ming vase! Before dinnertime I had the equation, just one line that encompassed all the silly data I had spent five days dragging out of the terminal. I punched the chief of staff's call and recorded that one-line equation, plus definitions of variables. I added no comment, no discussion; I wanted to force the faceless joker to ask for my opinions.
I got the same answer backÄi.e., none.
I fiddled for most of a day, waiting, and proving to myself that I could retrieve a group picture from any year and, through looking only at male faces and female legs, make close guesses concerning the price of gold (falling or rising), the time of that picture relative to the double sunspot cycle, andÄshortly and most surprisingÄ whether the political structure was falling apart or consolidating.
My terminal chimed. No face. No pat on the back. Just a displayed message: "Operations requests soonest depth analysis of possibility that plague epidemics of sixth, fourteenth, and seventeenth centuries resulted from political conspiracy."
Fooey! I had wandered into a funny farm and was locked up with the inmates.
Oh, well! The question was so complex that I might be left alone a long time while I studied it. That suited me; I had grown addicted to the possibilities of a terminal of a major computer hooked into a world research netÄI felt like Little Jack Homer.
I started by listing as many subjects as possible by free association:
plague, epidemiology, fleas, rats, Daniel Defoe, Isaac Newton, conspiracies, Guy Fawkes, Freemasonry, Illuminati, OTO, Rosicrucians, Kennedy, Oswald, John Wilkes Booth, Pearl Harbor, Green Bowlers, Spanish influenza, pest control, etc.
In three days my list of possibly related subjects was ten times as long.
In a week I knew that one lifetime was not nearly long enough to study in depth all of my list. But I had been told to tackle the subject
so I started inÄbut I placed my own meaning on "soonest"Äi.e., I would study conscientiously at least fifty hours per week but when and how I wished and with no cramming or rawhiding... unless somebody came along and explained to me why I should work harder or differently.
This went on for weeks.
I was wakened in the middle of the night by my terminalÄoverride alarm; I had shut it off as usual when I went to bed (alone, I don't recall why). I answered sleepily, "All right, all right! Speak up, and it had better be good."
No picture. Boss's voice said, "Friday, when will the next major Black Death epidemic occur?"
I answered, "Three years from now. April. Starting in Bombay and spreading worldwide at once. Spreading off planet at first transport.
"Thank you. Good night."
I dropped my head to the pillow and went right back to sleep.
I woke up at seven hundred as usual, held still for several moments and thought, while I grew colder and colderÄdecided that I really had heard from Boss in the night and really had given him that preposterous answer.
So bite the bullet, Friday, and climb the Thirteen Steps. I punched "local one." "Friday here, Boss. About what I told you in the night. I plead temporary insanity."
"Nonsense. See me at ten-fifteen."
I was tempted to spend the next three hours in lotus, chanting my beads. But I have a deep conviction that one should not attend even the End of the World without a good breakfast... and my decision was justified as the special that morning was fresh figs with cream, corned-beef hash with poached eggs, and English muffins with Knott's Berry Farm orange marmalade. Fresh milk. Colombian high-altitude coffee. That so improved things that I spent an hour trying to find a mathematical relationship between the past history of plague and the date that had popped into my sleep-drenched mind. I did not find one but was beginning to see some shape to the curve when the terminal gave me a three-minute warning I had punched in.
I had refrained from having my hair cut and my neck shaved but otherwise I was ready. I walked in on the tick. "Friday reporting,
sir. -
"Sit down. Why Bombay? I would think that Calcutta would be a more likely center."
"It might have something to do with long-range weather forecasts and the monsoons. Fleas can't stand hot, dry weather. Eighty percent of a flea's body mass is water and, if the percentage drops below sixty, the flea dies. So hot, dry weather will stop or prevent an epidemic. But, Boss, the whole thing is nonsense. You woke me up in the middle of the night and asked me a silly question and I gave you a silly answer without really waking up. I probably pulled it out of a dream. I've been having nightmares about the Black Death and there really was a bad epidemic that started in Bombay. Eighteen ninety-six and following."
"Not as bad as the Hong Kong phase of it three years later. Friday, the analytical section of Operations says that the next Black Death epidemic won't start until a year later than your prediction. And not Bombay. Djakarta and Ho Chi Minh City."
"That's preposterous!" I stopped abruptly. "Sorry, sir, I guess I was back in that nightmare. Boss, can't I study something pleasantem than fleas and rats and Black Death? It's ruining my sleep."
"You may. You are through studying plagueÄ"
"Hooray!"
"Äother than to whatever extent your intellectual curiosity causes you to tidy up any loose ends. The matter now goes to Operations for action. But action will be based on your prediction, not on that of the mathematical analysts."
"I have to say it again. My prediction is nonsense."
"Friday, your greatest weakness is lack of awareness of your true strength. Wouldn't we look silly if we depended on the professional analysts but the outbreak was one year earlier, as you predicted? Catastrophe. But to be a year early in taking prophylactic measures does no harm."