“What?”
“Then it means Tinkertoy is right.”
“But your computer analysis may be wrong. In projecting scenarios.”
She had smiled at him like a mother. “Hanley, everything we offer is fraught with human risk. Perhaps we are wrong and maybe the general sitting in his war room is wrong, but we’re the best we’ve got. If we can absolutely vouch for the information. And Tinkertoy.”
She had spent the rest of the day gathering up the logs necessary for the task. There were time in/out logs from computer analysis, from the control sections, from operations — which counted the field men, including agents, stationmasters, watchers, and freelancers — and logs for her own clerical staff. She would start from the beginning.
She had been so happy that Marge had caught her whistling to herself as she worked at her desk around four-thirty.
“Lydia?” She never called Mrs. Neumann by her first name during the working day, but that had ended a moment before.
Marge looked in the doorway of Mrs. Neumann’s friendly little cubicle. The office was in keeping with Mrs. Neumann’s pioneer-woman way of dressing. On the walls were bits of needlepoint and a sampler that said: Garbage In, Garbage Out. It had been done for her by a whimsical aunt long before, when she first began to work in computers and was full of the jargon of the trade.
“Hello, Marge. I haven’t seen you all day.”
“I was in Five Section, we’re overloaded with that Middle East stuff again.”
Mrs. Neumann smiled. “Have some coffee?”
“No. I’m just leaving, it’s four-thirty. Bill is going to meet me at the Mayfair, we’re with friends tonight. The ones from St. Louis, I told you?”
“Four-thirty already?”
“Working late?”
“Just a few things.”
“I thought we had been all caught up at this end,” Marge said. She put on a worried frown that did not suit her bland features. She was conventionally pretty in a fussy way, like a doll dressed in elaborate clothes that no woman could actually wear through a day. Somehow, Marge Andrews managed it, just as her hair managed never to seem unkempt, just as she never seemed to have a cold or to appear in an awkward moment. Some of the men in CompAn flirted with her, and she responded in a sweet, unbeguiling way. She might have been out of a Doris Day movie; her taste in clothes matched her taste in music and literature. Lydia Neumann was not well read in other fields but she had a native shrewdness that instinctively knew that there was a little bit of the practiced phony about Marge.
And yet, over the past two years, Marge had filled the older woman’s need for companionship and a patient soulmate to share her own anxieties with. Girl talk, Leo Neumann fumed at times when Lydia would delay coming home for a private heart-to-heart with Marge at the cocktail lounge across the way from Ag building. But Mr. Neumann was a patient man as well and understood that his wife could not share some things with him. Marge was good for Lydia, Leo had once said, and that was what everyone thought. Including Mrs. Neumann.
“Well, this is just a little something I want to try on Tinkertoy,” Mrs. Neumann said vaguely, with the same smile on her face that she had worn all day. She was on the hunt; she was sure she would find the flaw in the computer.
“Anything I can help you with?”
“No, no. Just run along.”
“Is it about — about the problem we’ve been having?” Marge kept the worried look pasted on her face. Her pretty blue eyes — there was no other way to describe them — were opened as wide as a china doll’s.
“No,” Mrs. Neumann said quickly. Both of them realized it was a lie, but Marge Andrews’ features did not change. She only blinked her eyes and made them wider.
“Just something I’ve been working on to…improve some of the programming capabilities, especially in the area of…of recasting the anagram code.”
“Oh,” Marge Andrews said.
“You run along.”
“Oh,” she said again.
Mrs. Neumann smiled maternally. “Been showing them Washington?”
“Who?”
“Your St. Louis friends.”
“Yes, They want to go to the top of the Washington Monument, can you imagine anything as corny as that?”
“Why don’t you take them on a tour of the Capitol? As long as Congress is still in session, I mean. I can get one of the boys from Senator Cox’s office to take them around.”
“Oh, I’m so tired of that. It’s so dreary. All that garbage…” She stopped. “Well, I mean, I suppose I wouldn’t have to go around with them.”
“They’d like it.”
“Yes. I suppose they would. Yes, I’ll suggest that to them. They’ve never been east. Bill knew him from college and we’ve traded Christmas cards. Bill wanted them to stay with us, but they didn’t want to impose. They’re sweet. People from the Midwest are sweet.”
Mrs. Neumann said, “I’m from Omaha.”
“Yes. I know. I meant it as a compliment.”
“I know, Marge. There. You run along, and I’ll call Connie over in Senator Cox’s office tomorrow and she’ll get one of the boys to take them around. Whenever they like.”
“All right. Good night, Lydia.”
“Good night, Marge. Have fun.”
She turned then, slowly and almost with reluctance, and started down the corridor. Her ruffled white blouse was unsoiled by the day’s work, her light brown hair was perfectly groomed, her makeup was discreetly doing its job.
Mrs. Neumann closed the door.
Within a half hour, the section of computer analysis that housed Tinkertoy’s monitors was closed.
At midnight, the cleanup crew would come in and search the place for scraps of paper that had been shredded during the day and dumped in wastebaskets. The floors would be swept and mopped and the desk tops cleaned off. And if anyone left anything on a desk top, it would be reported the next morning to the supervisor of security and there would be a great hullabaloo.
Mrs. Neumann would be undisturbed for nearly six hours. It might be enough time. She knew the questions she wanted to ask Tinkertoy now, finally, after six months of dead ends and blind leads and frustrations. She had the logs, the sacred books still kept in the old-fashioned way, each log item entered laboriously by hand and signed by the person entering it. Log and computer, old and new. She thought with satisfaction: Now we’re going to find out what’s gone wrong with poor old Tinkertoy.
She closed the door of her office and locked it and started down the darkened corridor for the security door, which led to the main security desk and the elevators. She had been in the building for nearly sixteen hours but she did not feel tired. Her step was light on the polished floor. She passed the supervisor of maintenance, and he nodded to her, and she gave him a smile that he would remember much later, when he was asked about it.
“I’ll drive down to get you,” Leo had said, but Lydia Neumann had demurred.
“I can get a taxi around the corner.”
“But it’s nearly midnight.”
“I’m all right. They’ve got a guard on duty right on the steps. I’m all right. I’ve worked in Washington for thirty years and I’ve never had an incident.”
“So tonight could be the first time. I want to come down to meet you.”
“You need your rest.”
“Listen, I can rest better when I know you’re in the house.”
“Leo, I’ll call for a taxi before I leave the building, all right? Then there’ll be one waiting for me when I get out. All right?”
“I can still come down and get you. How come that slave driver Hanley’s got you working so late?”
“Oh, Leo. If I could only tell you. I can’t, but I can tell you it’s all right now. I think I really understand everything now.”