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ordinance. He grinned at the cop and shook his head.
"I locked Mayor Sarquist in the safe," he stated evenly. The robot consulted
Central. There was a long twittering of
computer code. Then it said, "This is false information."
"Suit yourself, tin boy. 1 don't care whether you believe it or not."
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Again there was a twittering of code. Then: "Stand aside, please."
Mitch stepped out of the doorway. The subunit bounced over the threshold
with the aid of the four-footed sprockets and clattered hurriedly toward the
library. Mitch followed, grinning to himself. Despite Central's limitless
"intelligence," she was as naive as a child.
He lounged in the doorway to watch the subunit fiddling with the dials of
the safe. He motioned the girl down, and she crouched low in a corner. The
tumblers clicked. There was a dull snap. The door started to swing.
"Just a minute!" Mitch barked.
The subunit paused and turned. The machine gun exploded, and the brief
hail of bullets tore off the robot's antenna. Mitch lowered the gun and grinned.
The cop just stood there, unable to contact Central, unable to decide. Mitch
crossed the room through the drifting plaster dust and rolled the robot aside.
The girl whimpered her relief and came up out of the corner.
The cop was twittering continually as it tried without success to contact the
Coordinator. Mitch stared at it for a moment, then barked at the girl, "Go find
some tools. Search the garage, attic, basement. I want a screwdriver, pliers,
soldering iron, solder, whatever you can find."
She departed silently.
Mitch cleaned out the safe and dumped the heaps of papers, money, and
securities on the desk. He began sorting them out. Among the various stacks
of irrelevant records he found a copy of the original specifications for the
Central Coordinator vaults, dating from the time of installation. He found
blueprints of the city's network of computer circuits, linking the subunits into
one. His hands became excited as he shuffled through the stacks. Here were
data. Here was substance for reasonable planning.
Heretofore he had gone off half-cocked and quite naturally had met with
immediate failure. No one ever won a battle by being good, pure, or ethically
right, despite Galahad's claims to the contrary. Victories were won by
intelligent planning, and Mitch felt ashamed of his previous impulsiveness. To
work out a
scheme for redirecting Central's efforts would require time. The girl
brought a boxful of assorted small tools. She set them on the floor and sat
down to glower at him.
"More cops outside now," she said. "Standing and waiting. The place is
surrounded."
He ignored her. Sarquist's identifying code it had to be here somewhere.
"I tell you, we should get out of here!" she whined. "Shut up."
Mitch occasionally plucked a paper from the stack and laid it aside while
the girl watched.
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"What are those?" she asked.
"Messages he typed into the unit at various times." "What good are they?"
He showed her one of the slips of yellowed paper. It said: Unit 67-BJ is
retired for repairs. A number was scrawled in one corner: 5.00326.
"So?"
"That number. It was his identifying code at the time." "You mean it's
different every day?"
"More likely, it's different every minute. The code is probably based on an
equation whose independent variable is time and whose dependent variable is
the code number."
"How silly!"
"Not at all. It's just sort of a combination lock whose combination is
continuously changing. All I've got to do is find the equation that describes
the change. Then I can get to Central Coordinator."
She paced restlessly while he continued the search. Half an hour later he
put his head in his hands and gazed despondently at the desk top. The key to
the code was not there.
"What's the matter?" she asked.
"Sarquist. I figured he'd have to write it down somewhere. Evidently he
memorized it. Or else his secretary did. I didn't figure a politician even had
sense enough to substitute numbers in a simple equation."
The girl walked to the bookshelf and picked out a volume. She brought it to
him silently. The title was Higher Mathematics for Engineers and Physicists.
"So I was wrong," he grunted."Now what?"
He shuffled the slips of paper idly while he thought about it. "I've got
eleven code numbers here, and the corresponding times when they were good.
I might be able to find it empirically."
"I don't understand."
"Find an equation that gives the same eleven answers for the same eleven
times, and use it to predict the code number for now."
"Will it work?"
He grinned. "There are an infinite number of equations that would give the
same eleven answers for the same eleven substitutions. But it might work, if I
assume that the code equation was of a simple form."
She paced restlessly while he worked at making a graph with time as the
abscissa and the code numbers for ordinates. But the points were scattered
across the page, and there was no connecting them with any simple sort of
curve. "It almost has to be some kind of repeating function," he muttered,
"something that Central could check by means of an irregular cam. Th; normal
way for setting a code into a machine is to turn a cam by clock motor, and the
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height of the cam's rider is the code number for that instant."
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