its mechanism and it rolled open for him to pass. He entered a bare-walled corridor. The door behind him clanged closed. Ahead of him another door rolled open. Reaching the opening, he started through-but noticed that the shoestring of his telephone had come untied. He stooped to tie it. As he did so, the door clanged shut, nipping him from behind and sending him sprawling.
Rising, Max eyed the door malevolently. “Whose side are you on?” he snarled.
The door remained mute.
Max proceeded along the passageway until he reached an unmarked doorway. He rapped out the tune of “Yankee Doodle” on the door. There was no reply. He looked thoughtful for a second, then tried “Over the Waves.” Still there was no response.
Max turned the knob and opened the door. Seated at a large desk in a panelled, lavishly furnished office was a graying, dignified-looking man.
“Chief, what’s the code tune for today?” Max said.
“ ‘Yankee Doodle,’ ” the Chief replied.
“I tried that.”
“Which time-first time or second time?”
“First.”
“That sounded like ‘Anchors Aweigh,’ ” the Chief said.
“You know my tin ear, Chief. Will you accept ‘Anchors Aweigh’ for ‘Yankee Doodle’?”
The Chief sighed. “All right… since it’s an emergency.”
Max closed the door behind him, tried “Anchors Aweigh,” and got “Yankee Doodle.”
“Come in,” the Chief called.
Max stepped in, closed the door, inserted his card in the time clock, rang it up, then moved on to the Chief’s desk. “Sorry I’m late, Chief,” he said, “but that officer’s mother was bawling him out for forgetting his gun. He left it on the bureau.”
“Never mind that,” the Chief said crankily. As Max seated himself, the Chief leaned forward at his desk and said, “Max, this is the biggest case the department has ever been asked to handle. The fate of the whole civilized world may depend on its outcome. You couldn’t even guess what it concerns.”
Max frowned. “Sounds to me as if the Beatles are involved.”
“Something even more bizarre than that,” the Chief said. “Max, this concerns an electronic computer. The most sophisticated computer ever developed. The entire knowledge of civilized man has been fed into this computer. Ask it any question and you get back the correct answer in seconds. Imagine what that means! Ask it, for instance, how to make an explosive that would make the Atom Bomb look like a firecracker, and, peep-a-dotta, poop-a-dotta, dippa-dotta-boop, it would hand you the answer!”
Max squinted at him. “Peep-a-dotta, poop-a-dotta, dippa-dotta-boop?”
“That’s the sound it makes when it’s thinking.”
“Oh.”
“Max, the country that controls Fred controls the world!”
“Fred?”
“That’s its name.”
Max brightened. “Oh, yes, I see. Familiar as I am with Fechner’s Law-which states that, within limits, the intensity of a sensation increases as the logarithm of the stimulus-I can guess that FRED stands for Fechnerized Radiological Electronic Decoder. Right?”
“As a matter of fact, no,” the Chief replied. “FRED stands for Fred. The developer named the computer after her cocker spaniel… Fred.”
“Oh…” Max said disappointedly. Then, “Her? Fred’s inventor is a woman?”
“That’s right,” the Chief said. “Fred was constructed by a Miss Blossom Rose. You’ll meet her in a second. She’s going to accompany you on this case. Our hope is that Miss Rose will be able to talk some sense into this computer… that is, if and when you find him.”
“You mean he’s missing?”
“Unfortunately, yes. He left a note saying that, equipped as he was to provide the knowledge that would give one nation control over all others, he knew he wouldn’t have one peaceful moment. So he skipped. He said he hoped to find tranquility in obscurity.”
“A computer? Let’s face it, Chief-where could a computer go so he wouldn’t be noticed?”
“That’s your problem, Max. Your job is to find Fred and bring him back. Convince him that we’re his true and only friends. If possible, try to do it without violence. But, of course, if he won’t listen to reason, then the only alternative will be to destroy-” The Chief sighed. “Well, we’ll cross that alternative when we come to it.” He rose. “Right now, I want you to meet your companion on this case. She’s waiting in the other office.”
The Chief pressed one of the wall panels. It opened, revealing a small room where three off-duty agents were seated at a table playing poker.
“Oops… sorry,” the Chief said. He closed the panel.
“That makes the third continuous year for that poker game,” Max said. “When is it due to end?”
“Not soon,” the Chief said. “Harry is the heavy winner-he’s fifty-four thousand, two-hundred and seven dollars ahead-and the others won’t let him quit until they have a chance to get even.” He pressed another panel. It opened, he said, “Ah, yes,” then stepped back. “Miss Rose, would you come in here, please…”
A stunning blonde emerged. She blinked her large blue eyes demurely as Max rose to offer her his chair.
The Chief introduced the two, then Max said, “I assume you’re an electronic engineer, Miss Rose.”
“Call me ‘Blossom,’ ” she replied. “And, no, I’m at the check-out counter at the A amp; P.”
It was Max’s turn to blink his large blue eyes. “But the Chief tells me that you’re the inventor of Fred.”
“Yes,” she smiled. “But it was sort of an accident. You see, I have this nephew. And, for his birthday, I bought him this sort of set. You were supposed to be able to build a computer out of it. Anyway, I opened it up-just to see what it looked like-and it looked very interesting… all those little tubes, and things that went ‘click-click,’ and things. So I wanted to see if it would be too complicated for a little boy of twenty-four months, and I started putting things together. I couldn’t make much sense of the instructions. There was all that rigamarole about connecting ‘this’ to ‘that’ and ‘that’ to ‘this,’ and I could never find the ‘this’ that went to ‘that.’ So I sort of made it up as I went along. And, one thing led to another, and then there was-”
“Fred,” Max nodded.
“Yes.”
“I understand you named him after your cocker spaniel. Wasn’t that a little confusing-having a dog and a computer around the house who both answered to the name of Fred?”
“My ex-dog,” Blossom explained. “About six months ago, my puppy Fred passed on to that great dog house in the sky.”
“I see.” Max began pacing. “One other question. The Chief tells me that Fred has taken it on the lam. I wonder… how did he do it? Did you build him on roller skates?”
“Oh, no,” Blossom answered. “He has legs. Just like a human being.” She lowered her eyes. “You see, I’m a single girl… and I guess I sort of had Rock Hudson on my mind while I was building him. Not that he looks like Rock Hudson. But… as close as I could come. He looks like a robot.”
Again, Max nodded. “There may possibly be a similarity there,” he said. He halted, looking thoughtful. “There’s one aspect of this case that bothers me,” he said. His questioning eyes zeroed in on Blossom Rose. “Miss Rose, may I ask a personal question?”
Blossom colored. “Well…”
“The question is: What did you finally get your nephew for his birthday?”
She brightened. “A motorcycle.”
“Good, good,” Max said. “I was afraid there for a second that you had broken his little heart by not getting him a gift.”
The Chief spoke up. “Miss Rose,” he said, “I think it might be helpful if you told Max exactly how Fred operates.”
“I already know that-he operates alone,” Max said.
“No… I mean how he functions.”
“Well,” Blossom said, “I didn’t want him to be dependent on me. You know, have a mother complex. So I built
