Read Online The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge by Vernor Vinge - Free Book Online

expert. “How did you discover the theft, then, Arnie?”
    Arnold’s grin spread even further across his face. This was the question he had been waiting for. “Boss, you really don’t appreciate me. I’ve been expecting something like this for a long time. My section has an agreement with Control Data Corporation. Every year we audit their computer complex with ours, and vice versa. That way the problem is reduced to a battle of the computers, and we can detect this sort of automated deception. But the crook started embezzling sometime after the 1992 audit, so he wasn’t discovered until yesterday.”
    I picked up Arnold’s report. “Any idea who the culprit is?” Four million dollars, I thought. If I ever got my hands on the crook who—no wonder our general efficiency had fallen off in the last year.
    “Not the vaguest,” Su replied, “except that he’s a company VIP with computer privileges. Now if you had just let me bug the executive offices and washrooms …”
    “You know, Arnie,” I said slowly, “sometimes I think you would have been just as comfortable on Herr Himmler’s staff as you are here.”
    Arnold turned red. “Sorry, Boss, I didn’t mean—”
    “Never mind.” Su is a good man, the graduate of one of this country’s best schools of business administration. It’s just that he’s an incurable snoop, which makes him, properly supervised, an excellent security officer.
    Su continued, subdued, “We can’t even reconstruct what sort of problems the computer was doing during those seventy hours. The thief did a magnificent job on that computer.”
    I looked down the valley in the mural. Someone I trusted had sold me out. I’d worked twenty years to make the name Royce synonymous with computers and to make Royce Technology, Inc., competitive with IBM and CDC. In that time, I’ve collected a lot of good men under one corporate roof. They are the backbone of Royce, more than I, with my high school diploma, ever was. And one of them was rotten. Who?
    There was one individual who might be able to find that answer. I got up and started for the door. “We’re going to see Howard.”
    “Prentice?” asked Su. He grabbed his report off my desk and followed me. “You don’t think that he’s responsible?” Arnold was genuinely shocked.
    “Of course not,” I said, locking the door to my office.
    When we were out of earshot of my secretaries and their recording equipment I continued. “Whoever we’re up against obviously knows computers inside and out. We can’t catch him with old-fashioned automation techniques. We’re going to have to get him by exploiting the human angle. Howard Prentice has been kicking around longer than both of us put together. He knows human nature, and he knows more ways to skin a sucker than we’ll ever imagine. He makes the perfect investigator.” I noticed the hurt look on Arnold’s face and added quickly: “On a unique case like this.”
    It’s only five minutes by aircar from Chula Vista to the Royce Research Labs at Oceanside. In fifteen minutes we were standing in the hall outside Prentice’s lab. I prefer to see people in person rather than by phone—I get more out of them. But this time it backfired: Prentice wasn’t in his lab, which was locked. I was starting back to the parking lot when Su stopped me.
    “Just a minute, Boss.” He produced a flat, metal plate and inserted it in the lock. “Master key,” he explained confidentially. “Now we can wait for him in here.”
    I was too surprised to bawl him out for this latest invasion of privacy. Besides, he’ll never grow up.
    The room lighted up as we entered. Packed against one wall were the usual programming typers and TV screens. I also recognized a high-resolution video tape recorder and a picture reader. Stacked in orderly rows along the work benches were hundreds of Prentice’s oil paintings. Sometimes I wondered whether he considered himself an artist or a scientist—though I