The triple-zero mode was operating. Smith sat back at his console, while the Folcroft computers quietly sifted through the accumulated reports mentioning the name Foxx, from 257 police precincts around the country.
The computer had arranged the material according to Smith's programming and took out most of the dross automatically: The foxes, Phochses, and one-x Foxes were eliminated with whirring efficiency. The rest-the Foxxes ticketed for traffic violations, arrested for juvenile crimes, or reported as accident fatalities-had to be scrupulously, tediously scrutinized by Smith himself. He sat stone still at the console, afraid to blink, while he scanned the screen for each entry, pressing the "discard" button for every Foxx with nothing to offer.
His eyes burned. He took off his glasses for a moment and rubbed his face with a handkerchief. Then he opened them and scanned the entry on the screen. He pressed "Hold" and read the entry again.
"FOXX, FELIX, M.D. LAST SEEN WITH HOMICIDE VICTIM SCHWARTZ, IRMA L."
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Smith keyed in the code. "PLEASE GIVE CAUSE OF DEATH."
The computer whirred for a moment, then flashed its version of Irma Schwartz's demise onto the screen. "SCHWARTZ, IRMA L. DEATH CAUSED BY ADMINISTRATION OF HCN THROUGH NASAL CANAL."
"EXPAND."
"HCN = HYDROCYANIC ACID, I.E. PRUSSiC ACID. LIQUID OR GASEOUS STATES. UNSTABLE. MOLECULAR CONFIGURATION. . ,"
"HOLD." The computer would expand the subject forever untii every scrap of available information on it was exhausted, if he let it. Smith keyed out the "Expand" function. The screen reverted to the details of Irma Schwartz's death, listing blood levels of known substances arranged by quantity. At the bottom of the list was PROCAINE. . .00001, followed by a footnote: "ALL LEVELS NORMAL EXCLUDING FINAL ENTRY."
"PROCAINE: EXPAND"
"PROCAINE = NOVOCAINE, GENERIC TERM. FOUND IN CACAO PLANT. FREQUENTLY REFINED INTO COCAINE. ALSO FOUND IN HIGHLY PURE FORM BUT SMALL QUANTITIES IN HUMAN ENDOCRINE SYSTEM. . . .
"RELATION TO SCHWARTZ, IRMA L."
"NEAR ABSENCE OF PROCAINE IN SUBJECT'S BLOOD AT TIME OF DEATH. . . DISCREPANCY WITH 000 REPORT. . . DISCREPANCY. . ."
"EXPAND DISCREPANCY."
The screen flashed back to the police report. "SUBJECT FELT NO PAIN PRIOR TO DEATH."
"What?" Smith said aloud. He asked the computer to explain.
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"POLICE REPORT 000315219 QUOTE SUBJECT IS REPORTED TO HAVE FELT NO PAIN . . . DISCREPANCY WITH LOW PROCAINE LEVEL. . . ."
Smith was interested. He keyed in "PROCAINE" again and pressed the "Expand" button. The computer picked up where it had left off and spewed out volumes of information on procaine for the next twenty minutes. Among other things, Smith discovered that a body's procaine level controlled in some measure that body's tolerance for pain.
If irma Schwartz's procaine content was nearly nil, then the strange footnote that she had suffered no pain didn't make sense. On top of it all, Felix Foxx had been with her on the day she died. It still didn't shed any light on Admiral Ives's murder, unless. . .
"UNUSUAL PROCAINE LEVELS IN AUTOPSY REPORTS FOR WATSON, HOMER G., AND IVES, THORNTON?" Smith asked.
"PROCAINE LEVELS NORMAL," the computer answered.
No connection.
Smith readjusted the program back to its former position.
The computer expanded into historical references to the drug, including various published accounts. Smith dutifully read each entry as it appeared on the screen, sifting through decades of data, working backward. In 1979 there were 165 entries on procaine, comprising the whole of the printed word worldwide, including tabloids from Sri Lanka and encyclopedias. At this rate, Smith realized, it was going to take forever.
"AMERICAN PERIODICALS ONLY," he keyed in. "WORD COUNT ONLY."
There were twelve mentions of the word procaine in
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1978, all in one issue of the Journal of American Dentistry. Foxx's name was not mentioned. Nor was it mentioned through the entire decade of the sixties. Or the fifties. Or the forties. Smith blinked back a blinding headache.
!n 1938, American newspapers and magazines printed the word procaine more than 51,000 times.
"HOLD. EXPAND."
The articles appeared one after the other on the screen. All of them concerned a drug scandal involving a now defunct research facility in Enwood, Pennsylvania, from which a staggering quantity of endocri-nal procaine, extracted from human cadavers, was found missing. The research was being conducted, as later reports revealed, as a military experiment to increase the pain tolerances of combat soldiers.
A public outcry against scientists' fiddling around with pain experiments on Our Boys in Uniform far overshadowed any objection to the theft of the drug. As a result, the Pennsylvania facility was abandoned, the experiments aborted, and the project's head researcher quietly expatriated. His name was Vaux.
Felix Vaux.
"Vaux," Smith said, reprogramming the computer with new energy.
"EXPAND VAUX, FELIX. HEAD RESEARCHER AT ENWOOD, PA. FACILITY 416, CA. 1938," he keyed.
"VAUX, FELIX. B. AUG. 10,1888. . . B.S. UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO. . ."
"HOLD."
1888? That would make him ninety-four years old.
It was the wrong man. Six hours at the most powerful, omnipotent computer complex in the world, and he'd ended up with the wrong man.
Disgustedly he switched off the console. It was
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going nowhere. Undoubtedly, Remo had the wrong man, too. If Smith were an ordinary computer analyst working with ordinary computers, he would have put on his twenty-year-old tweed coat at that point, and his thirty-year-old brown felt hat, and locked the catches on the attache case containing his emergency telephone, and left for the night.
But Harold W. Smith was not ordinary. He was precise. Precise to the point where, if his peas were not positioned exactly at 9 o'clock on his plate, he would suffer with indigestion throughout the meal. So precise that he trusted almost nothing-not words, not people, not clocks. Nothing except the four items on earth that Smith considered to be adequately accurate to deserve his trust: the Folcroft computers.
And the four Folcroft computers had said, categorially, that Felix Foxx, M.D., was somehow living without a date of birth. Given that much as a premise, anything else was possible.
With fresh determination he switched on the console.
"COORDINATES, ENWOOD, PA. RESEARCH FACILITY, CA. 1938?" he asked. The coordinates came up on the screen. They matched exactly those Remo had given him for Shangri La.