Harris Harrison locked himself inside his office to work his magic with the financial information of three of the world's wealthiest people. His task was to find a faint trace of financial mischief hidden in a blizzard of bookkeeping information.
Unlike any modern investigator, Harris did not need to catalog the financial data, run data searches, or compile reports. Instead, he commanded the data set to yield up its General Field Theorem equations. Each of these equations could be examined graphically for clues. The collection of small computers behind his desk handled the crunching of the data. They produced a 64,342 bar histogram on Harris' desktop computer. To analyze the results, the desktop computer would "play through" thousands, if not millions, of artificial time frames.
