of the weekend in her office at Eastbury College. What she was doing, she knew, was probably illegal. It was definitely unethical, but she had wasted no time at all worrying about that. Instead, she had devoted all her time to discovering the access codes that would allow her to tap into the Eastbury Community Hospital records that were stored in the county’s computer. It was, like most programing, a matter of trial and error. For anyone without Sally’s background, it would have been nearly impossible; for Sally, it was simply a matter of knowing how the codes were constructed, then having the computer begin trying all the possibilities within the framework. The code, when she finally found it, turned out to be ridiculously obvious:
M-E-D-R-E-A-C-H. MEDical Records, EAstbury Community Hospital? Probably. Indeed, when she finally found the code, it had occurred to her that in an age of acronyms, she ought to have been able to figure it out without the aid of the computer.
Now, on Monday morning, she was tapping into the records, attempting to find out whether or not the children that CHILD was surveying had truly been selected through random sampling.
She began by instructing the computer to search the records and put together certain populations.
Children who were being surveyed by the Children’s Health Institute for Latent Diseases.
Children who had been victims of SIDS.
Children whose records reflected no health problems.
She went back twenty years. Without the computer it would have taken months simply to compile the data.
Now, after only two horn’s of work, Sally had begun to see a pattern emerge.
The computer had constructed the populations Sally had asked for and begun comparing them.
Until ten years ago there had been no discernible differences between the children who were being studied by CHILD and the entire population of juvenile patients for the entire county.
The same percentage of each population had come down, at one time or another, with such diseases as mumps, measles, and chicken pox.
The same proportion of each group had displayed similar incidence of emotional problems.
The same proportion of each group had fallen victim to SIDS.
On and on, it had been the same. As far as Sally could see, the CHILD surveys had involved a genuinely random sampling of all the children born at Eastbury Community Hospital.
And then, ten years ago, things began to change.
The incidence of sudden infant death syndrome seemed to have increased among children in Eastbury, particularly among those born at Eastbury Community Hospital.
In itself, Sally knew that such a fact could be statistically meaningless.
What was meaningful was that among the entire population of children in Eastbury, SIDS had increased by four percent.
Among the population being surveyed by CHILD, SIDS had increased by nearly ten percent.
Furthermore, the composition of the group of children struck down by SIDS had changed. For the first ten years, the syndrome had appeared with equal frequency in boys and girls. But ten years ago, the statistics began to skew, and baby girls became more frequent victims of the syndrome than baby boys. And among the population of children being surveyed by CHILD, an even higher ratio of girls to boys had died from SIDS.
Sally printed out the lists of populations, and the strange correlations between the two. Then she turned her attention to the other group she was looking at, the population of children whose medical records were remarkable for the excellent health they reflected. Here, Sally ran into a problem. Over the years, too many children had simply moved away from Eastbury, and their records had come to an abrupt end, to be continued in other areas of the country. Areas to which Sally had no easy access.
Still, she thought there was a pattern. It appeared, even from the sketchy records, that over the last ten years, the proportion of remarkably healthy little boys on the CHILD lists had risen.
Again, Sally Montgomery printed out the statistics.
Toward noon Sally asked the computer to complete one more task.
Given all the data in the records, she requested the computer to come to a determination as to whether or not the subjects of the CHILD surveys had, over the last ten years, been chosen on a truly random basis.
The minutes crept by as the computer began digesting all the material stored away in its data banks. At last the screen on Sally’s console came to life.
The computer’s answer brought tears to Sally’s eyes. Through the blur, she read the computer’s final summation one more time.
“Insufficient data to make determination.”
Sally switched off her