Barby said obligingly, "All right. I pick Ben Franklin. Now what?"
"We get the major books on old Ben, plus the copy of the encyclopedia we need. Then we set up an index, and we put principal categories of information on file cards. For Ben, we'd need the Sayings of Poor Richard, and the dates they appeared, and where. And we'd need a list of his inventions, plus dates. And so on. Generally, we fix things so we can find any answer in a few seconds."
Barby shook her head. "That would be awfully hard. It would take weeks, and whoever operated the file would have to know it nearly by heart."
Rick agreed. "But isn't a million bucks worth a few weeks of effort?"
Rick's famous father, Hartson Brant, walked into the library in time to hear the last comment. His eyebrows went up. "What's all this megabuck talk?"
That was a new word to Barby. "What talk?"
"In the metric system, 'meg' means million. So a megabuck is a million bucks, if you'll pardon the slang."
"Oh--well Rick is going to win a megabuck."
Rick explained rapidly about choosing a subject that could be cross-indexed for ease of reference, then went on. "After we get the subject all set, we choose the contestant. It has to be a real person. We'd need several contestants, because the gimmick could be worked on every big money quiz. Maybe more than once on each. Of course the contestants would have to be members of the Megabuck Mob, as we'll call it."
"I like that," Barby said enthusiastically. "That would make me a Megabuck Moll, wouldn't it?"
"Yep," Scotty agreed. "And Rick can be the Megabuck Mole."
"And you can be the Megabuck Moose, you big ox," Rick finished. He was warming up to his subject now. There had to be a hole in it somewhere, but he hadn't found it yet. "Anyway, we have Ben Franklin on file cards and Barby has studied carefully to be the first contestant. Then what?"
"Someone asks who Ben Franklin was, and I say that he started a chain of department stores," Barby said helpfully.
"Not you," Rick denied. "You know all the right answers. And why? Because the Megabuck Mob is behind you. The Megabuck Moose is going through the cards, and the Megabuck Mole is feeding the answers into the Megabuck Memory Machine, and the Megabuck Moll in maidenly modesty mumbles madly--"