I smiled. Smiles always mean exactly what somebody wants them to mean, without saying anything at all. And it worked again. After I graced him with a slanty view of my teeth, he relaxed and favored me with a view of his. He had fine large teeth, and I surmised that he either brushed often or chewed hay.

  “I suppose you’re here about old Miner.”

  “Good work, Hercule,” I said.

  “Don’t get sappy,” he said. “It’s torn things up around here, you can see.”

  “I can see,” I said, looking around at a laboratory that seemed to be running as smoothly as ever.

  “Well, of course the day-to-day isn’t affected, Juster, but at the highest levels—well, what about the directions for the future? We had everything worked out, Miner and I, and now—poof, all gone. Who knows what the new man’s going to do?”

  “Whatever he does, he’d better keep a bodyguard around while he does it,” I said.

  Herman Young laughed, long and loud. Utterly without mirth. I thought that his laugh would be appropriate for the devil, if there was one. But this hardly seemed like hell.

  “It’s a damned shame about Miner. I suppose I’m just about the last person who saw him alive, except for Cannon. And the murderer, of course.”

  “And who’s that?” I asked.

  “If I knew, do you think I’d wait for you to ask me?”

  “Not unless you were him.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Ah. I’m relieved to know that. I can go home now.”

  This time he didn’t laugh. “Look, I know I’m a material witness because the cops told me not to leave here. Well, that’s fine, I have plenty to do anyway and I had no plans to go anywhere. But if you’re going to sympathize, then sympathize. Don’t waste my time with a bunch of stupid questions and innuendos.”

  The voice had command in it, and against my will and judgment I found myself grinning sheepishly, as I always had in third grade when a particularly firm teacher had caught me playing doctor in the coat closet or some other such offense. Words of apology formed on my lips. However, I am a juster. I didn’t say them.

  “Dr. Young, there are really only two possible murderers. You and Mr. Cannon.”

  “Cannon?” he said, snorting incredulously. “He’d never lift a hand against Miner.”

  “Then you.”

  “Ridiculous. There must be someone else.”

  “Not possible. Was Miner alive when you went in to visit him shortly before five o’clock yesterday?”

  “No, he was bleeding to death, but I had another appointment and rushed out without telling anybody. Of course he was alive.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “I can’t tell you.” He looked as if he thought only a moron would have asked.

  “Humor me. Pretend that I’m a juster, and that it’s a crime to refuse to answer my questions.”

  “Good heavens, Juster! We talked about industrial secrets!”

  “You know my security clearance.”

  “Is it necessary to the investigation?”

  I shrugged. “I can hardly know unless you tell me.”

  “We were talking about funding,” he said reluctantly.

  “For the emotional link prebrain project?”

  “Damn,” he said. “Damn all laboratory assistants. I had no idea the rumors were so rampant. Yes, that and a dozen other things. I wanted to manufacture them here. Miner wanted to license them.”

  “Why?”

  “Why which? It’s going to make every other damn prebrain on the market instantly obsolete, that’s why. And the patent is ironclad and unbreakable. They can’t get around it. So everybody—including IBM, Xerox, and that damnable AT&T—is going to have to buy them from us.”

  “What makes this emotional link so important?” I asked.

  He looked heavenward, as if everyone should have known such an obvious thing.

  “When you want to know what happened yesterday at 2:46 p.m., all you do is think that query at your prebrain, and the answer flashes out of your memory, right? Or you think of a person, and your memories of him start tumbling up. Or you think of a subject, or you scan for important things in a certain time frame, and bingo, right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Well, with the emotional link prebrain, one of the features is that when you’re in a mood—happy, melancholy, passionate, anything—it just takes a little mental shove, and all the similar experiences you’ve had—things that gave you the same kind of feeling—they all flood back. So that every time you make love, you remember the first time you made love, and every place or person you’ve made love with, along with those old emotions. When you feel proud of something, all your other achievements flash back at you, and your pride is intensified. Every pleasant emotion is tripled, quadrupled, more than that, hey? It’ll sell a billion. And that ass Miner wanted to cut off the funding for it. ‘It’s good enough as it is, so patent it and we’ll license it out.’ Bull. The man has no vision. He let the damned prebrain out in the first place, and we lost billions. I don’t want to lose billions again!”

  “I can understand that,” I said.

  “It made me so damned mad.”

  “Mad enough to, for instance, slide a letter opener into his throat?”

  “Letter opener hell. Everybody knows it was a dagger on the wall. Is that what passes for tricky questioning among you justers? Waste of a good prebrain, that is.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “I was pretty damned mad. But when I talked to him yesterday, he agreed to consider a change. Why should I kill him? He was beginning to bend. You can ask Cannon, if you want. He was there. Unless he’s trying to pin this on me. Did he say I did it?”

  “What he tells me is none of your business right now.”

  With a roar of anger, Herman Young kicked the nearest desk so hard that is slid nearly four meters before crashing into a table. The lab assistant who had been sitting at it seemed accustomed to such a thing, however. He simply stood up and pulled the desk back without comment.

  “Perhaps we should find someplace private to talk,” I suggested.

  Young glared at me. “By all that’s holy, Juster, it’s my damned business if I’m being accused of murder. Right now! I demand that right now you sympathize with me and find out the truth. You’ll find out that Cannon is lying, right enough!”

  He offered his throat for me to hook into. I shook my head. “I haven’t even talked to Mr. Cannon yet, Dr. Young.”

  “Then how the hell can you accuse me—”

  “Dr. Young!” I said, losing patience. “I’m conducting a trial. It will go as I direct it, not as you do. And you will answer my questions and you will refrain from yelling at me.”

  He stalked away for a few paces, then turned back. “All right! What do you want to know?”

  “Was Mr. Cannon in the room with Mr. Miner when you left?”

  “Yes. Next question?”

  “Were they involved in any kind of discussion?”

  “Yes. They had been discussing something when I came in. They stopped discussing it while Miner and I yelled at each other for a while. When I left, I presume they continued discussing it.”

  “Thank you. That will do for now.”

  “Excellent. Are you going to sympathize?”

  “Maybe later,” I said.

  “Damn!” he shouted. The walls rattled faintly. “Do you mean you intend to interrupt my work again! Just do it now and get it over with!”

  He stared at me, rather defiantly, and I looked at him, too—trying to look cool and unruffled, but I rather imagine I failed at it. I wanted to belt him in the nose. Or can one belt someone anywhere but in the belt?

  “Dr. Young,” I said, sounding studiously patient, “If I didn’t believe you innocent, I would certainly believe you guilty because of your insistence that I sympathize with you. Surely you know the law on that point?”

  “You can sympathize with material witnesses, that’s the law, and I’m a material witness. There’s also a law that says you must act expeditiously. That means fast, in case you didn’t know.”

  “I knew. However, Dr. Young, there’s also a constitutional amendment that declares that a citizen can’t be compelled to testify against himself. And a Supreme Court decision that declares that the Bill of Rights is still valid, even in a case where a juster can get the truth. If I were to sympathize with you, as a material witness and not as a confessing defendent, and it turned out that you were the murderer, you could not be prosecuted.”

  “Oh.”

  “But you surely knew that,” I said.

  “All I knew was that I’m innocent of any crime and I have a lot to do. You’ll end up wanting to sympathize in the end, of course. And I suppose I’ll have to let you interrupt me. In the meantime, kindly go to hell and leave me alone.”

  He turned quickly and stormed out of the room. As soon as he was gone, a low chuckle went up from the lab assistants. Donna Silberman came over to me.

  “Congratulations, Juster,” she said, grinning. “You’re the first person ever to go through that and live.”

  Then she realized what she had said.

  “Oh, but of course you know I mean he’s never actually killed anybody!”

  I reassured her that I had indeed understood her meaning. She smiled again. I noticed with relief that she was actually capable of dropping the smile, if only for a moment. A thought occurred to me—which is one of the reasons computers are unlikely to replace human brains. Thoughts don’t just “occur” to computers.

  “Ms. Silberman—”

  “Donna—”

  “Dammit, Donna, I know your name!” And the idea had left me. I cursed, and asked her something else. “Is this emotional link really important?”

  “Oh yes, very. Didn’t you hear him describe it?”

  “Yes, of course. But doesn’t it magnify the unpleasant emotions, too? When you feel sad, don’t you remember every sorrow you ever had, making it a thousand times worse?”

  She shrugged. “Nope. It doesn’t work that way.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “How should I know?” she answered. “I only work here. We just put together little pieces and steps in a process. Young puts it all together, and he knows the workings of it.”

  “What if he died?” I asked.

  “Oh, any of us could probably figure it out in a few weeks, if we had a finished model to work with. But heaven knows what he does behind locked doors right now. He’s really paranoid about industrial spies. He’s certain that AT&T has smuggled some spies in here.”

  “Have they?”

  “Of course!” she answered, and once again I felt like a moron for not knowing something so obvious.

  And then Lieutenant Kimball came in to tell me that they had Cannon, Parks, and the man from Gilbert and Sons ready for questioning.

  For the sake of interest and a poetic setting, I talked to them one at a time in Miner’s own office. The body was gone, of course. Once I had seen it, they packed it away for the autopsy, just in case something extra was involved that the medical examiner hadn’t been able to pick up with his chemical sampler in situ.

  The man from Gilbert and Sons confirmed what Sally Garrett had told us: they had indeed caught Darrel Smith embezzling. But that really made no difference. Logically there was no way I could see that if Darrel really had killed Miner the fact wouldn’t have been noticed by Cannon or Young. I sent the accountant home.

  Billie Parks, a bright young woman who explained that she was only working as a typist to pay her way through school and become a scientist, corroborated Sally Garrett’s testimony. Cannon had entered the office first, followed by Darrel Smith. And after Smith left, Dr. Young had come in, stayed for five minutes. And Cannon didn’t leave until after Sally had gone in to answer the buzzer.

  I thanked Billie and sent her home. Then, alone in the office, I closed my eyes and scanned back over the testimony, with the anomalizer working. I tested each possible hypothesis. If Smith was the murderer, nothing else made sense, and the anomalizer and I agreed that Smith was innocent. Of murder, though not of embezzling.

  And if Young was the killer—and he certainly had a violent streak that made it possible—why didn’t Cannon accuse him? Well, maybe he would.

  A conspiracy? Doubtful. And really, quite ridiculous. Why would a conspiracy construct a murder in such a way that one of their number would be suspected? The anomalizer threw the theory out.

  Which left Cannon. I called him Lieutenant Kimball, of course, had to remain in the room—standard policy when a juster questioned a material witness. There always had to be someone else present. Justers are too expensive to keep having to replace them.

  Cannon was a small man, but his smile was pleasant and looked heartfelt, and I couldn’t help but smile back.

  “Juster Benson, they tell me your name is,” he said.

  “That’s true. John Cannon?” I motioned for him to sit.

  “Yes. I’m Rodney Miner’s lawyer. And his best friend. Or rather—I was. I have a hard time remembering that he’s dead.”

  “I daresay,” I said. Cannon was still smiling. Was it a disease running through the building? Did everyone have to smile?

  “I imagine it looks rather bad for me,” Cannon said.

  “It’ll help if you tell the truth,” I prodded.

  “Oh, I will, Juster. I know the law, and I know the way things look. I don’t understand things myself, though, and heaven knows I’ve been trying. You see, I can’t remember Rodney being killed at all. And yet I must have been there, mustn’t I?”

  “That seems to be the theory.”

  He shook his head. “I just don’t understand.”

  “Why not just tell me what happened?”

  So he did. Sally Garrett was right again—Darrel Smith’s long interview had been about her embezzlement. But I was surprised to hear Cannon tell me that at his recommendation, Rodney Miner had told Smith that he didn’t intend to prosecute her. That was news.

  “What happens to her now?” I asked. “With Miner dead?”

  “Well, of course, the matter’s up to the board of directors and the new president. But I’m sure that they will prosecute. Tough luck for Darrel, I say, even if she is a dyke.”

  Which meant that if John Cannon was telling the truth, Darrel Smith had no motive at all for killing Miner, and every motive in the world for keeping him alive. “Did she know that?”

  “Yes, of course,” Cannon said. “Darrel’s not stupid. She knew that everything depended on Rodney. And when she left, Rod and I talked about it some more. He was definitely alive. And then he got a call that Dr. Young wanted to see him, and so he had me look for some budget files while he went over what Gilbert and Sons had projected for him about costs on going back into wholesale manufacture. Something Dr. Young had cooked up. And frankly, we just didn’t have the capital for it. Unless we issued new stock or something like that. And we were afraid that the buyers would most likely be one of the big Three. We just didn’t see a way out of that—not legally, anyway.”

  “So Miner wasn’t just being stubborn about wanting to license out Dr. Young’s new prebrain?”

  “You know about that?” Cannon looked mildly surprised. “So much for our secrets. Yes, Miner wasn’t just stubborn. But Dr. Young had a hard time accepting that. He just doesn’t understand business. He doesn’t realize that capital has to come from somewhere, and that you don’t get it for free.”

  In spite of myself I discovered that I liked Cannon. He was a gentleman and a gentle man, soft spoken and yet warm. He didn’t stop smiling, but it didn’t irritate me as it had when Donna Silberman had grinned her way through a half hour. And yet everything that Cannon said removed suspicion from others and replaced it firmly on himself. A mad course, a foolish course—and Cannon seemed neither mad nor foolish.

  “Mr. Cannon, how did Dr. Young’s interview with Miner end?”

  “Oh, rather amicably. Rodney told Herman that he’d try to find a way to manufacture. Of course, we both knew it was impossible—but Rodney was always a man of his word, and I knew that he would certainly try. Young would have known that, too. Certainly he seemed calm when he left.”

  “And when he left, Miner was still alive?”

  “Oh, yes. Definitely. He asked me to continue going through the files, which I did until Sally came in—you know that Sally’s real name is Brian, don’t you?—and then Sally made a telephone call from Rodney’s desk.”

  “Did you look at Mr. Miner at that time?”

  “Why should I? I was looking through the files. But I know he wasn’t dead, Juster Benson, because he spoke to me several times, and he gave Sally permission to use the telephone.”

  I couldn’t understand why an intelligent man like Cannon would lie about something so easily verified. “Sally says he was calling the police.”

  Cannon shrugged. “I listen back to that conversation, and of course my prebrain gives it to me word for word, and on the telephone she simply asked for somebody to bring over dinner for the three of us, we were working late. Right after that I asked her to take a letter, since I had found the file, and she implied that she was too involved with another project “right then and so I left to get my own secretary on the telephone. When I came back in, Miner was dead. And I’ve looked back through my memory as much as I could, time and again, and Juster, I assure you, Miner was not dead while I was in the office.”

  I believed Cannon. I’ve been lied to so often that I’m skeptical of my own birth certificate, but I believed Cannon. He was a believable man.

  So, because I believed him, I began to think in another direction. And it occurred to me that there was one other potential murderer.

  “Lieutenant, could you send for Billie Parks?”

  Kimball was surprised. “Didn’t you just have us send her home?”

  “I need her.” I used my firm, don’t ask any damfool questions voice, and Kimball got up and went to the phone.

  “You don’t believe this guy, do you?” Kimball asked me as he dialed, using a phone number written efficiently on a sheet of his notebook.