“I might. I certainly can’t act as if I didn’t believe him, and make an utter ass of myself, can I?”

  If Kimball had any suspicion that I had already made an ass of myself, he kept it private. When he hung up the phone, he went back to his chair, saying, “She’ll be right over. She’s a little irritated.”

  “I’m sure, she is,” I said. Then I turned to Cannon. “We’ll wait until Ms. Parks comes.” Cannon nodded.

  Kimball looked puzzled. “Why her? She’s already told you everything.”

  “She’s told me everything she could tell me,” I said. “Now why don’t you and Mr. Cannon go outside the office and let me think for a while?”

  They went. I thought. I got nowhere.

  When Billie Parks arrived she had apparently got over her irritation, and she came into the office cheerfully enough.

  “Sit down,” I offered pleasantly.

  “Sure,” she said. “What do you want to know?”

  “Nothing you can tell me,” I said.

  She laughed. “If I can’t tell you, why’d you ask?”

  “I need to do something extraordinary, Ms. Parks. I’ve been rather foolishly following up on the obvious suspects, neglecting one who also had opportunity and, perhaps, motive.”

  “Me?” she asked, looking worried.

  “Of course not,” I said, reassuring her with my best smile. She relaxed visibly. “The person I’m wondering about right now is Sally.”

  “Sally?” she laughed. “Sally wouldn’t hurt a fly. And that’s not just a faggot cliche, Juster. Sally really is a sweet man. And he loves—loved Rodney Miner to distraction.”

  “Nevertheless,” I said, “a juster has to examine every possibility. You see, Billie, if I happen to sympathize with the wrong person—if I happen to go trekking through the murderer’s mind without a written confession first, then the murderer was compelled to testify against himself, and he or she goes free. So I can’t get the facts from anybody right now, because the stories are so confused. I need your help.”

  “If I can.”

  “Billie, you’re not a material witness. I can’t legally sympathize with you unless you are.”

  She nodded.

  “And I have no grounds to declare you a material witness. Except that I need, very badly, to go inside your head.”

  She stiffened. “I’ve already told you everything I know.”

  “I’m sure of it, Billie. Or I wouldn’t dare try this. But if—just supposing that Sally were the murderer. There might have been a hairsbreadth of time, just a moment between the time Cannon left Miner’s office and the time you actually saw the body. And I need to see how far the bleeding had progressed when you saw Miner dead.”

  She looked at her hands. “I don’t like the idea of you going into my head, Juster Benson. I’m like anybody else. I’ve done things that I’m ashamed of, that I don’t want you to see.”

  I nodded. Didn’t I have my secrets, too? “When I sympathize with you, Billie, I don’t read your whole mind unless I want to—or unless you make me. The machine doesn’t do things automatically. It’s still your brain and my brain. I have to get in sympathy with you, I have to think as you do, see with your memories. If you help me, I can find out what I need to know in a few moments, without seeing anything you want to keep secret.”

  She thought for a while, and then nodded. “If you’re sure it’s necessary.”

  I assured her that it was indeed necessary.

  “I don’t like it,” she said. “But I also don’t like murderers to get away with it. And even though Mr. Miner wasn’t exactly what I’d call a nice man, I don’t think he deserved to die. So I’ll help.”

  I asked her to come over and sit by me. She did, and then pulled her collar away from the prebrain outlet on her neck.

  I extended the male plug from my magic hand. The seven tiny prongs glistened in the light. She stiffened and looked nervous.

  “It doesn’t hurt,” I told her.

  “I know,” she said.

  “You won’t even know I’m there. Just think through, just recall everything that happened from the moment Dr. Young left.”

  And then I inserted the prongs from my finger into the female terminal on her neck, and suddenly my mind was awash with strange memories. I gasped—I always do, no matter how often I sympathize. Because suddenly I was totally disoriented. I was seeing a man leave Miner’s office, but I was seeing him from a rather small female body, and I thought of him as a demigod—Dr. Young, the greatest scientist of cybercephalology in the world. But because I’m experienced at sympathizing, I was soon able to observe. For a short time, all I could see was the typewriter and the reports I was typing—in Billie’s memory. But I was aware of the noise being made by Sally’s typewriter, too.

  After a while—about five minutes, my timesense told me—the buzzer on Sally’s desk sounded. It kept ringing. I remembered—again from Billie—the surprise and then irritation I felt when the buzzer kept ringing and ringing and ringing.

  “My God,” Sally said as I watched him go to the door to Miner’s office. “Does he think I’m Tinkerbell, to magically appear at a moment’s notice?” I recalled laughing—and was again startled to hear myself laugh with a high, tinkling, female laugh.

  Sally opened the door and went in. Immediately I heard him shout, excitedly, fearfully, “Mr. Miner!” And then, almost without a pause, the clatter of a receiver going up clumsily from its cradle.

  And then, maddeningly, I recalled turning back to my typewriter and continuing typing the report. I couldn’t hear a word being said on the telephone.

  But then my (Billie’s!) typing was interrupted by another shout. Sally’s voice saying, “Mr. Cannon! You’re still here!”

  A mumbling answer from Cannon. And then he was at the door, walking briskly out. He smiled cheerfully—that beautiful, warm smile—at me, Billie, and left. There wasn’t a break. Immediately Sally was at the door, his face white and ghastly, asking me to come in. I did, and felt again in memory the terrible fear and yet the morbid excitement and curiosity upon realizing that Mr. Miner was dead. I could hear Sally breathing in short gasps, as if he were taking quick bites of air before someone could take it away.

  Miner had already stopped bleeding; the blood had already spread as far as it was going to. Sally couldn’t have stabbed Miner after Cannon left the office.

  I was disappointed. For a moment I wondered if I had been hoping Sally was guilty—but I acquitted myself instantly. I had merely been hoping that Cannon was telling the truth. I wanted so badly to believe him.

  There was nothing more to be gained from Billie. I pulled my finger out of her neck. She sighed and opened her eyes. “Did you get what you needed?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Did Sally do it?”

  “Sally definitely didn’t kill Rodney Miner.”

  Billie smiled. “I’m so relieved.”

  “I wish I were.”

  She got up from her chair. “Can I go now?” I nodded. When she got to the door she turned around and asked, “Maybe there’s something really obvious that you’ve overlooked.”

  “There isn’t,” I said.

  “Weren’t there any fingerprints on the dagger?”

  I laughed. “Fingerprints are only left by morons on the holo. Our murderer left no trace on the dagger. The police checked that right off.”

  “Oh,” she said, disappointed. “Well, good luck.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and the door closed.

  My course was pretty inevitable from there. I called in Sally, told him he was a material witness, which scared him to death, but when I plugged into him (and it bothered me more to see the world as a homosexual than it did to see things as a woman—perhaps because it seemed more natural to be gay than to be female!), I only found out that he had told the absolute truth.

  When Sally went into the office, Rodney Miner was already dead, his dead hand pressing the buzzer. John Cannon really was in the room. Sally did call the police. John Cannon did leave, nonchalantly smiling.

  In fact, it was appalling how casual and callous Cannon seemed. Was this the man that had been described as Miner’s best friend? Grinning his way out of the office?

  When I was through with Sally I sent him home. He was clear, and there was no more need for him. All I needed now to make a conviction and send John Cannon to the courts for sentencing was the testimony—under sympathy—of Dr. Herman Young, that Miner was alive when he left the office. Then circumstantial evidence would leave no possibility of any murderer but John Cannon.

  But while the police were fetching Young from his laboratories, I found myself even more frustrated by Cannon. I still wanted to believe him. And there was a perverse sort of truth even as things stood: when he walked out of Miner’s office, smiling cheerfully at the corpse and the distraught secretary who was still holding the telephone, he might very well have been doing just what he said—heading out to make a call to his secretary, without any idea at all that Miner was dead.

  It was an attractive thought, that perhaps Miner was hallucinating. But even when we refuse to believe what our eyes tell us, the facts are there in our memories. And with the prebrain there is no way to lie—which is why a juster can make “perfect” judgments, barring mistakes in legal procedure, every time. No one can hide memories from himself—or from the sympathizer.

  Why, then, was I sure Cannon wasn’t lying? The man must be charismatic.

  My reverie was, thankfully, interrupted by Young’s arrival. He looked less surly and irritated than before—more cooperative. Lieutenant Kimball left two detectives with Cannon in the outer office and came in to watch the interrogation with me. An officer must be present, and all that.

  “Ready to sympathize?” Young asked me. “I’ve been thinking about it, and it has to be Cannon, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Well, my ironic little female plug is ready for intercourse with the sympathizer,” Young said, with a grin. I laughed—the joke was old enough, but I was grateful for anything to relieve the tension. Instead of having Young come to me, however, I got up and came to him. And as I passed by him to sit on his left, where the plug was, I looked him in the eye.

  And stopped cold.

  The moment I stopped, of course, concern passed over his face and he asked me, looking puzzled, “Is something wrong?”

  Was something wrong? It was obvious what I had to do. But in that fleeting moment before I stopped, I had seen such a look of—what, relief? Triumph?—in Young’s eyes. As if he had fooled me and taken himself off the hook.

  Exactly the look I might expect to see in the eyes of someone who was guilty, and who knew that sympathizing would violate his first amendment rights and set him free on the technicality.

  But it had been for a fraction of a second. And it was impossible. I closed my eyes and went over the facts again with the anomalizer. It was against logic to think of Young as the murderer—if he had killed Miner, why in heaven’s name would Cannon risk his life to protect him? Certainly risk his reputation, since if Cannon had lied and the real murderer got off because of it, the law declared that Cannon could no longer legally wear his prebrain. And that would mean the end of any career Cannon could hope for, except perhaps manual labor, and even then a prebrain was necessary to memorize the day’s list of instructions. Cannon wouldn’t risk everything for a man like Young.

  The anomalizer reassured me that Cannon was guilty and I was safe to sympathize with Young.

  But then I went to recall mode and remembered Cannon telling me his story—his lies, I was certain. But as I heard him, watched him tell me again in memory, I was again convinced that he was honest. It was just a gut feeling, but it was real enough.

  And then I laughed out loud. Of course I remembered Cannon and still believed he was honest. Because along with the memory of what he said came the perfect memory of how I had felt. It was self-reinforcing, just like Young’s emotional link prebrain. You remember something along with your feelings of belief, and you believe even.

  And then I stopped laughing. Because I remembered the question I had started to ask Donna Silberman earlier in the day. And it might—just might—make a difference.

  “Dr. Young, I’m sorry. Could you step outside and wait for just a few more minutes?”

  He looked even more puzzled, and this time irritated, too. Was I fooling myself that there was an undercurrent of fear? Probably. But when he had left the room, I told Kimball to get Donna Silberman for me.

  He looked very puzzled and not a little skeptical. I could almost hear him thinking, does this juster know what the hell he’s doing? The truth is, I couldn’t have answered that question just then. But that was why we had human justers instead of computers. Because computers didn’t wear pants. And sometimes people had to do a little seat-of-the-pants decision-making.

  The door was still open between Miner’s office, where I was waiting, and the outer office, where Cannon, Young, and the police were waiting. And so I heard the uproar when Kimball brought Donna Silberman in.

  “What the hell do you need her for!” I heard Young (of course) shouting.

  “I don’t know,” Kimball answered. “Juster wants her.”

  “She’s not material. She doesn’t know a damned thing! He’s only trying to pick her brains about the Happy Head research program!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Kimball said, and by then I was at the door.

  “Sit down, Dr. Young!” I shouted—louder than he, though I had doubted I could do it. “I am empowered to hold you in contempt of court for this kind of harassment of the judicial procedure!”

  “Judicial procedure hell!” he shouted back. “One man with a magic hand makes a judicial procedure? I like the old way—twelve good men and true, instead of all this mechanical crap!”

  At that I had to laugh. “Well, if you don’t like all this mechanical crap, Dr. Young, why in the name of heaven did you invent it?”

  And, miraculously, that shut him up.

  Donna Silberman came into the inner office and sat down. This time I didn’t need Kimball present, so I left him outside when I shut the door.

  “Donna, I just need to ask you a few questions.”

  “Shoot.” She was still grinning that idiotic grin.

  “I have to confess that Dr. Young is right. I’m going to quiz you a little about Happy Head research. About the emotional link prebrain. But I have top security clearance, and I assure you that if I revealed anything I learned in confidence to AT&T, Xerox, or IBM, I’d lose not only my job, but also my prebrain itself. The whole thing.”

  “You’re trying to tell me I can trust you.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

  “OK, Juster. That’s fine with me. Shoot.”

  So I got ready to shoot. And then wondered what the hell I had called her in for. The wrong answer to my first question, and I’d look like an idiot. Oh well, what’s one more person thinking I have a gibbon brain among so many who are already sure?

  “Donna, you said that Dr. Young has implanted experimental models of the emotional-link prebrain in several different people. How many?”

  She shrugged. “About twenty, I guess.”

  “Who?”

  “Crud, Juster, I don’t have a list.”

  “No, I mean, what kind of people. Where does he get his subjects?”

  “Lots of places.”

  “Hospitals?”

  “Sometimes. Or, like, kids, or even some of the staff people.”

  “There’s no formal group then,” I said. She nodded. “You say some of the staff people. Do you know who?”

  “Some of them.”

  “How can you tell if someone has an emotional link prebrain?”

  She smiled even more broadly. “They’re happy.”

  I laughed. “People have been happy before the experiment, Donna.”

  “Not happy all the time; and with the emotional link prebrain, you’re happy all the time. Drugs let you down. Sex takes seven minutes. But the emotional prebrain is always there.”

  She spoke with the fervor of a missionary. And I realized that my guess might just be leading to something. “Do you, Ms. Silberman, have an emotional link prebrain?”

  She looked annoyed. “Of course.

  Why else do you think I grin all the time? I just can’t stop smiling.”

  And then she laughed. “It’s really great to be happy, Juster. And when Dr. Young starts making these for the whole world—misery is over. You just have no idea, Juster. No idea at all. I just wish you could have one and be happy, too.”

  My cheeks hurt from watching her grin. But I thought of Young’s description of the joy of recalling all pleasant emotions at once, instead of each event as it happens. And it sounded pretty damn good.

  “Ms. Silberman. What happens to the negative emotions? Why don’t you double them, too?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. In fact, I really can’t think if anything bad has happened to me. Actually, Juster, I’m not a very good sample, because I just can’t think of any bad emotion at all, at least not very bad, since I had the emotional prebrain stuck into my head. I just don’t know what would happen.”

  Well, that was that. I thanked her for her help, and she got up to go. “I hope you don’t get in trouble with Young for talking to me.”

  “Oh, he’s just a lovable old bear, that’s all,” she said. “Yelling is just his way of showing affection.”

  Pretty funny affection, if you ask me. “Well, he did threaten to fire you when he caught you talking to me earlier today—”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “Of course he didn’t.”

  “Yes he did,” I said.

  “He’s not that kind of man.” She looked a bit perturbed—but still smiled.

  “Donna, why don’t you switch into recall mode? I distinctly remember him saying, ‘By all that’s holy, Donna Silberman, you’re about to be an unemployed happy person’.”

  She just looked more puzzled. “When did he say that? He never did.”