voice now. 'What if he did? It's just a name. After all that's happened, you can't expect me to remember some peculiar foreign name I happened to hear one time.'
'It was foreign, then?'
She pulled up short, avoiding the trap. 'I don't remember,' she said. 'I think it was a typically German name, but I don't remember. For all I know it was John Smith.'
I had to admit I didn't see the professor's point. I said, 'What are you trying to prove. Professor Rodney?'
'I'm trying to prove,' he said tightly, 'in fact I am proving, that it was Louella-Marie, the dead girl, who was at the desk when the furrier came in. He announced his name to Louella-Marie and she smiled in consequence. It was Miss Morey who was coming out of the inner office as he turned away. It was Miss Morey, this girl, who had just finished preparing and poisoning the tea.'
'You're basing that on the fact I can't remember a man's name!' shrilled Susan Morey. That's ridiculous.'
'No, it isn't,' said the professor. 'If you had been the girl at the desk, you would remember his name. It would be impossiblefor you to forget it. If you were the girl at the desk.' He was holding Hathaway's card up now. He said. That furrier's first name is Ernest, but his last name is Beilstein. His name is Beilstein!' The air went out of Susan as though she had been kicked in the stomach. She turned white as talcum powder.
The professor went on intensely, 'No chemical librarian could possibly forget the name of anyone who came in and announced himself to be Beilstein. The sixty-volume encyclopedia we've mentioned half a dozen times today is referred to invariably by the name of its editor, Beilstein. The name is like Mother Goose to a chemical librarian, like George Washington, like Christopher Columbus. It is more second nature to her than any of them.
'If this girl claims to have forgotten the name, it is only because she never heard it. And she never heard it because she wasn't at the desk.'
I rose and said grimly, 'Well, Miss Morey'-I abandoned the first name too-'what about it?' She was screaming in earsplitting hysteria. Half an hour later, we had her confession.
***
Some years before this next story was written, two colleagues and I joined forces in writing a large and complicated textbook in biochemistry lor medical students. We spent days-literally-on the galley proofs, and frequently we came across minor inconsistencies. We would spell a chemical one way here and another way there; here a hyphen and there no hyphen; here one phrase and yon an alternate. We despaired of getting everything perfectly concordant and one of us finally said, 'To quote Emerson: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."' We latched on to this with ebullient joy and thereafter, whenever the proof-reader questioned a small inconsistency, we would write 'Emerson!' in the margin and let it go. Well, the following story revolves about the possible invention of mass transference, and in preparing these stories tor inclusion in this volume, I noted that in 'The Singing Bell'-an earlier story with the same background-mass transference was taken lor granted as already existing. I was about to make certain changes to eliminate that discrepancy, when I remembered. So if you don't mind, Gentle Reader, I cry 'Emerson!' and pass on.
The Dying Night
It was almost a class reunion, and though it was marked by joylessness, there was no reason as yet to think it would be marred by tragedy.
Edward Talliaferro, fresh from the Moon and without his gravity legs yet, met the other two in Stanley Kaunas' room. Kaunas rose to greet him in a subdued manner. Battersley Ryger merely sat and nodded.
Talliaferro lowered his large body carefully to the couch, very aware of its unaccustomed weight. He grimaced a little, his plump lips twisting inside the rim of hair that surrounded them on lip, chin, and cheek.
They had seen one another earlier that day under more formal conditions. Now for the first time they were alone and Talliaferro said, This is a kind of occasion. We're meeting for the first time in ten years. First time since graduation, in fact.'
Ryger's nose twitched. It had been broken shortly before that same graduation and he had received his degree in astronomy with a bandage disfiguring his face. He said grumpily, 'Anyone ordered champagne?
Or something?'
Talliaferro said, 'Come on! First big interplanetary astronomical convention in history is no place for glooming.