dropped in the little gift-wrapped box containing the bottle of perfume, closed the purse, and set it in her lap.

“Now?” she asked.

“Almost,” I said. I put my hands up on each side of her face and kissed her very gently on the lips. “Now.”

She put her hands up over mine, pressing against them.

Her eyes opened. “I’ve got to go,” she whispered. “I’ve got to, Barney, please . . .”

. . . all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell,” I said, softly. Oh, knock it off you lousy ham, I thought. You’ve got the twenty? what do you want to do, make a production of it?

“What is?” she asked.

“Parting,” I said.

“Is it a poem?”

“Yes,” I said. “Maybe it’s not the parting she had in mind, but it can be rough enough.”

“Good-bye,” she said.

“All right.” I kissed her again, and this time she cracked a little. She put her arms up about my neck and clung tightly for just an instant before she began pushing me away.

“You’d better get out now,” she said, and there was a slight edge of raggedness to her voice. I wasn’t getting off so lightly myself, after that deal last night, and I wondered what the percentage was in beating my brains out this way after I’d already accomplished the mission. Well, you had to follow through and lend it a certain amount of verisimilitude. I got out, a little awkwardly under the circumstances, and closed the door.

“I won’t see you again?”

“Don’t ask me to,” she said. “I don’t think I can trust you.”

“Did you want to?” I asked.

She didn’t say anything. She turned the station wagon around and drove off without looking back.

When the sound of her car had died away, I took the twenty-dollar bill from my pocket. It was exactly like the other two, brand new, with that line of stain along the edge. And it had been right there on the counter, almost under his hand. I shuddered.

Flicking the lighter, I touched flame to one corner and watched it burn. I ground the ash to powder in the rut and pushed sand over it.

There may be more of you, boys, I thought; but don’t count Godwin out altogether. He has a number of assorted talents, and you can see he doesn’t care how he uses them.

* * *

When I got back to the store, Ramsey was in the office. He was as quiet and as courteous as ever, and the call was merely a routine follow-up, but in a little while I began to be afraid of him.

It did no good to remind myself that I’d committed no crime except that of withholding information, and that that wasn’t remotely susceptible to proof because nobody else knew I even had the information. He scared me, anyway. It was the questions.

Why? I wondered. What exactly is there about a trained investigator that frightens you when somebody else asking the same questions would merely be a nuisance or a bore? It took me several minutes to isolate it, and when I did it was absurd—at first glance. It’s simply that he’s listening to the answers.

It’s no more than that. In this antic bedlam of two billion people yakking all at the same time sixteen hours a day, a man who listens to the answers to his own questions can scare you. The tip-off is the complete, utter, absolute lack of any response at all to anything you say. He doesn’t have time to respond; he’s too busy listening. You say something. It doesn’t merely rattle on his eardrums and cause him to say Har, har, that’s a good one, or Say, that’s too bad, or Well, I’ll be damned. He absorbs it. There’s no other word for it. He closes himself around it with the terrible silence and the impersonality of quicksand engulfing an unwary animal, and when he does, it’s irrevocable. There’s no use trying to tell him something else six months later, because he knows what you said the first time. And in the end, of course, if you’re guilty of something, he kills you with simple mathematics. It’s easy to make two answers jibe. Try ten thousand.

Then, I reflected, a tape-recorder should have the same effect. No. Not necessarily, but the reason for that was obvious. It was a matter of conditioning. In the twentieth century we accepted the miraculous as commonplace in the Machine, but we still expected Man to talk more than he listened. When he didn’t,