The little fellow stared at me. He had curly hair and a mouth that fell in as though he were toothless, but that was just appearance, for when he talked, small yellow teeth were plainly visible. He said, 'Her. I told her. The girl sitting there.'

'That's right,' said Susan tonelessly. 'He spoke to me.'

Professor Rodney was gazing at her with a look of concentrated detestation. It occurred to me that his reason for wishing to see justice done quickly might be more personal than idealistic at that. However, that was none of my business.

I said to the furrier, 'Are you sure this is the girl ?'

He said, 'Yes. I told her my name and my business, and she smiled. She told me where to find books on insecticides. Then, as I was stepping away, another girl came out from inside there.'

'Good!' I said at once. 'Now here's a photograph of another girl. Tell me, was it the girl at the desk you spoke to and the girl in the photograph who came out of the back room ? Or was it the girl in the photograph you spoke to and the girl at the desk who came out of the back room ?'

For a long minute, the furrier stared at the girl, then at the photograph, then at me. 'They are alike.'

I swore to myself. The faintest smile had passed over Susan's lips, hovering there a moment before vanishing. She must have counted on this. It was intersession. Hardly anyone would be in the library. None of them would pay much attention to the librarians who are fixtures like the bookshelves, and if any did, he could never swear which of the Library Twins he had seen.

I knew she was guilty now, but knowing meant nothing.

I said, 'Well, which was it?'

He said, like one anxious to put an end to questioning, 'I spoke to her, the girl right there at the desk.'

'That's right,' said Susan, perfectly calm.

My hope in her nerves hit bottom.

I said to the furrier, 'Would you swear?'

He said at once, 'No.'

'All right. Hathaway, take him away. Send him home.'

Professor Rodney leaned over to touch my elbow. He whispered, 'Why did she smile at the fellow when he stated his business.'

I whispered back, 'Why not?' but put the question to her anyway.

Her eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch. 'I was just being pleasant. Is there anything wrong with that?'

She was almost enjoying herself. I could swear to that.

The professor shook his head slightly. He whispered to me again, 'She's not the type to smile at a troublesome stranger. It had to be Louella-Marie at the desk.'

I shrugged. I could see myself bringing that kind of evidence to the Commissioner.

Four of the students were a blank and took up little time. They were engaged in research, they knew what books they wanted, what shelves the books would be on. They went straight there without stopping at the desk. None could say whether Susan or Louella-Marie had been at the desk at any particular time. None had even looked up from their books, to hear them tell it, before the scream roused everything.

The fifth was Peter van Norden. He kept his eyes fixed firmly on his right thumb, which had a badly bitten nail. He did not look up at Susan as he was brought in.

I let him sit awhile and soften up.

Finally I said, 'What are you doing here this time of year ? I understand it's between sessions.'

He muttered, 'My Qualifyings are coming up next month. I'm studying. Qualifying examinations. If I pass, I can go on for my Ph.D., see?'

I said, 'I suppose you stopped at the desk when you came in here.'

He mumbled.

I said, 'What?'

He said in a low voice that was hardly an improvement, 'I didn't. I don't think I stopped at the desk.'

'You don't think?'

'I didn't.'

I said, 'Isn't that strange? I understand you're good friends of both Susan and Louella-Marie. Don't you say hello?'

'I was worried. I had this test in my mind. I had to study.

'So you couldn't even take time out for a hello.' I looked at Susan to see how this was going over. She seemed paler, but that might have been my imagination.

I said, 'Isn't it true that you were practically engaged to one of them?'

He looked up with uneasy indignation. 'No! I can't get engaged before I get my degree. Who told you I was engaged?'

'I said practically engaged.'

'No! I had a few dates, maybe. So what! What's a date or two?'

I said smoothly, 'Come on, Pete, which one was your girl?'

'I tell you it wasn't like that.'

He was washing his hands of the whole matter so hard, he seemed buried and smothered in an invisible lather.

'How about it?' I asked suddenly, addressing Susan. 'Did he stop at your desk?'

'He waved as he passed,' she said.

'Did you, Pete?'

'I don't remember,' he said sullenly. 'Maybe I did. So what?'

'Nothing,' I said. Inside me, I wished Susan joy of her bargain. If she had killed for the sake of this specimen, she had done it for nothing. To me it seemed a certainty that henceforward he would ignore her even if she fell off a two-story building and hit him on the head.

Susan must have realized that too. From the look she was giving Peter van Norden, I marked him down as a second candidate for cyanide-assuming she went free-and it certainly seemed as though she would.

I nodded to Hathaway to take him away. Hathaway rose to do that and said, 'Say, you ever use those books?' and he pointed to the shelves where the sixty-odd volumes of the organic chemistry encyclopedia stretched from floor to ceiling.

The boy looked over his shoulder and said in honest astonishment. 'Sure. I've got to. Lord, is something wrong with looking up compounds in Beilst--'

'It's all right,' I assured him. 'Come on, Ed.'

Ed Hathaway scowled at me and led the boy out. He hates letting go of an exploded theory.

It was about six and I didn't see that anything more could be done. As it stood, it was Susan's word against no word. If she had been a hood with a record, we could have sweated out the truth in any of several effective, if tedious, ways. In this case, such a procedure was inadvisable.

I turned to the professor to say so, but he was staring at Hathaway's cards. At one of them, anyway, which he was holding in his hand. You know, people always talk about other people's hands shaking with excitement, but it's something you don't often see. Rodney's hand was shaking, though, shaking like the clapper of an old-fashioned alarm clock.

He cleared his throat. 'Let me ask her something. Let me...'

I stared at him, then pushed my chair back. 'Go ahead,' I said. At this point, there was nothing to lose.

He looked at the girl, putting the card down on the desk, blank side up.

He said shakily, 'Miss Morey?' He seemed to be deliberately avoiding the familiarity of her first name.

She stared at him. For a moment she had seemed nervous, but that passed and she was calm again. 'Yes, Professor?'

The professor said, 'Miss Morey, you smiled when the furrier told you his business here. Why was that?'

'I told you, Professor Rodney,' she said, 'I was being pleasant.'

'Perhaps there was something peculiar about what he said? Something amusing?'

'I was just trying to be pleasant,' she insisted.

'Perhaps you found his name amusing, Miss Morey?'

'Not particularly,' she said indifferently.

'Well, no one has mentioned his name here. I didn't know it till I happened to look at this card.' Then suddenly, tensely, he cried, 'What was his name, Miss Morey?'

She paused before answering, 'I don't remember.'

'You don't ? He gave it to you, didn't he ?'

There was an edge to her 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.

Foreword.

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. And among friends, too!'

Kaunas said suddenly, 'It's Earth. It doesn't feel right. I can't get used to it.' He shook his head but his look of depression remained.

Talliaferro said, 'I know. I'm so heavy. It takes all the energy out of me. At that, you're better off than I am, Kaunas. Mercurian gravity is 0-4 normal. On the Moon, it's only 0 - I6.' He interrupted Ryger's beginning of a sound by saying, 'And on Ceres they use pseudo-grav fields adjusted to 0-8. You have no problems at all, Ryger.'

The Cerian astronomer looked annoyed. 'It's the open air. Going outside without a suit gets me.'

'Right,' agreed Kaunas. 'And letting the Sun beat down on you. Just letting it.'

Talliaferro found himself insensibly drifting back in time. They had not changed much. Nor, he thought, had he himself. They were all ten years older, of course. Ryger had put on some weight and Kaunas' thin face had grown a bit leathery, but he would have recognized either if he had met him without warning.

He said, 'I don't think it's Earth getting us. Let's face it.'