Asimov's Mysteries

'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.

***

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.