Peter shook his head and mourned. "We've lost the best chance U. S. Robots ever had of gaining an unbeatable public image; of overcoming the damned Frankenstein complex. What it would have meant for robots to have one of them work out the solution to the habitable-planet problem, after other robots had helped work out the Space Jump. Robots would have opened the galaxy to us. And if at the same time we could have driven scientific knowledge forward in a dozen different directions as we surely would have…Oh, God, there's no way of calculating the benefits to the human race, and to us of course."
Robertson said, "We could build other Janes, couldn't we? Even without Madarian?"
"Sure we could. But can we depend on the proper correlation again? Who knows how low-probability that final result was? What if Madarian had had a fantastic piece of beginner's luck? And then to have an even more fantastic piece of bad luck? A meteorite zeroing in…It's simply unbelievable-"
Robertson said in a hesitating whisper, "It couldn't have been meant. I mean, if we weren't meant to know and if the meteorite was a judgment-from-"
He faded off under Bogert's withering glare. Bogert said, "It's not a dead loss, I suppose. Other Janes are bound to help us in some ways. And we can give other robots feminine voices, if that will help encourage public acceptance-though I wonder what the women would say. If we only knew what Jane-5 had said!"
"In that last call, Madarian said there was a witness." Bogert said, "I know; I've been thinking about that. Don't you suppose I've been in touch with flagstaff? Nobody in the entire place heard Jane say anything that was out of the ordinary, anything that sounded like an answer to the habitable-planet problem, and certainly anyone there should have recognized the answer if it came -or at least recognized it as a possible answer."
"Could Madarian have been lying? Or crazy? Could he have been trying to protect himself-"
"You mean he may have been trying to save his reputation by pretending he had the answer and then gimmick Jane so she couldn't talk and say, 'Oh, sorry, something happened accidentally. Oh, darn!' I won't accept that for a minute. You might as well suppose he had arranged the meteorite."
"Then what do we do?" Bogert said heavily, "Turn back to flagstaff. The answer must be there. I've got to dig deeper, that's all. I'm going there and I'm taking a couple of the men in Madarian's department. We've got to go through that place top to bottom and end to end."
"But, you know, even if there were a witness and he had heard, what good would it do, now that we don't have Jane to explain the process?"
"Every little something is useful. Jane gave the names of the stars; the catalogue numbers probably-none of the named stars has a chance. If someone can remember her saying that and actually remember the catalogue number, or have heard it clearly enough to allow it to be recovered by Psycho-probe if he lacked the conscious memory-then we'll have something. Given the results at the end, and the data fed Jane at the beginning, we might be able to reconstruct the line of reasoning; we might recover the intuition. If that is done, we've saved the game-"
Bogert was back after three days, silent and thoroughly depressed. When Robertson inquired anxiously as to results, he shook his head. "Nothing!"
"Nothing?"
"Absolutely nothing. I spoke with every man in flagstaff-every scientist, every technician, every student-that had had anything to do with Jane; everyone that had as much as seen her. The number wasn't great; I'll give Madarian credit for that much discretion. He only allowed those to see her who might conceivably have had planetological knowledge to feed her. There were twenty-three men altogether who had seen Jane and of those only twelve had spoken to her more than casually.
"I went over and over all that Jane had said. They remembered everything quite well. They're keen men engaged in a crucial experiment involving their specialty, so they had every motivation to remember. And they were dealing with a talking robot, something that was startling enough, and one that talked like a TV actress. They couldn't forget."
Robertson said, "Maybe a Psycho-probe-"
"If one of them had the vaguest thought that something had happened, I would screw out his consent to Probing. But there's nothing to leave room for an excuse, and to Probe two dozen men who make their living from their brains can't be done. Honestly, it wouldn't help. If Jane had mentioned three stars and said they had habitable planets, it would have been like setting up sky rockets in their brains. How could anyone of them forget?"
"Then maybe one of them is lying," said Robertson grimly. "He wants the information for his own use; to get the credit himself later."
"What good would that do him?" said Bogert. "The whole establishment knows exactly why Madarian and Jane were there in the first place. They know why I came there in the second. If at any time in the future any man now at Flagstaff suddenly comes up with a habitable-planet theory that is startlingly new and different, yet valid, every other man at Flagstaff and every man at U. S. Robots will know at once that he had stolen it. He'd never get away with it."
"Then Madarian himself was somehow mistaken."
"I don't see how I can believe that either. Madarian had an irritating personality-all robopsychologists have irritating personalities, I think, which must be why they work with robots rather than with men-but he was no dummy. He couldn't be wrong in something like this."
"Then-" But Robertson had run out of possibilities. They had reached a blank wall and for some minutes each stared at it disconsolately.
Finally Robertson stirred. "Peter-"
"Well?"
"Let's ask Susan."
Bogert stiffened. "What!"
"Let's ask Susan. Let's call her and ask her to come in."
"Why? What can she possibly do?"
"I don't know. But she's a robopsychologist, too, and she might understand Madarian better than we do. Besides, she-Oh, hell, she always had more brains than any of us."
"She's nearly eighty."
"And you're seventy. What about it?"
Bogert sighed. Had her abrasive tongue lost any of its rasp in the years of her retirement? He said, "Well, I'll ask her."
Susan Calvin entered Bogert's office with a slow look around before her eyes fixed themselves on the Research Director. She had aged a great deal since her retirement. Her hair was a fine white and her face seemed to have crumpled. She had grown so frail as to be almost transparent and only her eyes, piercing and uncompromising, seemed to remain of all that had been.
Bogert strode forward heartily, holding out his hand. "Susan!"
Susan Calvin took it, and said, "You're looking reasonably well, Peter, for an old man. If I were you, I wouldn't wait till next year. Retire now and let the young men get to it…And Madarian is dead. Are you calling me in to take over my old job? Are you determined to keep the ancients till a year past actual physical death?"
"No, no, Susan. I've called you in-" He stopped. He did not, after all, have the faintest idea of how to start.
But Susan read his mind now as easily as she always had. She seated herself with the caution born of stiffened joints and said, "Peter, you've called me in because you're in bad trouble. Otherwise you'd sooner see me dead than within a mile of you."
"Come, Susan-"
"Don't waste time on pretty talk. I never had time to waste when I was forty and certainly not now. Madarian's death and your call to me are both unusual, so there must be a connection. Two unusual events without a connection is too low-probability to worry about. Begin at the beginning and don't worry about revealing yourself to be a fool. That was revealed to me long ago."
Bogert cleared his throat miserably and began. She listened carefully, her withered hand lifting once in a while to stop him so that she might ask a question.