Murder -- Fiction; Psychiatrists -- Fiction; Psychological fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; Space stations -- Fiction
Wolf pushed the button for an outside line and asked for the Atomic
Energy Commission, extension 5972. Wilford's image appeared on the
phone screen, the picture of a large, powerful face with a great mass
of gray hair. Wolf knew him only as someone high up in the personnel
department of the AEC.
"Good morning, Dr. Wolf," he said. "Find anything out?"
Wolf shrugged. "Britten killed Glover, if that's what you want to know.
But why? That's what really interests us. You can tell us one thing
that will help us find out. And that is--did Glover really take Britten
off his project for security reasons? If so, what were those reasons?"
Wilford's face froze slightly. "Obviously, Dr. Wolf, if security were
involved, it is a matter I cannot discuss with you, especially over
the phone. You may write me a full, confidential report, and we will
consider what is to be done."
Wolf cut the connection in exasperation and pushed his chair away from
the desk.
"Well, there's a bureaucratic mind for you!" he exclaimed. "He wants a
problem solved and then refuses to give you the information necessary
to solve the problem."
Slowly he filled his thinking pipe and lit it. "The hell with them,"
he said, finally. "We'll see this thing through ourselves. We'll have
another session with Britten tomorrow and get to the bottom of his
story."
"I hope," Alma Heller added, "that there is a bottom to be found."
* * * * *
As the attendants strapped Jim Britten on the table, the next morning,
Dr. Wolf thought how often the formula for murder repeated itself in
this psychiatric age. Knock off the victim, prepare a real sick motive,
and be sure you'll go to a hospital for treatment, to be released after
a "cure." Under these circumstances the psychiatrist must become a
detective--required to dig deep for the real motive, which generally
resolved itself into the classical ones to love-hate-money.
From his point of view as a doctor, any murder was a sick act, but the
authorities were interested only in the legal question of whether the
murderer knew what he was doing, and why.
In this case, the question of the motive had a fascination to Wolf even
from a purely academic point of view.
"Let's face it," he told Britten. "We both know you killed Glover.
You've heard the play-back of yesterday's session, so you can no longer
fall back on the old excuse of 'everything went black and when I came
to he was dead.' Nobody gets away with that any more."
Britten maintained a sullen silence.
"Just for the record," Wolf continued, "I want to fill in an important
gap in the story. You told us that you sat up half the night figuring
out what discovery your experiment was aiming at, but you glossed over
what you actually decided at that time. Suppose we return to that night
and go over the story once more in a little more detail."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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