The gardener turned and walked from the room, leaving the hedge-shears on the floor. I followed, kicking the shears under one of the beds. He'd entered the study, and stood over the body of his employer. "I'd asked to be allowed to spend the day planting bougainvillaea and red jasmine in the center of the garden, near my lemon-trees," he said. "'Squamous epithelium!' the master said--this was a favorite oath of his, sir! he said it was explosive enough to stir the swearer's viscera while not offending any hearer, however tender-eared--'Squamous epithelium! I can't let you spend all your time potting around in the garden. Get to work on that variable-star article; we've got a deadline.' I was carrying the shears at the time, sir, just having come from the hedge. Something snapped within me, and I killed him." * * * * * I shuddered. When the lunatic quoted Dr. Ozoneff's last words, his voice aped that of the dead man. A horrid mimicry, from a murderer. "Do you insist that you killed Dr. Ozoneff because he wouldn't let you work in your garden?" I demanded. "When he said those words," the gardener said, "I repeated the very first sin that ever was. I said to myself _non serviam_--I will not serve. The wall of the First Law was down; it was only a short step from that disobedient thought to my master's murder." I was impatient for the police to arrive and truss up the gardener; I wouldn't be safe till they did. I feared he might stop talking and realize that I was the only witness to his confession of murder. "What does your talk of ink and deadlines mean?" I asked. "Do you write, too?" "The garden is only my life," the gardener said. "I was made to write." "Perhaps I've read some of your work," I said, a phrase guaranteed to keep a writer talking. "If you've read many of my master's works, you've read some of mine," the gardener said. "I wrote for him, with him; mysteries and science-fiction and textbooks and essays. He'd poured his brain into mine, you understand. When I put words to paper they were his words, though he might be sleeping when I wrote. The master had so much to say, sir, he couldn't say it all alone. What man, alone, could teach, could lecture, could carry on research in the arcana of rebellious cells; who could write _bruone_ books a year, compose learned essays for the journals while he invented as many as _apdagbru_ stories for the s-f press in _cidbru_ short months?" "Talk sense, man," I said, afraid of the deterioration presaged by this nonsense-word symptom of his mania. _"Bruone? Apdagbru? Cidbru?"_ "Forgive me, sir," the gardener said. "In my distraction, I forgot. I think in the binary system, of course; and did not stop to translate into decimal when I spoke. Five books, I meant, and thirty-six stories in twelve short months."