That night, they said, they were being initiated into one of those atavistic fraternities which it seems impossible for the young to outgrow or the authorities to suppress. As part of their ordeal, they had been required to sneak into Central Park and to bring back as proof of their success a captured robot gardener. Between them they had decided that the only way they could ever get their booty would be to disassemble the robot, for though it could not injure them, if they took hold of it, its communication-valve would blow and the noise would bring others immediately; so they had taken along what seemed to them a practical weapon--a glass brick pried out of the back of a locker in the school gym. Hurled by a strong and practiced young arm, it could de-activate the robot's headpiece. When, as they waited in the darkness for a gardener to appear, they saw a figure moving about in the shrubbery bordering the path, one of them--neither would say which one it was--let fly. To their horror, instead of the clang of heavy glass against metal, they heard a muffled thud as the brick struck flesh and bone. They started to run away. But after a few paces they forced themselves to return. It was a girl, and the blow had knocked her flat. Her head was bleeding badly and she was moaning. Terrified, they knelt beside her. She gasped once and lay still. One of the boys laid a trembling hand on her breast, the other seized her wrist. There was no heart-beat and there was no pulse. On an impulse, the boy holding her wrist wrenched away her identification disc. Panic seized them, and they dashed away, utterly forgetting the brick, which at their first discovery one of them had had the foresight to kick farther into the shrubbery, out of view. Sick and shaking, they made their way out of the park and separated. The boy who had the disc threw it into the nearest sewer-grating. The next day, after school, they met again and talked it over. Finally they decided they must go to Fedpol and report; but to protect themselves they would say only that they had found a dead body. * * * * * Day after day, they kept seeing and hearing about the case on the videaud, and pledged each other to silence. Then suddenly one of the boys had a horrible thought--they had forgotten that the brick would show their fingerprints!... They had come desperately to search for it when Margret overheard them. Kazazian's men found it without any difficulty; it had been just out of the gardeners' regular track. In view of the accidental nature of the whole affair, and the boys' full confession, they got off easy. They were sentenced to only five years' confinement in a psychiatric retraining school.