"Yes, I suppose I do," Gelsen said unhappily. He had told himself all that a thousand times, but something still bothered him. Perhaps he would talk it over with Macintyre. As the conference broke up, a thought struck him. He grinned. A lot of policemen were going to be out of work! * * * * * "Now what do you think of that?" Officer Celtrics demanded. "Fifteen years in Homicide and a machine is replacing me." He wiped a large red hand across his forehead and leaned against the captain's desk. "Ain't science marvelous?" Two other policemen, late of Homicide, nodded glumly. "Don't worry about it," the captain said. "We'll find a home for you in Larceny, Celtrics. You'll like it here." "I just can't get over it," Celtrics complained. "A lousy little piece of tin and glass is going to solve all the crimes." "Not quite," the captain said. "The watchbirds are supposed to prevent the crimes before they happen." "Then how'll they be crimes?" one of the policeman asked. "I mean they can't hang you for murder until you commit one, can they?" "That's not the idea," the captain said. "The watchbirds are supposed to stop a man before he commits a murder." "Then no one arrests him?" Celtrics asked. "I don't know how they're going to work that out," the captain admitted. The men were silent for a while. The captain yawned and examined his watch. "The thing I don't understand," Celtrics said, still leaning on the captain's desk, "is just how do they do it? How did it start, Captain?" * * * * * The captain studied Celtrics' face for possible irony; after all, watchbird had been in the papers for months. But then he remembered that Celtrics, like his sidekicks, rarely bothered to turn past the sports pages. "Well," the captain said, trying to remember what he had read in the Sunday supplements, "these scientists were working on criminology. They were studying murderers, to find out what made them tick. So they found that murderers throw out a different sort of brain wave from ordinary people. And their glands act funny, too. All this happens when they're about to commit a murder. So these scientists worked out a special machine to flash red or something when these brain waves turned on." "Scientists," Celtrics said bitterly. "Well, after the scientists had this machine, they didn't know what to do with it. It was too big to move around, and murderers didn't drop in often enough to make it flash. So they built it into a smaller unit and tried it out in a few police stations. I think they tried one upstate. But it didn't work so good. You couldn't get to the crime in time. That's why they built the watchbirds." "I don't think they'll stop no criminals," one of the policemen insisted. "They sure will. I read the test results. They can smell him out before he commits a crime. And when they reach him, they give him a powerful shock or something. It'll stop him."