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helmet and fitted it, his mind raced through the alleyways of the situation. Why should Klaus Margle want to kill a concert guitarist? And how had Taguster come to know the gangster in the first place? It was not his usual type of acquaintance. They were questions that would need answering if he wanted to sew up this case before reporting it to the authorities. But Taguster was dead, and Margle would certainly not talk, so where did that leave Ti? Nowhere. He flipped the toggles, leaped into the beam, and settled into the receiver in Taguster's living room. The body was still there, of course, twisted grotesquely in its death agonies.
    Ti swung the cameras from left to right and found the closet door he wanted. He hoped the thing was where Taguster usually kept it. He palmed open the closet door with his power. Multicolored warning lights flashed amber and crimson and green. He shut off the alarm and looked at the simulacrum. It was a perfect likeness of the musician— except that it wasn't now full of poisoned pins.
    Taguster had had the simulacrum made to help him avoid the adulation of his fans. When he was on tour, it was always the android that entered the hotels through the front door, while Taguster sneaked in a service entrance. The simulacrum could walk, talk, think, do almost everything Taguster could do. Its complex, brain was cored with his memory tapes and his psychological reaction patterns, so that it could pass for him even in the company of casual friends, though someone as close to him as Ti could not really be fooled.
    Ti reached psionically under the flowered sports coat the machine wore, brought it to active status, its eyes opened, cloudy at first, then clearing until its gaze was penetrating. "You," Ti said. "Sim, come here."
    It walked out of the closet and stopped before the receiver. For a moment, Ti had the eerie sensation that Taguster had returned from the dead. It was suddenly distasteful to, be ordering this image of his friend about like a peasant before a monarch—but it was also essential to the half-conceived plan still taking shape in his mind.
    "Sim," he said again.
    It raised its eyes and stared directly at the cameras.
    "Sim, there is a young woman at the window in the bedroom. She is—dead. I want you to bring her into the utility room. Be careful and don't spill her blood on the carpet. Go."
    "Right," the Sim said, turning toward the bedroom. A moment later, he returned, the body cradled in his arms. The blood had ceased to flow and was drying on her lacy garment. The simulacrum stalked across the living room and out of sight.
    Ti shifted into the kitchen receiver, watched the android march through and into the utility area. He could only see part of that room through the door, for there was no receiver in it. "Empty the freezer," he directed the android. It complied, piling the hams and roasts and vegetables on the floor.
    "Now put her body in it."
    It did this thing too.
    He ordered it to retrieve Taguster's corpse and do the same with it. If it took a day or so for this plan to be worked out and put into operation, if it required a couple of days to trap Margle, he wanted to be certain the bodies were well preserved for a future autopsy. This was gruesome, but it was the only thing he could do. When both bodies were in the freezer and the food that had been there was dumped into the incinerator chute, he sent the android about cleaning up all traces of the muder, scrubbing the blood from the floor and carpet, washing the wall down where the musician had scribbled upon it. When the machine-man had finished, the house looked perfectly normal, completely serene.
    "Sit down and wait for me," he directed it.
    It complied.
    He dropped into the Mindlink beam and returned home. He went into the library, sat down at his typer, and used his nimble servos to compose a new headline story for the four thirty edition. Polly London would surely read Enterstat to see if she were mentioned, and it