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clutched, babylike, but with adult strength; she winced, but kept the smile.
    Dimsdale swallowed. “Reb, it’s not him. I swear it’s not. BharIdwaj and Nakamura are absolutely-“
    The smile was gone now. “Go away, John. Go far away, and don’t ever come back. You’re fired.”
    He opened his mouth, and then spun on his heel and left. A few steps down the hail he encountered Bharadwaj, alarmed and awesomely drunk. “She knows?”
    “If you value your career, Doctor, leave her be. She knows-and she doesn’t believe it.”
     
    Three years later she summoned him. Responding instantly cost him much, but he ignored it. He was at her Alaskan retreat within an hour of the summons, slowed only by her odd request that he come alone, in disguise, and without telling anyone. He was conveyed to her den, where he found her alone, seated at her desk. Insofar as it was possible for one of her wealth and power, she looked like hell.
    “You’ve changed, Reb.”
    “I’ve changed my mind.”
    “That surpnses me more.”
    “He’s the equivalent of a ten or twelve year old in a forty-three year old body. Even allowing for all that, he’s not Archer.”
    “You believe in brain-scans now?”
    “Not just them. I found people who knew him at that age. They helped me duplicate his upbringing as closely as possible.” Dimsdale could not guess how much that had cost, even in money. “They agree with the scans. It’s not Archer.”
    He kept silent.
    “How do you explain it, John?”
    “I don’t.”
    “What do you think of Bharadwaj’s idea?”
    “Religious bullshit. Or is that redundant? Superstition.”
    “When you have eliminated theimpossible…’ “she began to quote.
    “-there’s nothing left,” he finished.
    “If you cannot think of a way to prove or disprove a proposition, does that make it false?”
    “Damn it, Reb! Do you mean to tell me you’re agreeing with that hysterical Hindu? Maybe he can’t help his heritage, but you?”
    “Bharadwaj is right.”
    “Jesus Christ, Rebecca,” he thundered, “is this what love can do to a fine mind?”
    She overmatched his volume. ‘I’ll thank you to respect that mind.”
    “Why should I?” he said bitterly.
    “Because it’s done something no one ever did in all history. I said you cannot think of a way to prove or disprove Bharadwaj ‘s belief. No one ever has. “Her eyes flashed. “I can. I did.”
    He gaped at her. Either she had completely lost her mind or she was telling the truth. They seemed equally impossible.
    At last he made his choice. “How?”
    “Right here at this desk. Its brain was more than adequate, once mine told it what to do. I’m astonished it never occurred to anyone before.”
    “You proved the doctrine of reincarnation. With your desk.”
    “With the computers it has access to. That’s right.”
    He found a chair and sat down. Her hand moved; and the chair’s arm emitted a drink. He gulped it gratefully.
    “It was so simple, John. I picked an aibitrary date twenty-five years ago, picked an aibitrary hour and minute. That’s as close as I could refine it death records are seldom kept to the second. But it was close enough. I got the desk to-“
    “-collect all the people who died or were born at that minute,” he cried, slopping his drink. “Oh my God, of course!”
    “I told you. Oh, there were holes all over. Not all deaths are recorded, not by a damn sight, and not all of the recorded ones are nailed dOwn to the minute, even today. The same with birth records, of course. And the worst of it was that picking a date that far back meant that a substantial number of the deaders were born before brain-scan, giving me incomplete data.”
    “But you had to go that far back,” he said excitedly, “to get live ones with jelled personalities to compare.”
    “Right,” she said, and smiled approvingly.
    “But with all those holes in the data-“
    “John, there are fifteen billion people in the solar system. That’s one