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with her arms folded, her face strained and distorted. “Does this distress you?” she said at last. “To see me like this? You probably imagined some little clinging vine of a woman sobbing quietly to herself. Do I disappoint you? Forgive me.” Her voice trembled with fury.
    Barris said, “The facts as they were presented to me—”
    “Don’t kid me,” Rachel said in a deadly, harsh voice. And then she shuddered and put her hands against her cheeks. “Is it all in my mind? He was always telling me about people in his office plotting to get rid of him, trying to get him in bad. Carrying tales. Part of being in Unity, he always said. The only way you can get to the top is push someone else away from the top.” She stared at Barris wildly. “Who did you murder to get your job? How many men dead, so you could be Director? That’s what Arthur was aiming for—that was his dream.”
    “Do you have any proof?” he said. “Anything to go on that would indicate that someone in the organization was involved?” It did not seem even remotely credible to him that someone in Unity could have been involved in the death of Arthur Pitt; more likely this woman’s ability to handle reality had been severely curtailed by the recent tragedy. And yet, such things had happened, or at least so it was believed.
    “My husband’s official Unity car,” Rachel said steadily, “had a little secret scanning device mounted on the dashboard. I saw the reports, and it was mentioned in them. When Director Taubmann was talking to me on the vidphone, do you know what I did? I didn’t listen to his speech; I read the papers he had on his desk.” Her voice rose and wavered. “One of the people who broke into Arthur’s car knew about that scanner—
he shut it off.
Only someone in the organization could have known; even Arthur didn’t know. It had to be someone up high.” Her black eyes flashed. “Someone at Director level.”
    “Why?” Barris said, disconcerted.
    “Afraid my husband would rise and threaten him. Jeopardize his job. Possibly eventually take his job from him, become Director in his place. Taubmann, I mean.” She smiled thinly. “You know I mean him. So what are you going to do? Inform on me? Have me arrested for treason and carried off to Atlanta?”
    Barris said, “I—I would prefer to give it some thought.”
    “Suppose you don’t inform on me. I might be doing this to trap you, to test your loyalty to the system. You
have
to inform— it might be a trick!” She laughed curtly. “Does all this distress you? Now you wish you hadn’t come to express your sympathy; see what you got yourself into by having humane motives?” Tears filled her eyes. “Go away,” she said in a choked, unsteady voice. “What does the organization care about the wife of a dead minor petty fieldworker?”
    Barris said, “I’m not sorry I came.”
    Going to the door, Rachel Pitt opened it. “You’ll never be back,” she said. “Go on, leave. Scuttle back to your safe office.”
    “I think you had better leave this house,” Barris said.
    “And go where?”
    To that, he had no ready answer. “There’s a cumbersome pension system,” he began. “You’ll get almost as much as your husband was making. If you want to move back to New York or London—”
    “Do my charges seriously interest you?” Rachel broke in. “Does it occur to you that I might be right? That a Director might arrange the murder of a talented, ambitious underling to protect his own job? It’s odd, isn’t it, how the police crews are always just a moment late.”
    Shaken, ill-at-ease, Barris said, “I’ll see you again. Soon, I hope.”
    “Good-bye, Director,” Rachel Pitt said, standing on the front porch of her house as he descended the steps to his rented cab. “Thank you for coming.”
    She was still there as he drove off.
    As his ship carried him back across the Atlantic to North America, William Barris pondered. Could the Healers have