off the news-stat. People took the latest
echoes to bed with them, commuters gobbled it with their breakfast
cereal. Thank God today would see the end, and they could once more have
the hot South Polar crisis with their cereal.

* * * * *

Seven weeks! He clutched the bulging briefcase with a wearisome horror.
Twenty-two persona-tapes from Central File, all neatly processed and
ready for ECAIAC. End result of the endless chart sifts, emphasis (as
always!) on parietosomatic recession, the slow emergence of minor
constants, the inexorable trend toward Price Factor and then
_verification_, _verification_, to each his own, with all the subtle and
shaded values of the Augment Index brought finally to focus on the
relevance-graph _Carmack_.

Sure, thought Beardsley. A thing of augment-indexing and psych-tapes,
quite without possibility of error. Now in the _old_ days of crime
detection--it might have taken them seven months instead of weeks, not
to mention frustration and leg-work and false-leads and sweat, but--

His mouth pulled down bitterly. _Serological Cooerdinator. Glorified
file-clerk is more like it. High-salaried errand-boy._

"Here we are, sir!" The pilot's voice jarred him to reality as the
copter berthed.

Beardsley hurried toward the roof entrance. His faded blue suit, a size
too large, flapped about him, and the outmoded felt hat seemed to sink
to the level of his thick-lensed glasses. The guard greeted him, but
suppressed a smile as the cherubic little man flashed his official pass.

For there was something about Raoul Beardsley that eternally evoked
amusement--an air of vacuous innocence and a remote forlornness. He gave
the appearance of a person who sold shoes during the day, washed his
wife's dishes at night and then solved two or three galacti-gram puzzles
before turning off the light precisely at ten. Few, if any, remembered
that this nervous little man had once been top Inspector of New York
City's Homicide Bureau ... but that was a dozen long years ago. Since
then he had seen the antiquated detective methods of 1960 disappear, and
he had died a little, too, seeing his Homicide Bureau relegated to a
mere subsidiary with the growth of the Cooerdinate and Mechanical
Divisions. His appointment to Chief of Co-oerdinants, Federal, was
automatic and unquestioned; and Beardsley would have been the last to
know, or to care, that he had correlated some eight million miles o