re cars. I'll call Colonel Ferguson and see what he
can do for me. Max is going to have his hands full with this investigation
Gus started."

* * * * *

Piet Dumont, the Mallorysport chief of police, might have been a good cop
once, but for as long as Gus Brannhard had known him, he had been what he
was now--an empty shell of unsupported arrogance, with a sagging waistline
and a puffy face that tried to look tough and only succeeded in looking
unpleasant. He was sitting in a seat that looked like an old fashioned
electric chair, or like one of those instruments of torture to which
beauty-shop customers submit themselves. There was a bright conical helmet
on his head, and electrodes had been clamped to various portions of his
anatomy. On the wall behind him was a circular screen which ought to have
been a calm turquoise blue, but which was flickering from dark blue
through violet to mauve. That was simple nervous tension and guilt and
anger at the humiliation of being subjected to veridicated interrogation.
Now and then there would be a stabbing flicker of bright red as he toyed
mentally with some deliberate misstatement of fact.

"You know, yourself, that the Fuzzies didn't hurt that girl," Brannhard
told him.

"I don't know anything of the kind," the police chief retorted. "All I
know's what was reported to me."

That had started out a bright red; gradually it faded into purple.
Evidently Piet Dumont was adopting a rules-of-evidence definition of
truth.

"Who told you about it?"

"Luther Woller. Detective lieutenant on duty at the time."

The veridicator agreed that that was the truth and not much of anything
but the truth.

"But you know that what really happened was that Lurkin beat the girl
himself, and Woller persuaded them both to say the Fuzzies did it," Max
Fane said.

"I don't know anything of the kind!" Dumont almost yelled. The screen
blazed red. "All I know's what they told me; nobody said anything else."
Red and blue, juggling in a typical quibbling pattern. "As far as I know,
it was the Fuzzies done it."

"Now, Piet," Fane told him patiently. "You've used this same veridicator
here often enough to know you can't get away with lying on it. Woller's
making you the patsy for this, and you know that, too. Isn't it true, now,
that to the best of your knowledge and belief those Fuzzies never touched
that girl, and it wasn't till Woller talked to Lurkin and his daughte