ber one political boy. 'Night, darling."

* * * * *

Lindsay was on the verge of a breakdown himself by noon the next day,
after Computation Minister du Fresne, looking uglier than ever, had
finished conducting President Giovannini's official party through the
rooms and passages of Giac. If Nina hadn't been by his side during and
after the swift rocket trip to Death Valley, he might have collapsed.

It was she who had removed the glittering star from his breast before
breakfast in the Sherwood Forest mansion that morning. "You needed
something to wear for show last night," she had told him.

"Then it's not mine?" he had countered absently.

"Of course it is," she had assured him. "But Secretary General Bergozza
is going to make the official investiture after the test."

Lindsay had meekly surrendered the bauble, barely noticing. His brain
was straining to recall what he could of symbolic logic--a subject that
had never particularly interested him. For some reason it kept working
back to Lewis Carroll, who, under his real name of Charles Lutwidge
Dodgson, had been the founder of symbolic logic back in the nineteenth
century, along with the renowned Dr. Poole.

About all he could remember was the following problem:

(1) Every one who is sane can do Logic;

(2) No lunatics are fit to serve on a jury;

(3) None of _your_ sons can do Logic.

The Universal was "persons". The symbols were: a--able to do Logic;
b--fit to serve on a jury; c--sane; d--your sons.

And the answer, of course, was: None of _your_ sons is fit to serve on a
jury.

For some reason this, in turn, made him think of the ancient conundrum
that employed confusion to trip its victims: What's the difference
between an iron dog in the side yard of a man who wants to give his
little daughter music lessons but is afraid he can't afford them next
year, and a man who has a whale in a tank and wants to send him for a
wedding present and is trying to pin a tag on him, saying how long he
is, how much he weighs and where he comes from, but can't because the
whale keeps sloshing around in the tank and knocking the tag off?

This time, the answer was: One can't wag his tail, the other can't tag
his whale.

"None of _your_ sons is fit to tag a whale--or wag a tail," he said
absently.

"What was that?" Nina asked.

"Nothing, nothing at all," he replied. "Merely a man going out of his
mind."

"It will never miss you," sh