If one ignored the glare from the kitchen, the rest of the room was dimly lit. Red tableclothes were echoed by red-padded chairs. Scented candles in transparent red fish-bowls augmented the murk with a crimson flicker of their own.

With the exception of one other couple, they were alone in the place. But even had the room been filled with chattering others, they would have still been alone.

“I tell you, Annie,” Auberson was saying, “I knew he was pressuring me, but there was nothing I could do about it.”

She nodded, took a sip of her wine. In the dark her eyes were luminously black. “I know. I know how Dome is.” She set the wineglass down. “His problem is that he’s trying to be boss of too many things. He calls you in to talk even when there’s nothing to say.”

“That’s what this was,” he said. “Logically, he knew it was too early to expect results — but he felt he had to demand them anyway.”

She nodded again. “I’ve long suspected that Mr. Dome has reached his level of incompetency. If he’s ever given any more authority, he’ll be in over his own head.”

“How much higher can you get than Chairman of the Board?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know, but he’s working on it. The way he keeps taking over more and more jobs — it’s frightening. You know, don’t you, that he has no intention of hiring a new president?”

“I’d kind of guessed it.”

“I think he’s afraid that he isn’t indispensable, so he’s taking on more and more responsibility to prove the opposite. I don’t think it’s a good idea — it certainly isn’t good for the company.”

“Should you be saying that?” Auberson asked. “After all, you do work for him.”

“With him,” she corrected. “I only work with him. I’m an independent unit in the corporate structure. My job is what I want to make of it.”

“Oh? And what do you want to make of it?”

She was thoughtful. “Well, I interpret my function as being that of a buffer — or a lubricant to minimize the friction between certain departments.”

“I see. Is that why you accepted my dinner invitation? To keep me from chafing against Elzer?”

Annie made a face. “Oh, that awful little man. You would have to bring him up.”

“I take it you don’t like him.”

“I didn’t like him even before I knew him. His family was in my father’s congregation.”

“Oh? I didn’t know that Elzer was—”

“Carl Elzer and I have one thing in common,” she said. “We’re both ashamed that he’s Jewish.”

Auberson had to laugh at that. “You’ve got him pegged, Annie. I hadn’t realized it before, but you’re right.”

“What are you?” she asked.

“Huh? Oh, I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“Oh, well — my family was Episcopalian, but — I guess you could call me an atheist.”

“You don’t believe in God at all.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know if I do or not. I don’t know if there is a God.”

“Then you’re an agnostic, not an atheist.”

“So what’s the difference?”

“The atheist is sure — the agnostic doesn’t know.”

“Is one better than the other?”

“The agnostic,” she said. “At least he’s got an open mind. The atheist doesn’t. The atheist is making a statement every bit as religious as saying there is a God.”

“You sound like an agnostic yourself.”

Her eyes twinkled. “I’m a Jewish agnostic. What about HARLIE? What is he?”

“HARLIE?” Auberson grinned. “He’s an Aquarius.”

“Huh?” She gave him a look.

“I’m not kidding. Ask him yourself.”

“I believe you,” she said. “How did he — realize this?”

“Oh, well, what happened was we were talking about morality, HARLIE and I — I wish I had the printout here to show you, it’s beautiful. Never argue morality — or anything for that matter — with a computer. You’ll lose every time. HARLIE’s got the words and ideas of every philosopher since the dawn of history to draw upon. He’ll have you arguing against yourself within ten minutes. He enjoys doing it — it’s a word game to him.”

“I can imagine,” she said.

“Can you really? You don’t know how devious he can be. He had me agreeing with Ambrose Bierce that morality is an invention of the weak to protect themselves from the strong.”

“Well, of course, you’re only a psychologist. You’re not supposed to be a debater.”

“Ordinarily, I’d be offended at that, but in this case I’ll concede the point. In fact, I know some so-called debaters I’d like to turn him loose on.”

“It wouldn’t be hard to make a list,” she agreed.

“Well, anyway,” he said, getting back to his story, “I thought I finally had him at one point. He’d just finished a complex analysis of the Christian ethos and why it was wrong and was starting in on Buddhism, I think, when I interrupted him. I asked him which was the right morality. What did he believe in?”

“And…?”

“He answered, ‘I HAVE NO MORALS.’ ”

She smiled thoughtfully. “That’s kind of frightening.”

“If I didn’t know HARLIE’s sense of humor, I would have pulled his plug right then. But I didn’t. I just asked him why he said that.”

“And he said?”

“He said, ‘BECAUSE I AM AN AQUARIUS.’ ”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Honest, ‘I AM AN AQUARIUS.’ ”

“You don’t believe in that stuff, do you?”

“No, but HARLIE does.”

She laughed then. “Really?”

Shrug. “I don’t know. I think it’s another game to him. If you tell him you’re planning a picnic, he’ll not only give you tomorrow’s weather forecast, but he’ll also tell you if the signs are auspicious.”

She was still laughing. “That’s beautiful. Just beautiful.”

“According to HARLIE, Aquarians have no morals, only ethics. That’s why he said it. It wasn’t till later that I realized he’d neatly sidestepped the original question altogether. He still hadn’t told me what he really believed in.” He smiled as he refilled their glasses. “Someday I’ll have to ask him. Here’s to you.”

“To us,” she corrected. She put the wineglass down again. “What got him started on all that anyway?”

“Astrology? It was one of his own studies. He kept coming up against references to it and asked for further information on the subject.”

“And you just gave it to him?”

“Oh, no — not right off the bat. We never give him anything without first considering its effects. We qualified this one the same way we qualified all the religious data we gave him. It was just one more specialized system of logic, not necessarily bearing any degree of correspondence to the real world. It’s what we call a variable relevance set. Of course, I’m willing to bet that he’d have realized it himself, sooner or later — but at that point in our research we couldn’t afford to take chances. Two days later, he started printing out a complex analysis of astrology, finishing up with his own horoscope, which he had taken the time to cast. His activation date was considered his date of birth.”

Her face clouded. “Wait a minute — he can’t be an Aquarius. HARLIE was activated in the middle of March. I know because it was just after Pierson quit as President. That’s why I was promoted — to help Dome.”

Auberson smiled knowingly. “True, but that’s one of the things HARLIE did when he cast his horoscope. He recast the Zodiac too.”

“Huh?”

“The signs of the Zodiac,” he explained, “were determined in the second century before Christ — maybe earlier. Since then, due to the precession of the equinoxes, the signs have changed. An Aries is really a Pisces, a Pisces is really an Aquarius, and so on. The rest of us are thirty days off. HARLIE corrected the Zodiac from its historical inception and then cast his horoscope from it.”

Annie was delighted with the idea. “Oh, David — that’s priceless. Really priceless. I can just imagine him doing that.”

“Wait, you haven’t heard it all. He turned out to be right. He doesn’t have any morals. Ethics, yes. Morals, no. HARLIE was the first to realize it — though he didn’t grasp what it meant. You see morality is an artifice — an invention. It really is to protect the weak from the strong.