“You should sit down,” Herb said. “Or lie down. You look terrible.”

“It’s a terrible thing,” Buckman said. “It genuinely is. I disliked a lot about her, but, Christ—how vital she was. She always tried anything new. That’s what killed her, probably some new drug she and her fellow witch friends brewed up in their miserable basement labs. Something with film developer in it or Drano or a lot worse.”

“I think we should talk to Taverner,” Herb said.

“Okay. Pull him in. He’s got that microtrans on him, doesn’t he?”

“Evidently not. All the insects we placed on him as he was leaving the academy building ceased to function. Except, perhaps, for the seed warhead. But we have no reason to activate it.”

Buckman said, “Taverner is a smart bastard. Or else he got help. From someone or ones he’s working with. Don’t bother to try to detonate the seed warhead; it’s undoubtedly been cut out of his pelt by some obliging colleague.” Or by Alys, he conjectured. My helpful sister. Assisting the police at every turn. Nice.

“You’d better leave the house for a while,” Herb said. “While the coroner’s staff does its procedural action.”

“Drive me back to the academy,” Buckman said. “I don’t think I can drive; I’m shaking too bad.” He felt something on his face; putting up his hand, he found that his chin was wet. “What’s this on me?” he said, amazed.

“You’re crying,” Herb said.

“Drive me back to the academy and I’ll wind up what I have to do there before I can turn it over to you,” Buckman said. “And then I want to come back here.” Maybe Taverner did give her something, he said to himself. But Taverner is nothing. She did it. And yet.

“Come on,” Herb said, taking him by the arm and leading him to the staircase.

Buckman, as he descended, said, “Would you ever in Christ’s world have thought you’d see me cry?”

“No,” Herb said. “But it’s understandable. You and she were very close.”

“You could say that,” Buckman said, with sudden savage anger. “God damn her,” he said. “I told her she’d eventually do it. Some of her friends brewed it up for her and made her the guinea pig.”

“Don’t try to do much at the office,” Herb said as they passed through the living room and outside, where their two quibbles sat parked. “Just wind it up enough for me to take over.”

“That’s what I said,” Buckman said. “Nobody listens to me, God damn it.”

Herb thumped him on the back and said nothing; the two men walked across the lawn in silence.

On the ride back to the academy building, Herb, at the wheel of the quibble, said, “There’re cigarettes in my coat.” It was the first thing either of them had said since boarding the quibble.

“Thanks,” Buckman said. He had smoked up his own week’s ration.

“I want to discuss one matter with you,” Herb said. “I wish it could wait but it can’t.”

“Not even until we get to the office?”

Herb said, “There may be other policy-level personnel there when we get back. Or just plain other people—my staff, for instance.”

“Nothing I have to say is—”

“Listen,” Herb said. “About Alys. About your marriage to her. Your sister.”

“My incest,” Buckman said harshly.

“Some of the marshals may know about it. Alys told too many people. You know how she was about it.”

“Proud of it,” Buckman said, lighting a cigarette with difficulty. He still could not get over the fact that he had found himself crying. I really must have loved her, he said to himself. And all I seemed to feel was fear and dislike. And the sexual drive. How many times, he thought, we discussed it before we did it. All the years. “I never told anybody but you,” he said to Herb.

“But Alys.”

“Okay. Well, then possibly some of the marshals know, and if he cares, the Director.”

“The marshals who are opposed to you,” Herb said, “and who know about the”—he hesitated—“the incest—will say that she committed suicide. Out of shame. You can expect that. And they will leak it to the media.”

“You think so?” Buckman said. Yes, he thought, it would make quite a story. Police general’s marriage to his sister, blessed with a secret child hidden away in Florida. The general and his sister posing as husband and wife in Florida, while they’re with the boy. And the boy: product of what must be a deranged genetic heritage.

“What I want you to see,” Herb said, “and I’m afraid you’re going to have to take a look at it now, which isn’t an ideal time with Alys just recently dead and—”

“It’s our coroner,” Buckman said. “We own him, there at the academy.” He did not understand what Herb was getting at. “He’ll say it was an overdose of a semitoxic drug, as he already told us.”

“But taken deliberately,” Herb said. “A suicidal dose.”

“What do you want me to do?”

Herb said, “Compel him—order him—to find an inquest verdict of murder.”

He saw, then. Later, when he had overcome some of his grief, he would have thought of it himself. But Herb Maime was right: it had to be faced now. Even before they got back to the academy building and their staffs.

“So we can say,” Herb said, “that—”

“That elements within the police hierarchy hostile to my campus and labor-camp policies took revenge by murdering my sister,” Buckman said tightly. It froze his blood to find himself thinking of such matters already. But—“Something like that,” Herb said. “No one named specifically. No marshals, I mean. Just suggest that they hired someone to do it. Or ordered some junior officer eager to rise in the ranks to do it. Don’t you agree I’m right? And we must act rapidly; it’s got to be declared immediately. As soon as we get back to the academy you should send a memo to all the marshals and the Director, stating that.”

I must turn a terrible personal tragedy into an advantage, Buckman realized. Capitalize on the accidental death of my own sister. If it was accidental.

“Maybe it’s true,” he said. Possibly Marshal Holbein, for example, who hated him enormously, had arranged it.

“No,” Herb said. “It’s not true. But start an inquiry. And you must find someone to pin it on; there must be a trial.”

“Yes,” he agreed dully. With all the trimmings. Ending in an execution, with many dark hints in media releases that “higher authorities” were involved, but who, because of their positions, could not be touched. And the Director, hopefully, would officially express his sympathy concerning the tragedy, and his hope that the guilty party would be found and punished.

“I’m sorry that I have to bring this up so soon,” Herb said. “But they got you down from marshal to general; if the incest story is publicly believed they might be able to force you to retire. Of course, even if we take the initiative, they may air the incest story. Let’s hope you’re reasonably well covered.”

“I did everything possible,” Buckman said.

“Whom should we pin it on?” Herb asked.

“Marshal Holbein and Marshal Ackers.” His hatred for them was as great as theirs for him: they had, five years ago, slaughtered over ten thousand students at the Stanford Campus, a final bloody—and needless—atrocity of that atrocity of atrocities, the Second Civil War.

Herb said, “I don’t mean who planned it. That’s obvious; as you say, Holbein and Ackers and the others. I mean who actually injected her with the drug.”

“The small fry,” Buckman said. “Some political prisoner in one of the forced-labor camps.” It didn’t really matter. Any one of a million camp inmates, or any student from a dying kibbutz, would do.

“I would say pin it on somebody higher up,” Herb said.

“Why?” Buckman did not follow his thinking. “It’s always done that way; the apparatus always picks an unknown, unimportant—”

“Make it one of her friends. Somebody who could have been her equal. In fact, make it somebody well known. In fact, make it somebody in the acting field here in this area; she was a celebrity-fucker.”