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WITNESS
BY GEORGE H. SMITH
Ballard was quite dead. There could be no doubt of it. He lay sprawled in front of Edith, with his head very messily bashed in and with one hand still extended toward her. A long shimmering stream of blood ran half-way across the large room. Dr. Dudley Ballard had been as inconsiderate in his dying as he had been in his living.
Art MacKinney and I stood in the doorway and stared. We were shocked not so much by the fact that Ballard was dead as by the fact that he lay in this most secret room, this holy of holies. Ours was the most security conscious project in the whole country; and this was where he had picked to get himself killed.
"God! There'll really be a stink about this," MacKinney breathed.
"Well, I can't think of anyone who had it coming more than he did," I said. I hated Ballard's guts and everyone knew it, so there was no point in being hypocritical now.
Edith stood silently. She didn't seem to be interested in the fact that the man who had run her life, who had spent hours shouting questions at her and criticizing her slightest error with burning sarcasm was now dead. No, Edith wasn't interested, but you couldn't really expect her to be--she was only a computing machine, a mechanical brain, the final result of years of work by the best cybernetics experts in the world. Edith was silent, and would be, until we turned her on and fed the tapes into her.
"It looks as though this is what did it," MacKinney said, indicating a large spanner lying on the floor beside Ballard. He touched it gingerly with his foot. His face was white and strained and it occurred to me that he was more upset than I thought he should be. After all, he had as much reason to hate the dead man as the rest of us. Ballard had taken advantage of his position as head of the research project to make passes at Jane Currey and MacKinney wasn't at all a cool scientist when it came to Jane. He was engaged to her and quite naturally resented Ballard's attentions to her.
"You'd better not touch that until the police get here," I said as he bent over to pick up the spanner.
"Yeah, I guess you're right--I forgot. How do you suppose this got in here anyway?"
With Ballard gone, I was in charge. Maybe someone would think that was reason enough for me to kill him. I didn't care, I was just glad he was gone. Now he couldn't mistreat Edith anymore.
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