On the eighth day, Powell arose, bathed, dressed, successfully defeated his nurses in single combat, and left the house. He made one stop at Sucre et Cie, emerged with a large mysterious parcel and then proceeded to headquarters to make his personal report to Commissioner Crabbe. On the way up, he poked his head into Beck’s office.

“Hi, Jax.”

“Bless (and curses) ings, Linc.”

“Curses?”

“Bet fifty they’d keep you in bed till next Wed.”

“You lose. Did Mose back us up on the D’Courtney motive?”

“Lock, stock & barrel. Trial took one hour. Reich’s going into Demolition now.”

“Good. Well, I’d better go up and s-p-e-l-l it out for Crabbe.”

“What you got under your arm?”

“Present.”

“For me?”

“Not today. Here’s thinking at you.”

Powell went up to Crabbe’s ebony and silver office, knocked, heard the imperious: “Come!” and entered. Crabbe was properly solicitous, but stiff. The D’Courtney Case had not improved his relations with Powell. The denouement had come as an additional blow.

“It was a remarkably complex case, sir,” Powell began tactfully. “None of us could understand it, and none of us are to blame. You see, Commissioner, even Reich himself was not consciously aware of why he had murdered D’Courtney. The only one who grasped the case was the Prosecution Computer, and we thought it was acting kittenish.”

“The machine? It understood?”

“Yes, sir. When we ran our final data through the first time, the Computer told us that the ‘passion motive’ was insufficiently documented. We’d all been assuming profit motive. So had Reich. Naturally we assumed the Computer was having kinks, and we insisted on computation based on the profit motive. We were wrong…”

“And that infernal machine was right?”

“Yes, Commissioner. It was. Reich told himself that he was killing D’Courtney for financial reasons. That was his psychological camouflage for the real passion motive. And it couldn’t hold up. He offered merger to D’Courtney. D’Courtney accepted. But Reich was subconsciously compelled to misunderstand the message. He had to. He had to go on believing he murdered for money.”

“Why?”

“Because he couldn’t face the real motive…”

“Which was…?”

“D’Courtney was his father.”

“What!” Crabbe stared. “His father? His flesh and blood?”

“Yes, sir. It was all there before us. We just couldn’t see it… because Reich couldn’t see it. That estate on Callisto, for instance. The one that Reich used to decoy Dr. Jordan off the planet. Reich inherited it from his mother who’d received it from D’Courtney. We all assumed Reich’s father had chiseled it out of D’Courtney and placed it in his wife’s name. We were wrong. D’Courtney had given it to Reich’s mother because they were lovers. It was his love-gift to the mother of his child. Reich was born there. Jackson Beck uncovered all that, once we had the lead.”

Crabbe opened his mouth, then closed it.

“And there were so many other signposts. D’Courtney’s suicide drive, produced by intense guilt sensations of abandonment. He had abandoned his son. It was tearing him apart. Then, Barbara D’Courtney’s deep half-twin image of herself and Ben Reich; somehow she knew they were half-brother and sister. And Reich’s inability to kill Barbara at Chooka Frood’s. He knew it too, deep down in the unconscious. He wanted to destroy the hateful father who had rejected him, but he could not bring himself to harm his sister.”