Leland had not moved to help him. “You tried to talk him out of marrying her, didn’t you?”

“You don’t really understand the nature of my work, if you mean a thing like that.” He had untangled the power line and now he went to the wall for the baseboard outlet. “I work in the world of the possible. Of course there are value judgments. I believed that their relationship was beyond my influence. I didn’t want him to marry anybody, but if I had attempted to impose myself, I would have lost him, perhaps she would have lost him—she wanted to test herself as a wife, remember—and I would have lost her. There was no chance of success. It was not a calculated risk. He wanted her, he wanted to marry her—you’ll hear him say it. He did not die with the opinions he expressed here, please remember that. I came to like Colin. I admired him for the struggle he made. If it had gone the way I would have had it, we would have worked for ten years. I never said that to him; it would have defeated him. I was the one who was hoping to live long enough.” He sat down again heavily. Leland looked at him.

“I’m going on the assumption that you want to handle the tapes yourself,” Roberts said.

“That’s right.” Leland rose.

“He was not trying to apologize for himself,” Roberts said. “He thought he wanted these records for the reasons I’ve already given you. He told the truth as well as he could see it. By August twelfth he had come a long way. Some people would argue that he was only being more honest. It was that he was capable of more honesty. I wanted you to hear these, Joe. When he made them, he was a man still not really sure that he would ever take the reins of his life.”

Leland nodded. He had heard him; but he was thinking about other things that Roberts had said, too.

“All right?” a voice in the speaker asked.

“Go ahead,” Wendell Roberts’ voice said. Leland felt a start; the first voice had been MacIver’s.

“My name is Colin William MacIver,” the voice said, with the inflections of Manitou. The letter r had been as clear as a man could hope to pronounce it. A young voice, very clear, not a voice one heard on the radio—a true, young voice. “I’m thirty years old and I live at Sixteen-ninety Paley Street here in Port Smith. I’m reasonably sane and I’m making this record not because of any pressure.” There was a pause. “I want it to be a record of certain things that I did and that have happened to me.” There was another pause, a longer one. Leland sat back and started to light a cigarette, his first in hours. His hands were wet and much too warm.

“I killed a man,” the voice said. “I killed Theodore Leikman—” He stopped and there was another long silence.