Stern didn’t say anything. I turned on my belly on the couch and propped up my chin in my hands and looked at him. You never could tell what was going on with him, but I got the idea that he was puz-. zled.

“I said why,” I told him.

“Not to me.”

I suddenly understood that I was asking too much of him. I said slowly, “We all woke up at the same time. We all did what somebody else wanted. We lived through a day someone else’s way, thinking someone else’s thoughts, saying other people’s words. Janie painted someone else’s pictures. Baby didn’t talk to anyone, and we were all happy with it. Now do you see?”

“Not yet.”

“God!” I said. I thought for a while. “We didn’t blesh.”

“Blesh? Oh. But you didn’t after Lone died, either.”

“That was different. That was like a car running out of gas, but the car’s there—there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just waiting. But after Miss Kew got done with us, the car was taken all to pieces, see?”

It was his turn to think a while. Finally he said, “The mind makes us do funny things. Some of them seem completely reasonless, wrong, insane. But the cornerstone of the work we’re doing is this: there’s a chain of solid, unassailable logic in the things we do. Dig deep enough and you find cause and effect as clearly in this field as you do in any other. I said logic, mind; I didn’t say ‘correctness’ or ‘rightness’ or ‘justice’ or anything of the sort. Logic and truth are two very different things, but they often look the same to the mind that’s performing the logic.

“When that mind is submerged, working at cross-purposes with the surface mind, then you’re all confused. Now in your case, I can see the thing you’re pointing at—that in order to preserve or to rebuild that peculiar bond between you kids, you had to get rid of Miss Kew. But I don’t see the logic. I don’t see that regaining that ‘bleshing’ was worth destroying this new-found security which you admit was enjoyable.”

I said, desperately, “Maybe it wasn’t worth destroying it.”

Stern leaned forward and pointed his pipe at me. “It was because it made you do what you did. After the fact, maybe things look different. But when you were moved to do it, the important thing was to destroy Miss Kew and regain this thing you’d had before. I don’t see why and neither do you.”

“How am we going to find out?”

“Well, let’s get right to the most unpleasant part, if you’re up to it.”

I lay down. “I’m ready.”

“All right. Tell me everything that happened just before you killed her.”

I fumbled through that last day, trying to taste the food, hear the voices. A thing came and went and came again: it was the crisp feeling of the sheets. I thrust it away because it was at the beginning of that day, but it came back again, and I realized it was at the end, instead.

I said, “What I just told you, all that about the children doing things other people’s way instead of their own, and Baby not talking, and everyone happy about it, and finally that I had to kill Miss Kew. It took a long time to get to that, and a long time to start doing it. I guess I lay in bed and thought for four hours before I got up again. It was dark and quiet, I went out of the room and down the hall and into Miss Kew’s bedroom and killed her.”

“How?”

“That’s all there is!” I shouted, as loud as I could. Then I quieted down. “It was awful dark…it still is. I don’t know. I don’t want to know. She did love us. I know she did. But I had to kill her.”

“All right, all right,” Stern said. “I guess there’s no need to get too gruesome about this. You’re—”

“What?”

“You’re quite strong for your age, aren’t you, Gerard?”

“I guess so. Strong enough, anyway.”

“Yes,” he said.

“I still don’t see that logic you were talking about.” I began to hammer on the couch with my fist, hard, once for each word: “Why—did—I—have—to—go—and—do—that?”

“Cut that out,” he said. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

“I ought to get hurt,” I said.

“Ah?” said Stern.

I got up and went to the desk and got some water. “What am I going to do?”

“Tell me what you did after you killed her, right up until the time you came here.”

“Not much,” I said. “It was only last night. I went back to my room, sort of numb. I put all my clothes on except my shoes. I carried them. I went out. Walked a long time, trying to think, went to the post oflice when it opened. Miss Kew used to let me go for the mail sometimes. Found this check waiting for me for the contest. Cashed it at the bank, opened an account, took eleven hundred bucks. Got the idea of getting some help from a psychiatrist, spent most of the day looking for one, came here. That’s all.”

“Didn’t you have any trouble cashing the check?”

“I never have any trouble making people do what I want them to do.”

He gave a surprised grunt.

“I know what you’re thinking—I couldn’t make Miss Kew do what I wanted.”

“That’s part of it,” he admitted.

“If I had of done that,” I told him, “she wouldn’t of been Miss Kew any more. Now the banker—all I made him do was be a banker.”

I looked at him and suddenly realized why he fooled with that pipe all the time. It was so he could look down at it and you wouldn’t be able to see his eyes.

“You killed her,” he said—and I knew he was changing the subject—“and destroyed something that was valuable to you. It must have been less valuable to you than the chance to rebuild this thing you used to have with the other kids. And you’re not sure of the value of that.” He looked up. “Does that describe your main trouble?”

“Just about.”

“You know the single thing that makes people kill?” When I didn’t answer, he said, “Survival. To save the self or something which identifies with the self. And in this case that doesn’t apply, because your setup with Miss Kew had far more survival value for you, singly and as a group, than the other.”

“So maybe I just didn’t have a good enough reason to kill her.”

“You had, because you did it. We just haven’t located it yet. I mean we have the reason, but we don’t know why it was important enough. The answer is somewhere in you.”

“Where?”

He got up and walked some. “We have a pretty consecutive life-story here. There’s fantasy mixed with the fact, of course, and there are areas in which we have no detailed information, but we have a beginning and a middle and an end. Now, I can’t say for sure, but the answer may be in that bridge you refused to cross a while back. Remember?”

I remembered, all right. I said, “Why that? Why can’t we try something else?”

He quietly pointed out, “Because you just said it. Why are you shying away from it?”

“Don’t go making big ones out of little ones,” I said. Sometimes the guy annoyed me. “That bothers me. I don’t know why, but it does.”

“Something’s lying hidden in there, and you’re bothering it so it’s fighting back. Anything that fights to stay concealed is very possibly the thing we’re after. Your trouble is concealed, isn’t it?”