Taking Dr. Grant Johnson’s advice, I tried to slow myself down, keeping my feet on the ground with the ball and chain of formal logic:

     Where was the corroboration for his use of German as a secret language? Could I find more German in his files? He had been a post-doctoral fellow in Physiology in Frankfurt, Germany. People said he was fluent in German. How could I be sure he wasn’t using German innocently? I thought up a lot of wild stuff, like programming the computer to look for other German words. But then I realized that the answer had been under my nose for the last hour: The name of the cryptic file with the two poisoned dogs was "VERGELTU", which might be the first eight letters of a German word. Then what did it mean? I searched my memory. Ver was a German prefix, so gelt had to be the root of the word. It wasn’t money; that was Geld.

     Then I realized that the German dictionary — the one I’d promised to "bring right back" over an hour ago — was still in my lap. So I looked up Vergeltu. There was only one word in my dictionary, and that was Vergeltung. And it means reprisal! My heart stopped for a second, then I jumped in the air and let out a semi-voluntary shout and an involuntary burst of methane.

     "Now wait a minute, Ben," warned the little scientist inside my head. "That’s a medical dictionary, full of weird psychiatric terms."

     I flew down the stairs and ran to the reference desk, dictionary in hand, and told the librarian that I needed a regular German dictionary. He looked at me funny, thought for a minute, and told me to look in the student collection on the fourth floor. I raced up the stairs. It was a special collection of junk that wealthy medical alumni gave the Med School for tax write-offs: paperback novels, investment books and outdated atlases. I spent half an hour doing a book-to-book search before coming across a ripped and broken paperback Langenscheidt’s. The Z section had fallen off, but the V’s were still intact. A few minutes of checking, thinking and double-checking convinced me that the German language had only one Vergelt and that was Vergeltung, which means reprisal. Reprisal!

     Running down the road of discovery as fast as I could drag my ball and chain of logic, I took another look at the "VERGELTUNG" file and decided on a global search for Oregon #35. The computer found nothing. Ledbetter had really been clever in covering up his tracks. Either he had not referred to it anywhere else or he used a different name for it. I looked back at the entry:

     I would search the number 7532. I started to search the files, but the computer sorted out too many examples. It registered positive on all sorts of crap like phone numbers, zip codes and page numbers from journal articles. A search of E7532 came out negative. Then I tried E{space}7532 and came up with one example: It was a file "DIA-LAB" where he kept his notes on lab work. The relevant entry had the date Jan. 5, 1993 and read:

     So E stood for "Eta"! That meant that O stood for "Oregon". He now abbreviated Oregon #35 as O-35! Clever bastard. Eta Chemical Company is a major supplier! I ran across the street to McGregor’s lab and pulled out the Eta catalog. Number 7532 was bovine thrombin! Put this into your veins and your blood turns to jelly! I ran back to the library. My carrel still looked like a rat’s nest; no one had touched anything.

     Now I had to figure out what was KN25 or KNip 25. I couldn’t search 25. The letters had to be the name of a company. Remembering my boyhood stamp collection and my uncle’s stories of World War II in the Pacific, I took a wild guess that the Nip stood for Nippon, which meant Japan. My strategy payed off immediately. In Ledbetter’s "Idea" file, I found a note predating the dog poisoning:

     Eureka! It was a potent neurotoxin. The case was cinched! I could hand over a complete proof.

     I played through the whole scenario: Ledbetter looked through the catalog from this Kanazawa Nippon company and found a nice inexpensive killer neurotoxin with a dissociation constant of 10**(-12) M. It has a molecular compatibility score of 12. It had a high affinity for the acetylcholine receptor and would stay bound to it for a long time — long enough to stop Cooper’s breathing. And the wily Dr. Ledbetter had even abbreviated it "Mathriotox" so that no one could pick it up scanning his files for the word "toxin."

     Then Ledbetter had made a polite inquiry to Oregon Biologicals to find out if their mast-cell stimulator was a 4, a 10 or a 12. Finding it was suitable, he got his hands on at least 100 mg of it. Then he went back to his computer file, found the letter of inquiry and changed the text by substituting that snide sentence in German about an experiment "to advance science." He also got hold of some bovine thrombin to use as a third component of his poison containing microcapsules, just to be sure. He made his preparation on Jan. 5, 1993. If Dong Chiu or the technician had made it for him, there would be a detailed, handwritten notebook entry in one of the notebooks in his cabinet.

     With the poison microcapsules manufactured, he probably tried them out on a laboratory rat. After finding that was okay, he went into the animal rooms and tried it out on a dog, his "canine subject." At 7:00 PM on Feb. 3, 1993, he administered it to the first dog by mixing it up with some raw ground beef. The dog must have wolfed it down appreciatively. The next morning at 6:15 he returned (retd.) to find the dog dead (mort) with a purple mouth (cyanotic membranes), pupils dilated (dil.). He estimated (est.) the time of death (dth) as 1:00 AM, which meant that his stuff took about six hours to work.

     For his second experiment, five months later and only a matter of weeks before Cooper’s death, he devised a more realistic experiment. He mixed 50 mg of poison microcapsules (930105) in a syringe (syr) with 150 mg of water and observed that it had the consistency (consist.) of mayonnaise (mayo) and that it could be extruded through an 18 gauge syringe. He injected (inj.) it into a hamburger (fast fd.) at 5:30 and administered it (adm.) to his canine subject at 6:00. After the subject had satiated herself, he removed (remved.) the uneaten (uningest.) vegetable materials (veg. mater.) from the floor. He estimated that only 25% of the valuable poison had been wasted by the dog’s failure to eat the lettuce (Est. > 75% dose inj.). He returned (retd.) at 6:00 a.m. to find his subject dead (mort) and equally cold. At this point, he permitted himself an exclamation mark: "Success!"

     I could just imagine his disgust when he had to stoop to clean the floor because the dog didn’t eat the lettuce and tomato. (Schweinehund!) I could imagine his pleasure the next morning when he found that his formulation worked when mixed with food of the gooiest kind. (Sieg Heil!) His ultimate experiment was not described, but this Final Solution was all too obvious.

     It was 11:30 in the evening. I could still call Westley. I pulled a quarter from my pocket and called him on a pay phone near the restrooms. After four rings, I heard a very somnolent but irritated "Yes?"

     "Dr. Westley, this is Ben — "

     "Ben? Ben. Well, yes, but don’t you think it is a bit late? A little past the witching hour?"

     "Yes, but I have been doing some witchcraft myself, and I know that we have a definite Eureka!"

     "You are quite sure, are you?" he said, in a voice gaining clarity and enthusiasm. "Well, jolly good! I was wondering how you would come out with your late-night experiment."

     "The experiment was carried out that night, successfully. Since then, I have been working day and night to evaluate the data. Just this moment I have put everything together. I have a definite and verifiable proof."

     "Wonderful!" the Old Man said, with growing alacrity. "I rather imagine your experiment can be likened to an astronomy experiment. The astronomer spends an evening at the observatory making his measurements. Then, with the encroaching dawn, he packs up his data, disturbing nothing, leaving all the lenses in the telescope in place, not disturbing the archives and leaving nothing, not even his footprints."

     "Quite," I said confidently.

     "Did I hear you say ‘quite?’"

     "Aye, aye, sir!"

     "My Dear Benjamin, I believe we have made an Englishman out of you."

     "Well, at least you could call me an English mercenary," I said with irony, thinking about The Sea Chase.

     "We shall have to celebrate with dinner tomorrow evening! And you say that you have spent day and night literally poring over your data. There must have been reams of it."

     "Yes, but it is all stored in computers nowadays." I told Westley in code how I’d give him sample numbers and notebook reference just like one astronomer tells another how to find a star.

     "So tomorrow evening, seven o’clock," he enthused. "A little early so as to allow time. You will, of course, practice your little ditty for a few hours during the day, to guarantee a good performance.

     "I’ll be a good choirboy. I’ll practice singing my solo righteously and with — what did you once say? — with a joyful sound?"

     I dragged myself back to Rebecca’s apartment and found her sleeping. I tucked myself into bed next to her like a husband returning from a late night at the office.

     I had an important day in front of me.