They handcuffed him and hustled him out without even picking up his luggage and his raincoat. He tried to look confident, but I thought the law-abiding public wouldn't suffer much longer from the connivings of Statistomat, Inc. I settled back into the deep chair and turned with a triumphant grin toward the door of the room's closet.

It opened. My brother, dressed in the distinctive charcoal-green suit of a General Computers junior executive, stepped out, turning off the tape recorder as he came.

He was grinning too. "You had me biting my lip," he admitted, "but you came through all right. It's a good thing, too. It always gives me a specially grateful feeling when I see society saved from a deviant like that.... It's not that there was any danger they would have challenged Incomac's market leadership, but even if they had continued in existence as small as they are now they would have taken away some customers. Our responsibility to our stockholders is not just to make profit. It is to make the maximum possible profit—to optimize!"

Of course!

My brother's gaze was distant as his keen mind searched for the deeper lessons of the day's work. He said, "Maybe we should get the public release of those Commerce Department reports discontinued." 

 Prev. P 8/8