He waited deliberately. He looked at Jeff Arnold for a long moment and saw that the man was calm. Too calm. So absolutely motionless that it wasn't real.
"Third Prime. A strong one, believe me. In a way most interesting of all." He pressed the words out slowly and flatly. "The third Prime," said Beardsley, "is ... Pederson."
He watched Arnold relax ever so slowly, leaning back, the tension going away as he uncoiled in the chair; but the young man's face wasn't so much relieved as it was puzzled.
"Pederson. Pederson? I don't seem to—You can't mean Brook Pederson, the one-time tele-columnist?"
"None other. I don't suppose you remember, but back in '60 he opposed the ECAIAC lobby. I mean opposed it, fought it! Predicted that Government installation of such a machine would not inspire confidence, that the nation's crime rate would rise ... he saw nothing but chaos. For a while there he was quite a man. Got himself a following. Had ambitions."
"But I do remember it!" Arnold thumped the desk. "Of course! Pederson headed a bloc against 'Carmack's Folly,' but he backed the wrong horse, and when the bubble burst he was out in the cold. Became a laughing stock." Arnold paused, and his glance held something of shrewdness and a livening challenge. "Actually, Pederson couldn't have been more wrong. In those first two years ECAIAC reduced the crime-rate by some forty percent."
"So it's claimed!" This was a sore point and Beardsley rose to the bait. "It couldn't be that crime was on the down-grade already? I could show you plenty of statistics that—why, I could show you methods—"
"I'll just bet you could." Arnold gave a thin tolerant smile. "I refuse to enter that argument again, not with you, Beardsley. I for one trust in machines not in evolution. I've told you before...."
And Beardsley found himself sitting there with a flush of heat at his hair-roots, half-angry and half foolish as he realized how he had been baited.