“But there is something that must be cleared up first.
“A man died on the way out here. The circumstances surrounding his death have been cleared up now, and I feel that we all deserve an explanation.” He turned to Mike the Angel. “Mister Gabriel—if you will, please.”
Mike stood up as the captain sat down. “The question that has bothered me from the beginning has been: Exactly what killed Lieutenant Mellon? Well, we know now. We know what killed him and why he died.
“He was murdered. Deliberately, and in cold blood.”
That froze everybody at the table.
“It was done by a slow-acting but nonetheless deadly drug that took time to act, but did its job very well.
“There were several other puzzling things that happened that night. Snookums began behaving irrationally. It is the height of coincidence that a robot and a human being should both become insane at almost the same time; therefore we have to look for a common cause.”
Lieutenant Commander von Liegnitz raised a tentative hand, and Mike said: “Go ahead.”
“I was under the impression that the robot went mad because Mellon had filled him full of theological nonsense. It would take a madman to do anything like that to a fine machine—therefore I see no peculiar coincidence.”
“That’s exactly what the killer wanted us to think,” Mike said. “But it wasn’t Mellon that fed Snookums theology. Mellon was a devout churchman; his record shows that. He would never have tried to convert a machine to Christianity. Nor would he have tried to ruin an expensive machine.