The forensic sociologist looked closely at the image on the wail screen.  Two figures were frozen there, one in the act of stabbing the other through the heart with an antique letter cutter, once used at Johns Hopkins for surgery.  That was before the ultra-microtome, of course.

"As tricky a case as I've ever seen," the sociologist remarked.  "If we can make a homicide charge stick on Sam Clay, I'll be a little surprised."

The tracer engineer twirled a dial and watched the figures on the screen repeat their actions.  One - Sam Clay - snatched the letter cutter from a desk and plunged it into the other man's heart.  The victim fell down dead.  Clay started back in apparent horror.  Then he dropped to his knees beside the twitching body and said wildly that he didn't mean it.  The body drummed its heels upon the rug and was still.

"That last touch was nice," the engineer said.

"Well, I've got to make the preliminary survey," the sociologist sighed, settling in his dictachair and placing his fingers on the keyboard.  "I doubt if I'll find any evidence.  However, the analysis can come later.  Where's Clay now?"

"His mouthpiece put in a habeas mens."

"I didn't think we'd be able to hold him.  But it was worth trying.  Imagine, just one shot of scop and he'd have told the truth.  Ah, well.  We'll do it the hard way, as usual.  Start the tracer, will you?  It won't make sense till we run it chronologically, but one must start somewhere.  Good old Blackstone," the sociologist said, as, on the screen, Clay stood up, watching the corpse revive and arise, and then pulled the miraculously clean paper cutter out of its heart, all in reverse.

"Good old Blackstone," he repeated.  "On the other hand, sometimes I wish I'd lived in Jeffreys' time.  In those days, homicide was homicide."


Telepathy never came to much.  Perhaps the developing faculty went underground in response to a familiar natural law after the new science appeared - omniscience.  It wasn't really that, of course.  It was a device for looking into the past.  And it was limited to a fifty-year span; no chance of seeing the arrows at Agincourt or the homunculi of Bacon.  It was sensitive enough to pick up the "fingerprints" of light and sound waves imprinted on matter, descramble and screen them, and reproduce the image of what had happened.  After all, a man's shadow can be photographed on concrete, if he's unlucky enough to be caught in an atomic blast.  Which is something.  The shadow's about all here is left.

However, opening the past like a book didn't solve all problems.  It took generations for the maze of complixties to iron itself out, though finally a tentative check-and-balance was reached.  The right to kill has been sturdily defended by mankind since Cain rose up against Abel.  A good many idealists quoted, "The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground," but that didn't stop the lobbyists and the pressure groups.  Magna Carta was quoted in reply.  The right to privacy was defended desperately.

And the curious upshot of this imbalance came when the act of homicide was declared nonpunishable, unless intent and forethought could be proved.  Of course, it was considered at least naughty to fly in a rage and murder someone on impulse, and there was a nominal punishment - imprisonment, for example - but in practice this never worked, because so many defenses were possible.  Temporary insanity.  Undue provocation.  Self-defense.  Manslaughter, second-degree homicide, third degree, fourth degree - it went on like that.  It was up to the State to prove that the killer had planned his killing in advance; only then would a jury convict.  And the jury, of course, had to waive immunity and take a scop test, to prove the box hadn't been packed.  But no defendant ever waived immunity.

A man's home wasn't his castle - not with the Eye able to enter it at will and scan his past.  The device couldn't interpret, and it couldn't read his mind; it could only see and listen.  Consequently the sole remaining fortress of privacy was defended to the last ditch.  No truth-serum, no hypnoanalysis, no third-degree, no leading questions.

If, by viewing the prisoner's past actions, the prosecution could prove forethought and intent, O.K.