Now Gulliman intended to have none. He was going to be, he had decided, the first Chairman without any murder at all anywhere on Earth during his term. After that, and the favorable publicity that would result—

He barely skimmed the rest of the report. He estimated that there were at least two thousand cases of prospective wife-beatings listed. Undoubtedly, not all would be stopped in time. Perhaps thirty per cent would be consummated. But the incidence was dropping and consummations were dropping even more quickly.

Multivac had added wife-beating to its list of predictable crimes only some five years earlier and the average man was not yet accustomed to the thought that if he planned to wallop his wife, it would be known in advance. As the conviction percolated through society, woman would first suffer fewer bruises and then, eventually, none.

Some husband-beatings were on the list, too, Gulliman noticed.

Ali Othman closed connections and stared at the screen from which Gulliman’s jowled and balding head had departed. Then he looked across at his assistant, Rafe Leemy and said, “What do we do?”

“Don’t ask me. He’s worried about just a lousy murder or two.”

“It’s an awful chance trying to handle this thing on our own. Still if we tell him, he’ll have a first-class fit. These elective politicians have their skins to think of, so he’s bound to get in our way and make things worse.”

Leemy nodded his head and put a thick lower lip between his teeth. “Trouble is, though, what if we miss out? It would just about be the end of the world, you know.”

“If we miss out, who cares what happens to us? We’ll just be part of the general catastrophe.” Then he said in a more lively manner, “But hell, the probability is only 12.3 per cent. On anything else, except maybe murder, we’d let the probabilities rise a bit before taking any action at all. There could still be spontaneous correction.”