"This is John Dennis."
She felt that frightening excitement again--that feeling of dangerous
delight at something forbidden. "Yes?"
"Do you remember what I told you to do?"
"Yes."
"Has it been done?"
"Not yet."
"Why have you not done it?"
"I haven't had a chance."
"You have a chance now. Frank Corson is in your home."
"Yes. I have a chance now."
The phone clicked. Rhoda put it down and went back to the sofa. As she
sank to the floor, Frank Corson looked at her questioningly.
"That was certainly a cryptic conversation."
When Rhoda didn't answer, he scowled and snapped, "There you go again.
Into the brown study."
"Oh, I'm sorry, dear."
"What was the phone call about?"
"My hairdresser. It was nothing."
"Weird conversation to have with a hairdresser."
"He's a weird hairdresser."
"What had you started to say when the phone rang?"
"It just occurred to me--you never told me what happened when that
government man talked to you."
Frank wished she hadn't brought that up. He'd been ordered to keep the
incident in his room strictly to himself. That hadn't been too
difficult. It _had_ been hard not to look on the thing as a murder. The
blood had looked real and so had the body.
But if that was the way Brent Taber wanted it, all right. Frank was
amazed at how smoothly everything had been handled. There hadn't even
been a police car at the door--just an unmarked delivery truck and two
men carrying out what might have been a rolled-up rug.
And that had been that.
"He didn't say much. Actually, there was no point in mentioning it to
you."
"What ever happened to the man with two hearts?"
"I was wrong. He just had a peculiar heartbeat. As a matter of fact,
everybody's heart beats all over their body. Nothing strange about
that."
"But there's something strange about a doctor not being able to tell the
difference between one heart and two. Frank, you _are_ keeping something
from me."
"Rhoda! For heaven's sake! The government man told me to keep my mouth
shut about it."
"Does that mean you can't tell even me?"
He turned his head and looked into her eyes. "This isn't like you,
Rhoda. Not like you at all."
"That's silly. I haven't changed."
"Yes, you have."
"How?"
"It's hard to say. You don't seem to have the same sense of values any
more. You've--"
"Just how have they changed?"
If he sensed any inner fright in her question he said nothing about it.
"For instance, when I told you I'd given up all ideas of going into
research, when I said I'd decided to finish out my internship and
establish a practice, you hardly twitched an eyebrow. I thought that
would make you happy."
"It did, darling. I was delighted. But I'm still a woman and that gives
me a right to be curious. What _did_ the government man say?"
He sighed and drew her cajoling hand out of his hair. "They've got some
wild idea the man who broke his leg wasn't a man at all. They think he
was a synthetic of some kind. An android."
"Why, that's ridiculous. You saw him. You certainly know a man when you
see one."
"According to Brent Taber, these androids _are_ men, to all intents and
purposes, but they're manufactured."
"That's just utterly insane. Are we paying taxes just to keep a lot of
people in Washington who don't know the difference between a human being
and a--"
"Rhoda! Please! I'm sick of the whole thing and I'd rather not talk
about it."
"But he must have told you more than that. Where do these--these
androids come from?"
"He didn't tell us any more than he had to, but I got the idea they
think they're from outer space."
Rhoda laughed. "I never heard such foolishness in my life." She stopped
laughing abruptly. "Who's _us_?"
"What?"
"You said, 'He didn't tell _us_ any more than he had to ...' Who was
with you?"
"Oh. Les King. You don't know him."
She seemed satisfied with the information and probed no farther.
He drew her close and looked very seriously into her eyes. "You have
changed, Rhoda. What's got into you?"
She put her lips to his and whispered, "Is this changed?" She ran one
hand softly and seductively down his body. "Or that?"
He took her in his arms. "No, baby, that hasn't changed. I guess I was
wrong."
And as she kissed him, she saw the oddly expressionless face, the cold
empty eyes--of John Dennis.
And she was afraid.
* * * * *
Something in the mind that had been given him--the synthetic duplicate
of what had once been a part of Sam Baker--told the tenth android that
women were attractive. For just what reason, he could not tell. There
was nothing in his practical working structure that had any need of
women. Still, the attraction was there in the memory patterns that had
been transferred.
There were other attractions just as puzzling to him. He had vague
memories of people with whom he felt no affinity except as vaguely
nostalgic memories--Sam Baker's mother, his father, the blurred faces of
friends he had known. And, at times, there were faint tinges of the
terror Sam had known that night when a quick light flashed down from
nowhere and he was abducted into a world too strange and terrible to be
real. Yet it _had_ been real.
There were no birth memories in the android, but there were the vestiges
of Sam's death memories: the endless torture under a machine so
sensitive that, while it had no definition of a woman, it was able to
discern--in the names thefted from Sam's memory and used as names for
the ten androids--those which applied to males and those that did not.
But of all these traces of memories, those concerning women nagged the
android most. And now, as it turned his empty gaze on Rhoda Kane, it was
with a little more personal interest than before.
"What did Frank Corson tell you?"
"He said the man in the hospital with a broken leg was not a man. He was
an android."
The term, grotesquely enough, meant nothing to the creature who called
himself John Dennis. In the strange pattern of his consciousness there
were no patterns of definitive difference. Though in many respects more
able than the humans against whom he was pitted, he was no more aware of
himself as different than a dog is aware of its differences from a man.
The concept didn't take shape in the android's synthetic mind.
"Did he tell you where the man with the broken leg came from?"
"He said they thought it came from somewhere in outer space."
"There were others. Did he know of them?"
"No. He only told me about a man named Les King."
"What did he say about Les King?"
"King was there when the government man talked to Frank. That was all.
The government wanted them to say nothing."
"But Frank Corson told you."
"He would not tell anyone else, though. He is not interested in the
androids. He wants to forget them."
"But Les King does not want to forget them?"
"I don't know."
"Will he talk about them?"
"I don't know that, either. I have never seen Les King."
"Can the government man keep Les King from talking about the man with
the broken leg?"
"I doubt if he can force him to."
John Dennis again left the window and approached Rhoda Kane. She was
wearing a housecoat, a brassiere and panties underneath.
"Take off your clothes."
Rhoda unbuttoned the housecoat and slipped it off. That strange
excitement showed in her eyes now.