Chapter 7

“If you’ve changed your mind about anything--about us, maybe--just say so. I’ll understand.” Frank Corson felt he had to make this point--at this particular time. There was something inevitable in the need to do so.

“You’re being ridiculous. The old thing about money again,” Rhoda parried.

“There’s nothing old about money. The problem is ever new. It’s always with us.”

Rhoda Kane wanted to cry. She sat on the floor beside the sofa on which Frank Corson lay, his hands behind his head, his eyes staring up at the ceiling. She wanted to say, Darling, what’s happened to me? What is this thing inside me that keeps blocking me away from you? Why can’t I tell you about it?

But she could not say this. She could only push the tears back and lay her head seductively on his chest. “You’re just tired, dear. You’ve been working too hard.”

He ran his hand petulantly through her hair. “It isn’t me. It’s you, Rhoda. Half the time you don’t even realize I’m talking to you. You’re getting such a faraway look in your eyes I’m beginning to think there’s another man.”

“That’s silly,” she said lightly. “Let me make you a drink.”

“I don’t want a drink.”

The way he responded to her kiss indicated he didn’t want to make love, either. Rhoda settled back to the floor and said, “Darling--”

Suddenly she couldn’t go on. Somewhere inside, a dam broke; the strange, bewildering block tottered and began to fall. “Darling--there’s something I want to tell you--”

Frank Corson indicated with a jerk of his head. “The phone’s ringing.”

“Let it ring. Darling, I--”

“For heaven’s sake, answer it, Rhoda. It might be important.”

She got up, went to the phone and picked it up. “Hello.”

“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.”