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  “I am,” Lenister said, still clinging with one hamd. In the other he clutched his helmet while glancing about him for somewhere to put it.

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  The girl solved his problem by taking it and tossing it at a magnetized panel, where it landed with a click.

  “Professor Graubmayer asked for you to be brought to him directly on arrival," she said. “This way, please.”

  She eeled through the inner door of the lock with a quick swimming motion and set off along the corridor beyond. As best we could—I’d never had time to learn the knack of gravity-less running, and Lenister had never attempted it before—we followed her.

  There was almost the feel of a space-borne city about Starventure; compared to any other spaceship we had ever built she was as an ocean liner to an aircraft. You could have put two of the regular Mars ships inside her hull and left room for an orbital ferry as well. I’d studied her design pretty closely when writing up the story of her departure for the stars, but that wasn’t much help in locating where we were right now. The brief glimpse we’d had while transferring from the ferry hadn’t told me which of four possible locks we were being taken through, nor which way her nose was pointed. From the curvature of the corridor I guessed we might be heading in the midships direction.

  I was wrong. The door before which our guide brought herself to a halt long enough to activate the lock was labeled forward ferry hold. Beyond, there should have been a huge compartment into which the ferry could be drawn by a set of enormous hydraulic waldos. There wasn’t. Or rather, the hold was still there, but it had been converted to other uses.

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  What they had done, I later learned, was to push the ferry out Into space and couple it up to one of the after locks—because any habitable space was currently at a premium up here and people could sleep and eat in the ferry—and divide up the empty hold with lightweight screens. Into the boxlike rooms so created they'd tossed computers, scientific instruments, crates of microfilm and magnetape, and inevitably scientists. It was eerie to see an Elliott Million computer upside-down directly beyond the door, not resting on a stand but simply tethered, its power cable looping like a drunken snake across its back.

  I heard Lenister gulp as the man working at the computer, hanging head-down in relation to ourselves, glanced our way and spoke. It was Graubmayer himself, and his voice was indeed like curdled porridge.

  “Glad you made it, Lenister. Is that Drummond you've brought with you? And turn over so I can talk to you the right way up!”

  The girl pulled back to the wall of the corridor to let us past, then closed the door of the hold and abandoned us. We rolled over to the same attitude as Graubmayer, and found things a little better that way up.

  “Welcome to aboriginal chaos,” he went on with a trace of bitterness. “I’m trying to get a printout of our findings so far about Leon Drummond, but some double-dyed idiot put a wrong address on part of the data, and I can’t locate them in the memory.”

  "Siegfried!” a shrill voice called from the other side of the nearest partition. “Try punching for

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  continuity of personality—you should be able to work out the right address from that!”

  "That’s what I’m doing, thanks,” Graubmayer called back. "Just waiting for it to print out now."

  I noticed that a piece of mesh had been glued over the delivery vent of the computer to stop the tape flying out and getting tangled. As I glanced toward it, the little red light signifying data organized began to blink, and the tape emerged.

  Graubmayer gave a sigh. “So at last we have what we’re after—but I should have had it an hour ago!” He eased a yard or two of the tape out of the slot and studied it as he went on, “Now you’re Leon Drummond’s brother; isn’t that right?”

  Carelessly, I nodded, and as a result began to rock back and forth in midair.

  "I heard from the base that you’d volunteered to come up here, and personally I’m veiy grateful. I wouldn’t care to go through it myself in cold blood. It’s bad enough being slightly acquainted with members of the crew—I knew Chandra Dan, for example, who spent a while teaching at the same university as myself. But I’ve studied your brother’s preflight personality charts, and I gather that you and he were even closer than siblings usually are, as a result of being orphaned.”

  “Where—?” My voice failed me; I had to swallow and start again. “Where is he?”

  “Oh, we’ve left the crew in their own quarters. We've disturbed the routine they established during the trip as little as we possibly

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  could. Anything which tends to stabilize the environment, of course, helps to normalize their behavior. And we’ve merely cleared out the two ferries, which were used for storing records on the way home anyway. You probably saw them orbiting alongside as you came in.”

  "No,” Lenister said. “We didn’t see a damned thing.” He tried a laugh.

  “How soon can I see Leon?” I pressed. Now I was actually here, now the moment was upon me, waiting seemed unendurable.

  “As soon as we can arrange it!” Graubmayer snapped, suddenly revealing that he too was being worn out by the strain, as Suvorov was, and Lenister—indeed, everyone concerned.

  Lenister cleared his throat. "I think we ought to hurry,” he ventured. “We’re only supposed to be up here for twenty-four hours, and if possible I feel we should confront Mr. Drummond with his brother two or three times.”

  “We’re not dragging our feet, Lenister!” Graubmayer retorted.

  I pulled myself back to the bulkhead and waited with as much patience as I could contrive. Listening as Lenister and Graubmayer talked, to each other and to people who appeared from elsewhere in the hold to ask advice or report recent findings, I supplemented what I already knew from Suvorov.

  The physical change—assuming that was what had happened—might have taken place earlier than Suvorov had said. The crew had got into the habit of going naked, which wasn’t surprising; the crew of Mars vessels seldom wore more

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  than trunks, because skin was easier to keep clean aboard a spaceship than clothing. Consequently getting dressed could not have offered a clue to what had occurred, and it might have been as long as a month before the unfortunates who went to break out spacesuits were suddenly forced into awareness of their plight. Up until that moment they’d had no inkling. The curious blind spot which had been created in each mind was one of the most puzzling aspects of the whole affair.

  Suvorov had said the “new bodies” weren’t equipped for talking. That wasn’t strictly true. Some or all of the bodies could generate and detect sounds beyond the normal range, rather higher than a bat’s squeak. Sound-converters had been brought up a couple of days ago—I got the impression that that was the cargo which had taken precedence over Lenister—and more had come up by our own ferry, so it was becoming possible to conduct conversations.

  That disposed of an inconsistency which had earlier troubled me. I’d been told that some of the crew had attempted to greet the boarding party who discovered them, which would not have been possible if they’d suddenly realized they had no power of speech. It left another: why, if they were able to talk at all. they had continued to transmit code-groups instead of using radio when they came in range.

  The talk passed out of my area of comprehension after that. I’d always kept well abreast of the physical sciences, including fringe disciplines like aerobotany and spatiochemistry, but I was some years behind with the latest devel

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  opments In psychology—as I’d discovered from working on a book which I’d started a year ago and still hadn’t delivered to my angry publisher. Here they were talking about Duxman’s Factor, and the phi quotient, and the variation curve
of determinant scan, and I had only the haziest notion what the terms implied.

  A girl came swimming around the hold with a net bag full of squeezebulbs of lukewarm coffee and gave one to each of us. Rokossovsky came from the after ferry hold where he was working on the physiological aspects of the problem to discuss a thorny point with Graubmayer; he was told who I was, gave me a smile, and forgot me again. Alvarez Sico, a lean, handsome Mexican with distinguished gray hair whom I’d met briefly at an international congress the way I’d met most of the world’s scientific notables, was called to advise on some tactical question regarding my interview with Leon. Gradually ideas crystallized into plans.

  At last Graubmayer turned to me and beckoned me over.

  “We’ve run into a dilemma,” he admitted. “We want the conditions for the meeting with your brother to be as ordinary as possible, but at the same time we want to extract the maximum amount of information from it. We’d like you to go to his cabin as though everything was perfectly normal, and just knock on the door and walk in, but we can’t. We're going to have to bring you both to one of the large public rooms, where we’ll have space to install our equipment. Sico here would like to festoon you with wires and terminals, but I’ve put my foot down and

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  we’ve agreed to compromise on four recorders covering each of you. If you have no objection, I’ll be present in person, and Lenister and Sico will watch over closed-circuit TV. And then afterward, of course, well compare the records with what we’ve collected from our spy-eyes in the crew’s quarters to see if we can detect any discrepancies in your—uh—alleged brother’s behavior. There is, of course, the vanishingly small chance that we’re dealing with aliens pretending to have human minds, but if that’s so we might as well quit here and now. A psychology like that would be totally beyond our comprehension.”

  I felt a terrible wavering apprehension. “How soon will you be ready?” I demanded.

  “We’ll set up the preparations right away,” Lenister shrugged. “Graubmayer, where do you think would be most suitable?”

  “It’ll have to be the exercise hall,” Graubmayer answered. “It’s rather a stark setting, but we’ve used it for most of our physical and psychological tests so far, and there are enough power points to drive the sound-converter as well as all our recorders. You did gather, didn’t you, Mr. Drummond, that we expect your brother to be able to talk to you directly?”

  “Yes."

  “Good. Then come this way.”

  There was more waiting to endure when we reached the exercise hall, a bare room with all the bulkheads heavily padded so that free-fall games could be played in it. The exercise equipment on which every crewman had to spend at

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  least half an hour a day to maintain muscle tone had been cleared away, and technicians were busy with the newly delivered sound- converters as well as wide-angle visual recorders and a great deal of other equipment. On spotting Graubmayer, one of the technicians called him over, and there was much discussion around a tapedeck from which issued a noise like the grunting of a herd of pigs. Abruptly I recognized it as a vastly distorted version of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Apparently this confirmed Graubmayer’s optimism about being able to talk to Leon directly, and when he returned to me he was rubbing his hands.

  “We're ready to send for your brother now, Mr. Drummond,” he said. “I haven’t made any particular suggestions about what you should say to him, and I don't propose to. I’m . assuming that you can imagine situations that are at least analogous—long separation and physical disfigurement, for instance—where you’d need to satisfy yourself of the identity of someone claiming to be your brother. So I’ll only request that so long as you have the least suspicion that the claim is false you control yourself and act naturally. We’ll interrupt after an hour if you’ve not broken the interview off yourself before then.”

  I felt myself shiver.

  “Would you put this on, Mr. Drummond?”

  One of the technicians was offering me an earphone on a long elastic flex. I took it, glanced to see what it was connected to, and saw that it ran back to the bank of sound-converters. Dutifully I put it on.

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  “Don’t expect to hear his own voice," Graub- mayer warned me. ‘There may not be any resemblance at all after the frequencies have been stepped down so drastically. But the engineers have assured me they’ll preserve every clue they can.”

  “Yes, I appreciate that.” I said.

  “Good. Lenister, will you and Sico go to the TV monitor? And the rest of you—out, as soon as you can!”

  The hall emptied. Hanging on air, just out of arm’s reach of Graubmayer, in a silence dominated by the pounding of my heart, 1 awaited the arrival of Leon—monster—Drummond.

  X?l

  PERHAPS, IF I hadn’t been so numb with shock when Suvorov showed me that photograph (less than twenty-four hours ago!—was it possible?), I'd have been prepared for my own reaction when the door of the exercise hall next slid back. But I hadn’t studied the picture closely; I'd retained from it only a vague impression of a misshapen horror, and the memoiy had rapidly become muddled with the more vivid image of the monster that had looked down on Quito.

  It was the grace of its movements that startled me. I hadn’t wondered how such a creature would look when it moved. And while that surprise still had a hold on me, I found myself thinking, “Why—it’s rather a handsome beast!”

  Black, with a kind of glistening cobalt sheen which reminded me of the carapace of a tropical beetle, it drew itself through the doorway with rhythmical motions of its many legs. How many? I counted six, again reminiscent of a beetle. But the overall effect was somehow not insectlike. More, it resembled the gait of a moon- walker, the superbly efficient machines they developed for long-distance transport across the rocky lunar surface. Yes: certainly like a well-

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  designed machine. As the curious form came further Into the room, somehow shyly, I could see how neatly the limbs were articulated on the body, how their leverage was obtained, how even in the absence of gravity they suggested considerable strength without excessive bulk.

  I thought of what Tatiana Tobolkin had said about the possibility that these bodies might be artificial. If that body was an artifact, the artificer was a genius.

  There were eyes, not exactly set on a head . . . but then, the mass to which the legs were attached wasn’t precisely a body, either. One might say “thorax," but that again referred to insects and this wasn’t an insect. I told myself to say “torso.” The eyes were different from those of the Quito skymonster, and I was somehow taken aback by the fact. Apart from their color—a rich bluish green—they were quite like terrestrial eyes, having black pupils and mobile lids. But peculiar fringes of tendrils, hanging from below the eyes and from the forward edge of each limb, concealed many of the surface details. The tendrils were soft, and of a lighter color than the rest. Otherwise the blue-blackness was uniform.

  This creature, with as many legs as an insect, a machinelike precision of movement, and some additional quality which was wholly strange to me, checked itself by catching at the edge of the doorway with a hind limb. In my ear a voice which was not Leon’s at all as regards timbre but entirely his as regards inflection and emphasis, spoke.

  “For heaven's sake—Big Brother himself!”

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  I was so nervous I feared my voice would break, but it held out. I cracked back, remembering Graubmayer’s injunction to behave as naturally as possible, “What the hell have you been doing to yourself? I've never seen you in such lousy shape!”

  He kicked free of the doorway and came closer, checking his flight with a precisely timed touch on one of the pieces of equipment fastened to the—well, floor.

  “Obviously they w
arned you what to expect,” he said soberly. “Nobody tells us anything; I didn’t even know it was you waiting to see me until I reached the door there. . . . Did they show you pictures?”

  I nodded.

  “It’s the most extraordinary, incredible, impossible thing! He jerked his front limbs so that the tips clicked together. In a human body he would have pounded his right fist into his left palm, a habit of Leon’s whenever he was worked up about something. “You heard it was done so cleverly that we didn’t even realize we’d been changed until the men from the tug came aboard and gave us a standard of visual comparison?"

  “They told me that, but I don’t see how it’s possible. Surely you must—mustfeel different?”

  “No, not at all, and that’s the craziest part.” The voice in my earphone was earnest, almost pleading. “Look, I have an extra pair of limbs. Up here in my head I’m aware of the fact, I look at you or Graubmayer and I count and I realize the difference. Yet I can’t feel a discontinuity between my old body and my present one! These

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  middle limbs”—he gestured with them—“are either legs or arms according to the need of the moment, and they blend into my old memories so smoothly that I’m sometimes puzzled, thinking back, to remember that I sometimes had fiddling jobs to do when the extra hands would have been an advantage. I have to remind myself that there was a time when they weren’t there.”

  He broke off. “Dave, I can recognize your expression. You’re trying to pretend there’s nothing bothering you. Well, there is, damn it! Your eyes tell you there isn’t anything in common between this—this object in front of you and the Leon you used to know. Am I right?"

  “You know you’re right,” I said.

  He made a helpless movement; it couldn’t be a shrug because his shoulders weren’t constructed for shrugging, but it conveyed the same message. “I don’t blame you for being skeptical. Directly after the men from the tug showed up, when we first realized what had happened, some of us went half out of our minds thinking that people would—well, shoot first and ask questions afterward. Well, at least you’ve given us the benefit of the doubt. Crying was one of the things left out of these bodies, or we’d have drowned ourselves in an Alice pool from sheer relief. But now, of course, what’s driving us nutty is trying to think of a way to make you believe down to the gut-level that we are who we think we are.”