  "Doctor Corson. Calling Doctor Corson. Please come to the second-floor reception room." Frank Corson got the call as he was leaving the maternity ward. He took the elevator down and found a rather sloppily dressed, middle-aged man sitting on a lounge beside a weather-beaten camera that tended to mark his profession. "I'm Les King, a free-lance news photographer. You're Doctor Corson?" Frank Corson's reaction was slightly hostile. He wondered why. "I'm Doctor Corson." "I'm on the trail of a patient that came here late last night. Name, William Matson. They tell me he was your patient." Frank nodded briefly. "They say he was released." "That's right." "A little over an hour ago." "Right." "They say he had a broken leg." "If that's what they said, it must be a matter of record." "Well, they're wrong on both counts. He came to see me over three hours ago—and both his legs were as good as mine." Frank Corson did not volunteer the information that he had personally taken William Matson to his furnished room in Greenwich Village and that Matson was there at this very moment, awaiting Frank's return. "I think there must be some mistake on your part," Frank said. "No mistake. But something very definitely got crossed up. Maybe we ought to have a little talk—the two of us." Anger stirred in Frank Corson. Did this Les King character think a beaten-up camera gave him the right to walk in and make demands. "I'm busy now. And I can't see what we'd have to talk about." "A hell of a lot, maybe. There are some things you may not know about this deal. You might have let a big thing slip through your fingers." "Look here, I'm not interested in anything you've got to say. And I think you've got a hell of a nerve, coming in here and cross-examining me on something that's—" King reacted with weary patience. "Take it easy. I'm just trying to get some information that can help both of us, maybe." "How could it possibly help me?" "To make it simple, there's a standing ten-thousand-dollar reward for knowledge of the whereabouts of a Judge Sam Baker who disappeared ten years ago from a little upstate New York town. Now, if you aren't interested—" "Are you telling me that William Matson is Sam Baker?" "Let's say a hell of a lot indicates it. Matson left here without giving a home address. If you know what it is, we can do business. If you don't—" "I'm off duty in an hour," Frank Corson said. "Maybe we should talk it over." "That's better. In the meantime, if you'll tell me where I can find Matson—" Frank smiled. "Wait an hour. Then I'll show you. But we'll talk about it first." The tenth android, one of the two so earnestly sought after by Brent Taber, had observed the accident at 59th Street and Park Avenue on the previous night. He'd stood on the curb, lost in the crowd that gathered, and had watched the proceedings carefully. A man who was not a man, a machine that was not a machine, he incor He waited. He observed. He added the accident to the several other unforeseen incidents that endangered the project and its objective, and stored them in his memory-bank. He watched the minor drama as it unfolded, and what was somewhat akin to a danger bell went off in his mind when he saw a bright flash, traced its source to a camera, and carefully studied the man who had taken the picture. Pictures, he knew, could be dangerous. He must get his hands on the picture, if possible. He waited. He observed. He evaluated. The situation had gotten somewhat out of his control, but he did not blame himself for this. Certain emotions had been made a part of his being, but guilt, a useless one, had been omitted, as had been any ability to react to love, compassion, anger or hatred. So, with no hope of reward or fear of punishment, he had recorded the facts that he had been unable to communicate telepathically with eight of the units under his command and that, therefore, they were no longer operational. He had no way of knowing what had happened to them. This, however, did not make his work one bit less vital. Even though eight units were unaccounted for, his intelligent handling of the ninth android, and of himself, was still vitally important. It was up to him to see that the project was brought to a successful conclusion. He watched as the ambulance came, noted the name of the hospital, and recorded the proceedings. But he allowed the ambulance to drive away, keeping his attention pointed at the man who had taken the picture. When the man moved off down the street, the tenth android followed. When the man entered Central Park, he was observed from a discreet distance. When he came out again, he was followed into Times Square, down into Greenwich Village, back uptown and, finally, to an apartment building in the West Seventies. There he was At this point, temporarily entrusting King to destiny, the tenth android took a taxicab to the Park Hill Hospital where he entered, went to the desk, and inquired about a friend of his, a William Matson. He was directed to Emergency where a nurse, after checking a record sheet on her piled-up desk, told him that Doctor Corson was with the patient in Ward Five. Unaware that he had been extremely lucky, that very few real people—people with only one heart, and a soul to go with it—would have gotten such specific information out of a receiving-desk nurse, the tenth android began counting wards until he came to the one marked Five. He looked in through the small window in the swinging door and saw his counterpart in bed, a white-coated man bending over him. That made the ninth android unapproachable, so his counterpart-leader withdrew to the end of the corridor and waited until Doctor Corson came out. He followed Corson outside and, from the back seat of another taxi, never lost sight of the convertible until Rhoda Kane drove it into the garage under her apartment building. From the street, the tenth android saw Rhoda and Frank enter the elevator. As soon as the door closed, he was in the outer lobby, watching as the numbers progressed upward on the elevator dial. The hand stopped at 21. This was noted and recorded, after which the tenth android called a finish to the night's activities and retired to the small room he'd rented on a quiet street on the Lower East Side where, if you bothered no one, no one would bother you. He was back the next morning, however, and that's when his unavoidable contact with Frank Corson on the sidewalk was made. He noted the surprise on Corson's face, but the logical situation did not develop because Corson did not make an issue of the meeting. He allowed the tenth android to go on his way. A nonsynthetic man would have wondered at this and The cab waited, in front of the Park Hill Hospital. When Frank Corson and the ninth android emerged, two cabs, not one, wheeled down Manhattan and into Greenwich Village. Thus it was that some ten minutes after Frank Corson went back to his duties at the Park Hill Hospital, there was a knock on the door of his room in Greenwich Village. The ninth android opened the door. The tenth android entered. The ninth android hobbled back to his chair and waited quietly. The tenth android looked both ways in the corridor and then closed the door. He walked to the chair and stood looking down. He turned his eyes to the bulky, cast-encased leg. "It will not heal," he stated matter-of-factly. The ninth android nodded. "I—know." "That makes you useless." Another nod. "Why couldn't they have made it possible for our flesh and bone to become whole again after an—accident?" "That wasn't possible." The tenth android went to a tiny curtained-off kitchenette and returned with a knife. He put his hand on the head of the ninth android and drew it backward so that the neck muscles were taut. He raised the knife. Then he paused and looked down with a faint expression of interest in his otherwise empty eyes. "Are you afraid to die?" "I don't—know. What is it to—die?" "You become nonfunctioning." "I think I would rather not become nonfunctioning." The tenth android cut the ninth android's throat. Carefully and cleanly, he severed the big artery that carried the blood-fluid back down to the upper heart. The blood-fluid spouted out and drained down over the chest of the ninth android. He shuddered. His eyes And from somewhere in the synthetically created mind of the tenth android there came a question: Was it undesirable to become nonfunctioning? The human was afraid to die. He sensed this but not the reason for it, if there was one. The human was afraid to die. He wondered only momentarily, vaguely recorded it as a mistake to wonder about such things, and then crossed the room and put the red-stained knife into the sink. After that, he let himself quietly out of the apartment and walked off down the street. He had much to do. He had to leave town and finish the project alone. Then, quite suddenly, he stopped, stepped into a nearby doorway and stood motionless. There was no change in his expression except that possibly his eyes became a shade emptier. After a while he left the doorway and moved on. But it was with new purpose and with new plans. The new orders, relayed across a light-year of space, were not intercepted by any terrestrial receiving device, however sensitive. But they were received and recorded perfectly in the mind of the tenth android. Frank Corson and Les King sat in a coffee shop and regarded each other with a certain wariness. "It's like this, at least from where I sit," King said. "About ten years ago a small-town judge named Sam Baker—" "You told me that," Corson cut in impatiently. "Baker was supposed to have been drowned, but they never found the body. Now, you think William Matson is Sam Baker?" King pondered the question morosely. "I've got every right to think so. But Baker would have aged some in ten years. The man I saw—" "The man you saw didn't have a broken leg. I must have seen the same one when I—" King was instantly alert. When you were on the trail of ten grand you had to be alert, and suspicious of comparative strangers. "You saw someone who looked like Baker and Matson? A guy without a broken leg?" "I was leaving an apartment building on the Upper East Side this morning. I met him in the street." "You didn't tell me that." "I'm telling you now." King scowled. "I don't get it. You were the doctor. You left a man with a broken leg in bed in a hospital. You saw a man who looked like—" "I saw the same man, goddamn it!" "All right—the same man. And you didn't do anything about it? You didn't say Good morning or It might rain or What the hell are you doing out of bed? You just let him walk away?" "You're being unreasonable. When you come face to face with something that's impossible, you don't treat it as a fact. It throws you off balance." King continued to scowl. "We're not getting anywhere. Let's face it. It was impossible. Let's get the hell up to your room and talk to William Matson." "All right." Frank Corson came half out of his chair, then he dropped back again. "I don't like this," he said. "What's to like? What's to dislike? For ten thousand dollars we can ignore both." "I have a feeling we're getting into something beyond our depth." "Okay, then let me handle it. I'll see that you get your cut." "Not so fast," Corson said sharply. "I didn't say I was backing out. I just said this might be bigger than we bargain for." "I don't think that's quite it," King replied coldly. "I think you don't trust me." "Maybe that's it. I don't think you trust me, either." "Ten thousand is a lot of money. But we're not going to get it by sitting in a coffee shop arguing over it." "I guess you're right." "Then let's go." They left the coffee shop and, as they walked the four But it was too late to back out now. And what the hell! If there was ten thousand dollars lying around, why shouldn't he get a piece of it? What was wrong with that? He unlocked the door to his room. He took a step forward and stopped, blocking the entrance. "Oh, my God!" Les King pushed through. His eyes widened, but that was his only reaction. Then his camera swung up into position. The bulb flashed. He lowered the camera. "Somebody cut the bastard's throat!" he marveled. Frank Corson moved forward. "Good lord! It looks as though he just sat there and let himself be murdered." "Suicide maybe?" "No knife close enough. It's over there in the sink." "Well, he didn't cut his own throat and then walk back here." Frank Corson had been studying the wound. He pressed his fingers against the crimson shirt front and rubbed them together, testing the feel of the blood with his thumb. "What's wrong?" King asked. "I don't know. That's an odd color for coagulating blood. It doesn't feel right, either." "Do you think he was sick?" "There's just something crazy about this whole thing. The man had two hearts." King was both amazed and angered. "What the hell are you talking about?" "I didn't get a chance to tell you. This man was a freak. I found it out last night. He had two hearts. I'm sure of it." "No chance to tell me? Why, goddamn it, we sat in that coffee shop for half an hour while I leveled with you. No chance! You held out on me." King laughed cynically. "I guess that's human nature. With a couple of bucks at stake even honest men go cagey." Corson ignored the jibe. "Listen, for Christ sake! This is murder! Can't you understand that?" "Of course, it's murder—in your room, with your knife. You'll have some explaining to do." King's face hardened. He became subtly remote, impersonal. His eyes turned cold as he began inserting flash-bulbs into his camera and snapping the room and the body from various angles. Frank Corson, out of his depth for sure now, stood helpless. Les King looked up from his work. "Well, don't just stand there, Doctor. You've got a murder to report. Get with it." As Corson turned helplessly toward the door, King grinned faintly. "Me, I'm just a free-lance photographer trying to make an honest buck." Brent Taber stared icily down at Frank Corson and Les King. They looked up at him sullenly, looming over them as he did, from the position of authority. A little like two schoolboys being punished by the principal, they lowered their eyes. Defiantly, each told himself that he was a free citizen and didn't have to take this from Taber, even if he did represent governmental authority. Still, they sat and took it. "Of course," Taber said, "you have the universal alibi. You didn't know how serious this thing was. So far as you were concerned, you'd located a man with a reward on his head." He shook his head deprecatingly. "If we hadn't sent out a top-secret bulletin to all the big-city police chiefs to be on the lookout for this guy you'd have had it spread in some tabloid." "A person has a right to make a buck," King said stubbornly. "Oh, sure. Again the universal defense. Make the buck first and then think about your patriotic duty." "Patriotic duty, hell! There wasn't any as far as I was concerned. When I found out about that—What the hell did you call him? The android?—he was already dead." "And you'll do very well with the pictures you took." "They're my pictures." "The hell they are. We're confiscating them and you'll keep your mouth shut about this." "Then the people haven't got a right to know—" "Damn the people!" Brent snarled, and wished instantly that he hadn't said it. He didn't mean it, of course. He'd just been pressed too hard. In a sense, he was taking his own frustrations out on these two because they were handy. And yet, damn it all, he was right! Nobody gave a hoot for the welfare of the country! "You," he said, turning on Frank Corson. "In the course of your duty as a doctor, you came upon something very strange." "I wasn't sure!" "You found a man with two hearts. What should you have done as a doctor? Reported it through recognized channels. If you'd done that, do you realize we might have got word? We might have been able to act? We might have saved that creature's life. That may well have been the difference between life and death for this country. For this planet." "Are you sure you're not exaggerating things a little?" King asked the question and lit a cigarette as his self-confidence began to return. "Isn't the whole thing pretty far-fetched?" Brent held his temper. "I suppose you have every right to assume we aren't really sure ourselves. But please listen to me now and give me the benefit of the doubt. We have reason to believe that these creatures—there have been others—are a menace to our survival. We're also pretty sure that there's another one roaming around. It's my opinion that the last one, the tenth one, may have had something to do with what happened in Dr. Corson's room. I don't know whether your lives are in danger or "Of course, we will," Frank Corson said. "I didn't see any signs of hostility in the other one, though." "Be that as it may, we must get our hands on him." "If he did kill the one with the broken leg," King said, "wouldn't he have left town?" "If he thinks like a murderer, yes. But he probably doesn't. That's the trouble. We don't know how he thinks or what he's here for. We're playing it by ear." "I think we understand," Frank Corson said. "Thank you. And I'm sorry if I antagonized you. That wasn't my purpose. I'm just trying to do my job." He smiled and held out his hand. "This is all strictly confidential, of course." "Of course." "Thanks for coming." They left, but Brent Taber's frustrations remained with him. Earlier that day, in Washington, he'd stood on the carpet himself, before higher authority, and played the part of the reprimanded schoolboy. "It would appear," Authority said, "that you went out of your way to antagonize Senator Crane." "I'm sorry if that's the opinion up above." "It is not a matter of opinion, one way or another. It's a matter of expediency. The Administration has to get along with Congress. Senator Crane is in a powerful position. He is on three committees that can hamper legislation the Administration is vitally interested in." "I understand. And I didn't pick the quarrel with Senator Crane. He picked it with me. In my judgment, he is not the kind of person to be trusted with information of this vital nature." "You consider Senator Crane an unreliable demagogue?" "I didn't say that." Authority smiled wryly. "I'll concede that the Senator's type is rare in American politics—at least among those who get elected to high office. But the fact remains—he is a power." "If you agree that the information should have been withheld—" "I didn't agree on that at all," Authority said quickly. "And don't quote me as having said so. I'll deny it." Brent Taber smiled also, but inwardly, where it wouldn't show. He should have expected that denial. After all, Authority had Higher Authority to account to. Authority could also be put on the carpet. There was always Someone higher up. "I'm sorry," Brent Taber said. "I was put in charge of this project and I used my judgment—" "We are not questioning your over-all judgment," Authority assured him. Then what in the hell are you gabbling about? This question was also asked inwardly as Brent said, "I felt the gravity of the situation merited extreme care." "It does. But life must go on. The government must still function." That's right, play it from both ends, Brent Taber thought bitterly. Ride the fence. Stay in a position to jump either way. "What do you wish me to do about Senator Crane?" "I'd stay out of his way if I were you." "Whatever damage you say I have done can be corrected with a ten-minute briefing." "That's up to you," Authority answered nimbly. "As you say, you've been put in charge of the project." "Then I'll leave things as they are." "Very well. I just wanted to go on record." "Thank you," Brent Taber said. "Thank you very much." Frank Corson and Les King walked north together after their interview with Brent Taber. "I guess we got off lucky," King said. "Those Washington appointees can be tough." "He seems to have a pretty tough job." "They all think they've got tough jobs." "It's still a murder as far as the New York police are concerned. What do you think will happen?" "They turned us over to Taber, didn't they?" King asked. "That shows how they're playing it. The New York cops have enough murders to worry about. They like to pass them on to somebody else." "Then they won't question us any further?" King shrugged. "Who knows? You've got nothing to worry about, though. Just sit tight. In fact, you're damned lucky." "How so?" "This killing is under wraps. Nobody's talking. That means you won't get in trouble at the hospital." King grinned. "Your ethics won't come under scrutiny." Frank Corson flushed and said nothing. King, after a moment's silence, said, "I've been thinking about that tenth android." "Do you think there's as much danger in this thing as Taber says?" King shrugged. "Those guys always think that way. Remember what they said about the atom bomb? The world was doomed. We were going to blow each other up. But nobody's been heaving them around. The view-with-alarm boys always talk that way." "I hope you're right." "But about that android that's supposed to be walking around loose." "What about him?" "Those bastards confiscated all my stuff. The shots I made in your room—everything. But if I could get some shots of the other one—" "You're actually going to work on your own? In spite of what Taber said?" "It's a free country," King retorted hotly. "I've got a right to follow my profession. What I was going to say was that you're in a position to help yourself a little, too." "I am?" "Only you and I know what we're looking for. If you spot the android, see him hanging around anywhere, and let me know, I'll—" "You can go to hell, King. I want no part of any more of your ideas. I've had it. If I see the creature I'll call Frank Corson strode away. Les King stood watching him. King shrugged. Just another bewildered citizen who thought God lived in Washington. Afraid to spit if some Washington bureaucrat wagged a finger. Well, the hell with Corson. The hell with Taber. The hell with all of them. If Les King stood to make an honest buck, he was going to do his damnedest until somebody passed a law making it illegal. |
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