e 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 tol