to your psychiatrist," Taber said. "In the meantime, keep that
crowd out there from spilling in here."

Taber pushed out through the choked entrance to the areaway and went
back up the street. It was alive with activity now and he passed
unnoticed. No one recognized him as the man who had given chase in the
bloody business that would make headlines that evening in every New York
newspaper.

And yet the radio and TV news commentators gave it no special attention.
It went in along with other items of the day's news as a more or less
routine big-city happening.

One national-hookup headliner stated: "In New York City today, a man
identified as John Dennis, address unknown, went berserk in a
fashionable Upper East Side apartment. Dennis, wielding a knife, killed
a man and a woman, and seriously wounded another man before he was cut
down by police bullets.

"A jet airliner, down in the North Atlantic today, imperiled the lives
of seventy-six ..."

* * * * *

Frank Corson lay propped on two pillows in a private room of the Park
Hill Hospital. Rhoda Kane sat in a chair beside the bed. She was pale
and very beautiful. The fire was now gone from her body and the fever
from her eyes.

"They say he wasn't human. They say he was an android." She shuddered,
looked down quickly, then slowly raised her head.

"Yes."

"I'll--I'll never understand. I get sick thinking about it. I'll just
never understand."

"He was human and yet not human. He had extraordinary powers that we
don't begin to understand, so that what happened to you is no disgrace."

"It's a terrible disgrace."

"It happened to me, too. When he told me to sit down I had to do it. I
was helpless."

"But you fought! You overcame it."

Frank Corson smiled wryly. "No, I didn't. It was just that he'd had
little time to work on me. It was a single mental blow, so to speak,
that laid me out. Like one punch in the ring. Gradually, I came out of
it."

"I think I _tried_ to fight."

"Of course, you did. The disgrace was mine. I acted like a child. I
should have realized that something extraordinary had happened. But I
nursed my miserable little ego like a three-year-old."

"How could you know? My cruelty to you--"

"Don't talk like that! I knew about the ninth android, and I met the
tenth one in front of your apartment that second morning. I should have
associated. Brent Taber did, otherwise we might both be dead."

"It's all