owledge by reacting not at all.

His mind was on the kid. He was thinking, _Christ! With all the damned
miracle drugs and characters orbiting the earth in crazy capsules, they
still haven't figured out a way to keep a six-year-old from getting a
cold._ He remembered the kid waving from the window yesterday
morning--when he'd been ordered East to attend this clambake--standing
there beside Miriam, waving good-bye and barking like a sea lion. _What
the hell was wrong with doctors? Why didn't they get with it on a
stupidly simple thing like the common cold?_

" ... two hearts and--" Brent reached to the left and pulled down a
chart on a window shade-type rack that stood beside his chair, "--a
rather interesting arrangement of the internal organs." He pointed with
a thick finger. "You'll notice that the liver is exceptionally small,
while the kidneys are large enough to service a horse. You'll note also
that while the man had testicles, there is no prostrate gland."

The group waited in a kind of guarded abeyance that could be easily
sensed. Their silence gave the impression that they were asking: _Is
somebody kidding us?_

But there was certainly no lightness in Brent's manner. His arm dropped
and he scowled at the far end of the table as he said, "Now, the blood.
There was something strange about the blood--"

The door from Marcia Holly's reception room-office opened and she came
in silently, followed by a white-coated waiter who set a tray on the
table. The coffeepot on the tray was silver; the cups, fine china; the
napkins, linen.

"--something very strange about the blood in that it conformed to all
necessary specifications and yet it had a synthetic quality about it
..."

Goose pimples formed on Hagen's neck and walked gently down his spine.
Nothing was missing in this setup--synthetic blood, two hearts, oversize
kidneys. Hagen got a quick mental flash of a barker outside a circus
sideshow: _He walks like a man. He talks like a man. But for a thin
dime, folks, you can see--_

It was something to think and wonder about. And back in Chicago, he'd
had lots of company. Everybody in the office that night had wondered,
and you could see the vague uneasiness in their eyes as the creature
sat, acting like a human being and, at the same time, like nothing from
this world. You could see a vague revulsion in the people surrounding
the creature. There was also uncertainty, and this from men who were
required by their pr