ofession to be fairly certain about most things.

"The blood," Jones of the Air Force said. "Could it have been a--well, a
new kind of plasma?"

"Hardly. You see, the variation was almost theoretical, if you can
understand the term as I'm using it. Drawn from an ordinary human being,
it would not have been questioned. It was just that in the light of
other oddities in his man, it didn't seem right, somehow."

"Pretty vague," Bright of the Army said.

"This I'll grant you." Brent said. "Anybody for coffee?"

Nobody was for coffee so Marcia and the waiter retired and Brent said,
"Vague, I'll grant you. But let's get on with it. Two days later, a man,
in every way identical, was found lying in the street in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania. He was alive, but in a dying condition, and he succumbed
on the way to the hospital. Cause of death, as in the first place,
undeterminable. But the medics think it was some malfunctioning of the
lungs.

"All in all, gentlemen, eight identical specimens have been picked up in
various American cities. Five are dead, two more are now in a comatose
condition, at last report, and may very well be dead at this time. One
is still alive and relatively healthy...."

Alive and relatively healthy. The son-of-a-bitch! Hagen felt an odd
senseless rage against the creature they'd picked up in a Chicago bar.

Ordinarily it would have been a simple bull-pen, night-court case--a
loud-mouth drunk refusing to pay for a drink. But much of his talk,
anent enemy invasion, internal destruction, and civilian chaos, had been
a little too rough for the other barflies to swallow, and complaints had
been made. Later, when Bureau men went around trying to get something
tangible in the way of evidence, they found themselves dealing in
frustration. The complainants had left without giving their names. The
barkeep really hadn't heard anything. The actual charges had gone up in
smoke. But by that time, Washington was very much interested. The man
was questioned and it was the damnedest thing Hagen had ever gone
through ...

"By identical," Jones of the Air Force said, "you of course mean--"

Brent's dark, knifelike eyes sliced out at Jones. "By identical, I mean
just that."

Bright's throat bobbed as the astonishing implication came home to him.
"Hell, man! You mean--"

"I mean these specimens do not merely bear a resemblance to each other.
They were not just similar as to organisms and physical structure. They