e 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 thanked his own good
luck. Not so with the android. He knew nothing whatever about luck. He
accepted this bit of good fortune in exactly the same manner he would
have faced its opposite, and when Frank Corson boarded a bus, a taxicab
pulled out of a side street and followed.

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-of