ink anything could
change their minds. And they called _him_ a fanatic! If the facts he'd
dug up in ten years of hunting wouldn't convince them, nothing would.
And yet he had to see for himself, before it was too late!

He picked a cheap hotel at random and checked in under an assumed name.
He couldn't go back to his room while there was a chance that Jordan
still might try to turn him in. There wouldn't be time for Sylvia's
detectives to bother him, probably, but there was the ever-present
danger that one of the aliens might intercept the message.

He shivered. He'd been risking that for ten years, yet the likelihood
was still a horror to him. The uncertainty made it harder to take than
any human-devised torture could be. There was no way of guessing what an
alien might do to anyone who discovered that all men were not
human--that some were ... zombies.

There was the classic syllogism: _All men are mortal; I am a man;
therefore, I am mortal._ But not Blanding--or Corporal Harding.

It was Harding's "death" that had started it all during the fighting on
Guadalcanal. A grenade had come flying into the foxhole where Dane and
Harding had felt reasonably safe. The concussion had knocked Dane out,
possibly saving his life when the enemy thought he was dead. He'd come
to in the daylight to see Harding lying there, mangled and twisted, with
his throat torn. There was blood on Dane's uniform, obviously spattered
from the dead man. It hadn't been a mistake or delusion; Harding had
been dead.

It had taken Dane two days of crawling and hiding to get back to his
group, too exhausted to report Harding's death. He'd slept for twenty
hours. And when he awoke, Harding had been standing beside him, with a
whole throat and a fresh uniform, grinning and kidding him for running
off and leaving a stunned friend behind.

It was no ringer, but Harding himself, complete to the smallest personal
memories and personality traits.

* * * * *

The pressures of war probably saved Dane's sanity while he learned to
face the facts. All men are mortal; Harding is not mortal; therefore,
Harding is not a man! Nor was Harding alone--Dane found enough evidence
to know there were others.

The _Tribune_ morgue yielded even more data. A man had faced seven
firing squads and walked away. Another survived over a dozen attacks by
professional killers. Fingerprints turned up mysteriously "copied" from
those of men long d