the girl. She lay
flat on her back, arms helter-skelter. There was no blood, hardly any
sign of the wound; but the position in which she lay was one that no
living human being could have held.

Yet she wasn't dead.

She wasn't dead--and Burckhardt, frozen beside her, thought: _She
isn't alive, either._

There was no pulse, but there was a rhythmic ticking of the
outstretched fingers of one hand.

There was no sound of breathing, but there was a hissing, sizzling
noise.

The eyes were open and they were looking at Burckhardt. There was
neither fear nor pain in them, only a pity deeper than the Pit.

She said, through lips that writhed erratically, "Don't--worry, Mr.
Burckhardt. I'm--all right."

Burckhardt rocked back on his haunches, staring. Where there should
have been blood, there was a clean break of a substance that was not
flesh; and a curl of thin golden-copper wire.

Burckhardt moistened his lips.

"You're a robot," he said.

The girl tried to nod. The twitching lips said, "I am. And so are
you."

V

Swanson, after a single inarticulate sound, walked over to the desk
and sat staring at the wall. Burckhardt rocked back and forth beside
the shattered puppet on the floor. He had no words.

The girl managed to say, "I'm--sorry all this happened." The lovely
lips twisted into a rictus sneer, frightening on that smooth young
face, until she got them under control. "Sorry," she said again.
"The--nerve center was right about where the bullet hit. Makes it
difficult to--control this body."

Burckhardt nodded automatically, accepting the apology. Robots. It was
obvious, now that he knew it. In hindsight, it was inevitable. He
thought of his mystic notions of hypnosis or Martians or something
stranger still--idiotic, for the simple fact of created robots fitted
the facts better and more economically.

All the evidence had been before him. The automatized factory, with
its transplanted minds--why not transplant a mind into a humanoid
robot, give it its original owner's features and form?

Could it know that it was a robot?

"All of us," Burckhardt said, hardly aware that he spoke out loud. "My
wife and my secretary and you and the neighbors. All of us the same."

"No." The voice was stronger. "Not exactly the same, all of us. I chose
it, you see. I--" this time the convulsed lips were not a random
contortion of the nerves--"I was an ugly woman, Mr. Burckhardt, and nearly
sixty years old. Life had