Ten From Infinity Part 17

"Does that mean you can't tell even me?"

He turned his head and looked into her eyes. "This isn't like you, Rhoda. Not like you at all."

"That's silly. I haven't changed."

"Yes, you have."

"How?"

"It's hard to say. You don't seem to have the same sense of values any more. You've--"

"Just how have they changed?"

If he sensed any inner fright in her question he said nothing about it.

"For instance, when I told you I'd given up all ideas of going into research, when I said I'd decided to finish out my interns.h.i.+p and establish a practice, you hardly twitched an eyebrow. I thought that would make you happy."

"It did, darling. I was delighted. But I'm still a woman and that gives me a right to be curious. What _did_ the government man say?"

He sighed and drew her cajoling hand out of his hair. "They've got some wild idea the man who broke his leg wasn't a man at all. They think he was a synthetic of some kind. An android."

"Why, that's ridiculous. You saw him. You certainly know a man when you see one."

"According to Brent Taber, these androids _are_ men, to all intents and purposes, but they're manufactured."

"That's just utterly insane. Are we paying taxes just to keep a lot of people in Was.h.i.+ngton who don't know the difference between a human being and a--"

"Rhoda! Please! I'm sick of the whole thing and I'd rather not talk about it."

"But he must have told you more than that. Where do these--these androids come from?"

"He didn't tell us any more than he had to, but I got the idea they think they're from outer s.p.a.ce."

Rhoda laughed. "I never heard such foolishness in my life." She stopped laughing abruptly. "Who's _us_?"

"What?"

"You said, 'He didn't tell _us_ any more than he had to ...' Who was with you?"

"Oh. Les King. You don't know him."

She seemed satisfied with the information and probed no farther.

He drew her close and looked very seriously into her eyes. "You have changed, Rhoda. What's got into you?"

She put her lips to his and whispered, "Is this changed?" She ran one hand softly and seductively down his body. "Or that?"

He took her in his arms. "No, baby, that hasn't changed. I guess I was wrong."

And as she kissed him, she saw the oddly expressionless face, the cold empty eyes--of John Dennis.

And she was afraid.

Something in the mind that had been given him--the synthetic duplicate of what had once been a part of Sam Baker--told the tenth android that women were attractive. For just what reason, he could not tell. There was nothing in his practical working structure that had any need of women. Still, the attraction was there in the memory patterns that had been transferred.

There were other attractions just as puzzling to him. He had vague memories of people with whom he felt no affinity except as vaguely nostalgic memories--Sam Baker's mother, his father, the blurred faces of friends he had known. And, at times, there were faint tinges of the terror Sam had known that night when a quick light flashed down from nowhere and he was abducted into a world too strange and terrible to be real. Yet it _had_ been real.

There were no birth memories in the android, but there were the vestiges of Sam's death memories: the endless torture under a machine so sensitive that, while it had no definition of a woman, it was able to discern--in the names thefted from Sam's memory and used as names for the ten androids--those which applied to males and those that did not.

But of all these traces of memories, those concerning women nagged the android most. And now, as it turned his empty gaze on Rhoda Kane, it was with a little more personal interest than before.

"What did Frank Corson tell you?"

"He said the man in the hospital with a broken leg was not a man. He was an android."

The term, grotesquely enough, meant nothing to the creature who called himself John Dennis. In the strange pattern of his consciousness there were no patterns of definitive difference. Though in many respects more able than the humans against whom he was pitted, he was no more aware of himself as different than a dog is aware of its differences from a man.

The concept didn't take shape in the android's synthetic mind.

"Did he tell you where the man with the broken leg came from?"

"He said they thought it came from somewhere in outer s.p.a.ce."

"There were others. Did he know of them?"

"No. He only told me about a man named Les King."

"What did he say about Les King?"

"King was there when the government man talked to Frank. That was all.

The government wanted them to say nothing."

"But Frank Corson told you."

"He would not tell anyone else, though. He is not interested in the androids. He wants to forget them."

"But Les King does not want to forget them?"

"I don't know."

"Will he talk about them?"

"I don't know that, either. I have never seen Les King."

"Can the government man keep Les King from talking about the man with the broken leg?"

"I doubt if he can force him to."