Ten From Infinity | Page 7

while the
kidneys are large enough to service a horse. You'll note also that while
the man had testicles, there is no prostrate gland."
The group waited in a kind of guarded abeyance that could be easily
sensed. Their silence gave the impression that they were asking: Is
somebody kidding us?

But there was certainly no lightness in Brent's manner. His arm
dropped and he scowled at the far end of the table as he said, "Now, the
blood. There was something strange about the blood--"
The door from Marcia Holly's reception room-office opened and she
came in silently, followed by a white-coated waiter who set a tray on
the table. The coffeepot on the tray was silver; the cups, fine china; the
napkins, linen.
"--something very strange about the blood in that it conformed to all
necessary specifications and yet it had a synthetic quality about it ..."
Goose pimples formed on Hagen's neck and walked gently down his
spine. Nothing was missing in this setup--synthetic blood, two hearts,
oversize kidneys. Hagen got a quick mental flash of a barker outside a
circus sideshow: He walks like a man. He talks like a man. But for a
thin dime, folks, you can see--
It was something to think and wonder about. And back in Chicago, he'd
had lots of company. Everybody in the office that night had wondered,
and you could see the vague uneasiness in their eyes as the creature sat,
acting like a human being and, at the same time, like nothing from this
world. You could see a vague revulsion in the people surrounding the
creature. There was also uncertainty, and this from men who were
required by their profession 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 were all exactly alike; as alike as eight new cars of the same make
and model lined up side by side ..."
Identical. Hagen didn't know anything about that. He hadn't seen the
others. But he knew that there was something frightening about the one
they'd picked up in Chicago. At first glance he could have been Mr.
Anybody, from Anywhere, U.S.A. A youngish-looking forty, you
would have figured, with a sprinkling of gray at the temples and a face
women could have found interesting. He had the unpaunched figure of
a man who had taken good care of himself; he was