"Keep waiting, then! I'm ... I'm not distracted by personal fear. That's one advantage of being a Transplant."

  "High irritant value," Fern murmured. "It works fast."

  "Come on, Quent," Talman said persuasively. "You've still got the instinct of self-preservation. This can't be pleasant for you?"

  "It's ... too pleasant," Quentin said unevenly. "But it won't work. I could always stand my liquor."

  "This isn't liquor," Fern countered. He touched a dial.

  The Transplant laughed; Talman noted with satisfaction that oral control was slipping. "It won't work, I say. I'm too ... smart for you."

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah. You're not morons—none of you are. Fern's a good technician, maybe, but he isn't good enough. Remember, Van, you asked me in Quebec if there'd been any ... change? I said there hadn't. I'm finding out now that I was wrong."

  "How?"

  "Lack of distraction." Quentin was talking too much; a symptom of intoxication. "A brain in a body can never concentrate fully. It's too conscious of the body itself. Which is an imperfect mechanism. Too specialized to be efficient. Respiratory, circulatory—all the systems intrude. Even the habit of breathing's a distraction. Now the ship's my body—at the moment—but it's a perfect mechanism. It functions with absolute efficiency. So my brain's correspondingly better."

  "Superman."

  "Super efficient. The better mind generally wins at chess, because it can foresee the possible gambits. I can foresee everything you might do. And you're badly handicapped."

  "Why?"

  "You're human."

  Egotism, Talman thought. Was this the Achillean heel? A taste of success had apparently done its psychological work, and the electronic equivalent of drunkenness had released inhibitions. Logical enough. After five years of routine work, no matter how novel that work might be, this suddenly altered situation—this change from active to passive, from machine to protagonist—might have been the catalyst. Ego. And cloudy thinking.

  For Quentin wasn't a super-brain. Very definitely he was not. The higher an I.Q., the less need there is for self-justification, direct or indirect. And, oddly, Talman suddenly felt absolved of any lingering compunctions. The real Bart Quentin would never have been guilty of paranoid thought-patterns.

  So—

  -

  Quentin's articulation was clear; there was no slurring. But he no longer spoke with soft palate, tongue and lips, by means of a column of air. Tonal control was noticeably altered now, however, and the Transplant's voice varied from a carrying whisper to almost a shout.

  Talman grinned. He was feeling better, somehow.

  "We're human," he said, "but we're still sober."

  "Nuts. Look at the telltale. We're getting close to Earth."

  "Come off it, Quent," Talman said wearily. "You're bluffing, and we both know you're bluffing. You can't stand an indefinite amount of high frequency. Save time and give up now."

  "You give up," Quentin said. "I can see everything you do. The ship's a mass of traps anyway. From up here all I have to do is watch until you get close to one. I'm planning my game ahead, every gambit worked out to checkmate for one of you. You haven't got a chance. You haven't got a chance. You haven't got a chance."

  From up here, Talman thought. Up where? He remembered little Cotton's remark that geometry could be used to locate the Transplant. Sure. Geometry and psychology. Halve the ship, quarter it, keep bisecting the remainders—

  Not necessary. Up was the keyword. Talman seized upon it with an eagerness that didn't show on his face. Up, presumably, reduced by half the area they'd have to search. The lower parts of the ship could be ruled out. Now he'd have to halve the upper section, using the celestial globe, say as the dividing line.

  The Transplant had eye cells spotted all over the ship, of course, but Talman tentatively decided that Quentin thought of himself as situated in one particular spot, not scattered over the whole ship, localized wherever an eye was built in. A man's head is his locus, to his own mind.

  Thus Quentin could see the red spot on the celestial globe, but that didn't necessarily mean that he was located in a wall facing that hemisphere of the sphere. The Transplant had to be trapped into references to his actual physical relation to objects in the ship—which would be hard, because this could be done best by references to sight, the normal individual's most important link with his surroundings. And Quentin's sight was almost omnipotent. He could see everything.

  There had to be a localization—somehow.

  A word-association test would do it. But that implied co-operation. Quentin wasn't that drunk!

  Nothing could be gauged by learning what Quentin could see—for his brain was not necessarily near any one of his eyes. There would be a subtle, intrinsic realization of location on the Transplant's part; the knowledge that he—blind, deaf, dumb except through his distant extensor sensory mechanisms—was in a certain place. And how, except by too obviously direct questions, could Quentin be made to give the right answers?

  It was impossible, Talman thought, with a hopeless sense of frustrated anger. The anger grew stronger. It brought sweat to his face, rousing him to a dull, aching hatred of Quentin. All this was Quentin's fault, the fact that Talman was prisoned here in this hateful spacesuit and this enormous death trap of a ship. The fault of a machine—

  Suddenly he saw the way.

  It would, of course, depend on how drunk Quentin was. He glanced at Fern, questioned the man with his eyes, and in response Fern manipulated a dial and nodded.

  "Damn you," Quentin said in a whisper.

  "Nuts," Talman said. "You implied you haven't any instinct for self-preservation any more."

  "I ... didn't—"

  "It's true, isn't it?"

  "No," Quentin said loudly.

  "You forget I'm a psychologist, Quent. I should have seen the angles before. The book was open, ready to read, even before I saw you. When I saw Linda."

  "Shut up about Linda!"

  Talman had a momentary, sick vision of the drunken, tortured brain somewhere hidden in the walls, a surrealistic nightmare. "Sure," he said. "You don't want to think about her yourself."

  "Shut up."

  "You don't want to think about yourself, either, do you?"

  "What are you trying to do, Van? Get me mad?"

  "No," Talman said, "I'm simply fed up, sick and disgusted with the whole business. Pretending that you're Bart Quentin, that you're still human, that we can deal with you on equal terms."

  "There'll be no dealing—"

  "That's not what I meant, and you know it. I've just realized what you are." He let the words hang in the dim air. He imagined he could hear Quentin's heavy breathing, though he knew it was merely an illusion.

  "Please shut up, Van," Quentin said.

  "Who's asking me to shut up?"

  "I am."

  "And what's that?"

  The ship jumped. Talman almost lost his balance. The line hitched to the pillar saved him. He laughed.

  "I'd be sorry for you, Quent, if you were—you. But you're not."

  "I'm not falling for any trick."

  "It may be a trick, but it's the truth too. And you've wondered about it yourself. I'm dead certain of that."

  "Wondered about what?"

  "You're not human any more," Talman said gently. "You're a thing. A machine. A gadget. A spongy gray hunk of meat in a box. Did you really think I could get used to you—now? That I could identify you with the old Quent? You haven't any face!"

  -

  The sound-box made noises. They sounded mechanical. Then—"Shut up," Quentin said again, almost plaintively. "I know what you're trying to do."

  "And you don't want to face it. Only you've got to face it, sooner or later, whether you kill us now or not. This ... business ... is an incident. But the thoughts in your brain will keep growing and growing. And you'll keep changing and changing. You've changed plenty already."

  "You're crazy," Quentin said. "I'm no ... monster."

  "You hope, eh? Look at it logically. You haven't dared to do that, have you?" Talman held up his gloved hand and ticked off points on his sheathed fingers. "You're trying very desperately to keep your grip on something that's slipping away—humanity, the heritage you were born to. You hang on to the symbols, hoping they'll mean the reality. Why do you pretend to eat? Why do you insist on drinking brandy out of a glass? You know it might just as well be squirted into you out of an oil can."

  "No. No! It's an aesthetic—"

  "Garbage. You go to teleshows. You read. You pretend you're human enough to be a cartoonist. It's a desperate, hopeless clinging to something that's already gone from you, all these pretenses. Why do you feel the need for binges? You're maladjusted, because you're pretending you're still human, and you're not, any more."

  "I'm ... well, something better—"

  "Maybe ... if you'd been born a machine. But you were human. You had a human body. You had eyes and hair and lips. Linda must remember that, Quent.

  "You should have insisted on a divorce. Look—if you'd only been crippled by the explosion, she could have taken care of you. You'd have needed her. As it is, you're a self-sufficient, self-contained unit. She does a good job of pretending. I'll admit that. She tries not to think of you as a hopped-up helicopter. A gadget. A blob of wet cellular tissue. It must be tough on her. She remembers you as you used to be."

  "She loves me."

  "She pities you," Talman said relentlessly.

  In the humming stillness the red telltale crept across the globe. Fern's tongue stole out and circled his lips. Lindquist stood quietly watching, his eyes narrowed.

  "Yeah," Talman said, "face it. And look at the future. There are compensations. You'll get quite a bang out of meshing your gears. Eventually you'll even stop remembering you ever were human. You'll be happier then. For you can't hang on to it, Quent. It's going away. You can keep on pretending for a while, but in the end it won't matter any more. You'll be satisfied to be a gadget. You'll see beauty in a machine and not in Linda. Maybe that's happened already. Maybe Linda knows it's happened. You don't have to be honest with yourself yet, you know. You're immortal. But I wouldn't take that kind of immortality as a gift."

  "Van—"

  "I'm still Van. But you're a machine. Go ahead and kill us, if you want, and if you can do it. Then go back to Earth and, when you see Linda again, look at her face. Look at it when she doesn't know you're watching. You can do that easily. Rig up a photoelectric cell in a lamp or something."

  "Van ... Van!"

  Talman let his hands drop to his sides. "All right. Where are you?"

  The silence grew, while an inaudible question hummed through the yellow vastness. The question, perhaps, in the mind of every Transplant. The question of—a price.

  What price?

  Utter loneliness, the sick knowledge that the old ties were snapping one by one, and that in place of living, warm humanity there would remain—a mental monster?

  Yes, he had wondered—this Transplant who had been Bart Quentin. He had wondered, while the proud, tremendous machines that were his body stood ready to spring into vibrant life.

  Am I changing? Am I still Bart Quentin?

  Or do they—the humans—look on me as—How does Linda really feel about me now? Am I—

  Am I—It?

  "Go up on the balcony," Quentin said. His voice was curiously faded and dead.

  -

  Talman made a quick gesture. Fern and Lindquist sprang to life. They climbed, each to a ladder, on opposite sides of the room, but carefully, hitching their lines to each rung.

  "Where is it?" Talman asked gently.

  "The south wall—Use the celestial sphere for orientation. You can reach me—" The voice failed.

  "Yes?"

  Silence. Fern called down, "Has he passed out?"

  "Quent!"

  "Yes—About the center of the balcony. I'll tell you when you reach it."

  "Easy," Fern warned Lindquist. He took a turn of his line about the balcony rail and edged forward, searching the wall with his eyes.

  Talman used one arm to scrub his fogged face plate. Sweat was trickling down his face and flanks. The crawling yellow light, the humming stillness from machines that should be roaring thunderously, stung his nerves to unendurable tension.

  "Here?" Fern called.

  "Where is it, Quent?" Talman asked. "Where are you?"

  "Van," Quentin said, a horrible, urgent agony in his tone. "You can't mean what you've been saying. You can't. This is ... I've got to know! I'm thinking of Linda!"

  Talman shivered. He moistened his lips.

  "You're a machine, Quent," he said steadily. "You're a gadget. You know I'd never have tried to kill you if you were still Bart Quentin."

  And then, with shocking abruptness, Quentin laughed.

  "Here it comes, Fern!" he shouted, and the echoes crashed and roared through the vaulted chamber. Fern clawed for the balcony rail.

  That was a fatal mistake. The line hitching him to that rail proved a trap—because he didn't see the danger in time to unhook himself.

  The ship jumped.

  It was beautifully gauged. Fern was jerked toward the wall and halted by the line. Simultaneously the great celestial globe swung from its support, in a pendulum arc like the drive of a Gargantuan fly swatter. The impact snapped Fern's line instantly.

  Vibration boomed through the walls.

  Talman hung on to a pillar and kept his eyes on the globe. It swung back and forth in a diminishing arc as inertia overcame momentum. Liquid spattered and dripped from it.

  He saw Lindquist's helmet appear over the rail. The man yelled, "Fern?"

  There was no answer.

  "Fern! Talman!"

  "I'm here," Talman said.

  "Where's—" Lindquist turned his head to stare at the wall. He screamed.

  Obscene gibberish tumbled from his mouth. He yanked the blaster from his belt and aimed it at the maze of apparatus below.

  "Lindquist!" Talman shouted. "Hold it!"

  Lindquist didn't hear.

  "I'll smash the ship," he screamed. "I'll—"

  Talman drew his own blaster, steadied the muzzle against the pillar, and shot Lindquist in the head. He watched the body lean over the rail, topple, and crash down on the floor plates. Then he rolled over on his face and lay there, making sick, miserable sounds.

  "Van," Quentin said.

  Talman didn't answer.

  "Van!"

  "Yeah."

  "Turn off the inductor."

  Talman got up, walked unsteadily to the device, and ripped wires loose. He didn't bother to search for an easier method.

  -

  After a long while the ship grounded. The humming vibration of currents died. The dim, huge control chamber seemed oddly empty now.

  "I've opened a port," Quentin said. "Denver's about fifty miles north. There's a highway four miles or so in the same direction."

  Talman stood up, staring around. His face looked ravaged.

  "You tricked us," he mumbled. "All along, you were playing us like fish. My psychology—"

  "No," Quentin said. "You almost succeeded."

  "What—"

  "You don't think of me as a gadget, really. You pretended to, but a little matter of semantics saved me. When I realized what you'd said, I came to my senses."

  "What I said?"

  "Yeah. That you'd never have tried to kill me if I'd still been Bart Quentin."

  Talman was struggling slowly out of his spacesuit. Fresh, clean air had already replaced the poison atmosphere of the ship. He shook his head dazedly.

  "I don't see it."

  Quentin's laughter rang out, filling the chamber with its warm, human vibrancy.

  "A machine can be stopped or destroyed, Van," he said. "But it can't be—killed."

  Talman didn't say anything. He was free of the bulky suit now, and he turned hesitantly toward a doorway. He looked back.

  "The door's open," Quentin said.

  "You're letting me go?"

  "I told you in Quebec that you'd forget our friendship before I did. Better step it up, Van, while there's still time. Denver's probably sent out helicopters already."

  Talman swept one questioning look around the vast chamber. Somewhere, perfectly camouflaged among those mighty machines, was a small metal cylinder, cradled and shielded in its hidden socket. Bart Quentin—