alive again, as I think you know. Millions more are in process. One way or another, by record or by the memories of others, in flesh of the old kind or the new, almost everyone will return."

Ed felt his father's hand. As far as he could tell, it was of flesh. Yet it could be something else; Ed nearly trembled with excitement as his eager wonder and primitive dread of the strange battled inside him. He thought again of Mitchell Prell's first samples of vitaplasm.

"Of which flesh are you, Dad?" Ed asked anxiously.

His father studied him there in the twilight of the day, while the silvery ring of lunar wreckage brightened in the sky.

"The old kind, Eddie," he answered.

"I'm glad," Ed said, feeling greatly relieved, a reaction which he knew was odd for one who loved the thought of coming miracles.

Jack Dukas sighed as if he had escaped a terrible fate. "So am I glad, pal," he said. "I guess I was favored by family connections." Here he paused, but his wink meant Uncle Mitch. "However," he continued, "the old flesh takes so much longer. That's why in many cases it won't be used. There must be thousands of androids already among us, living like everybody else. Since personal concerns are involved, statistics are kept rather confidential. These synthetic people have organs the same as we have. And you can't recognize them just by looking. Only they're thirty per cent heavier, stronger, and they don't tire. There was a thought, once, that robots would make human beings obsolete and replace them. Sorry, Eddie. Why be gruesome at a time like this? Let's patch you up and then find your mother."

Young Ed Dukas was happier than he had ever been before. For quite a while he found peace. Maybe that was true of most of humanity now—for the past three or four years at least. There was no sharp delineation of an interval before the smokes of doubt began to come back.

Les Payten was still around. And Barbara Day continued to live at the Youth Center on the hill. Often the three would meet. Their childhood was behind them. Barbara Day's freckles had faded. Her dark hair had a coppery glint. A promise of beauty had begun to blossom. And her talk expressed many whimsical thoughts.

"We all know each other, Eddie," she once said. "So don't be offended. I sometimes think that you wonder whether your father is really the same person that he was—whether he ever could be more than a careful duplicate."

Les Payten frowned. "You're speaking to me, too, Babs," he pointed out. "I also have a 'memory father.' He's good to me, and mostly I like him. But sometimes I get scared, though I don't always know why."

Ed's skin tingled. "Could I be myself now and still be myself in another body, years later? Could there ever be two of me—truly—constructed exactly the same? I don't deny such a thing. I simply don't know."

But Ed Dukas continued to wonder about his father. There were several occasions when his dad was supposed to recognize certain people, casually encountered in the street. For they knew him.

Ed was present on one of these occasions. "Sorry, friend," Jack Dukas apologized to a burly, jovial man. "I guess they forgot to put a picture of you inside my head."

Les Payten's father was also subtly different from his original—though in a somewhat different way. The change was even very dimly apparent in his face. He had once been a big, easy-going, timid soul, nagged by his wife. Now his features bore a hint of brutality. He walked with a slight swagger. He did not roar, but the aura of power was there.

Ed's mother explained the change to his father: "Memory seems not always to match facts, Jack. Mrs. Payten fooled herself into believing that Ronald Payten used to be a bully. So she even fooled Schaeffer's mind-machines. And lo! Ronald Payten is a bully now, as far as she is concerned. No, don't worry about her too much, Jack. She may even like being pushed around."

In the months that passed, from out on an asteroid came the step-by-step reports of the building of the first huge star ship. At home, one by one, old acquaintances—or was it just their reasonable facsimiles?—reappeared. Gradually most of the dead of the lunar blowup were restored to life—except for certain scientists who remained unforgiven.

But a new type of population was creeping into the fabric of human society. Its humanness, in an old sense, could be debated. Its first quiet intrusion was marked by an awe that faded into a shrug; it began to be accepted casually and somewhat dully, as most past novelties had been accepted before. Foresight could extend into tomorrow, but its pictures remained not quite real. The skills of cool, clear thinking, which education tried to impart in an era that needed it so much, fell short again. No doubt it should have been remembered that the shift from inattention to unreasonable panic can often be swift.

Even young Ed Dukas, though dedicated in his heart to New and Coming Things, sometimes lost sight of these deeper concerns because of his lighter interests. Without much help from art, Barbara Day turned out to be beautiful. She had a pair of suitors automatically. Ed could have had his stocky frame lengthened. Les Payten could have had his big ears trimmed. But young men often frown on the vanity of tampering with one's appearance. Sometimes there is even a certain pride in minor ugliness.