"Your parents will come back," Jack Dukas affirmed. "I am the first 'memory man' to be resurrected. Among those killed who had had their bodies and minds recorded as was recommended, about a hundred thousand are 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 

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