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 

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