The Green Dream
"Owen. Listen to me. It won't work with you. You're unintegrated. You—"

He finished the admonition with a long bubbling cry, and crumbled on the plastic mosaic of the floor. A bright, unreal-looking stream of blood flowed oilily from the blasted chest.

Owen leaned with a sudden awful weariness against the desk. He had wondered how it would feel to kill his twin. Now he knew. A strange mysterious fear filled his heart as he stood there in the silence looking down at the corpse. Somehow, the revenge wasn't so delectable as he had anticipated.

But after that Owen didn't waste any more time. First he dragged Albert's body into the small but expensively compact and complete laboratory just off Albert's office. He prepared a large vat which, thirty minutes after his twin's corpse was lowered into it, revealed only scant fluid evidence that Albert Baarslag had ever existed. No one would ever check because Owen was assuming his identity. The blood-stained clothes he also disposed of in a similar manner. He cleaned up the blood-stains on the floor with the immaculate care of his kind.

After that, dressed in Albert's clothes, no one could possibly have known that it was not really Albert Baarslag, but the hated, despised, obscenity known as Owen Baarslag, who sat behind his desk.

And it was the next afternoon that Professor Albert Baarslag was supposed to submit himself to the time-encystment experiments. The Professor, Owen Baarslag, was right on time as he dropped his gyro-car down on the vast roof-landing of the great Solar Museum which contained the deeply-buried encystment chamber inside its massively thick and many-layered vault.

The teleo-electronic robot attendant wheeled the gyro onto an elevator while Owen, stifling a growing feeling of dusty desperation, dropped downward toward the deeply-buried rendezvous.

Professor Kaufman, one of the Chiefs from the Cosmology Section, greeted Owen with frank and open concern. From his earlier acquaintanceship with his brother, Owen knew that Kaufman had been Albert's closest associate. Others greeted Owen with formal, though terrific enthusiasm. This was one of the most dramatic experiments of the past five eras—eras which had been obsessed with social sciences and not sensational pastimes.

There weren't many there besides the Teleaudio Ethercast Representatives. They were busy broadcasting to Earth, Mars and the rest of Venus, the 
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