"Nevada," he responded unhesitatingly, telling me that we were heading now
straight for the place. "It's near where they used to test atom bombs years ago. We still have what is referred to as a 'Nuclear Research Facility' there—that's IMC as it appears in the federal budget, Pentagon budget, official ledgers and such. Initial fund-ing was a bloody bitch—we took a little from just about every DoD program—but, since then, our maintenance budget hasn't really been out of line with what we're supposed to be. That's one way we get away with it. Most senators and congressmen are simply too busy and too rushed to check out every single project, particu-larly established routine expenditures, and we can get pretty convincing should one ever decide to inspect the place." "I still can't believe you can keep such a thing secret," I told him. "You said DoD—that's defense. Somebody has to know." He chuckled. "You'll see that we can be most effective there. But, you see, it has to be that way. There's per-haps half a dozen senators and two dozen congressmen who can keep a secret. The rest would cause more stu-pid, ignorant panic than anything else. Our work de-pends on secrecy, not really from our own people although that is necessary, but from the aliens. We can, after all, be penetrated. We don't know who's who—let's face it. That's why it's essentially a sealed facility, like a good top secret research project working on anything danger-ous. Once in, you're in until we feel we can let you out." I wasn't sure I liked the implications of that. I won-dered just how free our choice was going to be, but I said nothing. "IMC," he continued, "stands for Identity Matrix Cen-ter. When we discovered that we had been penetrated, invaded, whatever you like , by aliens who could body-switch it was the logical choice. Heretofore body-switching had been considered a total impossibility, a fantasy thing and nothing more. The very concept was unthinkable, for it meant that no one anywhere could be trusted and literally nothing could be safe for long. We were then forced, by a couple of blunders like the one that left you alive, to confront the reality of the thing—and there seemed only one logical response. In the forties this country decided upon an atom bomb, found the money, got the best experts on atomic physics together with as unlimited a budget as was possible, and told them to design and build one. They did. In the sixties, we decided to put a man on the moon and created NASA. It was more public, of course, but the approach was the same—get the money you need and the top experts in the field together in the best research facili-ties you have and tell 'em to do it. They did and there's American flags all over the moon now. The same ap-proach was tried with the Alternate Energies Task Force, although that's been underfunded. The same thing is applied to IMC. Body-switching exists. It's possible. Therefore, we need a defense against it as priority number one. A secondary priority is to learn how to do it ourselves if we can—for obvious reasons." I nodded, only beginning to see the scope of this thing. "And have you made any progress?"
He shrugged. "We know what happens when they do it, but not how they can do it. I am living proof that they have made a lot of progress—I was not born im-mune to the aliens. The trouble is that it still requires enormous

technological backup to do even that to one person. Mass protection is still
practically impossible although theoretically we could do it. What we lack the most is concrete information on our enemy—how many they are, where they come from, just what they're doing here. Without those we're still somewhat defenseless, since we assume their technology to be far in advance of ours. Were we to just go to a big program, let the cat out of the bag as it were, they might well easily invent a counter and then we're worse off than we were. See what I mean?"
"You're military, then?"
He chuckled. "Oh, no. Most of the boys you've met are FBI, of course, and the Defense Intelligence Agency ac-tually manages the security of IMC, but I'm the top watchdog. I'm the Chief Security Officer of the General Services Administration."
Chapter Five
IMC didn't look like much from the air—miles and miles of miles and miles, composed of yellow, red, and orange sand, mostly flat, with a few high sharp moun-tains far in the distance. We passed Yucca Flat, where long ago the first atomic weapons were tested—you could still see the ghostly remains of old mock villages and protective concrete bunkers as we circled for a landing. Twenty or thirty miles from all this an airstrip loomed ahead on the barren desert. There was no question it was in use—a squadron of sleek fighter-bombers was berthed in two concrete parking areas and a couple of huge transports were parked near the tiny terminal, nearly dwarfing it. The base itself was small—a few dozen squads at best of what looked to be regulation Air Force barracks, all looking like long veterans of continu-ous occupation. All badly needed paint at the very least. I felt something of a let-down and said so. "That's only the top of it," Parch laughed. "The main base is underground, going down more than half a mile. They built them deep for the atomic stuff, and we made it even deeper. Our computer banks alone run for miles under the desert, a couple thousand feet down and very isolated from any outside influences.''
I frowned. "A computer that large? I thought that went out with the integrated circuit."
"Ordinarily that'd be true," he admitted, "but even when you consider that a hand-held computer with a phone plug can do almost anything, it's limited by the amount of information that can be stored in it. Consider the human brain, then, with every single thing in it reduced to computer bytes. That's what that computer—computers, really—down there is for. We need mechani-cal equivalents of human brains plus. There's never been a computer complex like IMC."
We rolled up to the little terminal building, almost under the wing of one of the giant transports. Again a car, this time from the government interagency motor pool, picked us up and drove us from the plane to one of the barrack-like buildings. Entering, we discovered it was a complex of small offices.

Nasty-looking Air Force guards with menacing automatic rifles, checked us out
and quizzed us every fifteen or twenty feet. I had the distinct feeling that, if Parch didn't give the correct response each time—and each was different we would all have been shot down where we stood. A huge and incongruous freight elevator was in the middle of the first floor, with two more Air Force guards on either side of the door. Again the routine, then both guards plugged in keys on opposite sides—too far, I noted, for any one person to do it—and turned together, opening the elevator door. We stepped aboard and the door rumbled closed once more. Parch then punched a numerical combination in the elevator wall, there was a click, and he extracted from a small compartment yet another key and placed it in a slot, turning it not like a key but more like a combination lock. I began to feel very, very trapped. We descended, and, passing the next floor, then the next, and still another, I knew we were sinking into the Nevada desert. Level five was ours, but I had the im-pression that the shaft continued on a lot further, and walked out into a long, lighted tiled corridor with an antiseptic smell. The ceiling was lit with indirect fluo-rescent lighting, and except for the lack of windows it looked like any modern office building. Uniformed Ma-rine guards seemed to be everywhere. Parch led us down a side corridor, then through a series of double doors. I saw that we were in some kind of dispensary, although that wasn't quite right. Men and women in medical whites looked up at us and one woman walked over and had a conversation with Parch. Finally he came back to us. "Processing first," he told us. "Just believe it's all necessary. It won't take long, anyway."
He waited while the efficient team photographed us, took our fingerprints, retinal patterns, EKG and EEG, blood sample—the whole thing. The end result was going over to a small window and receiving two small cards, one for each of us, that looked like credit cards. On the front was our photographs, fingerprints, and a lot of zebra-stripe coding, the back was entirely coated with a magnetic surface.
"Guard those cards," Parch told us. "To get into and out of your room, or anywhere here, you'll need them. They contain everything about you that we know now, all linked to a cross-checking computer. You'll need them even to eat. There's some paperwork to fill out, which I have here, but I'll take you to your quarters and get you settled in first. You can fill it out there and give it to me later."
We followed him down another corridor and the de-cor changed a bit. The floor was even carpeted and the doors were evenly spaced. "I feel like I'm in a motel," I noted.
"You are," he replied. "The IMC Hilton, we call it." He went up to a door about halfway down with the number 574 on it. "No keys, though. Go ahead, Gonser -try your card in the little slot there." I hesitated, then put the little plastic card in the small, narrow slit next to the door. The card went in about halfway, then something seemed to grab it, pull it all the way in, and there was a click. I didn't immedi-ately try the door, expecting the card to come back.

Parch realized the problem. "Just go on in. It keeps the card until you leave
the room and close the door. When the computer control senses the room's empty it'll offer the card back to you in the slot. Take it and it automatically locks. Neat, huh?"
I shrugged, turned the knob, and opened the door. The quarters were quite nice, like a luxury hotel suite. There was a single queen-sized bed, dresser with mirror, nightstands, a table and couch, a couple of comfortable-looking chairs, lots of lights and lots more closet space, and, in the other room, a large bath with shower. The main room even had a color TV and there were remote controls for it and all lights beside the bed. Parch showed us everything like an experienced bellman, even trying the TV to make sure it worked.
In back of the parlor area was a small portabar which was mildly stocked and a miniature refrigerator for ice, also containing some fresh fruit, milk and juice, and the like. A cabinet held glasses.
I was impressed. It was far more than I'd expected from the U.S. government. Parch just shrugged it off. "Look, we have some of the top brains in biophysics, biochemistry, computer sciences, you name it—and, in some cases, their families as well. We can hardly take such people and lock them away in some fallen-down barracks, can we? All your things have been brought here and unpacked, by the way, along with a number of extras in your size; lab whites, that sort of thing. You'll notice the phone has no dial—it's not a line to the outside. But there's a directory there, so you can call anybody in IMC, even arrange wake-up calls. There's daily maid service and the bar and fridge are kept stocked. If you need more, or pharmacy items, anything like that, the numbers to call are there."
Dory looked around the room with a mild look of disapproval. "The bed's for both of us? Don't you have a king size?" "This is Ms. Gonser's room, not yours. You have an almost identical one next door in 576."
"Why can't we stay together?" we both asked, almost together. "Rules," Parch told us. "Get used to them—there are a lot of them, I'm afraid." He hesitated a moment, look-ing a little apologetic. "Look, you'll be next door and can visit all you want. The only thing is, well, you're still on probation, so to speak. Please go along with us for now and trust me that there are good reasons born of past experiences behind those rules. O.K.?" There seemed little choice but to accept it—for now. "Come, Ms. Tomlinson, I'll show you your room," he said, turning to Dory. "And I'll leave the papers here. Take a little time, stretch out, relax, fill the things out, and after I check in and tend to my own business we'll get together again. Take advantage of this time—you're going to be very busy soon." They went out and the door closed behind them. I went over to it and saw that there was one difference between it and a motel that made me vaguely uncomfor-table—no inside lock. I finally just sighed, turned, and went over to the bed. Hell, if you can't trust a setup as guarded as this a puny little lock wasn't going to help, I told myself.

Finally I explored the room. In addition to the other features I found a clock,
a radio, some recent magazines, and the day's Las Vegas newspaper. I checked the clothes, all neatly unpacked and put where they should be. I got undressed, then stood there, looking at my nude body in the dresser mirror. Damn it all, I told myself, I still turn myself on. Suddenly, on impulse, I got up, lugged one of the chairs over to the door and propped it against the knob. It made me feel better, even if it made no sense. I wanted no sudden surprises, and the guards in the local area I'd seen were all male.
I took a brief shower, which felt good, then just plopped on the bed, looking at that supine reflection in the mirror. It was no good, I thought moodily. I've joined the human race, all right, but I've joined the wrong half. Oh, it might be fun to act like a woman—all the way, with my choice of men, just to see what it was like, but, somehow, I didn't think so. It wasn't my body—it was hers.
As much as I enjoyed the attention now being paid to me, the courtesies, the fact that I was the automatic center of attention, the ogled rather than the withdrawn and hopeless ogler, I couldn't pretend that my inner self had really changed. Mentally, I was still male. All those handsome young men I'd met that morning hadn't done anything for or to me. I still looked sideways at some of the cute and attractive women we'd passed in Seattle, and the only time I'd felt any sort of sexual stirring was in the women's room of the coffee shop back at the hotel. I still was attracted to women. I would rather be in bed with this reflection than be this reflection.
I reached over and flipped on the TV. It was the news, something I usually immersed myself in. The usual was going on. Two dead in hotel fire… Secretary of State hopes for new arms treaty with the Russians… Presi-dent of the Central African Republic shot in coup attempt… And so it went. Somehow, it just didn't seem important anymore.
I flipped off the TV and lay back face up on the bed, closing my eyes for a moment. What the hell kind of future did I have? I was a gorgeous sex symbol who was the opposite of what I appeared to be. In a sense, noth-ing had really changed. I was still the alien, the out-sider, the non-participator in society because my inner and outer selves were so damnably different. Idly, I became aware that parts of my body were reacting to my inner thoughts, a pleasurable tension building, and I was only half aware that my hands were touching, stroking those parts. My nipples felt like tiny, miniature erections, and responded to rubbing with a tremendous feeling of eroticism. I kept rubbing one, almost unable to stop, and reached down between my legs, doing to myself what I wanted to do to myself. I could imagine me—the old me—here, in bed, next to this beautiful sex goddess, doing this to bring her to a fever pitch, then penetrating, thrusting… I grew tre-mendously wet, my finger feeling so good, my thumb massaging the clitoris, until, finally, I experienced an orgasmic explosion that shook my entire body. It felt so good I kept at it, accomplishing it several more times. It felt so good and I think I just about screamed with ecstasy at the repeated orgasms. Finally I stopped, a sudden fear that my outcry had

been overheard bring-ing me down a bit, and I just went limp, breathing hard on
the bed, savoring the afterglow. Male and fe-male orgasms were certainly related experiences, but very different in the way the sexual sensation was trans-mitted. It was a wonderful feeling, but it did little to snap my depression. For it was still me inside this sensuous body, me, Victor Gonser, male, all by myself, alone in the quiet of the room.
After a while I managed to get up and went over to the desk to look at the forms to be filled out. There were a lot of them, and they were very detailed about my past life, work, interests. I filled them out almost haphaz-ardly, not really caring very much.
The phone rang and I picked it up. It was Parch, asking me to come down to his office. "The guard will show you the way," he told me. "We'll have a light dinner, then I want to go and wake up our prisoner." "He's here?"
"Oh, yes—and still sleeping like a baby. We've prepared a special room for him and it's about time we tried to find out what we can." "Is Dory coming?"
"No, just me and you, then a couple of specialists. Don't worry—she's fine. You can visit her later on tonight if you like." I hung up, got up, and looked through the clothing. I had never appreciated before how much trouble women go through to look the way they do. It all felt funny, cumbersome, and slightly uncomfortable. The bra was the most uncomfortable of the lot, but with my ample chest I thought I needed it. I went through the clothing Dory had bought for me and cursed her for it. All the stuff was clingy and sexy and that was not what I wanted, definitely. I looked over at the added stuff and decided on it for the mo-ment, choosing a pair of white pants, a plain white T-shirt, and sandals. It looked just as sexy as all the elaborate stuff, but, what the hell, it was comfortable and practical. With my shape I hardly needed a belt, didn't see one that worked, and decided against one. Finally I brushed my hair, which I hadn't washed, nod-ded to myself in the mirror, then walked over and pulled the chair from the door. I opened it and spotted the Marine guard at the end of the corridor. I stepped out, letting the door shut behind me. There was a click and a whirring sound and my card reappeared in the little slot. I'd almost forgotten it, but I removed it now and stuck it in my hip pocket.
The guard gave me the kind of look that betrayed ev-ery thought in his licentious mind, but he was very disciplined and directed me down the corridor to another, small elevator. The guard on that one had been expecting me and inserted and turned his single key. I stepped in, was told to punch the next level up—four—and the door closed. It was more like a normal elevator than the other, but, I noted, the buttons went only from levels three to sixteen. No way out on this one.
I punched four, noted the implications of level sixteen, and was quickly taken up. The guard on four di-rected me to Parch's office, which proved to be a large affair, with two secretaries in the outer office, teletype-writers chattering away, computer terminals like mad, and lots of different colored telephones. It looked

more like the city desk on a newspaper than the office of a man like Harry Parch.
He was carefully putting his costume back on as I entered. I noticed more comfortable military khakis draped over a chair, and a makeup and dressing table resembling an actor's off to one side. When he turned around he was the Parch we'd seen from the start—but now knew. I wouldn't recognize the real Parch from Adam in any group of men. No wonder I hadn't seen him on the ferry earlier than that show-down day—he probably was all over the place, but as someone entirely different. The blue eyes were special contact lenses; I saw a pair of glasses on the table. The moustache was one of several different types he kept in a small case, and there were more wigs and a wardrobe of differently styled clothing in a rear closet. Everything, I realized, about Harry Parch was phoney. He brightened and smiled. "Well! You certainly have adjusted well. Most folks in your—er—situation go a bit off the deep end, you know. Some worse than others."
I nodded. "I think Dory's a bit off. Nothing serious—but she's not quite herself, I'd say."
He shrugged. "Could be worse. We have an entire psychiatric unit here just to treat problems like that. They're good, but nobody can work miracles. I suspect we'll let them take a good long look at your friend when you take the routine tests tomorrow. Maybe they can help her adjust. She's going to be no good to anyone, even herself, unless she does." It was clear as we walked down the hall who was the boss here. Sentries snapped to when he approached, nobody once questioned him about anything at all, and he walked to a small executive dining room like he owned the place. In a sense, he did. The dining room with its own chef and fancy meals, was obviously for the select few at the top. "Why the costume?" I couldn't help asking him as the salad came. He smiled softly. "Symbols are important to anyone. I head the people who track the dybbuks down, and I'm immune to their biggest trick. I'm not Superman, though—a bullet does the same thing to me that it does to you. They both hate and fear me—and so I let them hate and fear this. It affords a physical magnet for them that also serves as a terror symbol—the man with the stake out after the vampire, so to speak. And it protects me as well, of course. If they knew my real identity and appearance I could never venture anywhere without an armed guard."
"The accent—is that phoney, too?"
"Oh, my, yes, ducks!" he came back in thick Cockney. "Any bluddy toime y'want, luv." He chuckled, then switched to Brooklynese. "Dem bums ain't gonna know wud I'm like." He switched back to the familiar soft Irish he normally used. "You see? I've studied accents for years. Makeup, too. In my younger days I was going to be a great actor. Maybe I am. I like to think so." "That Belfast story—it was a phoney, then?" He thought for a moment, and I wondered if he were deciding whether to elaborate a lie, invent another, or tell me the truth. Would I ever know? This strange man exuded something vaguely sinister, something I couldn't really pin

down intellectually but felt, deep down. Per-haps it was his total lack of anything
real—or was that cold and analytical tone the real man coming out? In his own way, Harry Parch was as chameleon-like as the alien dybbuks he chased. "Yes, I'm a naturalized citizen," he said hesitantly. "The early part is genuine. I'll be quite frank, Ms. Gonser—that experience shaped my entire life. You have no idea what it's like to grow up with the army on every street corner, neighbor against neighbor depending on what church your folks went to, not knowing whether the next parked car contained a bomb or the next ordi-nary man or woman you passed wasn't going to turn and blow your kneecaps off." His tone grew very seri-ous. "You have no idea what it is like to see your par-ents blown to bits before your twelve-year-old eyes." There was nothing I could say to that, but I couldn't help thinking that he was either being honest or was one hell of an actor. "Those early nerves—Belfast reflexes, I call 'em—stand me in good stead now. Coming down that trail up north, not knowing who was who… And I'm well-suited for this battle, I think. I always doubt strangers, but only a Belfast boy doubts his old friends."
I more or less believed him, but it didn't make me feel any better about him. I had the strong feeling that Harry Parch loved no one, trusted no one, lived in a violent world where all could be enemies. If his story were true he was undoubtedly so paranoid as to be in many ways insane; if it were not true, then he was even worse—a man who loved the game, to whom patrio-tism, ideology, and human beings were all just words to him, labels on chess pieces to be moved and sacrificed at will. I wondered which he was. A little of both, proba-bly. Pragmatically, governments need people like Harry Parch, I reflected, but always as agents of someone else, never as the boss. We continued talking as dessert came, but it was all small talk. That was all I was going to get from Harry Parch, on himself or on anything else. I was just another pawn to him in his grand game and I would get only what he decided I should get.
We left the dining room and he led me back to the elevator which we took three more levels down. The new area looked like a clinic—which, in a sense, it was. Three people met us—two women and a man—all dressed in sharp medical whites. He talked with them for a minute, then introduced me to them, and finally said, "Well, I have to go in there with him. I'm supposedly immune but you never know—so what about a password?" I thought a minute. "How about—Machiavelli?" He. laughed sharply, although I could see he was somewhat nervous. "Machiavelli it is, then. You all hear that?" The others nodded and I was a little surprised to see that it was the two women who drew nasty-looking pistols from their pockets. One I recognized as a vet's dart pistol, the kind used for putting zoo animals to sleep, but the other was a vicious-looking magnum. We walked down another corridor and entered what looked like a recording studio. No, I thought again, maybe like the place where police hold line-ups of sus-pects for witnesses. There were several comfortable seats in front of a thick pane of safety glass, with microphones in front of each chair. The two women

took positions on either side of me, putting their weapons in swivel vises, then
opening small doors in the glass win-dow through which the pistols could protrude. I saw that there was a wire mesh on the other side of those tiny openings, preventing anyone from touching the weap-ons. For a moment I was uneasy about this, since I wondered if these aliens might not be some sophisti-cated collection of microbes, an alien symbiote or parasite—but I quickly dismissed the idea. Not only would they have known that, at least, by now but the odds of any alien organism being able to affect humans was slight to none.
Behind the glass lay the man, on a hospital bed, a bottle of some clear fluid hanging on the side, dripping a little bit of itself into the unconscious figure through a small needle inserted in a vein in his wrist. The body was strapped securely to the table.
Parch and the male technician in white slid a number of bolts and locks from the door to one side of the glass—I could hear each lock give—and Parch stepped inside. The door closed behind him and I could hear every lock going back into place. Only when that was done did the inner door open electrically, allowing Parch to step into the chamber. "Now, everyone, I'm going to slowly bring him around," Parch's voice came from the speakers, sounding oddly distant. "I'm simply going to prompt him with some elementary stuff, perhaps sprinkled with some little white lies, so we can get the measure of him a little better." He took a deep breath. "Let's do it." I had to admire Parch's coolness, even though he was clearly a little nervous. Carefully he removed the needle from the dybbuk's wrist and hung it to one side, then quickly left. I noticed that the medical technician who remained outside gazed anxiously at an electronic con-sole. Obviously the alien's body was monitored—and perhaps Parch as well.
"Now, no shooting unless my life is in danger," Parch ordered, and I realized that it was his fellow humans, not aliens, that worried him. "Also, please no one say anything until and unless I ask you to. He can not see you; the glass is one-way."
We sat there, waiting expectantly, intently watching the figure on the hospital bed. It took about five tense minutes before the man seemed to stir, groan, then, finally, groggily open his eyes.
Abruptly, his eyes focused, found Parch, and widened in what I could only think was fear. He struggled to get out of his bonds but got nowhere. "You'll not break those shackles very easily," Parch warned him. "You should have chosen a weightlifter or someone else more muscular. However, that still would do you little good. You're covered by both a sleep gun and a magnum, and both would be used as unhesitat-ingly on me or on you." The man—a rather good-looking man of thirty or so, with sandy hair and a ruddy, outdoorsy complexion—looked around the chamber and, stopped struggling. "Where am I?" he asked in clear and accentless Ameri-can English. "You're at IMC, and at IMC you'll stay," Parch told him. "It's where your folks have been trying to get to all this time anyway. Well, you made it. Now, let's be civil about this—introductions?" He looked around with an-noyance. "I

should remember to bring a chair in here." He sighed. "Well, I'm Harry Parch,
Security Officer for IMC—but I expect you know that." The man just stared at him.
"What do we call you?" Parch asked, shuffling a bit from foot to foot. "My name would mean nothing to you—literally," the man on the table responded. "For general purposes, I use the name Dan Pauley." I started slightly. So this was Dan, the leader on the trail. Parch nodded to him. "All right, then, Mr. Dan Pauley it is. You know, this is the first time I've ever had the chance to talk civilly to one of your kind. This is quite an occasion. Sorry I forgot the champagne." "You've killed a lot of us, though," Pauley almost spat. Parch assumed a mock-hurt look. "Oh, come now! I'm not the one who picks innocent people and shoots air bubbles into their veins after stealing the bodies they were born in."
"I never liked the killing," Pauley responded in a sincere tone. "At first, I admit, none of us gave it a second thought—to them you seemed barely higher than the apes, if you'll pardon the expression. But I've lived here a long time, got to know this place, and it became more and more unpleasant. We simply had no choice if we were to stay undetected."
"Oh, my! Pardon me!" Parch responded, his tone if anything more cynical than before. "Isn't it fortunate that the first of you that we capture in one piece is a moralist, an idealist, and even has a guilty conscience! My, my!" His tone suddenly changed to chilling hatred. "And I'm so glad that all your murders were necessary! How much comfort that is to your victims, their spouses, children, friends. How very comforting."
Pauley sighed. "All right, all right. But don't make such a moral crusade out of it yourself. The human race hasn't been very kind to any of its own who happened to be in the way if they were more primitive than the civilization moving in on them. To a race that prac-tices genocide on parts of itself that differ only in color, or religion, or some other trivial thing I think we're pretty civilized about it. We killed only when necessary, and we killed only to safeguard our own mission."
Parch had started pacing a bit, but suddenly he stopped, turned, and looked directly at the man strapped on the table. "Ah, the mission. If the killing and body-stealing is an abhorrent necessity, then you must have quite a good reason for doing so, at least in your own mind. What? Anthropology? Conquest? What?"
The man thought for a while, obviously wrestling with his inner self. If he told too much he'd betray his people to his worst enemy. If he told nothing he would be un-able to escape the moral corner into which he'd painted himself. I felt a little sorry for him. He couldn't know that he was not the first Harry Parch had caught nor, I suspected would he.
"Look," he said at last, "my people—we call ourselves Urulu, which just means people, really—are in trouble. In many ways we're quite different from you, maybe more so than you can imagine, but in some ways we're the same. We evolved on a life-sustaining world, became dominant, and built a civilization.

Finally, we reached the stars, as you may someday do, and began looking for
other civilizations. We found a lot, but none capable of interstellar flight, and things went along pretty well for a while. Like most expanding cultures, we stole from the civilizations we discovered, but not anything you might guess. We stole ideas—art, new ways of looking at things, scientific breakthroughs in areas we never con-sidered, things like that. They're the true treasures of a civilization, and we could steal them to our profit without injuring any other cultures. They never really guessed we were there."
"Like Earth."
"Well, not really. Frankly, Earth is just a bit too prim-itive and too alien to have much to offer us. But, finally, we bumped into another civilization, a far different one, also spreading out to the stars. We frankly don't know much about them, although they're technologically our equals. In many ways they seemed like us, even to the body-switching capabilities, but when they'd reached our level they had made different choices about how to use their powers. They weren't a civilization you could even talk to, identify with, or really understand. They were—well, missionaries, I guess, interested only in con-verts. When we met they tried it on us, we resisted, and war resulted. A gigantic war, really, on a no-win scale. They won't surrender—they can't surrender, it wouldn't be something they'd comprehend—but we're so strong militarily that they can't win, either. This state of per-petual stalemate has existed now for thousands of years. And we can't win, either—they're too many and we too few." Parch's expression was both grim and thoughtful and I saw him nod once or twice to himself. I had the feeling that Pauley was confirming what Parch had been told by others, and I thought I could see how his mind was going. Either the Urulu had one hell of a convincing and consistent cover story or they were telling the truth—and they seemed too egocentric to bother concocting anything this elaborate. It would be hard for them to imagine being caught like this. And if this war were true—where was the other side? "How does all this involve the Earth?" Parch wanted to know. "Are we now the front? Or might we be?"
"I—I really don't know. There's no front in the normal sense. We have a military stalemate, remember—and destroying a planet doesn't get you anything but one more dead planet. The war now is a battle for the minds, the souls, if you will, of various planets. There's some evidence that they are active on Earth, but it wouldn't be a high priority item for them. You're very rare in the galaxy, you know. Most—maybe 95 percent—aren't like you at all. Most races couldn't exist here in their natural forms, we included. But there are enough planets with what you might call humanoid life to make it worth their while—and ours. We have few allies, and those we have are much closer to our form of life than yours, and we occasionally need, well, warm bodies to work those planets. You're out here on a spiral arm, pretty far away from the action, but you're the closest, most convenient source of warm-blooded mammalian oxygen-breathers we have."
I was appalled, and even Parch looked disturbed, at all this. "We're your spare parts depot, then, for humanoid worlds," Parch said more

than asked.
Pauley nodded slowly, a sheepish look on his face. "Look, this world's massively overpopulated anyway, and I think you'd admit that most of those people are vegetative—subsistence farmers, primitives of all kinds. They die young, of curable diseases and terrible cus-toms, sometimes of starvation, and it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever to your race, your history, if such people live or die. We try to concentrate on people like that—we really do. Most of the bodies we take are from people who matter not a bit to Earth but they matter a great deal to us. In a sense, we give them purpose." "At the cost of their lives," Parch responded darkly. "This is a war! You'd react the same way and do the same things if you were in our shoes! You know it!"
Parch didn't reply to that because he knew as well as I did that the whole of human history supported the alien's point of view. We really weren't that different after all.
"So those people on the trail and in Skagway and on that ship—they were all expendable?"
Pauley sighed. "Look, I was a—station chief, I guess you'd call it. I've been here a very long time, and I was due to go home as soon as I could break in my relief. That's who I picked up in Alaska—but something went wrong. You know more about that than I do. We got chased halfway across Alaska and the Yukon by you, no matter what tricks we tried. I wish I knew how you did it, I really do. All those we left—well, it was them or us. You'll understand that a body-switching race doesn't face death easily because there's a good chance it won't happen."
Parch nodded at that, and I considered it. A race of body switchers would be potentially immortal, subject only to accidents and acts of violence. Particularly a spacefaring race with access to all the bodies of many worlds. It was a staggering concept.
"Now what happens?" Pauley asked. "You can kill me, of course and I admit the thought terrifies me. But I'm a soldier and a volunteer—I'll die if I have to. You can keep me prisoner, but that won't gain you much, either. I don't mind telling you the general things but there's much, the important parts, no amount of coer-cion can get from me. You can try torture, but I can shut down the pain centers—I have far more control over this body than you have of yours. You can't use drugs—although I'm sure you'll try. All you'll get is a Urulu mind and unless you know Urulu, a language with few common references to yours, it'll get you noth-ing but a lot of bad sounds." "Or I could let you go," Parch said softly. To my surprise that caused the alien to laugh. "Come on, Parch! You and I both know I couldn't do anything now if I wanted to. You have me in your sights. You have some way of tracking me—how I can't imagine. I'm not about to betray my people."
"We have your matrix, you know," Parch said in that same soft tone. The man stiffened. "My ma—" He seemed to collapse, to deflate as if a balloon newly pricked by a needle. "So you've come that far," he managed

weakly.
"You started it, you know," the IMC agent pointed out. I wished I knew what they were talking about.
Pauley seemed to regain a little of his composure. "I suppose we did, although it's hard to believe you're advanced enough to manage it. I wish my people knew. It might change everything. Make us allies instead of adversaries." He hesitated a moment, thinking. "Maybe that's what they are doing here. We thought it was just to try and cut off our body bank, but if they even guessed…" Again a pause, then, "You may be in far more danger than you realize." "If they know—and we have only your word that they even exist—we're already doomed," Parch noted. "I rather suspect they do not know, Mr. Pauley, if you didn't."
"Which brings us back to question one," the Urulu said. "What do we do for now?"
"Well, I can't trust you, of course, for I have only your word on these matters, and you can't trust me, since you can hardly place your faith in my hands childishly. What I think we shall do for the moment is leave things as they are while we get to know each other better. For now, I'm going to release you from this bed, and we have rigged up a small apartment in back, through that door there. It is, of course, totally bugged and moni-tored and is not the world's most comfortable accom-modations, but it should do. Food will be passed in to you. Automatic and human-controlled weapons will be trained upon you at all times, of course, so please keep that in mind. Just consider yourself, well, a prisoner of war."
The man nodded. "I understand." Parch undid the straps holding the alien down and Pauley got up un-steadily, rubbing the places where the tight restraints had cut into him. Finally he got unsteadily to his feet and went over to Parch. "Truce?" he asked, and put out his hand. We all tensed, knowing what Pauley was trying to pull. Parch did not hesitate, taking Pauley's hand and shaking it vigorously, a wide smile on his face. "Now that we have that established, yes, a truce," Parch told him. Pauley looked more than a little astonished and somewhat worried. "The only people I ever knew that were immune are other Urulu, who can consent or not, and our enemy," he said suspiciously. "Which are you, Parch?" For the first time I understood just why Harry Parch was such a terror figure to them. They knew all their own people on our little world, so Parch, who had the power to block a switch, had to be their enemy in hu-man guise. It seemed to me that Parch, too, must have thought of that, perhaps long ago. For a second I won-dered if it might not just be true, but I quickly dis-missed the idea. That way lay madness, and you could be paranoid enough just knowing what I knew. "I'm no alien," Parch assured him. "I was born in this body on this planet, I promise you. I am—a prototype, you might say. A few of us have been rendered immune to you, although at great cost." Pauley just stared at him and I did likewise. "Cost?" The alien repeated. He nodded. "I am totally immune. I am myself—forever. Forever, Pauley. You yourself mentioned the promise of immortality from the process. You can

see, then, why so few working on this project have been willing to take the
cure."
Pauley's mouth dropped slightly, and, for the first time, I understood IMC's problem, why the defense wasn't "perfected" as Parch had said. If we really could learn how to switch bodies then immortality, at least for some, would be attainable. Attainable, yes, like the Urulu -but not for Parch. Never for Harry Parch…
"I must leave you now," the agent told the alien. "However, I'm assigning someone directly to you, to talk to you, discuss ways out of this mess, give us some common ground. I think you two will get along famous-ly—considering you are responsible for her being in the body she's in. Your partner, anyway. Does the prospect interest you, Ms. Goner?" I almost jumped at the sound of my name. Finally I leaned over and keyed the microphone. "There's noth-ing I'd like better," I told them both. Chapter Six
I was escorted by Marine guard back to my room, and I decided to drop in on Dory and fill her in. I went to her door and knocked, finally hearing a muffled ques-tion. I called out who I was and heard the sound of something being pulled back from the door. The motion made me chuckle a bit, and feel a little better, too. I wasn't alone in my privacy demands, it seemed. Finally the door opened a crack and Dory said, "Come on in. I'm not really fit for those gorillas at either ends of the hall." I pushed the door open and walked through, shutting it behind me. She was nude and had a towel wrapped around her hair. The TV was on, and I saw a mirror, scissors, and make-up kit on the bed. It was already getting hard to remember myself in that slight, dark body, and I reflected how odd it was that I'd adjusted so easily to all this. Humans were adaptable animals, all right.
She was extremely thin and quite cute in an exotic sort of way. Although not quite there as yet, you could tell she was going to be an attractive, if small, young woman.
"What've you been doing?" I asked her.
She went over and snapped off the television. "Sitting around, mostly. Watching TV. They got a couple of movie channels here I never saw before—one's all porn. Inter-esting. I been sitting here doing my hair and taking notes for when I can use it properly."
I smiled and took a seat on the couch. "Did you get anything to eat?" "Oh, yeah, hours ago. One of the Marines came by and we went up to the dining hall. The food's not bad, although I have a thing against cafeterias. They got some setup here, though. Bar with dance floor, movie theater with first-run stuff, game rooms—you name it, like a luxury hotel. Swimming pool, jaccuzi, saunas, you name it. Even tennis courts. They live pretty good here, I'd say." "I'll have to see it," I told her, then proceeded to fill her in on my evening. She followed my story with rapt attention, occasionally breaking in with

questions. When j was through she considered it all for a while.
"You know, you sound like you really liked that alien thing," she noted. I shrugged. "I don't know what I think. I can say that I found him reasonable, at least. I don't like the idea of my planet being a body bank for some alien species, but I can understand his point of view without approving. I think, inside, we're more alike—his people and us—than either of our groups wants to admit."
"Or he just understands humans better than we un-derstand his kind," she responded a bit cynically, then changed the subject. "Any idea what happens next to us?"
I shook my head. "Parch said we'd spend most of the day tomorrow taking a battery of tests."
"Tests?"
"Psychological tests, mostly, I think. They want to find out if there's anything wrong with our minds after the switching, how we look at ourselves, the world, that kind of thing."
She nodded. "I guess I understand. The truth is, I've been looking a little at myself lately. I'm not really sure I know myself anymore, if I ever did. I mean, it's kind of funny, but the more I think about all this the less I mind it. Isn't that weird?"
I frowned. "I don't understand what you're saying, frankly." "It's—well, it's hard to explain. I think maybe you'll find out for yourself. But, well, things weren't going right for me. I was pretty screwed up inside, and I didn't really know where I was going, only that I couldn't really go back to my old life, my old friends, be the kind of girl they wanted. It's—well, hard to explain. But life was getting to be such a pisser this wasn't so bad—once you get over the shock. For a day or two I really went off the deep end, particularly with my old self standing there in front of me. It's passed, though. I keep thinking that this was the best thing that could have happened to me—becoming somebody else, that is." She hesitated, realizing she wasn't getting through. I had the impres-sion that there was more to this than she was telling me, some missing piece of the complex puzzle that was Dorian Tomlinson. For my part, I couldn't imagine a nineteen-year-old stunner of a woman with money, brains, and looks having any problems I could recognize as problems. "What about you, Vicki? How are you holding up? I mean, you had a lot more of a change than I did. All I did was lose some height, about six years, and gain reddish-brown skin."
My own sense of loneliness and isolation, of being out of place, returned to me with a vengeance. The interlude with Parch and the alien had allowed me to temporarily push it to the back of my mind, but it never really left, and now here it was back full once again. In a way, I thought, I was worse off than I was before, for the only way I got any release was by pretending I was doing it to somebody else. I felt a need, almost a hunger, to share this feeling with somebody and Dory was, now, closer to me than anyone else in the world. I began cautiously, but eventually it just poured out, my whole life story, my frustrations, the whole thing. "I feel as alien as that Urulu or whatever it is in that

cage," I told her. "Just like I always have. God, Dory! I have such a need to
belong, somewhere, just once."
She came over to me and kissed me softly on the forehead. "Poor Vicki," she sympathized, "you really have the worst of it, I think." She curled up into a cute little ball on the couch opposite me, looking at me thoughtfully. "You know," she said, "it's really crazy. I never knew you as a man and I have a tough time thinking of you in those terms. You're mannish, yes, in your movements and gestures, but not male, if that makes any sense. Part of that's my own conditioning, I guess. I knew a lot of women who dreamed of being men, but you're the first man I know who admitted fantasizing being a woman. It's the old image thing, I guess. Women say they want men to be more emotional, tender, all that—but you got me to thinking that maybe that's all wrong. Maybe men are all those things women are, but it's all locked inside somehow. Maybe we contribute to it—I know many of my friends say they want a warm, tender man but they only go to bed with macho types." I nodded. "That's my bitter experience. Men who really are what our liberated women say they want are often friends, confidants, of those women—but never sexual partners. That was my experience. I always won-dered if the male stereotypes everybody decries—the macho types, that sort of thing—aren't reinforced by women's behavior towards them. A man with normal sexual drives who tries to be a warm, friendly human being to women only to see them march off with what they say they abhor might become more of that macho type himself. In the process he loses his humanity, and maybe his pride, which makes him inwardly bitter, but he does it because he's forced to. And then there were those like me who couldn't lower themselves that way, and so became the permanent outsiders. You have no idea the hurt it causes—and the cynicism it breeds against women in general, fair or not." She considered that. "So you envied women. The pretty ones got all the attention, while the more open economy gave them all equal competition with men in the mar-ketplace and other options. You know, I wonder if we haven't hit on one of the basics of human behavior. Still, you know, it's a man's world in most respects. Men still run the country, most of the businesses, make most of the decisions, make more money and seem gen-erally freer to us women. Male culture dominates so much that the successful businesswomen really get there and stay there by imitating the men, being as aggres-sive, as macho, maybe, as they are."
"We begin as little babies, but there it departs. Everything in a boy's life is competition—winning. Sports. Fighting to establish pecking orders in gangs. Showing off, But, you see, the necessary basic training is there because men can't do anything else. Women now have the same career choices as men, but they can opt not to work, to have and raise babies, their choices clear early in life. Men have only that sense of purpose in the job. Even if they marry, the law gives the man the obligation to support the wife and kids, and in a divorce gives the kids almost invariably to the mother while making Dad pay for it, even if Mom's a cultist murderer with a fifty-thousand-dollar-a-year job while Dad's a kind, devoted, loving ten-thousand-dollar-a-year janitor. He has no rights, only

responsibilities, and no real options. No wonder men die so much earlier than
women."
"It's no picnic as a woman, either," Dory responded. "We get the dolls, the toy stoves, the frilly little dresses. We rarely get the attention our brothers do, the prepa-ration for something big. Then along comes puberty and you get periods that make you feel yucky, and suddenly you can't go to the store alone. If your parents aren't scared for you then you soon get scared yourself. Rape becomes a threat you live with. You envy your brother going downtown alone to pick up something at the store or take in a movie. The boys see you as a thing, not a person, and usually have only one thing in mind. I was seventeen before my parents would trust me out on a date after dark! And most girls have to decide in the college years-career or family. The pressure's big, you get hurt fast and often, and if, like me, you're good looking you're even more limited. It's understood you'll work for a while until you get married and settle down, but aside from modeling or show business or something like that you can get any job—if you want to pay the price for keeping it, and if you don't expect to go anywhere.
"Pretty women aren't supposed to be smart, and they don't have to be. You quickly learn what you're ex-pected to do to get what you want—and you either do it, or don't and go nowhere, or get married and settle down. You get a dozen passes just going to lunch. You wind up a prisoner in your own skin without options at all. You know, I really envied men. I had two older brothers and I really wanted to be one of them. Come and go when you please, free to pick and choose careers, free to be left alone in a crowded party if you wanted to be or go on the make if you felt like it. No period, no danger of getting pregnant, none of that."
I shook my head sadly from side to side. "The grass is always greener. You wonder how anybody winds up happy in this life, or satisfied, or content. "Luck, mostly," Dory decided. "Enough people, enough combinations. But not either of us, it seems." She chuckled dryly. "How did two such miserable outsiders wind up together in this fix?" I looked at her without comprehending. "Surely you were better off comparatively than me. You had a lot more of your life ahead of you, were still far along from making those choices. You had the potential to find hap-piness, a potential I really ended."
"No, Vicki," she responded gently. "It wasn't that way at all." She sighed and was silent for a moment, as if making a decision. Finally she shook her head slightly and mumbled to herself, "O.K. True confessions time, I guess." She looked back up at me. "What I'm going to tell you I've never told a living soul. I just really got to telling myself a few days ago, for real." "You don't have to tell me anything you don't want to." She shook her head. "No, I want to tell you. Particu-larly now." She sighed once more and looked a little thoughtful. "Look, I knew what growing up was supposed to mean, supposed to feel like. I had a lot of girl friends in the neighborhood, and they all had crushes on big pop stars or TV actors, things like that. Even on some local boys. I never did, but I figured I was just more

picky, smarter, or something. I just stuck mostly, with my girl friends, never
really feeling too comfortable around boys. I was a virgin until I was seventeen—that's weird in this day and time, but I never really thought it was until I hit college. I was sure horny all the time—the tension inside me was unbelievable. I tried a couple of boys in college—after all, I had my pick— but it just didn't do much for me. I never got off and hardly even got wet. I got to wondering if maybe most of this stuff I'd heard was bullshit, that women just faked it but didn't really get out of sex what men seemed to. But I could get myself off, and it felt great—but I felt like a freak." She paused here but I said nothing, having a feeling as to the direction she was going. It was most difficult to remember that she'd been in college only a year—and so all this was only fourteen or fifteen months at most, still very fresh to her. Despite the tiny thirteen-year-old body and childish voice she seemed so very much older than nineteen.
"After school ended last May, we had a big party off-campus to celebrate," she continued. "Lots of stuff around. Booze, pot, pills, coke, even opium, would you believe? I never really was much into that whole thing, but it was that kind of party, you know, and I drank a hell of a lot more than I should and did a little hash with the group and the next thing you know I'm rolling around on the floor making out passionately…" She sighed. "… With Mary Forester." I nodded, although it felt very strange to hear it. She looked up at me and there was genuine anguish in her face.
"You see? Well, when I woke up on the floor much later there, I got out fast and went back to my little off-campus apartment. I was sick at myself as well as being hung over. I kept telling myself that it was the booze and drugs, and I had myself halfway believing it, but I didn't want to see any of those people again. I was embarrassed, afraid, I guess. I just wanted to run, get away—not home, either, although that's where I went. My folks were glad to see me, of course, and Mom was trying to fix me up with dates while Dad was talking about my future and all that and all I wanted to do was crawl into a hole and die." "And after a month of hiding out, with your family pressing you to get out, you decided to pack off to Alaska."
She nodded. "Tommy Coyne wasn't at the party—he'd already gone home to Vancouver. I decided to call him, he invited me along on his trip to Glacier, and we managed to con my parents—not hard to do—into be-lieving it was a summer trip for college credit. There really was a course like that so I had all the brochures. Tommy was a nice guy who had the hots for me but we'd never made it. I figured this trip would not only let me sort myself out but maybe reassure me."
"It didn't, though," I guessed.
She nodded grimly. "It was worse. Even worse because he is such a nice guy. I knew it even before. That roll with Mary Forester had unlocked something in me and I found myself looking at women in a whole new way every time I passed them, talked to them, whatever. Look, I didn't want it. God! Here I was a sexy young woman in college with a bright future someplace and then this. Of course, once I came face to face with it I could see that it'd been that way all

along. I just hadn't considered it, hadn't wanted to think about it. And now my
whole world was crumbling around me. Choices closed, options closed. I walked out on Tommy without explaining—I just couldn't think of what to say, how to tell him—and caught the next boat through. I could've flown, but I wanted the trip, the time to think things through and sort things out. All I could think of was that I couldn't tell my parents—they wouldn't un-derstand, couldn't understand. They're conservative, solid, all that. The scandal alone would have killed Mom, at least. But I couldn't just turn my back on it, either. I wasn't cut out to be celibate. I was still trying to make my decisions, find a way out for myself short of suicide, when you showed up and gave me somebody else to think about. You know the rest."
I nodded. "And what about now? Has anything changed for the better?" She smiled thoughtfully. "At first, as I said, I was real upset. I wasn't me any more. I wasn't really free. But where had I been going, anyway? The more I've thought about this, the better it seems, the more like a godsend. I'm somebody else and somewhere else. Cut off from the past completely. No matter what I do now, it's not my old problems. In a way this has solved my problems. I don't know if I'm going to still feel the same sexually or not —I rather think so—but I don't care any more. I can live that life if it's divorced, now and forever, from my family, friends, classmates." She sounded genuinely re-lieved, sincerely satisfied, although it was as if she herself were seeing all this for the first time. "Dorian Tomlinson is dead," she breathed. "I'm free." I looked at her and tried to smile a little. Dorian Tomlinson was dead and she was free, yes, perhaps. But Dorian Tomlinson was also looking at her and sitting very near her this very moment, imprisoning a very different sort of person with a different problem not at all resolved. Chapter Seven
Most of the next day was taken with the testing we'd been told to expect. It was quite involved and elaborate, with all sorts of written exams—some forcing pretty bizarre choices—plus interviews, extensive questions on personal background and attitudes, everything. There were even a couple of very involved I.Q. tests, and those results they were willing to tell us. Mine was 162, down a couple of points from my old tests but well within the margin of error. Dory's was 144, lower than mine but still well above any norms, confirming my opinion of her. She was a little disappointed. "Not quite a genius," she grumped. "The story of my life."
We hadn't had much time to talk to each other, but after it was all over, a little after 5 in the afternoon, and we were in the cafeteria getting a bite to eat, she brought it up briefly.
"You know our talk last night?"
"Uh huh."
"I was pretty free with the same information today. I tell you, Vicki, it's like a gigantic weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I didn't even flinch at the word. I really do think, maybe for the first time in my life, that I like myself, that

I'm at peace with myself."
I squeezed her hand. "I'm glad for you," I told her, and I really was. She smiled back. "I know. The funny thing was, they didn't seem at all bothered by it. Lesbian. Such a weird word. They even told me there might be nothing really wrong at all. One of 'em said it was partly physiological—a function of brain development. I want to find out more about that angle. If I could know that for a fact it would kind of, well, knock out the last guilty stab wound."
I admitted I didn't know much about it, but I pointed out that IMC was probably the greatest assemblage of experts on the brain and human behavior ever assem-bled in one place—certainly assembled with such facili-ties and such a budget. She'd get her answers here.
We had the evening free, and Dory delighted in show-ing me around the luxurious facilities. She was almost a different person, half girl-child, half wise adult, but I knew that she'd probably slept solidly and without real worries or guilt for the first time in a couple of months the past night. I found, too, that she was right about this body I wore. I don't know how many passes men made—I'm sure I missed some of them—but it was not only annoy-ing, I really did begin to feel like some kind of object, a pretty piece of art or sculpture. A part of me wanted to take one of them up on it, to really be a woman, but I wasn't one, not really.
We'd gotten up early and were, therefore, tired early. I had a message from Parch that we were cleared now and that we had tomorrow for the grand tour and then to work. Dory would be placed in a training program for technicians—she'd have her choice of several types—while I'd begin the process of making friends with, and trying to draw out, the mysterious Dan Pauley. I was looking forward to that.
In one way, at least, Dory's own revelations, her own emotional outpouring and honesty about herself to oth-ers, had done me some good. She no longer dreamed of getting this body back, and I was no longer a caretaker. That made things a little easier on me—I could begin to think of this as a permanent condition and make my plans accordingly. Still, I didn't want to think much beyond IMC, at least not right now. In a sense, I was where I would have wanted to be had I known of the place in my old existence. An encounter with aliens from another world was the most momentous act in the history of modern man, one that would forever change the way human beings saw themselves and their place in the universe. I was still a social scientist, and still wanted to be one, and, for that field as well as the others here, this was the place to be. Parch met us after breakfast and took us down to Level 10, lower than we'd ever been allowed before. We were ushered into a large, spacious office even grander than Parch's, and the sign on the glass door read, "S. Eisenstadt, Ph.D.—IMC Project Director." I was a little shocked at that name—hell, I knew Stu Eisenstadt! He'd been on the faculty at Hopkins until mysteriously leav-ing for "government work" four years ago. Now I knew what that work was and where he'd gone.
He came out to meet us and I couldn't help thinking how little he'd changed.

He always reminded me of a fat Albert Einstein, even to a thin, reedy, and
slightly ac-cented voice. He'd been in the United States most of his life but he still couldn't tell the difference between a V and a W. He stopped when he saw us, gave a look of slight distaste, I thought, to Parch, then eyed us, eyes lighting up and a large smile growing under his bushy white moustache. "Vell, vell, vell! You bring me two beautiful ladies!" He was the kind of person who was charismatic in an odd way, exuding a grandfatherly warmth you could feel. He had always been among the most highly re-garded men I could remember by, those who knew him, always doing favors, always willing to listen, sympa-thize, give advice. His father, a Lutheran minister, had died in a concentration camp during World War II and he remained a deeply, if inwardly, religious man, seeing no conflict between his science and his faith. He never pushed it on you; he just lived it and that was far more impressive.
I went up to him and offered my hand. To my surprise he didn't shake it but took it gently and kissed it. "Dear lady," he said softly, and suddenly I was yanked back to the present and my own new form. This wasn't Hopkins, and he was seeing a far different person he'd never known. "Stuart, it may be hard to believe, but inside this body is Vic Gonser, an old colleague of yours."
He grinned broadly, and there was added twinkle in his eyes. "My! Victor! How you have changed!" He turned to Dory. "And you must be Miss Dorian Tomlinson." He bent down slightly and repeated the hand-kissing routine. I cursed myself for underestimating the wily old bas-tard and not remembering that "Project Director" title on his door. His often comic personality masked a bril-liant mind fully as devious as anyone's. Of course, he'd known all about us, who we were, how and why we were here, all the facts well ahead of time.
He gestured to chairs and we all took seats except Parch, who excused himself and left with a few whis-pered words to the professor we couldn't hear. I couldn't help noticing that the others in and around the office kept glancing nervously at Parch, while the security chief was anything but deferential to Stuart. When Harry Parch left, he seemed to take a black cloud with him. Eisenstadt sighed. "Vell, Victor! So—it is a great im-provement, this change in you. I find you positively radiant to look at." He turned to Dory and said with mock seriousness, "He was a bald little schmoo of a man ven he vas a he." She giggled, and I could see she was falling under his spell. "Stuart, I may look different and you the same, but I have to say I'm surprised to see you here—surprised and pleased," I told him. "Project Director, huh?"
He nodded. "This is vere it's all done. Parch, he chases the aliens and keeps us a secret, but here ve find out how they do it, what they do, and open up the frontiers of knowledge. I tell you, Vict—Vicki—that here ve have already taken quantum leaps—quantum leaps!—in man's knowledge of himself, the most important frontier you can imagine."
I was interested. "You've made real progress, then?"

"Wery much so. I'll be glad to explain it to you, but first ve begin at the
beginning, yes? Some old college biology. Ve have not vun brain in our head, you know, but three. Vun, the medulla oblongata, is the first, the basic, the primal brain from our reptilian ancestors. It controls much of our automatic functions. Then there's the cerebellum, our mammalian brain. Body tempera-ture, blood pressure, voluntary muscles, that sort of thing. If you have both these you are perfectly equipped to be an ape, yes? A primitive ape, anyway. Memory data, too, is mostly stored here. But to use it for anything but the most basic stuff you need the cerebrum, yes? In computer terms, the cerebrum is the program-mer, the cerebellum is data storage, and the medulla is the electric company, you see?"
I had to laugh at the analogy, which was simple but apt. I would like to admit that such basic stuff was unnecessary, and it was to me, but I could see that Dory was getting her memory jogged.
"Now, that's a simplified model—extremely so." Stuart continued, "but it's vat ve need for our purposes. Ve will keep to the computer analogy for all this, but it is important you not think of the brain as an integrated whole but a series of assembled components. All right?"
We both nodded.
"All right, then. Ve have known for a long time that the memory process is basically, holographic—you see complete, integrated ideas or images in your cerebrum, not individual data bits. Ve had some success back at Johns Hopkins vith feeding additional information into the brain in such a manner, but it vas child's stuff. But this holographic idea vas a wrong direction, even though it was right. No, don't look at me like that. I mean it. It meant ve didn't ask the right question next."
"And that was?" I prompted.
"How that information is stored rather than how it is processed," he replied. "Look, basically we vould have claimed that what we can now do vas, if not totally impossible, then unlikely in our lifetime. What shocked us all was the self evident fact that complete memory and personalities could be changed with no apparent physical harm. Incredible! Impossible! But a fact. The process itself is so complex that it defies rational expla-nation among my colleagues. The fact is, like gravity and magnetism, ve're not quite sure how it works but ve know it does."
"You can do it, then?"
He shrugged. "Not vat these aliens do, no. They do in moments vat it takes this entire complex of the most sophisticated computers to do. No machines, no vorry, just touch and pfft! It is something inside them, something to do with the nature of what they really are. I think they are some sort of energy creatures, bound together in a complex pattern, that needs a body to vork. They are born in bodies, yes, same as ve, but they are not that body. They are symbiotic organisms inside animal bodies, although they can not exist outside bod-ies at all. So, vat they do naturally ve are not physically equipped to do. But if they can do it to us, there is a vay, vith technology, for us to do it to us." "I'm sitting here listening to all this," I said, "in a body so different from my

own it's incredible, yet it's still hard to believe."
He nodded. "I know, I know. I don't believe it myself sometime. But, let's make a try at it, yes? Let's start by saying that the brain is everything. The most incredible, complex, and vonderful computer ever designed. It is made up of cells called neurons that are so densely packed that there are one hundred thousand of them in a square inch! And interconnected by ten thousand miles or more of nerves. The whole brain contains over ten trillion neurons—a staggering number, bigger than ve can really conceive. So much ve don't live long enough to fill it all up.
"But the brain is a prisoner, you see, an isolated thing with no sensations, not even pain. It is totally input-dependent for its information, and this input comes from everyvere else in our bodies—eyes, ears, nose, throat, and the nerve cells that cover our bodies inside and out. It can be fooled—that is the basis of hypnosis. If it can be convinced by its receptors, its input, that something false is true, it accepts it. It has no independent vay of checking out that information." I glanced over at Dory and saw her rapt attention. Stuart was a good teacher, and he was obviously relish-ing the role once more. "Now, input—sensory data, whether it be light, shape, color, anything—is sent to the brain and routed to the proper place for it," he continued. "It indexes by area. There's really no difference in the neurons, but our genes set up a pattern, a matrix if you will, that the brain follows as its own unique coding and indexing system. Evolution, in other vords, produced an incredibly effi-cient indexing system. Each individual matrix is unique, like fingerprints, and so our first problem is how to discover how the brain indexes for each personality—their identity matrix, you might call it. Ve do this by a sophisticated probe—actually millions of tiny energy probes—that finally find the right place and are able to plug in, as it were, to the individual's brain. The process is new—invented here—and quite complex."
"You don't have to shave the head and drill, then?" Dory put in. He chuckled. "Oh, no. At the start, yes, but no more. It is necessary only to establish a direct, electrical connec-tion to the brain. The Urulu, they do it at almost any set of nerve ends in the body, but ve believe there is actual entry by the Urulu organism along the nervous system and into the brain. Ve based our own work on that hypothesis and it vorked. Our computer system and probes is the mechanical replacement for the organic, as it were, Urulu." "But you said each matrix was unique," I pointed out. "So how can you replace one pattern for another?"
"Veil, ve start by shooting tremendous amounts of stimuli into the cerebrum directly. You say 'name' and your name is brought forth into the cerebrum. The com-puter seizes on that and follows it back, and so on. But after a vile it can ask questions far faster than ve, and it asks millions of them per second. Ultimately it learns the code, the matrix, for the information center and can track down miscellaneous material until it has complete access to memory storage. It generally needs an external stimuli—like us asking questions—to start, then it takes over, and, at computer speed, it still takes twenty or more minutes, sometimes longer, to completely map a matrix. At the end it is just recognizing

the existence of data, of course, not caring vat that data is."
I was starting to feel a little uneasy about what he was saying. The idea of mapping the memory, the very core of being, of an individual like Rand McNally did roads was unsettling.
"Now, let's go back to the brain itself," Eisenstadt went on. "Although retrieval is holographic, storage is not really so. The hologram is constructed in the cere-brum from retrieved data. How is that data stored? Vell, all the input, all the information from your senses, goes to the cerebrum—but not as you perceive them. All external stimuli are instantly converted into brain language—and that brain language is chemical in na-ture. But there are two languages. One, the holographic one, is transmitted to the brain. There it is broken down into bytes of information and recoded. Each byte becomes a synapse, a chemical messenger that is hustled along and routed by a tiny electrical impulse. Each little messenger gets to the brain where neurons route it, according to the matrix, to its proper place. When it gets to that proper place the individual neuron in charge, as it vere, make a tiny copy in its own individual language. All this at incredible speed, you understand. Like trillions of tiny chemical tape recorders, infinitely specialized, who record the message ven the chemical messenger runs past its little recording head. "Ven you remember something, or use something, or need to retrieve something, then the command is sent out from the real 'you'—your cerebral cortex, or com-mand center—and, instantly, the little bits of informa-tion that apply rush back with copies of the information needed—copies, note, the original stays there—where the cerebrum reintegrates this information into a holographic picture. An idea. A memory. You name it. Natu-rally, the information that is most frequently used is easiest to get at. The less it is used the more difficult it is to get at that information—you 'try to remember' but can't, quite, because you have had no need for it for so long the track is overgrown with veeds. It has to be this way. Most information you get from cradle to grave simply isn't needed or relevant, no matter how big it vas at the time, and it is stored avay in the cranial closet, so to speak, to make room in the more efficient areas for more pressing stuff. Once out of the main matrix and off in that closet, it becomes hard to find, like any attic overfilled with unused and unvanted stuff, becoming even harder as you grow older as those closets fill with all the junk. That's why much of the brain appears to be doing nothing and ve don't even miss some of that stuff if it has to be removed, say, in an operation." "Does the brain ever—erase?" Dory asked hesitantly. I got the impression she was a bit unsettled by all this, too. "Oh, yes," he replied. "Sometimes it's accidental. Sometimes it's the result of an injury—repairs inside the brain may require it. Self-repairs, I mean. In fact, some of it is automatically erased very qvickly. Vy should it bother to keep instructions it gave to the gastrointestinal tract for digesting a specific meal when you vere three? So, after a decent interval, it erases and generally keeps this sort of expendable information in one area for con-stant reuse. So, to sum, the neurons store the informa-tion, the synapses feed the input to the brain, copy and transmit stored input, and erase. They also do much more, of course—they

create enzymes that do different things in and to the brain and the like in
response to stimuli."
"That explains the brain in layman's terms," I agreed, "but not how the Urulu swap minds."
"Ah, the Urulu. Vell, vat they do seems to go something like this. By simple touch they are able to plug into anyone's nervous system the same as our computer. Automatically, in no more than a few seconds, they are able to do vat ve vith our huge computer take half an hour or so to do—get a complete picture of your matrix, and, as such, know exactly vere and how your informa-tion is stored and processed. And they know instinct-ively what to ignore—the automatic functions, for example. Then they are able to order the neurons to disgorge this information and it flows in an electro-chemical rush to the point of contact and from there to the Urulu brain. The same thing happens to the other matrix, which flows, simultaneously, in the opposite direction. The amazing thing is not only is the exchange complete in both directions, without disrupting the body functions, but it is accompanied by a 'carrier' signal, as it were, which is the exact opposite of the information being extracted. In other words, the neurons receive a signal that is absolutely complimentary to the chemical code they already are storing—in effect canceling it out. The effect is that each brain rearranges itself into an exact chemical copy of the other. Not a hundred percent, mind you—memories, personality, yes, but not vat is necessary to keep the body going, to manage the unique physical body into which it is now placed. Vether this is an actual transfer of information or vether this is simply a rearrangement is something ve don't really understand yet, although ve tend to think it is a rear-rangement rather than an actual exchange considering the speed at vich it is done. If memory, personality, whatever is chemically stored, then prior information is duplicated by the other brain and then totally erased in the original by giving such commands to the cerebral cortexes of each brain and a channel through which the information needed may be exchanged." "Then—I'm not really Victor Gonser at all," I said, feeling a little hollow and distant. "Dory's mind just thinks it's me. And that Indian girl, whoever she was, just thinks she's Dory."
Stuart shrugged. "If all that vas you, your id, ego, superego, all the memories and bits of information that went into forming them, your identity matrix, in other words, is duplicated exactly—vat is the difference? I think of it as an exchange of souls in a marvellously mathematical way." "These chemical messages—you already said false ones could be sent and that total erasure was possible," Dory put in, thankfully changing the subject. "You also said that the computer can figure out our entire filing sys-tem. Does that mean what I think it means?"
"If you are thinking vat I think you're thinking, then, yes. An unforseen side product, but a revolutionary dis-covery. In its own vay the equivalent of atomic energy—with the same potential both vays." I suddenly felt very stupid. "What are you two talking about?" "Selective memory," Dory responded. "If that com-puter tells you you're Joan of Arc you'll set the fire yourself."

"It is a fact," Stuart admitted. "Ve can read out the mind and record it, even
store it like Beethoven sym-phonies are recorded. Feed it into any mind. It's still very primitive right now, and there are too many risks to try it on humans, but it is coming, it is coming!"
I felt sick. "And anything that can be digitally recorded can be selectively doctored."
Stuart nodded, apparently not bothered by that. "Oh, yes. Ve have high hopes that ve can bypass brain disor-ders, cure cerebral palsy, for example, epilepsy, and other such things. Do away vith dyslexia. Perhaps, even-tually, be able to order cancer cells to self-destruct. The potential for ending much human misery and suffering is unlimited!"
I grew increasingly uneasy, and I could see Dory was the same way. "You could also turn an entire popula-tion into loyal, loving, obedient slaves." The scientist shrugged. "Like all discoveries, the po-tential for abuse is awesome. It is our responsibility, our trust, to see that it does not happen. Fortunately, ve have much time—the technology involved in such a thing is not yet here, and, for now, ve alone have it. But ve cannot unlearn vat ve have learned, cannot undo vat ve have done any more than the atomic genie could be pushed back into the bottle once released. It is a grave responsibility, but it is no more grave than other great discoveries of mankind. Ve have the responsibility vether ve vant it or not, and, as always, ve puny little fallible humans have to deal with it. Considering how far ve have come to now, I think ve vill." An assistant brought Stuart and Dory tea and me coffee. I couldn't help thinking about the potential, and wondering about the possibilities of abuse. I looked around at the people at IMC and thought about the others I'd met. Except for Parch they seemed very ordi-nary people, middle-level bureaucrats in administration, technicians and scientists and their families as well. Not evil threatening people. Not headed by Stuart, particu-larly, one of the finest men I'd ever known. Still, they would worry me, particularly Parch. In the hands of such a man as he, the pontential was horrible. It was Dory who shifted subject again, possibly partly in self-defense against thinking too hard on what was bothering me. "What about genetics?" she asked Stuart. "I mean, you can't change the genetic code when you change this information in the brain." "I'll admit that is a puzzle," Eisenstadt admitted. "There are so many things about a person that are determined by his physiology and science is no closer to solving the heredity-versus-environment debate now than twenty years ago. Perhaps people like you vill eventu-ally solve the puzzle, although there is debate even on that. After all, your personalities were shaped by your original genetic and other makeup and might by this time be too fixed to be measurably changed. Maybe not. If you find out vill you tell us?" We both laughed, and Dory kept to this point for a reason I slowly started understanding.
"What sort of things are you certain are genetically caused?" she asked him. He shrugged. "Studies vith tvins have shown a little but it is more puzzling than before. They make a great thing about identical twins separated at birth

using the same shaving lotion—but might that not be because their taste and
smell are the same so the same stuff vould be pleasurable? Ve don't know." "What about—sex?" she pressed, becoming obvious. "Sex is obviously genetic in the most basic sense," Stuart replied, at first missing the real question. "The degree of sex and of sexual response is partly a matter of enzyme and hormone production, stuff like that. You can be oversexed or undersexed, for example, even in the drive, as determined by your genetic make-up. Beyond that, though, so many cultural factors go into it that it is hard to say. Victor, here, vas Victor for thirty-five years and is now Vicki, but not in the usual sex-change vay. Fully functioning, vith all the body's genetic drives, hormones, that sort of thing. I vould suspect the head to respond to vomen and the body to men, vich vill give you the life of a real svinger for a vile—but you vill settle down into vichever pattern body and mind com-promise on, feel best vith, over the long run."
"That was my body," Dory pointed out.
"I'm avare of that."
"Doc—I was a lesbian."
That stopped him, but only for a moment. He thought over the possiblities, then said, "Veil, that puts a little more of a strain on Vicki, here. There is a tiny area in the cerebellum discovered in 1980, a small group of neurons that is normally sexually consistent—it looks vun vay in men, the other in vomen. It came out of studies to see if the male and female brain differed in any significant vay. Now, this is not the cause of all homosexual tendencies—much of it is psychological and environmental. But it has been found that some vomen have the male configuration—not many, but some—and some men have the female. Who knows vy? A mistake in genetic coding? A mutation? Something the mama drank? Extreme sexual mirror-imaging vas found in hermaph-rodites, but a small but important percentage have the thing tilted a bit towards the wrong sex, if you'll par-don me. It might cause extra—complications—for Victor if that body's sexual identity center is more male than female. Only time vill tell—or, of course, ve could do a computer scan and find out." "You mean hook me up to your computer? Uh uh, Stuart. Not now, anyway. I've had enough fooling around with my mind for the time being." He chuckled softly. "Come. I vill show you the heart of IMC and maybe you vill not feel so bad."
We got up and left the office, going down a hall to a set of large double doors with all sorts of security warn-ings on them. He ignored them and held the doors for us to pass inside.
The room was huge, looking more like the control center for some space system than anything related to biology. An orange wall-to-wall carpet went around the floor in a semi-circle, but it was almost obscured by the computer terminals, control centers and chairs, that made it seem like Mission Control. They all faced a raised semicircular platform carpeted in light green, on which sat two large chairs looking like nothing so much as dental chairs with large beauty-parlor hair dryers attached. Enormous masses of cable ran from the chair assemblies into the floor.

"The soul of IMC," Stuart told us with obvious pride.
We walked onto the orange-carpeted area and Stuart went over to a large and forbidding looking console. He opened the top and reached down, removing from it a ruby-colored translucent cube perhaps a foot square. He handed it to me and I looked at it curiously. It weighed no more than two or three pounds at best. I handed it back and asked, "What is it?" "A digital recording module," he replied. "Inside it can be stored over ten trillion bytes of information. In a sense, a couple of these can hold the sum total of a human brain's knowledge and experience. It is a revolu-tionary vay of storing information and the key to our progress here. The equivalent of tventy thousand kilometers of magnetic tape fifty centimeters wide. Two or three of these, in the computer system, and ve can record and play back a human mind." I shivered. "Then you can actually remove informa-tion from the brain, like they can?"
He nodded. "Yes, yes, ve can do that. It is simply a matter of applying the correct electrical signal at the correct point in the cerebral cortex. Ve can now get a readout."
I looked down at Dory and thought that her expres-sion must be matched by my own face. "So can you—switch minds?"
"Ve are not that far along yet, although ve are very close. So far ve have managed first to copy someone's identity matrix and store it on the cubes. Then it was but a short step to learning how to erase as ve recorded. Ve can take it out and erase now, and put it back in the same head from which it vas took, vith no apparent loss. In fact, ven ve do that the person always remembers much more of their life, seems to think a bit more clearly. Remember—ve are cleaning out not only the active memory and personality but also that attic full of forgotten junk, opening new pathways to it and for it. It becomes accessible again. But only for a vile. Since it vas stored there in the first place because it vas no longer needed, it fades with disuse, in a veek or two at the most." I nodded to myself. "Yes, I remember the first time I got switched. I seemed to remember things back to babyhood and everything seemed so crisp and clear, like my I.Q. had been doubled. But it faded." "Can you—put people back into other bodies?" Dory asked hesitantly. He saw her concern and smiled reassuringly. "No. Not yet. Not really, anyvay. Tolerances are too critical. Ve just don't know enough. There is anyvere from a ten to fifty percent insertion loss, or the information is there but can't be gotten at. The roadblock seems to be the brain vaves, the woltage inside the head. It, too, is dif-ferent for different people and the old values won't do since that would interfere with the autonomic functions of the body ve don't touch. The values of the new body aren't matched to vat the old matrix system is used to. It appears there is an almost no-tolerance compromise between vat the input needs and the new body requires that is unique with each individual. But the Urulu find it—find it and automatically match it in moments. Vun day, perhaps soon, ve vill find it, too."
And, somehow, I knew he would. I shuddered at the idea of an "insertion loss" of ten to fifty percent. An I.Q. 150 might become a below-normal I.Q. 75.

Stuart had to go about his business after that, and we left him in the
command center of IMC. We headed for the cafeteria, although neither of us felt like eating. I, for one, felt the need to sit down and get control of myself for a few moments.
"It scares the hell out of me," I told Dory. "Right now he can read us out and store us in little cubes. You know it won't be long before they'll know how to switch. Considering how far they've come in such a short time now, it could be today, or tomorrow. Certainly it's a matter of months, not years. And all that will be put in the hands of men like Harry Parch. Worse. Can you imagine them with a bunch of bodies, clearing them out, then feeding Parch's recording into all of them? An army of Harry Parches. He wouldn't need his makeup kit any more." "It's worse than that, if you remember our earlier conversation with Eisenstadt," Dory replied. "Look, I own—used to own—a good digital tape recorder. Puts the signal on tape as a binary code, millions of tiny dots, each representing a single element of the music. Mine won't edit much—it's a cheap model—but at the store where I got it they had this real fancy kind, the kind professional recording companies and TV companies use. They had a string quartet—four instruments playing together—on tape. They used to show what you could do with an editor by removing one instrument—the violin, say—and replacing it with a piccolo playing the same part. Sounded stupid and weird, but that com-puter tape recorder-editor of theirs could figure out which little dots applied only to violins—even reverb, echo, you name it—then separate it from all the other sounds and replace it."
For a moment I didn't see it, but suddenly it hit me. Holographic memory… That meant that the brain didn't store your name, for example, in a billion places. Inefficient. It stored that in one place and went to it when forming its thoughts. If they learned which little digital dots, which bytes of information, were which, and could locate your name as easily as the musical engineer located Dory's violin, they could replace that information when reading it back into you. Edit your memories.
"You see what I mean," she said gravely. "They could redo everybody. We'd be happy little robots. And Dr. Eisenstadt seemed so nice." "He is," I assured her. "I'm sure he and his colleagues are thinking along the lines he said. Curing disease, treating hopeless mental illness, that sort of thing." "These people—the ones we've met they seem like decent sorts, I guess. They have husbands and wives and kids and many live on the surface, in normal homes, having normal family lives. They join the PTA, play tennis, laugh at comedies, bowl. Am I wrong to be so afraid?" I reached over and squeezed her hand. "No, you're not. History is on the side of your nightmares, I'm afraid. Oh, I doubt if anybody here, even Parch, is acting from selfish, power-seeking motives. Whatever they do with this power they will do for the best of reasons, from the purest of motives. Their psychiatric screening is damned good, as good as for the guys who fire the nuclear mis-siles in case of atomic war—and we've never had one fired incorrectly yet. But good motives don't make ac-tions good. These people aren't monsters or crazy dictator types, they're worse—middle-level government

bure-aucrats and naive scientists. But consider—I'll just bet there is, or soon will
be, a Genetic Research Center that's the equivalent of IMC somewhere. So that IMC and GRC combined can produce the sanest, healthiest, most perfect human specimens government bureaucrats can devise. Perfect people made to order—a glorious ideal. Without hatred, without prejudice, all equal. And all somebody else's idea—and ideal—of perfection." She shivered. "What a horrible idea. Surely there must be something we can do about it."
I shook my head slowly from side to side. "There isn't much. The only thing that might undo it would be the full glare of publicity. And, no matter what Parch said, we're prisoners here, really, Dory. They aren't going to let us out of here until they can be assured of our silence. And as long as they are in a wartime type situa-tion, with everybody concerned with meeting an alien menace from the stars, they'll have a Harry Parch around to make sure nothing gets out." I sighed. "We're in the position of knowing the danger, but we have to sit back and hope somebody else blows the whistle. It's out of our hands, damn it." "At least they aren't there yet," she said, trying to convince herself that there was some light at the end of the tunnel. That very afternoon they put me to work. By this time Dan Pauley had been transferred to a more automated and more secure glass cage, and I was able to work without a lot of gunslingers around. Remote monitoring would stop Pauley before he could do just about anything; a rat caught in a very frustrating trap. This left me with Jeff Overmeyer as the one man always there for my sessions with the alien. Overmeyer was a nice young technician who oversaw the technical aspects of my talks, made certain the recordings were clear and that all systems in the alien's security were working properly. Although officially Parch's man, a security man, he was neither as sinister nor as secretive as his boss and generally tended to be a really nice guy. It wasn't an act, either, and more than once I suspected that the usual government games were being played and that he might be Eisenstadt's man in Parch's orga-nization the same as Parch undoubtedly had people with Eisenstadt's technician crew. Both men were co-equals who often got in each other's way, and both would be always trying to circumvent the other.
As for Pauley, he seemed to enjoy talking, particularly with me, although never about things he didn't want to discuss. Overmeyer assured me that they had already tried the drugs and other tricks short of physical torture on Pauley and found him not only impervious, as he'd said, but infuriatingly amused by their attempts. It was up to me.
Some things I learned explained a little. The Urulu didn't like airplanes, for example. I found it amusing that a race that flew across countless light-years of space was terrified of airplanes, so much so that they'd gone from car to train to horseback to ferry in Alaska rather than easily circumvent Parch by switching bodies se-cretly and taking a plane south. It was an odd bit of alien psychology that helped remind me that this nor-mal, pleasant young man was neither normal nor a man. The best explanation I got was that the normal Urulu form was so different from ours that their normal environment posed its greatest threat in

changes in pres-sure. Although unaffected physically by small changes while in
human form, their inborn alien fear of such a thing was so great they couldn't bring themselves to do it. It was a handy fact, anyway, as Overmeyer pointed out. It meant they didn't have to check airplanes and airports as much, and that a really good test of whether a body was taken over or not might be to take them for a plane ride.
They'd played pressurization games on Pauley here, but it hadn't worked. The terror was so complete that the knee-jerk reaction he had was to pass out cold. Nobody won again.
As to how the Urulu switched bodies, he was no help at all. Not that he withheld much information—he just didn't know. It was like raising your right arm, or blink-ing, or anything else normal—you just did it, that's all. About the Urulu he was no other real help, although he was willing to discuss his enemies, a group that translated out as The Association. The master races of that alliance had apparently developed the technique mechanically, much as IMC was trying to do, and had hit upon our wildest nightmares. It was odd, in fact, how much Dan's description of the Association matched Dory's and my own fears about IMC. Theirs was a race—the original one—that had used the process to create "perfect" people according to an idealized standard. It was a dull, soulless, mechanical society but everybody was happy because they couldn't be anything else, and nobody had any doubts, fears, jealousies, nor love, hate, or any of the emotions we would recognize. Their sole drive, their sole aim, was to bring that driving "perfection" to all sentient races in the universe. They would find a race on a world, study it in cool, computer-like terms, analyze the "imperfections" of the society and the race—and the world—and then slowly, surreptitiously, they would worm their way in, gain converts, create a force of native devotees, and eventually they would gain the seat of power in each and every nation, tribe, you name it. The world, then, could be easily remade.
"That's why the very existence of IMC worries us," Pauley told me. "We don't think they've found it yet, or infiltrated it yet, but it's tailor-made for them to take over. If, of course, it doesn't become a homemade and homegrown version of The Association without their help." That last, I think, disturbed me more than any exter-nal threat. I asked him what his people would do if they discovered IMC. "Destroy it, certainly," he responded instantly. "But not the minds who created it. Just the physical plant.
With that done, they would then try to enlist the Earth as an ally against The Association. Space and potential immortality in exchange for fighting a war Earth had a stake in winning."
"That didn't seem your direction as of Alaska," I pointed out coolly. He shrugged. "Alaska was another era. If my people now knew just of IMC and how much progress it had made they might well destroy the entire planet, writing it off as lost to The Association." That was a chilling thought. "So we have the coopera-tion of the dead? Some alliance!"

"No, no! You must understand Earth, as I said, is very peculiar. Evolution
went a wildly different way here. That's why we needed the bodies and had to come all this way to get them. Maybe ten, fifteen planets out of tens of thousands, went your way. There is some, well, prejudice there, of course. The belief that such a world and such a race can't develop the kind of human quali-ties we see as valuable. You see, the mother race of The Association was more like yours than ours. My people would have to be convinced that Earth wouldn't inevi-tably take The Association's path. Soulless, we call such races. But I've been here. I know you're capable of the kind of qualities we value so highly—individuality, love, warmth, feeling, caring for one another. They looked and saw only the bad points—the terrible hatred and prejudices on such petty grounds, the dehumanizing philosophies, the cruelty and hatred and suspicion. If my people could be convinced that you are not on one side of the ledger but poised on the line, able to go both ways, they'd fall over backwards to make sure this planet developed its true potential for greatness." "And who will convince them?" I asked skeptically. "You? If we let you go will you usher in this great new era? Even if you could, why should we believe you? Why trust you to do that?"
He just shook his head sadly. "No, I don't know if I could convince them. I'm not sure how to do it in the limited amount of time we'd have to make a decision. Even if I'd get listened to by somebody who could make such a decision." He hesitated, then concluded, his tone one of total defeat, "And I have no way at all to show that I'm not a dirty villain lying through my teeth. That's what's so frustrating, Vicki—knowing what has to be done, and knowing that you can't do a damned thing about it, not even knowing if you could if you had the chance."
I nodded sadly. I knew exactly what he was feeling. It was close enough to home I felt more comfortable chang-ing the subject. "Dan—why do your people need live bodies at all? Why wouldn't cloning do as well?"
"It won't work," he told me. "Don't ask me why but it won't. An experienced, complex mind just doesn't mesh right with a cloned body that has no history of its own. If you raise the clone as a total individual, yes it'll work—but not an unused mind grown for that pur-pose." He looked apologetic. "When you think of Earth people the way most Urulu do, as little more than com-plex animals, it's easier just to nab bodies as you need them." Every day I was continually fighting off men's ad-vances. I began to realize what Dory meant by beauty being a curse. All men seemed to think they were God's gift to women, none seemed to think I could do anything for myself, and, since very few knew that I was not born in this body, all assumed I was "making it" regularly with somebody or other. Trouble was, this damned body looked good in a potato sack.
I found what relief I could in masturbation but couldn't bring myself to anything more overt, although I hardly lacked for opportunity even with a few of the women around, lesbians themselves. They were more tolerant of such things at IMC, where the brain was the object and the subject. Ultimately, though, I

knew I would have to face up to the problem, since my body was more and
more insistent and had far greater needs than my old one had, and, of course, I badly needed some sort of companionship in this cold, underground city. Dory was around, of course, but not much after a while, as her training program took her to far distant levels and re-quired a lot of practice and studying. Besides, I told myself, she'd found her new life, her new start. I still felt that I owed her, but she didn't necessarily feel the same towards me, and I couldn't blame her. I was also, now, experiencing menstruation, and it still shocked me every time my "period" came. It was messy, smelly, uncomfortable, you name it, and every month on the first day of it I got the most horrible, debilitating cramps I'd ever experienced. The IMC med-ical staff prescribed some stuff which helped enormously, but I was still experiencing the underside of what it was like to be a woman, and the physical discomfort and mental shifts were far greater than I'd ever realized from the viewpoint of being a man. I was pretty well reconciled to being in this body the rest of my life, though. That, at least, grew easier every day. I no longer awoke with a feeling of surprise at who and what I was, and I'd long ago gotten used to the bras, the odd feeling of women's undergarments, not to mention all the cosmetic stuff, hair care, and the rest. Real high heels were still a bit beyond me, but I was practicing, in the private places, and I was also con-sciously studying and imitating women's mannerisms, ways of walking, that sort of thing. I was a long way from being completely natural, but it was coming. I wanted to fit. And that, finally, brought me to the decision point. I had to know about myself, and that meant taking the plunge. There was no question as to who would be the first experiment. Jeff Overmeyer had been the closest thing I had to a confidant and friend since Dory'd gotten so busy, and he was young, experienced with women, knew my background but didn't mind, and had never once pushed himself on me or treated me as other than an equal. I liked him a lot, even if I didn't fully trust him, and although I hesitated for weeks I was the one who finally made the first move.
After, coming back to my quarters, I saw that Dory was still up and went in to tell her.
"Well, you don't look any worse for wear," she noted. "What did you think?" "I don't know what I think," I told her honestly. "It was—well, strange. On the one hand, I'm now convinced that women get a little more out of it than men. A man's only got one place to feel it, while we've got four." "We," she noted. "You are adjusting."
I shrugged. "On the one hand, it felt really good. On the other, well, it felt wrong. I kept wanting to be the aggressor, for one thing. And while the preliminaries were fine, during intercourse I kept wanting to stick it in, to feel that total sensation, and instead I had a whole different set of feelings. Not unpleasant, in any way, but not what I knew he was feeling. Put it down to mixed reviews, I guess. I haven't gone sour on the deal, although the idea of a blow job is pretty repulsive."
"Did he come?"

"Yes."
"Did you get off?"
I hesitated, then replied, "No."
She just nodded for a moment, then asked, "Did he use a condom? Or have you started on the pill?"
I felt a slight shock go through me. "No on all counts," I said uneasily. "Jesus! How far along are you? How long since your last period?" "I thought a moment. "Two weeks. I'm about mid-way." "Holy shit! You took a chance there! Or do you plan to have his baby?" I just sat there, stunned, for a bit. It simply hadn't occurred to me. Dory whistled. "You're really in the club now. You got two weeks or more of heavy sweating to do. As much as you hate your period, you're gonna be praying for it to come. And if it doesn't, and the feds don't do abor-tions here, you're gonna go through more than I ever did. Now you're really gonna find out what it's like to be a woman."
Chapter Eight
The next three weeks were among the most misera-ble of my life. I grew increasingly nervous and irritable, and even throwing myself into the reports and mounds of paperwork on Pauley and the Urulu didn't help. I screwed up form after form, couldn't type worth a damn, and every little thing made me furious where in other circumstances I'd have laughed them off. I was a holy terror to be around and I knew it, but I just couldn't help it. I certainly didn't blame Jeff Overmeyer. In fact, I didn't even tell him, although he didn't quite escape blame in my mind. I was irritated with myself, of course, for not thinking things through, and the primary blame was mine, but there seemed something unfair about the fact that he had assumed that I had taken precautions rather than think along those lines himself. Score another one culturally for men, I thought sourly, realizing that, as a man myself, in my very infrequent sexual acts not once had I considered any kind of male birth control. Dory tried to cheer me up by noting how much against the odds any intercourse leading to pregnancy was, but I was sure that the venerated Murphy's basic law would apply. When I was a week late, I got one of those home pregnancy test kits from the pharmacy and tried it, only to get some chemical confirmation of my worst fears. I was pregnant.
The very news, knowing for sure that the worst had happened, calmed me a bit, since, at least, it outlined a series of actions. I knew from the start that I wasn't ready for this sort of thing, not yet, anyway, and that left abortion as the only option. The trouble was, the medical facilities at IMC were entirely governed by government regulations, and while they see-sawed on the abortion question and had for many years they cur-rently didn't allow it in government facilities except to save the life of the mother. I was furious at this—they didn't have to carry the kid, let alone bear it under these circumstances—but they wouldn't let me take the only obvious way out. There seemed a particular irony

to my problem, since we were of undetermined status (although officially on the
government payroll) at IMC and it had been many months since either Dory or I had seen the sun. I wasn't about to take this, though, and finally confessed the problem to Jeff.
He arranged an appointment with Harry Parch. I'd seen almost nothing of the man since the first few days at IMC, and I'd had the impression that he'd been away more than here which suited everybody just fine, but walking into his office once again I found him the same cool fish, only more cruel and infuriating than ever. "So you got knocked up and you're stuck," he said with a trace of amusement. I grew furious at his tone and felt myself becoming flush with anger, yet I held it in. No matter what kind of slimy eel the man was, he was the only one who could help.
So instead of yelling at him, I just replied, "I'm in trouble, I have a problem, and my status here keeps mefrom resolving it. I'm asking—pleading—for your help. It's only a problem because of your goddamned govern-ment restrictions." He nodded. "I'll agree that the situation is compli-cated beyond normal bounds. Just what do you want me to do about it? I can't order the clinic to ignore those policies—the folks that slap them on pay our bills and our salaries. Frankly, my influence just doesn't extend into the medical field." "I know that. They already explained that to me. But we're in Nevada, a state with liberal laws on almost everything. I've talked to several women here, and they tell me there are abortion clinics in Las Vegas." "I thought it was something like that." He sighed. "I don't mind telling you that you present me with a real problem, since you certainly know too much at this point for true security's sake." He paused, hands to-gether, thinking it over. Finally he said, "However, I can sympathize with your situation. If it were strictly up to me, there'd be no problem. I doubt if you could do much harm anyway, unless you ran into some Urulu. You're too trusting, too much of an idealist. Tell you what, though—I'll pass this on to the full Directorate of IMC, which includes myself and Dr. Eisenstadt, and recom-mend we allow it. It could be a little while, though, so you'll have to just grin and bear it until then. Everyone's not here right now and I have to leave again shortly for Washington." I had a sinking feeling. "How long?"
He shrugged. "As soon as possible. That's all I can promise." "It'll have to do," I agreed, resignedly. I had, naturally, talked all this over with Dory, and she seemed interested in the idea of me getting out, however briefly. "Look, I've been in lots of places you haven't," she told me. "I told you about some of the things I've seen." She had been giving me regular reports, since my own areas of IMC were now routinely familiar but off the beaten track. It was clear that IMC was experimenting on human beings, starting with some terminally ill vol-unteers from various government hospitals. Close to death and without hope, these people had allowed themselves to be placed in the two sinister chairs downstairs. Early results, rumor said, had been very encouraging. Finally some volunteers who were themselves on the project had been

tested—with horribly mixed results. Bright young men and women who now had
pieces of themselves missing, muddled, or scrambled, now kept around in whatever menial tasks they could do until the bugs were worked out. Eisenstadt, it had been said, opposed the experiments at this point but was overruled by the Pentagon bosses in Washington who were desperate for results. Now he was working eighteen-hour days and seven-day weeks to break the puzzle, because, of course, those damaged people had had their "identity matrices" recorded prior to the experiment. He was determined to restore them. It rang true to me, first because it sounded like Stuart, and also because the pressures would be mounting. From my security contacts, mostly through Jeff, I had learned of some independent confirmation that a second alien group might well be operating and that the Urulu story might not be just a common bluff. If the Urulu scared them, The Association practically terrified them, not just because of its philosophy (since we had no real way of knowing if the Urulu were any better) but because it represented Earth as a potential battleground between two superior alien forces and technologies, helpless to do anything about it. The pressure to crack the last bits of the identity matrix puzzle would be enormous.
That they would do it neither Dory nor I doubted. But when they did—what would they do with it, these faceless, nameless Pentagon bosses? It made some sort of public disclosure even more imperative. Time passed, though, with my own problems taking on more urgency than the larger, global picture. If they went too long without a decision, I might have to have a far more dangerous and drastic type of abortion and that scared me most of all. I began to think that, in spite of everything, I might have to bear the child.
Nine weeks after that fateful intercourse I finally got a summons to Parch's office once again. He looked tired and haggard and not at all in the mood for trivialities like me. Still, he said, "All right. They approved it. We’ve made an appointment for you at one of these places for one tomorrow afternoon, and will, of course, deduct the considerable cost from your account here. Obermeyer will drive you there and stick with you. It's almost a three-hour drive, and who knows how long there so we've approved your staying at a motel in town for the night, then driving back in the morning. I picked Overmeyer because he's at least partially responsible for this, but it'll be his head if anything, and I mean anything, goes wrong. His and yours, too. Understand?" "I understand," I nodded glumly.
"Oh—the motel's on you, too. We'll pay for the gas." "Thanks a lot," I muttered sourly, and left him. I met Dory for lunch—she was now working in one of the computer centers as an operator, seemingly enjoy-ing it, although she had some problems with everyone taking a thirteen-year-old kid seriously as a co-worker—and told her the news.
She brightened at the news I was getting out. "Look," she whispered, her tone becoming somewhat conspira-torial, "while you're there you can get word out."

I was startled. "To who? And how? I'm not going to be alone—except for,
well, you know… "
"You've gotta know somebody's home phone number. tend a telegram by phone and charge it to that number."
I considered it. It actually sounded plausible. My own old number would, of course, have been long disconnected, but there were a number of people whose numbers I knew and who wouldn't even notice such a charge on their bill. "But who?"
She thought a moment. "How about Hari Calvert?" I thought about it and the more I thought the more sense it made. Calvert was the biggest syndicated muck-raking columnist in Washington. He'd sell his soul for a story like this if he hadn't already sold it long ago—but once he had it he wouldn't let go. And he was listed, so they could phone in the telegram without my having to give specific addresses.
Still, I was extremely nervous about the abortion and this only doubled my anxiety. Yet, the abortion might disguise my actions, and it was worth a try. That was all I could promise, I'd try.
I won't dwell on the ride into Vegas in the scorching sun, nor the abortion experience, except to say that Jeff seemed as worried and depressed as I was, so there was little conversation, and the clinic was the most dehu-manizing cattle barn I'd ever been in, with loads of miserable looking women, mostly teens it seemed, sit-ting around waiting to be called. The experience itself was administered by doctors who had the same regard for you as they did for a piece of meat and it was painful and horrible to undergo, and more of a shock to my nervous system than I'd expected.
It was also, in a more personal way, very depressing. No matter what my liberal feelings on abortion, they'd sprung from the viewpoint of being a man, one who would never have even the threat of undergoing one himself and not the slightest idea of what it was like. And, somewhere deep inside me, I realized I'd always bear the cross of the action, always feel like I'd killed, if not someone else, then at least a little part of me. Jeff was solicitous and left me alone when I wanted to be. We were registered in as "Mr. and Mrs. Jeffrey Overmeyer" which, I supposed, was only fitting. It was odd, somehow, that the most abnormal combination of circumstances imaginable gave such an air of total so-cial normalcy. Still, he left me alone in the room to sleep a little—I was pretty shaky still and hadn't slept at all the night before—and, there I was, alone in the motel room with a motel phone.
I admit I lay there on that bed staring at that phone, knowing what I had to do but also knowing that if I waited much longer, Jeff would return and my chance would be gone.
Finally I got up the nerve to do it.
I charged the telegram to my father's law firm. Although he was long dead the firm continued and even prospered and it'd never much changed its number. I took a chance in identifying myself as George Lloyd's secretary, since it'd been long enough she might not still work there, but they took the message and didn't

seem to have any problems.
I sent, "Top secret government mind control project well underway in Nevada desert near Yucca Flat. People held virtual prisoners to security there." I didn't sign it, of course.
But it was done—and now it was up to Hari Calvert. I had barely finished when the key rattled in the door and I almost jumped back into bed as Jeff opened it. The initial scare was followed by some relief—if he were this close he couldn't have been overhearing me at the switchboard, and if he were lurking just outside he would have come in earlier. He brought the local papers and seemed totally free of suspicion. "How are you feeling?"
"Much better," I told him, and I was, although a bit weak. "I feel starved, though. What time is it?"
He looked at his watch. "About seven thirty." I got up, and found myself slightly dizzy. "Umph. Still a little weak. They said it was all in the mind, though, so I guess my mind decides what's important. What's for dinner?"
He laughed, looking relieved. "Glad to see you more like yourself again. Look, there's no room service in this dump, and none of my instructions covered barring the doors. Parch is pretty convinced you could shout to the rooftops `the aliens are coming!' and only get thrown in the asylum anyway. What say we make the most of tonight? Go down to a good restaurant, hit a casino, then get a good night's sleep."
I smiled. "That's the first bright spot I've had in weeks," I told him with total sincerity. "Just let me get dressed."
I dressed quickly, not only because I genuinely was anxious to get out but also because I feared that something would go wrong, that they'd call back and inquire about a telegram or something.
And it was a good night, although I was still feeling slightly weak and it didn't last very late. It was the first time since Seattle, so very long ago, that I'd been out in public, and I was a different person now even if in the same body. It was fun to be out with someone, to walk arm-in-arm down a casino-lit strip, to let go a little and hug him when he hit on the crap table. Being with him I felt very normal and very secure. I was still aware of the heads turning, the admiring glances, but it didn't bother me that night. And, later, in the motel room, he held me when I wanted to be held and we kissed goodnight and I thought that he was probably the only man who had any understanding of me.
I wasn't falling in love with Jeff, and still felt no real sexual passion for him, but I liked him a lot, not just for being a nice person but for understanding. I didn't really know myself yet, or what I wanted or even could be, but I did know that Jeff had brought me, in the worst of circumstances, the closest I'd ever felt to belonging, to fitting in, to being a part of the human race, and I owed him for that.
It almost made me feel guilty that I had betrayed his kindness and trust in me with the telegram. Almost, but not quite. For looming behind Jeff was IMC, and

Harry Parch, and I certainly felt the same about them.
I had taken the risk and done what I could, and I could do no more. It was out of my hands now. But I had some satisfaction in the wording of the message. Parch had been right—had I even mentioned "alien in-vaders" or "body switching" in my telegram it would have been tossed right in the circular file with the other nut cases. But I hadn't. I had lived in and around Wash-ington too long to make that kind of mistake. I had offered instead the irresistible. We had been taken to IMC in July; it was now Febru-ary of the next year and things were still running according to routine. I'd long since finished with Dan Pauley; I had no idea where he was or even if he still was anyplace. I was now working with the computer techs on assembling a basic history and psychological profile of the Urulu and it was proving fascinating to me, although it would probably have driven most peo-ple nuts to go through all that minutiae for some little scrap here and there. Much of what I found confirmed the essentials of Pauley's own statements, although, I had to note, they had all been the most casual, friendly talkers any interrogator would want and yet they'd told precious little anybody wanted to know.
I also turned twenty in February, according to Dory—February 16. Dory remained in the technicians ranks, mostly by choice. She had never had much interest in some grandiose career or the joys of college learning; she was far more practical-minded than I was and found a hands-on job far more satisfying. She'd grown a little, and near the end of the year had begun the final stages of passage into puberty, the change into womanhood bringing out an innate beauty in her.
My telegram had been sent in late October, appar-ently to no avail. I'd lived in some fear of discovery for weeks after, but now my greater fear was that it had either not reached its intended party or had been disre-garded by Calvert's column. All I could tell Dory and myself was that I had tried, done, what I could, and it just hadn't been enough.
It was, therefore, a major surprise late in February when the whole of IMC was abuzz with the news: a big-shot congressman, Chairman of the House Intelli-gence Committee, Phillip Kelleam, was paying us a visit—and, word was, there would be at least one reporter with him. The rumors were soon confirmed as we were com-manded to attend little after-hours seminars by Parch's people on what to say and what not to say, who we could talk to and who we couldn't.
I had continued to see Jeff Overmeyer, although not romantically, on a social basis and got more details.
"Somehow, Calvert—that Washington columnist with spies in every department—got wind of IMC," he told me. "We don't know how, but, then again, it's a miracle something this big has managed to escape the public this long. He dug up enough supporting stuff to make a real stink and threatened to go public with it unless he got the whole story and could be convinced not to run it. That got Kelleam involved, since it's his ass as much as anybody's, and so they're orchestrating this little tour. All Parch wants is for nobody except hand-picked people to say more than polite nothings to them and leave them to

him."
"He'll get that much," I noted. "After all, who wants to be the one that broke the rules who's still here with Parch after they leave? But I think you're blown now Jeff. Even if Kelleam's in on this Calvert won't sit still no matter what bullshit he's fed. If he finds out the truth he'll splash it over the whole world; if he doesn't, he'll mount a massive attack on us as a wasteful extravagance." Overmeyer just sighed. "No, I don't think so. You just don't know, Vicki, what we can now do." He wouldn't go any further, but it worried me. Kelleam turned out to look like everybody's favorite uncle; he was a twenty-four-year veteran of the House and one of its masters, in line, some said, for the Speak-er's chair. I stared at him, going around, shaking hands like anybody here could vote for him, and being so much the saccharine politician that I knew he was anything but what he appeared. He was a damned smart and shrewd political manipulator, a power-lover with guts, and one of the few men who'd know all about IMC. As different as the two men appeared on the surface, if Harry Parch had a friend and soul-mate in this world it was almost certainly Phil Kelleam.
He brought an entourage, of course, mostly bright-looking young men and women, his aides and yes-men whose very souls he owned but who had dreams one day of being at the center of power themselves. How much they knew of IMC's true job was unknown, but, courts or no courts, I bet myself that every one of their phones were tapped, their every waking moment spied upon or monitored by somebody.
Calvert was by himself, nobody else allowed from his side. He looked much older than the little picture they always put with his column and not at all well, but his brown eyes darted everywhere and his expression showed that he was not here for any pleasure trip.
When Parch, Eisenstadt, and another man in a busi-ness suit whom I'd not come across before but who was, obviously, IMC's own chief of administration, Joe Parks, shook hands around with the party, it was Calvert who spoke up.
"I want to know the truth about this place," he snapped to Parch in a somewhat threatening tone. "You have a lot to account for, you know. The budget for a whole nonexistent nuclear aircraft carrier is here and the pub-lic has a right to know how you can float a ship in Nevada." Parch didn't seem at all disturbed. "We'll show you everything," he assured the columnist. "Answer any ques-tions, anything you want. Even give you demonstra-tions. At the end, if you still think this place should see print at this time, we'll do nothing to stop you."
Calvert just nodded dubiously and walked to catch up with the Congressman. From my office I just watched the group fade down the long hall until they were gone.
Something definitely stunk to high heaven, though. The level of cover-up necessary to fool somebody like Calvert just hadn't been done at IMC, and Harry Parch had sounded a little too confident of himself. I began to worry a bit. Would they dare kill Calvert? I hoped not, not only because I'd feel like a

murderer but also because it would mean a sense of power here beyond any in
the country. But, no, I told myself, they wouldn't do it anyway. All you'd need to blow this place irrevocably would be to have Calvert die in the course of its investi-gation, even by the most accidental of causes. I didn't see them again, but Dory did, twice, and what she saw made us both even more nervous.
"I saw Calvert twice," she told me. "Once on the same day you did, then again two days later when they were leaving. It was incredible, the change in him, Vicki. I swear to you that I heard him talking to Kelleam and Parch like old buddies and assuring him that he'd do everything in his power to keep the lid on! Calvert!"
I felt defeated. "You think this is all an act of his, then? That he's really with them."
"He wasn't with them, wasn't acting, when he came here," she responded ominously. "Oh, Vicki, I'm really scared now. I think they've done it—broken the road-block wide open! I think they did what they told him they'd do—show him around, answer every question, and give him a demonstration. I think they demon-strated all right—on him!"
I was wrapping up my work in early March. They seemed quite pleased with it, despite my own estima-tion that it was full of holes in all the important places. We were winding down now, though, and I expected to find out in another few days what my next assignment would be.
I, therefore, wasn't all that surprised late one afternoon to get a summons to Parch's office. Technically I worked in his area, although far removed from his nas-tier jobs, and it would be from him or one of his admin-istrative assistants that I would get my new assignment.
I was, however, surprised to find Dory there, and I got a very uneasy feeling. As I walked into that familiar office I noticed an immediate change. The secretaries and technicians were nowhere about, but present were several well-dressed men who could only be some of Parch's agents. Parch himself looked grimly at us and gestured for me to take a seat. Still, his opening remark was very rou-tine. "You've finished the master report?" I nodded nervously. "It just needs to be correlated and printed out." "That's good, that's fine," he responded. I glanced anxiously at Dory but she had the same nervous look I was feeling and her eyes and expression told me that she had no idea what this was about. Parch leaned back in his office chair and sighed. "Ms. Gonser, Ms. Tomlinson. The time has come to discuss both your futures, I'm afraid. You've been most helpful to us in a number of ways, and I'd like to just pay you off, give you new identities, and be rid of you. Unfortu-nately, I cannot. You have also been a wee bit harmful, I'm afraid, and even if we could overlook or fix that part, neither of you are very trustworthy when it comes to making my job easier. I am charged with keeping this installation secure. I do not believe that this is possible were I to let you go, even if we could, somehow, erase the location of it from your minds."
"I don't know what you're talking about, Parch," I managed, my mouth

feeling suddenly very dry.
He shook his head sadly. "Look, I'll not play games with you, nor can I spare the time in needless cat-and--mouse talks. We know you sent the telegram to Calvert. It was quite a good try, really. We had no idea at the time, but once his people got to poking and probing we managed to get into his files and discover the text of it, then compare it with Western Union. Although it was charged to a Washington law firm—your father's old one, I believe—the official file copy contained the num-ber from which it was placed, That proved to be where, from its date, we already suspected—the Mirage Motel in Las Vegas, Nevada. It was not nice, Ms. Gonser, to abuse our hospitality like that." He had me cold. There was really nothing to say. He turned to Dory. "As for you," he continued, "while we have few places totally monitored on a routine basis, since this place is so large, we did, because of your psychological profile, take extra precautions with you. During your initial medical exam here we placed a tiny micro-miniature transmitter under your skin. It ran down a week or so ago, finally, but we have a nice tape record-ing of your conversations with Ms. Gonser, particularly one just before she went for her abortion." "You bastard," she muttered.
He shrugged off the insult. "Now, even with all that, I wouldn't normally be worried. But, as I said, we can't really remove IMC from your minds, not all the people, physical layout, you name it, unless we induced amne-sia from the point of the final switch on the ferry. That I could do, but it wouldn't mean much to your futures and your life. It simply wouldn't be fair." "Since when has something like fair play ever been a part of your behavior?" Dory snapped, and a little part of me cheered. He sighed. "Look, I'm not the evil mastermind you think me, I assure you—for all the good it does. I do not make the final decisions, although discretion is left to me on how those decisions will be carried out. If it were strictly up to me, I would just let you continue until the time, here, when we know enough to go public and face down our threats. But it's come down to a matter of security. The Urulu were telling the truth, in one regard, at least. They are at war with another alien power and that war is reaching us more and more. Because we lack the defenses we cannot yet meet the threat. The security of IMC is important now first and foremost because either of those alien sides would destroy it in an instant and the warfare would become open and blatant. Millions of lives are at stake, I firmly believe—and in that condition, what can a few individuals count for? Not only the two of you, but me, anyone here, no matter how high and mighty."
"The land of the free and the home of the brave," Dory sneered. Again he was surprisingly defensive. "Yes, it is ironic that we claim to be defending freedom and yet must resort to unfree methods. Still, free has a whole new meaning now. We're talking about the potential for the most absolute form of slavery—tyranny of the mind of every human being on earth by an alien power." He grew quite intense, and I began to think that, perhaps, he really didn't like all this. "I believe that what we are doing here will determine forever whether or not the human race can be free. I cannot, will not, allow per-sonal

feelings or considerations to jeopardize that sa-cred trust."
There was silence for a moment. Finally, feeling wooden and empty, I said, "So you're going to kill us, then."
"No, I'm not," he replied, sounding a little hurt. "First of all, both of you are already dead. The Indian girl is forever just plain missing, of course, but any records traceable to her original identity were removed totally. Fingerprints, footprints, you name it. They appear on no official record anywhere. You, Gonser, are dead and buried as you know. And as for the Tomlinsons, a bit of scouring morgues throughout the northwest turned up a decent candidate. You, Ms. Tomlinson, missed your train at Prince Rupert, decided to hitchhike, were in an acci-dent and burned almost beyond recognition. You were identified by your personal effects, and are buried in Parklawn Cemetery, Winnipeg." Dory started, and I was almost as surprised. "Again, records were gotten to, but, this time, other data was substituted. Ours is a society of records, of bureaucracy. Both of you, as you currently are, are anom-alies in the world today—people on whom not a single solitary record exists."
I felt sick, like I was going to throw up. "However, this is the United States of America, not Soviet Russia or China or some two-bit dictatorship. We simply don't shoot and dump people, at least anywhere I'm in charge."
"Then you're going to imprison us here? Maybe for years?" Dory gasped, and, odd as it sounds, there was a note of hope within her. If we remained alive, there was always a future.
"We have no budget for such a thing, and no author-ity," Parch told us. "Besides, it would be controversial here and it would be such a waste. No, there is another way, a way that will make things as right as they can be, allowing you to live normal lives while keeping us secure and you removed as any possible threat. We have come a long way technically here, as you certainly have guessed by now. It was the only reason we could deal with your Mr. Calvert. Unfortunately, the remedy for him, as I said, is not possible with you. You're still not at peace with yourself anyway, Gonser, and you, Ms. Tomlinson, shouldn't be cooped up here, perhaps for years, unable to live any sort of life." "You're going to make us into robots, slaves," Dory gasped, horrified. "No, nothing like that. Consider it from my view-point. We can not continue as before. It's bad for you, and it presents a continual risk to us. We can't morally justify killing you. It would be almost as criminal to have you both wake up strangers with a nine-month gap in your memories, not to mention embarrassing things that are possible if you did decide to return home and convince people you're who you really are. To imprison you would be illegal and unconscionable. To process you like we did Mr. Calvert and a couple of Kelleam's aides would be impossible if we were to release you because we can't be that selective, and anything like that would open up one of the possible cans of worms I already mentioned. We can't simply turn you around to our point of view, either, since you have been here nine months, gotten to know a very large number of people, and such a personality change would be noticed, they'd put