He tried to banish them utterly into the darkness and they would not go.

After a time he grew accustomed to them and it seemed that the campfire flickered lower and the coyote-ideas did not run so fast nor snap so viciously.

There was another factor, too, said his sleeping mind. The mutants were short on manpower. That's why they had the robots and the androids.

There would be ways you could get around a manpower shortage. You could take one life and split it into many lives. You could take one mutant life and you could spread it thin, stretch it out and make it last longer and go further. In the economy of manpower, you could do many things if you just knew how.

The coyotes were circling more slowly now and the fire was growing dimmer and I'll stop you, Crawford, I'll get the answer and I'll stop you cold and I love you, Ann, and -

Then, not knowing, he had slept, he woke and sat bolt upright in the bed.

He knew!

He shivered in the slight chill of summer dawn and swung his legs from beneath the covers and felt the bite of the cold floor against his bare feet.

Vickers ran to the door and jerked it open and came out on the landing, with the stairway winding down into the hall below him.

"Flanders!" he shouted. "Flanders."

Hezekiah appeared from somewhere and began to climb the stairs, calling: "What is the matter, sir? Is there something that you want?"

"I want Horton Flanders!"

Another door opened and Horton Flanders stood there, bony ankles showing beneath the hem of nightshirt, sparse hair standing almost erect.

"What's going on?" he mumbled, tongue still thick with sleep. "What's all the racket?"

Vickers strode across the hall and grabbed him by the shoulders and demanded: "How many of us are there? How many ways was Jay Vickers' life divided?"

"If you'll stop shaking me —»

"I will when you tell me the truth."

"Oh, gladly," Flanders said. "There are three of us. There's you and I and…"

"_You?_"

"Certainly. Does it surprise you?"

"But you're so much older than I."

"We can do a great deal with synthetic flesh," said Flanders. "I don't see why you should be surprised at all."

And he wasn't, Vickers suddenly realized. It was as if he had always been aware of it.

"But the third one?" Vickers asked. "You said there are why they had the three. Who's the other one?"

"I can't tell you yet," Flanders said. "I won't tell you who it is. I've told you too much already."

Vickers reached out and grasped the front of Flanders' nightshirt and twisted the fabric until it tightened on his throat.

"There's no use in violence," Flanders said. "No possible use in violence. It was only because we reached a crisis sooner than expected that I've told you what I have. You weren't ready for even that much. You weren't fit to know. We were taking quite a chance of pushing you too fast. I couldn't possibly tell you more."

"Not fit to know!" Vickers repeated savagely.

"Not ready. You should have had more time. And to tell you what you ask, to tell you now, just isn't possible. It would — create complications for you. Impair your efficiency and your value."

"But I know _that_ answer already," Vickers told him angrily. "Ready or not, I know the answer to Crawford and his friends, and that's more than the rest of you have done, with all the time you've spent on it. I have the answer now, everything you'd hoped for; I know the secret weapon and I know how to counteract it. You said I should stop Crawford and I can."

"You're sure of that?"

"Completely sure," Vickers said. "But this other person, this third person…"

There was a suspicion creeping into his mind, a frightful suspicion.

"I have to know," he said.

"I just can't tell you; I can't possibly tell you," Flanders repeated.

Vickers' grip on the nightshirt had loosened; now he let his hand drop. The nagging thing tearing at his mind was a torture, a terrible, rising torture. Slowly he turned away.

"Yes, I'm sure," Vickers said again. "I'm sure I know _all_ the answers. I know, but what the hell's the use."

He went into his room and shut the door.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

THERE had been a moment when he had seen his course straight and clear before him — the realization that Kathleen Preston might have been no more than a conditioned personage, that for years the implanted memory of the walk in the enchanted valley had blinded him to the love he bore Ann Carter and the love that he now was sure she felt for him, glossed over with their silly quibbling and their bitter quarreling.

Then had come the realization, too, that his parents slept away the years in suspended animation, waiting for the coming of that world of peace and understanding to which they had given so much.

And he had not been able to turn his back upon them.

Perhaps, he told himself, it was as well, for now there was this other factor — making more than one life out of a single life.

It was a sensible way to do things, and perhaps a valid method, for the mutants needed manpower and when you needed manpower you did the best you could with what you had at hand. You placed in the hands of robots the work that could be left to robots and you took the life of living men and women and out of each of those lives you made several lives, housing the divisional lives in the bodies of your androids.

He was not a person in his own right, but a part of another person, a third of that original Jay Vickers whose body lay waiting for the day when his life would be given back to him again.

And Ann Carter was not a person in her own right, either, but the part of another person. Perhaps a part — and for the first time he forced himself to allow his suspicion to become a clear and terrible thought — perhaps a part of Jay Vickers, sharing with him and with Flanders the life that had been held originally by one.

Three androids now shared the single life: he and Flanders and someone else. And the question beat at him, whispering in his brain: who could that other be?

The three of them were bound by a common cord that almost made them one, and in time the three of them must let their lives flow back into the body of the original Jay Vickers. And when that happened, he wondered, which of them would continue as Jay Vickers? Or would none of them — would it be an equivalent of death for all three and a continuation of the consciousness that Jay Vickers himself had known? Or would the three of them be mingled, so that the resurrected Jay Vickers would be a strange three-way personality combining what was now himself and Flanders and the unknown other?

And the love he bore Ann Carter? In the face of the possibility that Ann might be that unknown other, what about the tenderness he suddenly had felt for her after the moonlight-androses years — what of that love now?

There could be no such love, he knew. If Ann were the third, there could be no love between them. You could not love yourself as you would another person. You could not love a facet of yourself or let a facet of yourself love you. You could not love a person who was closer than a sister or a mother…

Twice he had known love of a woman and twice it had been taken from him and now he was trapped with no other choice but to do the job that had been assigned to him.

He had told Crawford that when he knew what was going on, he'd come back and talk to him and between the two of them they'd see if there was a compromise.

But there was no compromise now, he knew.

Not if his hunch was right.

And Flanders had said that hunch was a better way of reasoning, a more mature, more adult way of arriving at the answer to a problem that was up to you to solve. A method, Flanders had told him, that did away with the winding path of reason that the human race had used through all its formative years.