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Prologue

I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together I saw the hideous phantas of sons of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital htful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator

—Mary Shelley on the creation of Frankenstein

It was the fifth clone ship to go out from Moonbase on Project Consciousness and he leaned forward to watch it carefully as his duty de the Pluto orbit and he knew that by this tirammed frustrations, even some deaths and serious injuries, but that was the pattern

Earthling, it was called Earthling Number Five

The ship was a giant egg, one-half of it a dark shadow la silver from the distant sun

A nervous cough sounded from the darkness behind him and he suppressed a sympathetic repetition of that sound Others were not as self-controlled

By the tiun to make its turn Thewhat they all saw The ship turned through one hundred and eighty degrees and reversed, heading directly back down its outward track

“Any clue at all on how they did that?” he asked

“No, sir Nothing”

“I want you to go through the ”

“Yes, sir” It was a sigh of resignation

Someone else spoke fro …”

Yes, they’d all seen this enough to anticipate the sequence

The capsule was a silver needle that looped fro’s stern It held to the ship’s blind spot (who kneeapons such a shipthe stars

From beneath their view a flae A purple glow touched the ship’s bulbous nose It held for no more than three heartbeats before the ship exploded in a blinding orange blossom

“That Flattery model is sure as hell reliable,” someone said

Nervous laughter went around the roo on the viewer Why the hell did they always think it was the Flattery model? It could be anyone on the crew

Their view closed on the swollen blosso speed of tiht wink out too rapidly Presently, thewreckage, probing with crystalline flares of light until it found what it sought—the recording box That and thefrom this failure

Claw retractors could be seen grabbing the recording box and pulling it back beneath their view The crystalline light continued to probe Anything they saw here could be valuable But the light picked out nothing but twisted metal, torn shreds of plastic and, here and there, limbs and other parts of the crew There was one particularly brutal glimpse of a head with part of a shoulder and an arlobules had fornized it

“Tim!” someone said

A woman’s voice far to the rear of the roo: “Shit … shit … shit …” until someone silenced her

The view blanked out and he leaned back, feeling the ache between his shoulders He kneould have to identify that wo the near hysteria in her voice Some harsh catharsis was indicated He shut down the holopack’s controls, flicked the switch for the roo brilliance

“They’re clones,” he said, keeping his voice cold “They are not human; they are clones, as is indicated by their uniforets that is going off Moonbase in the next shuttle That sign on an Hempstead, Director’ There will be noas I am Director”

Chapter 1

We call it Project Consciousness and our basic tools are the carefully selected clones, our Doppelgangers The n into our syste That’s e chose Tau Ceti as the target: there is no livable planet at Tau Ceti

—Morgan Hempstead, Lectures at Moonbase

“It’s dead,” Bickel said

He held up the severed end of a feeder tube, stared at the panel fro too fast and he could feel his hands tre

Fluorescent red letters eight centi on the panel in front of hi seemed a mockery after what he had just done

“Organic Mental Core?

?To Be Reineer”

Bickel felt an extra sense of quiet in the ship Soh the ’s concentric hulls and spread through to the heart of this egg-shaped chunk oftoward Tau Ceti

His two companions rapped in this silence, Bickel saw They were afraid to break the quiet er … and relief

“What else could we do?’ Bickel delared at it

Raja Lon Flattery, their psychiatrist-chaplain, cleared his throat, said: “Easy, John We share the blame equally”

Bickel turned his glare on Flattery, noted the , the narrow, haughty face that somehow focused a sense of terrible superiority within remote brown eyes and upraked black eyebrows

“You knohat you can do with your blaer, made him feel defeated

Bickel swung his attention to Tiineer, the man who should have taken responsibility for this dirty business

Timberlake, a quick and nervous scarecrow of a man with skin almost the color of his brown hair, stared at theBickel’s eyes

Shaht

Timberlake’s weakness—his inability to kill the OMC even when itthe ship with its thousands of helpless lives—had almost killed them And all the man could feel noas shame … and fear