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Chapter 1

Owl-eyed and terrified, Warren Snyder occupied an ar room He sat stiff, erect, his hands upturned in his lap Now and then his right hand shook His htly open, and his lower lip trembled almost continuously

On his left teleamed As rounded and as polished as the head of a decorative upholstery tack, it looked like a

The bead was in fact packed with electronics, nanocircuitry, and was rather like the head of a nail in that it was the visible portion of a needle-thin probe that had been fired into his brain by a pistol-like device Instantaneous che

Warren said nothing He had been ordered to remain silent, and he had lost the power to disobey Except for his twitching fingers and the tremors, which were both involuntary, he did not e position in the chair, because he had been told to be still

His gaze shifted back and forth between two points of interest: his wives

With a silver bead on her left telazed like those of an amped-out ether, hands folded serenely in her lap She didn’t twitch or tremble like her husband She seeed her brain in ways not intended

The other Judy stood by one of the living-roo the snowy night and regarding her two prisoners with contempt Their kind were the spoilers of the earth Soon these tould be led away like a couple of sheep, to be rendered and processed And one day, when the last hus were eradicated, the world would be as much of a paradise as it had ever been or ever could be

This Judy was not a clone of the one on the sofa, nothing as disgusting as a s were She had been designed to pass for the original Judy, but the illusion would not hold up if her internal structure and the nature of her flesh were to be studied by physicians She had been created in a couple of ramround, with no tao other than her program, with no illusion that she possessed free will, with no obligation whatsoever to any higher power other than her creator, Victor Leben, whose true last name was Frankenstein, and with no life after this one to which she needed to aspire

Through the parted draperies, she watched a tallthe snow-mantled street, hands in his coat pockets, face turned to the sky as if delighting in the weather He approached the house on the front ay, playfully kicking up little clouds of snow Judy couldn’t see his face, but she assumed he must be Andrew Snyder, the nineteen-year-old son of the family His parents expected him to return home from work about this time

She let the draperies fall into place and stepped out of the living room, into the foyer When she heard Andrew’s footsteps on the porch, she opened the door

"Andy," she said, "I was so worried"

Shucking off his boots to leave them on the porch, Andrew smiled and shook his head "You worry too much, Mom I’s have been happening in town tonight"

"What terrible things?"

As Andrew stepped into the foyer in his stocking feet, the Judy replicant closed the door, turned to hian to unbutton his peacoat In the best ie, she said, "You’ll catch your death in this weather"

Pulling a scarf fros?" He froith confusion and annoyance, as if her fussing with his coat must be out of character for her

As she opened the buttons, she maneuvered him until the doorway to the study lay beyond even his peripheral vision

"All the killings," she said, "it’s horrible"

Intent upon her to an extent he had not been until now, Andrew said, "Killings? What killings?"

As he spoke, his replicant glided silently out of the study, directly to hi the muzzle of the brain-probe pistol to Andrew’s left te man’s face wrenched with pain but for only a moment Then his eyes widened with terror even as his face relaxed into an expression that was hardly more readable than that of someone in a coma

"Come with me," said the replicant Andrew, and led his na roo like a drop of mercury on his temple, Andrew Snyder did as he was told

If the replicant Andrew had chosen to sit opposite the real one and squeeze the trigger again, the pistol wouldn’t have fired another skull-piercing dart The second shot would have been a tele transe anic brain In ninetye, hts and sounds--would be downloaded to his impersonator

The replicant had no need, however, to pass for Andrew Snyder in ht after next, all the citizens of Rainbow Falls would have been killed, rendered, and processed; no one who had known the real Andreould remain alive to be deceived by his laboratory-bred double

Ninetywould be, in this instance, a waste of time Replicants despised waste and distraction Focus and efficiency were important principles The only morality was efficiency, and the only immorality was inefficiency