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in the microphone, she handed it to me. “Hold it about there. Don’t jiggle it, or bump it. When I throw the machine on “Record” and the tape starts rolling, begin reading.”
    “Don’t you have to erase what’s on there first?”
    She shook her head. “It erases and records at the same time. Ready? Here we go.”
    She started it, and I read the speech into the microphone. She stopped the machine, and ran the tape back, still watching the counter. I could sense she was keyed-up. I knew what she was doing by now, of course, but it struck me as absurd. She put the machine on “Play Back” and sat down near me on the end of the bed. I started to say something, but she cut me off with an imperious gesture of her hand. She sat with her head lowered, listening intently.
    She’d gone back pretty far this time, and it was the man called Chris who was speaking.
    “—one hundred Gulf at the market. Anything else, Mr. Chapman”?”
    “Just one more thing. Will you ask the research—”
    Chapman’s voice went on through the speech. At the end of it there was a little whrrp where she’d put it on “Record” and I’d started speaking.
    “Just one more thing. Will you ask the research department to send me everything they’ve got—”
    I sat bolt upright. “Hey—!” She clapped a hand over my mouth. We both sat perfectly still until it was finished.
    She got up and turned the machine off. Then she turned to me with a faint smile. “Now you know what I was listening to all the time.”
    I stared at her. “It’s incredible. They’re almost exactly the same.”
    She nodded. “That’s the reason I wanted to do it this way, with the two voices end-to-end. As a comparison check, it’s absolutely conclusive. You see, it’s not only the timbre—plenty of male voices are down in that low end of the baritone range—but you both have the same quick, alert, self-assured way of speaking. Clipped, and rather aggressive. Either of you could do a perfect imitation of Ralph Bellamy playing one of those detective roles. In fact, Harris quite often does, at parties.”
    “Harris?” I asked.
    “Harris Chapman, the man you were just listening to.”
    “Do we actually sound that much alike?” I asked. “Or is it the recording?”
    She shook a cigarette from a packet on the dresser, and leaned down. I held the lighter for her. She sat in the armchair, facing me with her knees crossed. “I could tell you apart, in person,” she said thoughtfully. “And on hi-fi equipment. I might even, in fact, on the telephone—because I’m aware there are two of you.”
    “What do you mean by that?” I asked.
    She inhaled smoke and regarded me coolly. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? If you were speaking over the telephone to anybody who knew Harris Chapman but didn’t know you, you’d be Chapman.”
    “I’m not so sure—”
    “Let me explain,” she interrupted. “If you said you were Harris Chapman, why should he doubt it? Your voices are almost identical, and they’re not there side-by-side for comparison. Add to that the way you both speak—which is almost exactly alike, and very much unlike Southern speech in general. He lives in Thomaston, Louisiana. You follow me, don’t you?”
    “Yes,” I said. “In other words, he’s unique—at least, in his manner of speech. They hear it—it’s Chapman.”
    “Exactly. You could fool anybody who knows him.”
    “For just about five seconds,” I said.
    She smiled. “No. You’re wrong.”
    “If you’re speaking of impersonation, it takes one other thing. Information.”
    “I was coming to that,” she said. “It happens that I know more about Harris Chapman than anybody else in the world.”
    “What are you driving at?”
    “This. In ten days of intensive study, you could become Harris Chapman—that is, to the extent that Harris Chapman as a personality or an individual is projected over a telephone circuit.”
    I stood up and crushed out my cigarette. “And