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people who rescued me enjoy hearing what I told that bastard, I don’t mind their listening to it. But I don’t talk that way ordinarily.”
    “Nobody thinks you do.” She gave me a quick peck. “But you did so when it was needed and you made every woman in the company proud of you. And our men, too.”
    She didn’t seem disposed to let go of me but the night nurse showed up then and told me firmly to go to bed and she was going to give me a sleepytime shot—I made only the usual formal protest. The clerk said, “Hi, Goldie. Night. Night, dear.” She left.
    Goldie (not her name—bottle blonde) said, “Want it in your arm? Or in your leg? Don’t mind Anna; she’s harmless.”
    “She’s all right.” It occurred to me that Goldie probably could monitor both sight and sound. Probably? Certainly! “Were you there? At the farm? When the house was burned?”
    “Not while the house was burning. I was in an APV, taking you here as fast as we could float it. You were a sad sight, Miss Friday.”
    “I’ll bet I was. Thanks. Goldie? Will you kiss me good-night?”
    Her kiss was warm and undemanding.
    I found out later that she was one of the four who made the run upstairs to grab me back—one man carrying big bolt cutters, two armed and firing…and Goldie carrying unassisted a stretcher basket. But she never mentioned it, then or later.
    I remember that convalescence as the first time in my life — except for vacations in Christchurch — when I was quietly, warmly happy, every day, every night. Why? Because I belonged!
    Of course, as anyone could guess from this account, I had passed years earlier. I no longer carried an ID with a big “LA” (or even “AP”) printed across it. I could walk into a washroom and not be told to use the end stall. But a phony ID and a fake family tree do not keep you warm; they just keep you from being hassled and discriminated against. You are still aware that there isn’t any nation anywhere that considers your sort fit for citizenship and there are lots of places that would deport you or even kill you—or sell you—if your cover-up ever slipped.
    An artificial person misses not having a family tree much more than you might think. Where were you born? Well, I wasn’t born, exactly; I was designed in Tri-University Life Engineering Laboratory, Detroit. Oh, really? My inception was formulated by Mendelian Associates, Zurich. Wonderful small talk, that! You’ll never hear it; it does not stand up well against ancestors on the Mayflower or in the Domesday Book. My records (or one set) show that I was “born” in Seattle, a destroyed city being a swell place for missing records. A great place to lose your next of kin, too.
    Since I was never in Seattle I have studied very carefully all the records and pictures I could find; an honest-to-goodness native of Seattle can’t trip me. I think. Or not yet.
    But what they gave me while I was recovering from that silly rape and the not-so-funny interrogation was not phony at all and I did not have to worry about keeping my lies straight. Not just Goldie and Anna and the youngster (Terence) but over two dozen more before Dr. Krasny discharged me. Those were just the ones I came into contact with. There were more on that raid; I don’t know how many. Boss’s standing doctrine kept members of his organization from meeting each other save when their duties necessarily brought them together. Just as he firmly snubbed questions. You cannot let slip secrets you do not know, and you cannot betray a person whose very existence is unknown to you.
    But Boss did not have rules just for the sake of rules. Once having met a colleague through duty one could continue the contact socially. Boss did not encourage such fraternizing but he was no fool and did not try to forbid it. In consequence Anna often called on me in the late evening just before she went on duty.
    She never did try to collect her pound of flesh. There wasn’t much opportunity but