f it.
"No two sets of prints can be identical. A group of babies vanished
during the last big flying saucer scare. _You were one of them._ I was
trying to find your birth certificate. If I could find it...."

Julia talked on. Her voice was sincere and intense and compelling. As he
listened, Walt felt the case against the aliens grow stronger.

Can't think clearly, he told himself. Trust Forential.

No.

He did lie about the war.

Forential lied about that.

He'd lie about ... about other things?

They kept me in ignorance, he thought. Perhaps they really were afraid
I'd discover my real nature.

I don't know; I can't think; I can't _think_!

As he watched Julia, the female who had (the truth of this slowly dawned
on him) actually saved his life, he felt the first stirrings of an
emotion he was not prepared to cope with. How pretty she looked,
standing before him, her eyes serious and her face intent. He wanted to
nestle her.

The footprints, he thought. She couldn't find mine among the birth
certificates she had. She could have faked a set if she'd wanted to.
Does the fact she didn't mean she's not lying?

I think I'm sorry I threw the picture at her.

"If you could have heard Mrs. Savage on the phone," Julia said, "you'd
understand better. She lost her son--had him _stolen_--and she was still
saving the birth certificate, after this long. She told me she knew
she'd find him some day."

Mrs. Savage sounds just like Forential, Walt thought.

"She's been waiting all these years," Julia said. "She's never given up
hope."

Still waiting for her ... son, Walt thought. Still waiting, still
needing her son.

Walt had never thought much of his parents until now. They were obscured
by Forential; they existed somewhere on Lyria. But suppose Julia were
telling the truth? Would they have been more fond of him than Forential?
Could they have been?

There were so many things he did not understand. He must ask Forential
about the process by which babies are created; what was the connection
between parent and child? It was all so _puzzling_.

... why not ask Julia?

"Wait a minute," Walt interrupted. "I understand so very little. How are
babies made?"

And there was a harsh, peremptory knock on the door. The manager's angry
voice came booming through the paneling:

"The bell boy tells me you've got a man tied to the bed in there! We
can't have that sort of thing in this hotel! Open the door, you hear me?
O