were all _exactly_ alike; as alike as eight new cars of the same make
and model lined up side by side ..."

_Identical._ Hagen didn't know anything about that. He hadn't seen the
others. But he knew that there was something frightening about the one
they'd picked up in Chicago. At first glance he could have been Mr.
Anybody, from Anywhere, U.S.A. A youngish-looking forty, you would have
figured, with a sprinkling of gray at the temples and a face women could
have found interesting. He had the unpaunched figure of a man who had
taken good care of himself; he was quietly dressed in a blue suit; he
looked like a decent-enough guy who just happened to have gotten stiff
on the double hooker he'd ordered and sounded off without meaning to.

In fact, he was still sounding off when they got him into the
interrogation room. And when the barflies called his talk treasonable,
they hadn't been fooling.

Brent said, "Identical, gentlemen, even to the finger-prints; to the
very last ridge."

Pender's eyebrows tried to crawl up his forehead and disappear into his
hairline. "That's utterly and completely ridiculous."

Brent smiled. "Then, at least, I've gotten one idea over to you--that a
public release on this thing would be greeted with hoots of derision by
the realistic American public."

"And perhaps deservedly so?"

"I think not," Brent said gravely.

_Is it some incredibly ingenious hoax?_ Hagen asked himself the question
and found no answer. He only remembered the words and the eyes and the
tone of the creature that walked like a man ...

"He was our--father. They had him a long time before we--came. He was
our father, and after we came they told us what we were to know and we
knew--it."

There it was--that odd little break, cutting off the word at the end of
each sentence. It gave the impression of a mind groping, yet not really
groping; a mind sure of itself, yet wondering.

"What did you know?"

"We knew what we were--for. Our--reason. We knew what we were created to
do--here."

"How many of you were there?"

"Ten of--us."

"You said, 'created to do here.' Where do you come from?"

"There."

"Where is _there_?"

At this point the man or the creature, or whatever you wanted to call
him, pointed upward.

At this point, Cantrell, another of the interrogation group, turned away
in disgust. "A kook! A kook with a religious compulsion. A character,
and we got called out of bed to--"

"--to get you ready