here, I contacted Mr. Fieschi, and we found that a man
answering to Gerrit's description had come in on the _Peenemuende_ from
Odin seven years before, about the time Gerrit had left Odin. The man
who called himself Steve Ravick. Of course, he didn't look anything
like the pictures of Gerrit, but facial surgery was something we'd
taken for granted he'd have done. I finally managed to get his
fingerprints."

Special Agent Ware took out a cigar, inspected it with the drunken
oversolemnity he'd been drilling himself into for five years, and lit
it. Then he saw what he was using and rose, holding it out, and I went
to the desk and took back my lighter-weapon.

"Thank you, Walt. I wouldn't have been able to do this if I hadn't had
that. Where was I? Oh, yes. I got Gerrit-alias-Ravick's fingerprints,
which did not match the ones we had on file for Gerrit, and sent them
in. It was eighteen months later that I got a reply on them. According
to his fingerprints, Steve Ravick was really a woman named Ernestine
Coyon, who had died of acute alcoholism in the free public ward of a
hospital at Paris-on-Baldur fourteen years ago."

"Why, that's incredible!" the Reverend Zilker burst out, and Joe
Kivelson was saying: "Steve Ravick isn't any woman...."

"Least of all one who died fourteen years ago," Bish agreed. "But the
fingerprints were hers. A pauper, dying in a public ward of a big
hospital. And a man who has to change his identity, and who has small,
woman-sized hands. And a crooked hospital staff surgeon. You get the
picture now?"

"They're doing the same thing on Tom's back, right here," I told Joe.
"Only you can't grow fingerprints by carniculture, the way you can
human tissue for grafting. They had to have palm and finger surfaces
from a pair of real human hands. A pauper, dying in a free-treatment
ward, her body shoved into a mass-energy converter." Then I thought
of something else. "That showoff trick of his, crushing out cigarettes
in his palm," I said.

Bish nodded commendingly. "Exactly. He'd have about as much sensation
in his palms as I'd have wearing thick leather gloves. I'd noticed
that.

"Well, six months going, and a couple of months waiting on reports
from other planets, and six months coming, and so on, it wasn't until
the _Peenemuende_ got in from Terra, the last time, that I got final
confirmation. Dr. Watson, you'll recall."

"Who, you perceived, had been in Afghanistan," I mentioned, trying to
sal