"Oh yes." Galeni closed his eyes again, as if he contemplated escaping Miles, and this whole tangle, by retreating into sleep.

Galeni's stiff, halting movements hinted of torture. . . . "They been urging you to change your mind? Or interrogating you the old hard way?"

Galeni's eyes slitted open; he touched the purple splotch under the left one. "No, they have fast-penta for interrogation. No need to get physical. I've been round on it, three, four times. There's not much they don't know about embassy security by now."

"Why the contusions, then?"

"I made a break for it . . . yesterday, I guess. The three fellows who tackled me look worse, I assure you. They must still be hoping I'll change my mind."

"Couldn't you have pretended to cooperate at least long enough to get away?" said Miles in exasperation.

Galeni's eyes snapped in truculence. "Never," he hissed. The spasm of rage evaporated with a weary sigh. "I suppose I should have. Too late now."

Had they scrambled the captain's brains with their drugs? If old cold Galeni had let emotion ambush his reason to that extent, well—it must be a bloody strong emotion. The down-deep deadlies that IQ could do nothing about.

"I don't suppose they'd buy an offer to cooperate from me," Miles said glumly.

Galeni's voice returned to its original drawl. "Hardly."

"Right."

A few minutes later Miles remarked, "It can't be a clone, y'know."

"Why not?" said Galeni.

"Any clone of mine, grown from my body cells, ought to look—well, rather like Ivan. Six feet tall or so and not . . . distorted in his face and spine. With good bones, not these chalk-sticks. Unless," horrid thought, "the medics have been lying to me all my life about my genes."

"He must have been distorted to match," Galeni offered thoughtfully. "Chemically or surgically or both. No harder to do that to your clone than to any other surgical construct. Maybe easier."

"But what happened to me was so random an accident—even the repairs were experimental—my own doctors didn't know what they'd have till it was over."

"Getting the duplicate right must have been tricky. But obviously not impossible. Perhaps the . . . individual we saw represents the last in a series of trials."

"In that case, what have they done with the discards?" Miles asked wildly. A parade of clones passed through his imagination like a chart of evolution run in reverse, upright Ivanish Cro-Magnon devolving through missing links into chimpanzee-Miles.

"I imagine they were disposed of." Galeni's voice was high and mild, not so much denying as defying horror.

Miles's belly shivered. "Ruthless."

"Oh, yes," Galeni agreed in that same soft tone.

Miles groped for logic. "In that case, he—the clone—" my twin brother, there, he had thought the thought flat out, "must be significantly younger than myself."

"Several years," agreed Galeni. "At a guess, six."

"Why six?"