"All the way downtown,, huh, and a half day's 'time... what do you pay?"

"Eh? The subjects are asked to contribute their time in the interests of science."

Pat shook his head. "Sorry, Mr. Geeking. This is exam week... and my brother and I have part-time school jobs, too."

I kept quiet. Our exams were over, except Analysis of History, which is a snap course involving no math but statistics and pseudospatial calculus, and the school chem lab we worked in was closed for examinations. I was sure Dad did not know these things, or he would have butted in; Dad can shift from prejudice to being a Roman judge at the drop of a hint.

Pat stood up, so I stood up. Mr. Geeking sat tight. "Arrangements can be made," he said evenly.

Pat stuck him as much as we made for a month of washing bottles in the lab, just for one afternoon's work—then upped the ante when it was made clear that we would be obliged to take the tests together (as if we would have done it any other way!). Mr. Geeking paid without a quiver, in cash, in advance.

I never in my life saw so many twins as were waiting on the fortieth floor of the TransLunar Building the following Wednesday afternoon. I don't like to be around twins, they make me think I'm seeing double. Don't tell me I'm inconsistent; SISTENT; I never saw the twins I am part of—I just saw Pat.

Pat felt the same way; we had never been chummy with other twins. He looked around and whistled. "Tom, did you over see such a mess of spare parts?"

"Never."

"If I were in charge, I'd shoot half of them." He hadn't spoken loud enough to offend anyone; Pat and I used a prison-yard whisper that no one else could hear although we never had trouble understanding it. "Depressing, isn't Then he whistled softly and I looked where he was look ing. Twins of course, but this was a case of when once is good, twice is better. They were red-headed sisters, younger than we were but not too young-sixteen, maybe-and cute as Persian kittens.

Those sisters had the effect on us that a light has on a moth. Pat whispered, "Tom, we owe it to them to grant them a little of our time," and headed toward them, with me in step. They were dressed in fake Scottish outfits, green plaid which made their hair flame like bonfires and to us they looked as pretty as a new fall of snow.

And just as chilly. Pat got halfway through his opening speech when he trailed off and shut up; they were staring through him. I was blushing and the only thing that kept it from being a major embarrassing incident was a loudspeaker that commenced to bray:

"Attention, please! You: are requested to report to the door marked with your surname initial." So we went to door A- to-D and the red-beaded sisters headed toward the other end of the alphabet without ever having seen us at all. As we queued up Pat muttered, "Is there egg on my chin? Or have they taken a vow to be old maids?"

"Probably both," I answered. "Anyhow, I prefer blondes." This was true, since Maudie was a blonde. Pat and I had been dating Maudie Kauric for about a year-going steady you could call it, though in my case it usually meant that I was stuck with Maudie's chum Hedda Staley, whose notion of dazzling conversation was to ask me if I didn't think Maudie was the cutest thing ever? Since this was true and unanswerable, our talk did not sparkle.

"Well, so do I," Pat agreed, without saying which blonde—Maudie was the only subject on which we were reticent with each other. "But I have never had a closed mind." He shrugged and added cheerfully, "Anyhow, there are other possibilities."

There certainly were, for of the hundreds of twins present maybe a third were near enough our age not to be out of the question and half of them, as near as I could tell without counting, were of the sex that turns a mere crowd into a social event. However, none came up to the high standards of the redheads, so I began looking over the crowd as a whole.

The oldest pair I saw, two grown men, seemed to be not older than the early thirties and I saw one set of little girls about twelve—they had their mother in tow. But most of them were within a loud shout of twenty. I had concluded that "Genetics Investigations" was picking its samples by age groups when I found that we were at the head of the line and a clerk was saying, "Names, please?"

For the next two hours we were passed from one data collector to another, being fingerprinted, giving blood samples, checking "yes" or "no" to hundreds of silly questions that can't be answered "yes" or "no." The physical examination was thorough and involved the usual carefully planned nonsense of keeping a person standing in bare feet on a cold floor in a room five degrees too chilly for naked human skin while prodding the victim and asking him rude personal questions.

I was thoroughly bored and was not even amused when Pat whispered that we should strip the clothes off the doctor now and prod him in the belly and get the nurse to record how he liked it? My only pleasant thought was that Pat had stuck them plenty for their fun. Then they let us get dressed and ushered us into a room where a rather pretty woman sat behind a desk. She had a transparency viewer on her desk and was looking at two personality profiles superimposed on it. They almost matched and I tried to sneak a look to see where they did not. But I could not tell Pat's from my own and anyhow I'm not a mathematical psychologist.

She smiled and said, "Sit down, boys. I'm Doctor Arnault." She held up the profiles and a bunch of punched cards and added, "Perfect mirror twins, even to dextrocardia. This should be interesting."

Pat tried to look at the papers. "What's our I.Q. this time, Doctor?"

"Never mind." She put the papers down and covered them, then picked up a deck of cards. "Have you ever used these?"

Of course we had, for they were the classic Rhine test cards, wiggles and stars and so forth. Every high school psychology class has a set and a high score almost always means that some bright boy has figure out a way to cold-deck the teacher. In fact Pat had worked out a simple way to cheat when our teacher, with a tired lack of anger, split us up and made us run tests only with other people—whereupon our scores dropped to the limits of standard error. So I was already certain that Pat and I weren't ESP freaks and the Rhine cards were just another boring test.

But I could feel Pat become attentive. "Keep your ears open, kid," I heard him whisper, "and we'll make this interesting." Dr. Arnault did not hear him, of course.

I wasn't sure we ought to but I knew if he could manage to signal to me I would not be able to refrain from fudging the results. But I need not have worried; Dr. Arnault took Pat out and returned without him. She was hooked by microphone to the other test room but there was no chance to whisper through it; it was hot only when she switched it on.

She started right in. "First test run in twenty seconds, Mabel," she said into the mike and switched it off, then turned to me. "Look at the cards as I turn them," she said.

"Don't try, don't strain. Just look at them."

So I looked at the cards. This went on with variations for • maybe an hour. Sometimes I was supposed to be receiving, sometimes sending. As far as I was concerned nothing happened, for they never told us our scores.

Finally Dr. Arnault looked at a score sheet and said, "Tom, I want to give you a mild injection. It won't hurt you and it'll wear off before you go home. Okay?"

"What sort?" I said suspiciously.

"Don't fret; it is harmless. I don't want to tell you or you might unconsciously show the reaction you expected."