“Arthur is not Dotty’s father, Mr. Dalgreen. You see, this is my second marriage. He ... I mean we cannot have children.” She spoke the words as if they were a pain, heavy within her. * * * * * Brent was slightly embarrassed--yet elated at the same time. This was the first crack in the facade of normality that concealed the occupants of the house. Her sudden change of expression could only mean that there was something troubling her--something he would give his last tube of oil paint to find out. Perhaps it wasn’t the secret hidden in the painting, but there must be a relationship somewhere. He was determined to search it out. Apartment lights were out all over the city, the daytime world was asleep. Brent stirred in the large chair and reached out for the glass of sparkling Burgundy that was slowly dying on the end table. A little flat--but still very good. It was one of the luxuries he allowed himself. A luxury that might really be called a necessity to one who lived by selling his emotional responses, translated into color. The wine was going flat, but the view of the city never would. New York, the eternal wonder city. The soft lights of his studio threw no reflections on the window, and his sight travelled easily over the architectural fairyland. Sparkling search-beams swept across the sky, throwing an occasional glint as they slid across a jetcar or a stratoplane. A thousand lights of a thousand hues twinkled in the city below. Even here on the one-hundred-eightieth floor he could hear the throbbing roar of its ceaseless activity. This was the foremost of the cities of man, yet somewhere in that city was a man who was ... not quite human. Brent had the partial answer, he was sure of that. He had found the missing factor in one of his own paintings. It was the only one he was even slightly pleased with. He had turned it out in nine solid hours of work, one of the “dangerous exposures” the doctors talked about. He had it propped on the video console, a stark vista of Mare Imbrium in the afternoon--moon time. It was a canvas touched with the raw grandeur of eternal space. It had a burning quality that reacted on human sight. An alien landscape seen through a human eye. Just as the Di Costa canvases were human scenes seen through a different eye. Perhaps not totally foreign to earth--they weren’t that obvious. Now that he understood, though; the influence was unmistakable. * * * * * He also had substantiating evidence. The Law was the Law and genes would always be genes. Man and ape are warm-blooded mammals, close relatives among the anthropoids. Yet even with this close heritage, there could be no interbreeding. Offspring were out of the question; they were a genetic impossibility.