"That was a mistake," she said. "We did not fully understand your world then. In our time, medical science is very exact. There are no incomplete men or incomplete women. We assumed that because this man ... person ... looked like a man, and seemed to be a man, he was one. However, we have since discovered that this is not always true, and it was not in this case. We could not allow him to work on the machine, since we could not predict his reactions adequately."
Not predict his reactions? There was an obvious corollary—
Dolan's lips tightened. "But you can predict mine, is that it?"
Moirta ran her fingers lightly along the back of his hand, studying his knuckles with the tips of them. "Of course," she said idly, "Why not? There is nothing wrong with your reactions, George dear."
He flung her hand away violently. "Why not? So you push the buttons, and I react as predicted, and you sit back and laugh at me while I fix your machine, and then you all go tootling off to find more suckers, while I hold the bag. That's it, isn't it? Boy, I bet you've been getting a big charge out of this. I thought it was mighty coincidental the way one of your boyfriends always pops up as soon as we're alone for five minutes. Not taking any chances on the reaction getting out of hand, are you?"
She stared up at him in shocked surprise. "No," she said, "no. Oh, poor George. How stupid of me. You see, I am not really very wise, I know only one thing, how to be a woman. I keep forgetting that you do not think as we do. Because we can predict a reaction, does that make it less real?"
"But you used me, you knew this would happen."
There were tears in her eyes. "I used you," she admitted, "and I used myself, and Brown used both you and me.
"And you used me, also. Do you wish me to think that when you hold a woman's hand, and say certain things to her, and look at her in a certain way; you are entirely innocent, you do not guess what may happen?"
"I didn't force you," he said stubbornly, "the choice was yours to make."