"Fine. Then your directional audio pick-ups should be able to tell you where this voice is coming from."
"Yes, sir. It is coming from the approximate volume of space now occupied by Mr. Oak's head. But it is definitely not Mr. Oak's voice."
Felder put a hand over his eyes and moaned.
Videnski, who had carefully lighted a cigarette, blew out a cloud of smoke and looked at me. "I got to admit he's right. That is not Daniel Oak's voice."
"Which came first the chicken or the egg?" Vivian said abstractedly.
"What's that got to do with it?" Videnski asked with a scowl.
"A matter of definition," Vivian said. "Somewhere along the line of chicken evolution, it would have been possible to point at a specific bird and say, 'This is a chicken, but its parents were not chickens.' Now, do you define a chicken egg as an egg laid by a chicken or an egg that hatches out a chicken?"
"That's right," Felder said. "Do you define Oak's voice as any voice coming from Oak or as any voice that sounds like Oak's?"
"Well, you people ought to be able to answer that," I said. "Which is it?"
"Both," said Felder in a dull voice. "When you activated him by giving him his first order, he identified you and the voice as parts of the same unit. If you'd gone hoarse slowly, step-by-step, as it were, McGuire could have made logical adjustments to the change. But this sudden change is too big a jump for his logic to follow; he hasn't got the intermediate steps he needs to put it into syllogistic form."