Over our heads sounded a faint scuffle of a shoe, a hesitant footstep, another, and then another, dragging, stumbling.
Paula's trembling body stiffened at the first sound. She looked up at me in numb unbelief, then wonder, seeing in my expression, my eyes, the culmination of my revenge. She started to pull away, to run toward the stairs.
"No!" I said softly. "Wait. He deserved this."
The defiance left her. She stood beside me while we both waited.
Feet came into view. Legs. Hands sliding weakly along the wall for support. A face bearing the shocked realization that another mind existed in the world identical with itself. A realization of the fallacy of believing that by destroying oneself at the instant of creation of that other mind it would in some absolute way become oneself.
As I looked at him standing there on the stairs the hate that I had nurtured disappeared. In its place was pity and sympathy.
I was up the stairs catching him before he could fall, lifting him, surprised at his lightness. Paula, her lips trembling on a hesitant worried smile, was opening doors ahead of me as I carried her father into the house and laid him on his bed.
And as Paula and I undressed him to treat the bruises caused by the straps, in my mind rose a picture of the other Dr. Leopold Moriss, the robot, hurrying along some street and, perhaps, already making plans to search for—the other January Stevens.