He waved a hand in dismissal, and then watched out the window of his office to make sure the skipper went back to his own ship and not the other. There'd been one deplorable incident. An aide to the Minister of Commerce had met his duplicate and his duplicate's wife while both were taking exercise between the two grounded ships, and there was very nearly a murder there and then. One of the two men had made the trip alone, his wife having sprained her ankle two days before the take-off. The other had brought his wife along. She'd tripped, but not quite sprained her ankle.
The man who'd come alone went into a murderous rage when he saw his wife with the other man. She was living with the other man on the other Corianis! Openly! She was his wife and the other man was himself. The man who'd traveled alone tried desperately to kill his duplicate-who as determinedly tried to destroy him. The wife screamed in horror because she could not tell which of the two was her husband.
But not all minor non-correspondences produced so much emotion as, in that case, the fact that one woman had sprained her ankle while her duplicate had not.
There was the mail. In some dozens of sacks from each Corianis, less than a score of letters were not twinned. In many cases the twin missives were exactly alike, down to the last and least and most unconsidered comma. In others, a word or an occasional phrase differed from one counterpart to the other. One personal letter, however, mentioned in one copy that a certain person had died, and in the other copy that he had made an unexpected recovery.
Kathy said desperately, "But it's all so-so impossible! Things like this… I feel as if we'd all gone insane! We, and the people in the other ship, and the people on Maninea who believe in the people of the other ship- everybody!"
Bedell nodded. "Yes. It's like walking up to a big mirror, and suddenly you find that there isn't any glass there, and the people can walk out of the mirror-or maybe we've walked into it. We don't know."
"But it's-impossible!"
"Hmmm…" said Bedell. "There was a time when people thought you couldn't talk to anybody a mile away, and people couldn't fly, and nobody could travel faster than light. All these things are still impossible. You still can't do them. But you can do things that have the same consequences. We use those other things as substitutes for things that can't happen. In a way, this apparently impossible state of things may be a substitute for something that couldn't happen."
"Such," demanded Kathy, "such as what?"
"Such as the wrecking of the Corianis," he suggested. "Maybe all this has happened as the alternative to the Corianis exploded to vapor from some collision, with all of us floating around as gas-particles in space."
Kathy didn't believe it. Still Bedell acted more like a sane man than anybody else on the Corianis. The nervous strain inside the ship was nerve-racking.
X
When the two Corianis had been aground for two weeks, the situation took a very nasty turn. At first, the ordinary citizens of Maninea accepted the problem of the two ships as a sort of sporting event. They assumed that daring and clever crooks had planned a massive imposture, and that they'd been stymied by the appearance of the impersonatees. It seemed still more of a sporting event when the assumed frauds gallantly seemed to try to bluff it out; when they defied the police to unmask them. And when the police failed, the citizens of Maninea admired the impostors more than ever-but they were no longer certain which set of passengers were the frauds. So they waited for the scientists to make their tests and say, with confident certitude, that these persons were who they said they were, and those other persons were impostors.
But the scientists couldn't answer either. That was a shock. It was a disappointment. It was frightening. For example, the news-broadcasters found a man who'd been a schoolmate of the Planetary President when both of them were ten years old. He hadn't spoken to the President since. He would remember things that nobody but the President and himself could possibly know about. He could tell! The newscasters also found a grandmother who-at seven-had made mud pies with the now Speaker of the Senate. Nobody could fool her! The two unimportant persons spoke, respectively, to the two claimants to the Planetary President's identity, and to the two men who claimed to be Speaker of the Senate. They came from their interviews shaking and unable to decide. Both Planetary Presidents remembered everything from the age of ten. They reminded their pre-presidential playmates of things that the playmates had forgotten. The woman who'd made mud pies with the Speaker of the Senate was positive after she'd spoken to only one. He'd reminded her of the spanking she got for using the morning milk to manufacture mud-pie pancakes. Only her old playmate knew about that! But the second copy of the Speaker of the Senate not only remembered it too, but described to her the funeral of a defunct mouse and the decoration of its grave. So he was her former playmate, too.
During the ships' third week aground the citizens of Maninea reacted violently. It seemed as if they suddenly realized that the natural order of things was defied, that something sneakingly suggestive of the supernatural was involved. When science could not reveal the mystery, the mystery might be beyond science. Rumors sprang up and flew about. Some were ominous; some were pure horror.
There was the rumor that devils out of hell had somehow escaped confinement and planned to move in among mankind and ultimately destroy it. Only a few people believed this.
There was the rumor that witches, by compact with the powers of evil, had become able to take forms other than their own. They would rule humanity; they would eventually enslave it. A larger number believed this.
The most popular of the rumors had a touch of scientific imagination in it. One Corianis and the beings on board it, said this rumor, had come from a remote and hidden world where there existed a race of monsters. They were non-human Things which could make even scientists believe them human. They could read human minds; they could take control of human bodies. They had come to Maninea to begin the extermination of humanity. And this rumor declared that the monsters could duplicate human bodies and that humans were being missed, about the space-port. Children had vanished; women had disappeared. The monsters who passed for men were anthropophagi. They devoured human flesh in orgies too horrible to be described, and then went out in the likeness of their victims to allure or seize on other victims.
Very many people accepted this idea and felt a growling, rumbling hatred for the two ships which could not be explained except by some such tale as this. And the fact that this story spread and spread brought denials. There were women who had sons and daughters in government service; they'd made the trip to Kholar and returned, but in duplicate. Some of these women fiercely demanded to see their children. They'd know their flesh and blood!
But they didn't. A woman who'd had one son found that she had two. And she could not have two, but she did. Then there were women whose husbands were aboard the Corianis. They protested that they would know them! And they came to weep horribly because they could not know which of two burning-eyed, frantic men had been their husband before he went to Kholar.
Enmity to the Corianis' passengers became a thing to shudder over. Almost any man would agree that, in all probability, one of the two sets of human beings was human; but one was not. It was something more horrible than death, and it must be destroyed. If it could not be decided which was human and which was not-then, regretfully but remorselessly, all must die…
Kathy no longer made any attempt to mingle with the other passengers. She and Jack Bedell had been two retiring, diffident, self-conscious people who found talk with other people absurdly difficult. Now the confined shipload of diplomats and political appointees was so nerve-racked that Kathy felt aloof rather than retiring; she was defensive instead of shy. And Bedell's manner had taken on a tinge of authority. He'd started to work with the men of the Astrophysical Institute, testing materials from the two ships in extreme conditions to find out some basic difference. Very soon it was unwise for Bedell to try to go from the spaceport to the Institute and back. Shortly after, it became even dangerous for the people at the Institute to come on board the ship. So they worked together with a vision-screen connection in being. As other approaches to the mystery proved hopeless, the research of which Bedell was the driving force came to be the only hope for a truly scientific solution. In self-defense he had to adopt a manner pushing aside hysterical passengers who'd have taken up all his time.