"I could have told you it wouldn't work," one Haslop said when Gibbons
threw up his hands and quit. "I've lived so long with that phony that
he even knows what I'm going to say next."
"I was going to say the same thing," the other one growled. "After
twenty-two years of drinking and arguing with him, we've begun--God help
me!--to think alike."
I tried my own hand just once.
"Gaffa says that they are exactly identical so far as outside appearance
goes," I said. "But he may be wrong, or lying. Maybe we'd better check
for ourselves."
* * * * *
The Haslops raised a howl, of course, but it did them no good. Gibbons
and Corelli and I ganged them one at a time--the Quack refused to help
for fear of being contaminated--and examined them carefully. It was a
lively job, since both of them swore they were ticklish, and under
different circumstances it could have been embarrassing.
But it settled one point. Gaffa hadn't lied. They were absolutely
identical, as far as we could determine.
We had given it up and were resting from our labors when Gaffa came
grinning out of the darkness and brought us a big crystal pitcher of
something that would have passed for a first-class Planet Punch except
that it was nearer two-thirds alcohol than the fifty-fifty mix you get
at most interplanetary ginmills.
The two Haslops had a slug of it as a matter of course, being accustomed
to it, and the rest of us followed suit. Only the Quack refused, turning
green at the thought of all the alien bacteria that might be swimming
around in the pitcher.
A couple of drinks made us feel better.
"I've been thinking," Captain Corelli said, "about what Gaffa said when
he limited the time of the test, that we might or might not discover the
reason for ourselves. Now what the hell did the grinning heathen mean by
that? Is there a reason, or was he only dragging a red herring across
the bogus Haslop's track?"
Gibbons looked thoughtful. I sat back while he pondered and watched the
Quack, who was swallowing another antibiotic capsule.
"Wait a minute," Gibbons exclaimed. "Captain, you've hit on something
there!"
He stared at the Haslops. They stared back, unimpressed.
"Gaffa said you two were exactly alike outside," Gibbons said. "And
we've proved it. Does that mean you're not alike _inside_?"
"Sure," one of them said. "But what of it? You're sure as hell not going
to cut one of us open to see!"
"You're confusing the issue," Gibbons snapped. "What I'm getting at is
this--if you two aren't made alike inside, then you can't possibly exist
on the same sort of diet. One of you eats the same sort of food as
ourselves. The other can't. But which is which?"
One of the Haslops pointed a quivering finger at the other. "It's him!"
he said. "I've watched him drink his dinner for twenty-two years--he's
the fake!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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