Interstellar travel -- Fiction; Science fiction; Space colonies -- Fiction
“Fine,” Ross said bitterly. “We had a few clear minutes to think and now
we find they were wasted by the crackpot dissertation of a female and my
reasonable attempt to show her the elements of logical thinking.” He put
his head in his hands and tried to ignore them, tried to reason it out.
But the truck made a couple of sharp turns and jolted to a stop.
The door opened and the voice of their driver said, again from behind a
flashlight’s dazzling circle: “Out. Walk ahead of me.”
They did, into a fair-sized, well-lighted room with eight people in it
whom they studied in amazement. Every one of the eight was exactly the
same height—six feet. Every one had straight red hair of exactly the
same shade, sprouting from an identical hairline. Every one had
precisely the same build—gangling but broad-shouldered. Their sixteen
eyes were the identical blue under sixteen identical eyebrows. Head to
toe, they were duplicates. One of them spoke—in exactly the same voice
as the truckdriver’s.
“So you want to be Joneses, do you?” he said.
“Absolutely impossible.”
“But we took their money.”
“Give it back. Reasonable changes, yes, but look at them!”
“We can’t give it back. Look what we spent already. Anyway, Sam,——” It
sounded like “Sam” to Ross. “——anyway, Sam, look at some of the work
you’ve done already. You can do it. I doubt if anybody else could, but
you can.”
Ross felt his eyes crossing, and gave up the effort of trying to tell
which Jones was speaking to which. Even the clothing was nearly
identical—purple pantaloons, scarlet jacket, black cummerbund sash,
black shoes. Then he noticed that Third-from-the-left Jones—the one who
seemed to be named Sam—wore a frilly shirt of white under the scarlet
jacket. Only a lacy edge showed at the open collar; but where his was
white, the others were all muted pastels of pink and green.
Sam said coldly, “I know nobody else can do it. Anybody else! Who else
_is_ there?”
A Jones with a frill of chartreuse pursed his lips. “Well,” he said
thoughtfully, “there’s Northside Tim Jones——”
“Northside Tim Jones,” Sam mimicked. “Eight of his jobs are in the
stockade right now! Paraffin, for Jones’s sake—he still uses paraffin to
mold a face!”
“I know, Sam, but after all, these people need help. If you won’t do it
for them, what’s left?”
Sam shrugged morosely. “Well——” he said. Then he shook his head, sighed,
and came forward to look at the three travelers. With an expression of
revulsion he said, “Strip.”
Ross hesitated. “Hold it!” he said sharply to Helena, already half out
of her coveralls. “Sir, there may have been some mistake. Would you mind
explaining just what you propose to do?”
“The usual thing,” Sam said irritably. “Fix your hair, build up your
frames, level you off at standard Jones height. The works. Though I must
say,” he added bitterly, “I never saw such unpromising specimens in my
life. How the Jones have you managed to stay out of trouble this long?
Whose garrets have you been hiding in?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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