Read Ebook: Problem on Balak by Aycock Roger D Francis Dick Illustrator

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Ebook has 118 lines and 8101 words, and 3 pages

And that was it. All we had to do was to take these two identical twins--who looked alike, thought alike and cursed alike--and determine which was real and which was bogus.

"For a very pertinent reason which you may or may not discover," Gaffa said, "the test must be limited to a few hours. You have until sunrise tomorrow morning, gentlemen."

And with that he crutched away at his skip-a-step walk, taking his grinning cohorts with him. The two Haslops remained behind, glowering and grumbling at each other.

The situation didn't look too bad at first.

"There are no two things," Captain Corelli declared, "that are exactly and absolutely identical. And that applies, I should say, especially to identities."

It had a heartening sound. I've never been long on logic, being a very ordinary S.E. navigator whose automatic equipment is designed to do practically everything for him, and Corelli seemed to know what he was talking about.

Gibbons, being a scientist, saw it differently.

"That's not even good sophistry," he said. "The concept of identity between two objects has no meaning whatever, Captain, unless we have a prior identification of one or the other. Aristotle himself couldn't have told an apple from a coconut if he'd never seen or heard of either."

"Any fool would know that," one of the Haslops grunted. And the other added in the same tone: "Hey, if you guys are going at it like that, we'll be here forever!"

"All right," Corelli said, deflated. "We'll try another tack."

He thought for a minute or two. "How about screening them for background detail? The real Haslop was a bounty-claimer, which means that he must have made thousands of planetfalls before crashing here. The bogus one couldn't remember the details of all those worlds as well as the original, no matter how many times he'd been told, could he?"

And to the captain he said, "We're getting nowhere, friend. You're underestimating these Balakians--they look and act like screwballs, but they're sharp. In the twenty-two years I've lived with that carbon copy of myself, he's learned everything I know."

"He's right," Gibbons put in. He blinked a couple of times and turned pink. "Unless the real Haslop happened to be married, that is. I'm a bachelor myself, but I'd say there are some memories that a married man wouldn't discuss, even when marooned."

Captain Corelli stared at him admiringly. "I never gave you enough credit, Gibbons," he said. "You're right! How about--"

"Don't help any," one of the Haslops said morosely. "I never was married. And now I never will be if I've got to depend on you jerks to get me out of this mess."

The sun went down just then and a soft, drowsy darkness fell. I thought at first that we'd have to finish our investigation in the dark, but the natives had made provisions for that. A swarm of fireflies as big as robins sailed in from somewhere and circled around over the court, lighting it as bright as day. The Balakian houses made a dim row of flattened shadow-mounds at the outskirts of the circle. A ring of natives sat tailor-fashion on the ground in front of them--a neat trick considering that they had three legs each to fold up--and grinned at us.

They had waited twenty-two years for this show, and now that it had come they were enjoying every minute of it.

Our investigation was pretty rough going. The fireflies overhead all circled in one direction, which made you dizzy every time you looked up, and besides that the Quack had remembered that he was a prisoner in an alien environment and was at the mercy of any outlandish disease that might creep past his permanent immunization. He muttered and grumbled to himself about the risk, and his grousing got on our nerves even worse than usual.

I moved over to shut him up, and blinked when I saw him pop something into his mouth. My first guess was that he had managed to sneak some food concentrate out of the ship somehow, and the thought made me realize how hungry I was.

"What've you got there, Quack?" I demanded. "Come on, give--what are you hiding out?"

"Antibiotics and stuff," he answered, and pulled a little flat plastic case out of a pocket.

It was his portable medicine chest, which he carried the way superstitious people used to carry rabbits' feet, and it was largely responsible for our calling him the Quack. It was full of patent capsule remedies that he had gleaned out of his home medical book--a cut thumb, a surprise headache, or a siege of gas on the stomach would never catch the Quack unprepared!

"Jerk," I said, and went back to Gibbons and Corelli, who were arguing a new approach to our problem.

"It's worth a try," Gibbons said. He turned on the two Haslops, who were bristling like a pair of strange dogs. "This question is for the real Haslop: Have you ever been put through a Rorschach, thematic apperception or free association test?"

The real Haslop hadn't. Either of them.

"Then we'll try free association," Gibbons said, and explained what he wanted of them.

"Spigot," the Haslops said together. Which is exactly what any spaceman would say, since the only water important to him comes out of a ship's tank. "Lake" and "river" and "spring," to him, are only words in books.

Gibbons chewed his lip and tried again, but the result was the same every time. When he said "payday" they both came back "binge," and when he said "man" they answered "woman!" with the same gleam in their eyes.

"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.

"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!"

Corelli snapped his fingers.

"So that's why they limited our time, and why they brought this stuff--to keep their fake Haslop refueled! All we've got to do to separate our men now is feed them something solid. The one that eats it is the real Haslop."

"Sure, all we need now is some solid food," I said. "You don't happen to have a couple of sandwiches on you, do you?"

Everybody got quiet for a couple of minutes, and in the silence the Quack surprised us all by deciding to speak up.

"Since I'm stuck here for life," he said, "a few germs more or less won't matter much. Pass me the pitcher, will you?"

He took a man-sized slug of the fiery stuff without even wiping off the pitcher's rim.

After that we gave it up, as who wouldn't have? Captain Corelli said the hell with it and took such a slug out of the pitcher that the two Haslops yelled murder and grabbed it quick themselves, and from then on we just sat around and drank and talked and waited for the sunrise that would condemn us to Balak for the rest of our lives.

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