Clifford D. Simak

“Some sort of stone. Quartz, perhaps. Although I can’t be sure. It could be metal. There was some metal there.”

Drayton asked smoothly. “You wouldn’t have known, when you started out, that you’d wind up on this planet?”

“If it’s collusion you have in mind,” said Maxwell, “you’re very far afield. I was quite surprised. But it seems you aren’t. You were waiting here for me.”

“Not particularly surprised,” said Drayton. “It has happened twice before.”

“Then you probably know about the planet.”

“Nothing about it,” said Drayton. “Simply that there’s a planet out there somewhere, operating an unregistered transmitter and receiver, and communicating by an unlisted signal. When the operator here at Wisconsin Station picked up their signal for transmittal, he signaled them to wait, that the receivers all were busy. Then got in touch with me.”

“The other two?”

“Both of them right here. Both tabbed for Wisconsin Station.”

“But if they got back…”

“That’s the thing,” said Drayton. “They didn’t. Oh, I guess you could say they did, but we couldn’t talk with them. The wave pattern turned out faulty. They were put back together wrong. They were all messed up. Both of them were aliens, but so tangled up we had a hard time learning who they might have been. We’re still not positive.”

“Dead?”

“Dead? Certainly. A rather frightful business. You’re a lucky man.”

Maxwell, with some difficulty, suppressed a shudder. “Yes, I suppose I am,” he said.

“You’d think,” said Drayton, “that anyone who messed around with matter transmission would make sure they knew how it was done. There’s no telling how many they may have picked up who came out wrong in their receiving station.”

“But you would know,” Maxwell pointed out. “You’d know if there had been any losses. A station would report back immediately if a traveler failed to arrive on schedule.”

“That’s the funny thing about it,” Drayton told him. “There have been no losses. We’re pretty sure the two aliens who came back dead to us got where they were going, for there’s no one missing.”

“But I started out for Coonskin. Surely they reported…”

Then he stopped as the thought struck him straight between the eyes.

Drayton nodded slowly. “I thought you would catch on. Peter Maxwell got to the Coonskin system and came back to Earth almost a month ago.”

“There must be some mistake,” Maxwell protested weakly.

For it was unthinkable that there should be two of him, that another Peter Maxwell, identical in all details, existed on the Earth.

“No mistake,” said Drayton. “Not the way we have it figured. This other planet doesn’t divert the pattern. What it does is copy it.”

“Then there could be two of me! There could be…”

“Not any more,” said Drayton. “You’re the only one. About a week after he returned, there was an accident. Peter Maxwell’s dead.”

Around the corner from the tiny room where he’d met with Drayton, Maxwell found a vacant row of seats and sat down in one of them, rather carefully, placing his single piece of luggage on the floor beside him.

It was incredible, he told himself. Incredible that there should have been two Pete Maxwells and now one of those Maxwells dead. Incredible that the crystal planet could have had equipment that would reach out and copy a wave pattern traveling faster than the speed of light-much faster than the speed of light, for at no point in the galaxy so far linked by the matter transmitters was there any noticeable lag between the time of transmittal and arrival. Diversion-yes, perhaps there could be diversion, a reaching out and a snatching of the pattern, but the task of copying such a pattern would be something else entirely.

Two incredibles, he thought. Two things that should not have happened. Although if one of them had happened, the other surely followed. If the pattern had been copied, there would, quite necessarily, have been two of him, the one who went to the Coonskin system and the other who’d gone to the crystal planet. But if this other Peter Maxwell had really gone to Coonskin, he should still be there or only now returning. He had planned a six weeks’ stay at least, longer if more time seemed necessary to run down the dragon business.

He found that his hands were shaking and, ashamed of this, he clasped them hard together and held them in his lap.

He couldn’t go to pieces, he told himself. No matter what might be facing him, he had to see it through. And there was no evidence, no solid evidence. All that he had was what a member of Security had told him and he couldn’t count on that. It could be no more than a clumsy piece of police trickery designed to shake him into talking. Although it could have happened. It just could have happened!

But even if it had happened, he still had to see it through. For he had a job to do and one he must not bungle.