every time we made planetfall.

"You speak Terran fluently," Gibbons said. "Or is this some sort of telepathic contact that creates the illusion of oral communication?"

The native grinned delightedly. "The contact is oral. We learned your language from an independent planet-hunter named Haslop, who was wrecked here some years ago."

In Solar Exploitations you learn to expect the unexpected, but to me this was stretching coincidence clear out of joint. We had the latest zero-interval-transference drive made, and I couldn't believe that any independent planet-staker could have beaten us here with outmoded equipment.

"A Terran?" I asked. "Where is he now?"

"Coming up," Gaffa said. "With my fellows."

A couple of dozen other Balakians, looking exactly like him, bore down on us through the dwarf shrubbery, and with them were two lanky Terrans dressed in loose shirt-and-drawers ensembles which obviously had been made on Balak. Even at a distance the Terrans looked disturbingly alike, and when they got closer I could see that they were identical twins.

"You don't count so good, chum," I said. "I see two Terrans."

"Only one," Gaffa corrected, grinning wider. "The other is one of us."

I didn't believe it, of course. Corelli didn't get it, either; his eyes had a glazed look, and he was shaking his head like a man with a gnat in his ear.

One of the Terrans rushed up to us with tears in his eyes and his Adam's apple bobbing, so overcome with emotion that I was afraid he might kiss us.

"I'm Ira Haslop," he said in a choked voice. "I've been marooned here for twenty-two eternal years, and I never thought I'd see a Terran face again. And now—"

He stopped, but not for breath. The other skinny Terran had grabbed his arm and swung him around.

"What the hell do you think you're doing, you masquerading nightmare?" the second one yelled. "I'm Ira Haslop, and you damn well know it! If you think you're going to pass yourself off as me and go home to Earth in my place...."

The first Haslop gaped at him for a moment; then he slapped the other's hand off his arm and shook a bony fist in his face.

"So that's your game! That's why these grinning freaks made you look like me and threw us together all these years—they've planned all along to ring in a switch and send you home instead of me! Well, it won't work!"

The second Haslop swung on him then and the two of them went to the mat like a pair of loose-drawered tigers, cursing and gouging. The grinning natives separated them after a moment and examined them carefully for damage, chattering away with great satisfaction in their own language.

Corelli and Gibbons and I stared at each other like three fools. It was impossible to think that either of the two men could be anything but what he claimed to be, a perfectly normal and thoroughly angry Terran; but when each of them swore that one of them—the other one, of course—was an alien, and the natives backed up the accusation, what else could we believe?

Gaffa, who seemed to be a sort of headman, took over and explained the situation—which seemed to be an incredibly long-range gag cooked up by these octopod jokers, without the original Haslop's knowledge, against the day when another Terran ship might land on Balak. Their real intent, Gaffa said, was to present us with a problem that could be solved only by a species with a real understanding of its own kind. If we could solve it, his people stood ready to assist us in any way possible. If not....

I didn't like the sound of it, so I reached for my heat-gun again. So did Captain Corelli and Gibbons, but we were too slow.

A little stinging bug—another link in the cooperative Balakian ecology—bit each of us on the back of the neck and we passed out cold. When we woke up again, we were "guests" of Gaffa and his tribe in a sort of settlement miles from the S.E.2100, and there wasn't so much as a nail file among us in the