It had been easy, he assured himself, much easier than he had thought.
The puudly was dead or dying and the Earth and its millions of unsuspecting citizens were safe and, best of all, Henderson James was safe … safe from indignity, safe from being stripped naked of the little defenses he had built up through the years to shield him against the public stare. He felt relief flood over him and it left him pulseless and breathless and feeling clean, but weak.
«You fool,» the dying puudly said, death clouding its words as they built up in his mind. «You fool, you half-thing, you duplicate …»
It died then and he felt it die, felt the life go out of it and leave it empty.
He rose softly to his feet and he seemed stunned and at first he thought it was from knowing death, from having touched hands with death within the puudly’s mind.
The puudly had tried to fool him. Faced with the pistol, it had tried to throw him off his balance to give it the second that it needed to hurl the mind-blasting thought that had caught at the edge of his brain. If he had hesitated for a moment, he knew, it would have been all over with him. If his finger had slackened for a moment, it would have been too late.
The puudly must have known that he would think of the zoo as the first logical place to look and, even knowing that, it had held him in enough contempt to come here, had not even bothered to try to watch for him, had not tried to stalk him, had waited until he was almost on top of it before it moved.
And that was queer, for the puudly must have known, with its uncanny mental powers, every move that he had made. It must have maintained a casual contact with his mind every second of the time since it had escaped.
He had known that and … wait a minute, he hadn’t known it until this very moment, although, knowing it now, it seemed as if he had always known it.
What is the matter with me, he thought. There’s something wrong with me. I should have known I could not surprise the puudly, and yet I didn’t know it. I must have surprised it, for otherwise it would have finished me off quite leisurely at any moment after I climbed out of the moat.
You fool, the puudly had said. You fool, you half-thing, you duplicate … You duplicate!
He felt the strength and the personality and the hard, unquestioned identity of himself as Henderson James, human being, drain out of him, as if someone had cut the puppet string and he, the puppet, had slumped supine upon the stage.
So that was why he had been able to surprise the puudly!
There were two Henderson Jameses. The puudly had been in contact with one of them, the original, the real Henderson James, had known every move he made, had known that it was safe so far as that Henderson James might be concerned. It had not known of the second Henderson James that had stalked it through the night.
Henderson James, duplicate.
Henderson James, temporary.
Henderson James, here tonight, gone tomorrow.
For they would not let him live. The original Henderson James would not allow him to continue living, and even if he did, the world would not allow it. Duplicates were made only for very temporary and very special reasons and it was always understood that once their purpose was accomplished they would be done away with.
Done away with … those were the words exactly. Gotten out of the way.
Swept out of sight and mind. Killed as unconcernedly and emotionlessly as one chops off a chicken’s head.
He walked forward and dropped on one knee beside the puudly, running his hand over its body in the darkness. Lumps stood out all over it, the swelling buds that now would never break to spew forth in a loathsome birth a brood of puudly pups.
He rose to his feet.
The job was done, The puudly had been killed—killed before it had given birth to a horde of horrors.
The job was done and he could go home.
Home?
Of course, that was the thing that had been planted in his mind, the thing they wanted him to do. To go home, to go back to the house on Summit Avenue, where his executioners would wait, to walk back deliberately and unsuspectingly to the death that waited.
The job was done and his usefulness was over. He had been created to perform a certain task and the task was now performed and while an hour ago he had been a factor in the plans of men, he was no longer wanted. He was an embarrassment and superfluous.
Now wait a minute, he told himself. You may not be a duplicate. You do not feel like one.
That was true. He felt like Henderson James. He was Henderson James.
He lived on Summit Avenue and had illegally brought to Earth a beast known as a puudly in order that he might study it and talk to it and test its alien reactions, attempt to measure its intelligence and guess at the strength and depth and the direction of its non-humanity. He had been a fool, of course, to do it, and yet at the time it had seemed important to understand the deadly, alien mentality.
I am human, he said, and that was right, but even so the fact meant nothing. Of course he was human. Henderson James was human and his duplicate would be exactly as human as the original. For the duplicate, processed from the pattern that held every trait and characteristic of the man he was to become a copy of, would differ in not a single basic factor.
In not a single basic factor, perhaps, but in certain other things. For no matter how much the duplicate might be like his pattern, no matter how full-limbed he might spring from his creation, he still would be a new man.
He would have the capacity for knowledge and for thought and in a little time he would have and know and be all the things that his original was …
But it would take some time, some short while to come to a full realization of all he knew and was, some time to coordinate and recognize all the knowledge and experience that lay within his mind. At first he’d grope and search until he came upon the things that he must know. Until he became acquainted with himself, with the sort of man he was, he could not reach out blindly in the dark and put his hand exactly and unerringly upon the thing he wished.
That had been exactly what he’d done. He had groped and searched. He had been compelled to think, at first, in simple basic truths and facts.
I am a man.
I am on a planet called Earth.
I am Henderson James.
I live on Summit Avenue.
There is a job to do.
It had been quite a while, he remembered now, before he had been able to dig out of his mind the nature of the job.
There is a puudly to hunt down and destroy.
Even now he could not find in the hidden, still-veiled recesses of his mind the many valid reasons why a man should run so grave a risk to study a thing so vicious as a puudly. There were reasons, he knew there were, and in a little time he would know them quite specifically.
The point was that if he were Henderson James, original, he would know them now, know them as a part of himself and his life, without laboriously searching for them.
The puudly had known, of course. It had known, beyond any chance of error, that there were two Henderson Jameses. It had been keeping tab on one when another one showed up. A mentality far less astute than the puudly’s would have had no trouble in figuring that one out.
If the puudly had not talked, he told himself, I never would have known.
If it had died at once and not had a chance to taunt me, I would not have known. I would even now be walking to the house on Summit Avenue.