It wasn't six months before I saw the thing starting off. That was when I was invited to Garrity's second wedding. It was in Terra City, and when he asked me to come down with him for a witness, I assumed it would be the girl he had been busily courting before he went to Serco. But when I walked into the marriage registry office and took a look at the girl, I got a clear, horrific idea of just what Katha had done to Garrity.
He didn't think anything had been done to him. He was all smiles. He brought the girl toward me, proud and possessive, grinning all over his face.
"This is Mary Collins," he told me, and I kept on looking, not saying anything. She smiled, and shook hands, and I could tell by her expression that she knew exactly what I was thinking.
Unfortunately, I couldn't say a word about it to Garrity. There was always the faint possibility that I might be wrong, in which case I could make a lot of trouble by saying a few words. The words were there, though, straining to get out. When he said, "Mary Collins," what I wanted to say was, "No, it isn't. It's Katha."
Because it was. After I watched the girl long enough, all the way through the marriage ceremony, then down in the elevator and out into the street, I became dead certain.
There was a brown mole on Katha's arm. Mary had it, too. And there was a look about the eyes—well, there could only be one Katha.
What I could not understand was why Garrity didn't see it. After all, he'd been married to Katha.
But when I tried to say something to him, he brushed it off.
"Sure, Mary looks a little like Katha," he agreed with me. "But there are all kinds of small differences. Things a man finds out as he goes along. Look, I'm very fond of both of them. I know the difference. You're just confused by the slight resemblance."
The clincher was the problem of how Katha had reached Terra City ahead of Garrity, to begin with, and whether there was still a Katha in Serco. I asked a man off a ship fresh from Serco and he told me Katha hadn't been there for some time. No one knew where she'd gone, but she had said she'd be back.