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?