The situation didn't look too bad at first.
"There are no two things," Captain Corelli declared, "that are exactly and absolutely identical. And that applies, I should say, especially to identities."
It had a heartening sound. I've never been long on logic, being a very ordinary S.E. navigator whose automatic equipment is designed to do practically everything for him, and Corelli seemed to know what he was talking about.
Gibbons, being a scientist, saw it differently.
"That's not even good sophistry," he said. "The concept of identity between two objects has no meaning whatever, Captain, unless we have a prior identification of one or the other. Aristotle himself couldn't have told an apple from a coconut if he'd never seen or heard of either."
"Any fool would know that," one of the Haslops grunted. And the other added in the same tone: "Hey, if you guys are going at it like that, we'll be here forever!"
"All right," Corelli said, deflated. "We'll try another tack."
He thought for a minute or two. "How about screening them for background detail? The real Haslop was a bounty-claimer, which means that he must have made thousands of planetfalls before crashing here. The bogus one couldn't remember the details of all those worlds as well as the original, no matter how many times he'd been told, could he?"
"Won't work," one of the Haslops said disgustedly. "Hell, after twenty-two years I can't remember those places myself, and I was there."