On Earth a man named Peter Summers and his wife Ruth--two people out
of Earth's teeming millions, but chosen with care because of their
exceptional courage and comeliness of form--went about their daily
affairs with no memory of what had happened to them on board a Martian
ship a short month previously.
Summers was a writer of mystery novels and his wife an artist
whose paintings had been widely acclaimed by critics. They were
quite ordinary people in some respects, brilliantly exceptional in
others. They had both been used as models by Tragor in constructing
experimental android men and android women, but those particular
androids had been discarded as not quite what the Plan called for.
The android who resembled Summers and the lithe-limbed, sultry-eyed
robot-woman who was almost an exact duplicate of Summers' wife had not
been destroyed, however. They had been kept immobilized in a laboratory
on Mars, the disks on their thighs turned off.
Summers and his wife had not been harmed. They had been released
at the completion of what had been one of the earliest of the
android-constructing experiments, with all knowledge of what had
happened to them on board the Martian ship blotted from their minds.
They were no longer of any interest to Tragor. However, the two
androids who resembled them had now become of vital interest to Tragor,
for the writer, Peter Summers, was a strong-willed, imaginative and
sensitive man and greatly resembled the crucial figure in the entire
Plan: David Loring. Not physically, but in the subtle and complex
configuration of his mind, and that configuration had been duplicated
in the robot-man fashioned in Summers' image. And Ruth Summers bore a
quite striking resemblance, even physically, to the woman whom Loring
loved.
The man and the woman awoke and stared about them. The man was not
Peter Summers. The woman was not Ruth, his wife. But the man resembled
Peter Summers in all respects. He had the same physical build, the same
eyes, ears, nose and mouth. Not only were his facial contours the same,
his body was a twin-duplicate of Peter Summers' body. He moved in the
same way, with the same gestures and mannerisms, and his voice would
not have seemed in any way strange to his wife or to any of the people
who knew him well.
The woman looked exactly like his wife. Her face and body would have
deceived anyone who knew his wife, knew precisely how she gestured and
talked. Even the tiny mole on her right shoulder was the same, and the
way her eyes crinkled slightly at the corners when she smiled.
In fact, the resemblance was almost too perfect, for there is something
obscurely and indefinably artificial about a duplication that is
flawlessly exact, unassailable in all of its parts. The living
organism changes constantly, is never quite the same from moment to
moment. In a duplication such elusive changes are hard to capture and
preserve. Even when the effort has been made and can be looked upon as
successful, a faint aura of artificiality remains.