"You are powerless to do anything except what I tell you," he said. It
was true. I was only half thinking now, my attention concentrated on
this superbly confident other self of mine. Somewhere among the missing
cylinders, however, was my recollection that this was the creature
who had taken my place in bed with Mae. My head hurt at the thought,
coupled with his proximity. I longed to take him by the neck and
throttle him until he was dead, dead, dead. But I was powerless to move
except as he directed.
Then Joy came back around the bend behind him. I threw myself against
him and he fell off balance. She had only a few seconds to take in the
situation. She swung up her handbag and gave him a good clout on the
head. He crumpled to the floor. She hit him again, on the downswing,
and the sharp metal corner of her bag banged into his skull. He was
out.
"Thanks, Joy. You're a lifesaver."
"Maybe," she said. "If we don't get out of here we'll both be more like
wads of second-hand chewing gum. What are you _doing_?"
I'd pulled my unconscious image to a sitting position against the wall
of the corridor and was going through his pockets.
"Little identity switch," I told her.
He had nothing at all in his inside breast pocket, but there was a
clip-on pencil and a small notebook in his shirt pocket. I exchanged
them for the little notebook and clip-on pencil I keep in the same
place. I exchanged wallets, too, not without a pang for the eighty-odd
dollars in expense money that was in mine. I put off examining his. For
good measure I switched the handkerchiefs we both carried in our right
hip pockets and the few coins in the change pockets of our jackets.
"Looks like a fair exchange," Joy said. "Now what? Can't we hurry up?"
"Where are the others?"
"I don't know. I came back when I missed you."
I found a door that opened and pulled my duplicate into the room. It
was an empty cabin, obviously unused. I propped him against a chair and
Joy said, "Shall I give him another whack?"
"No, let's just leave him. We don't want to kill the guy. He looks as
if he'll be out for quite a while."
We decided to head for the landing stage. On the way I asked Joy about
something that had been puzzling me: "Just how did you know which one
of us to hit?"
She thought for a moment. "Intuition, I guess. You were the one who
was attacking--using physical violence--so you couldn't have been the
Monolithian. He would have been armed with one of his super weapons. I
didn't really think about it." She looked at me and said, apparently
only half-jokingly, "You _are_ you, aren't you?"