“Rafe. You have to call me something. I’m you. Or something like. I can see you—there. I guess you can see me. Do I look like you?”

“Where’s Jillan and Paul? The people with me—where are they?”

“They’re—” The doppelganger pointed off toward the dark outside the light. “They’re somewhere about. Not speaking to me. Please—let me try to explain this. I don’t know where their bodies are. I found you. Me. Lying there. I thought—you know, the way you can see yourself—they say you can see yourself when you die. You float up near the ceiling and look down and see yourself lying there, and you can hear, and you don’t want to go back—But I wanted to. I tried. Jillan and Paul—they’re like me. They’re with me. I think they are.”

“You’re talking nonsense.” He hugged himself, trying not to shiver, but the thought kept circling him that it was not an alien in front of him. He wanted it to be. He wanted it to change into something else, anything else. “Evaporate, why don’t you?”

“Please.” The doppelganger seemed to shiver. Tears ran down its face. “I think I might. I don’t know. Maybe I’m you, a part of you, and we got separated somehow.”

“Maybe I’m dreaming this.”

“Or I am. But I don’t think so. There’s this dark place. I come and go out of it and I don’t know how. You walk and you cover so much ground you can get lost. Maybe you can lose yourself and not get back. I’m afraid that’s what’s happened to Jillan and Paul. I think they’re off looking—looking for their own selves. Like you. They’re not taking this well. I’m scared. Please don’t look like that.”

“God, what do you expect me to look like?”

“I know. I know. I feel it like we were still connected when you look like that.”

“You read my mind. Is that it? You’re the alien. You just pick up on what I think, what I’d think—”

“Don’t.” The doppelganger shook its head, wiped a fist across its mouth in an expression which was his own. “Don’t do that. I know I’m not. I know. I wouldn’t choose to feel like this if I had a choice. I don’t remember being anything else. I was born at Fargone; Jillan’s my sister; our kin all died—”

“Cut it!”

“It’s all I know. It’s all I know, and—Rafe—I remember the jump, remember this place we were in—”

He remembered too, the terror, the waving arms, the pain, the ungodly pain....

“I woke up in the dark,” the doppelganger said. “And they were with me, Jillan was, and Paul. And somehow I found you. You were lying on the floor. I tried to get to you. I thought—I thought we were dying then. That I had to get back.”

“I don’t know why I’m talking to you.” Rafe put his head down, ran his hand through his hair, looked up again in the earnest hope the apparition would have gone. It had not. It stared at him, a mirror image of despair.

“I’m afraid,” it said. “O God, I’m scared.”

“Where are they?”

“I don’t know.”

He drew a deep breath and got to his feet, came closer and saw the image lose its coherency at close range. “I can see through you.”

“Can you?”

“You’re an image. That’s all you are.” He kept walking till the image lost all its coherency and he moved into it. He saw it projected around his outstretched hand. “Fake!”

“But I’m here,” the voice persisted, forlorn, with an edge of panic. “Don’t. Don’t do that. Back off. Please back off.”

He swept his arm about as if that could scatter it, like vapor. “You’re nothing, hear?”

There was no answer. The image reconstituted itself a little way away, naked and frightened looking. Tears still glistened on its face.

“I think,” it said, “I think—somehow they made me. I don’t know how. While you were asleep. O God, hold onto me. Please hold onto me.”

“How?” The terror in the voice was real. It hurt him, so that at once he wanted to deal it hurt and heal it. “I can’t touch you. You’re not here, do you hear me? Wherever you are, it’s not here.”

“I think—think they made me out of you. Up to—I don’t know how long ago—we have the same memories, because I was you.” The doppelganger folded his hands over his nakedness, wistful, lost-looking, in a dreadful calm. “I’m really scared. But I guess I haven’t got title to be. All I am—I guess—is you.”

“Look—” he said to himself, hurting for himself, feeling half mad. “Look, where are you? Can you tell that?”

“Here. Just here. There’s that other place. But it’s only dark. I don’t want to go back there.”

“I think—I think they’ve made some kind of android.”

“I might be.”

“The Jillan and Paul with you—they’re like you?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know? Bring them here.”

“I don’t know how to look.”

“Liar.” He flung his arm at the doppelganger, somewhere between hate and pity. “Go try.”

“It’s dark out there.”

He wanted to laugh, to curse, to weep. He did none of them, feeling a shaking in his knees, a mounting terror. He had never liked dark confined spaces. Crawlways, like Fargone mines. “Go on,” he said. “Come back when you know something.”

And that too was mad.

“Will you—” his double asked, in a faint thin voice, “will you find something to call me—so I have a name?”

“Name yourself.”

“ Youname me,” the other said, and sent chills up his spine.

“Rafe,” Rafe said. He could not commit that ultimate robbery. “That’s what you are, isn’t it?”

The shoulders straightened, the head came up, touching a chord in him, as if he had discovered courage in himself he had never seen. “That’s what I am,” the doppelganger said. “Brother.”

And it walked away.

What it had said chilled him, that it had said a thing he had not dreamed to say.

He sat down where he was, locked his arms over his head, thinking that he might have witnesses.

He looked up when he had got his breath back.

“If you’ve built that thing,” he said to the walls, able to think of it as thingwhen he was not staring at it face to face, “you’ve got some way to interpret it. Haven’t you? You understand? Why are you doing this?”’

There was no answer. He sat there until the strength had returned to his legs and then he began carefully to retrace his way back to the small horror that was his, the place stocked with food that he could use.

Habitat,he thought. As if I were an animal.He nursed hope, all the same, that if he had come through it, if the pain was done, then their captors were only being careful. It did not guarantee that they were benign. There were darknesses in his mind that refused to come into the light, the memory of the ship that had done what no ship ought to do; of pain—but they might have been ignorant, or in a hurry to save them.

So he built up his hope. The lights came on ahead of him, at an easy pace. He went, looking over his shoulder from time to time, and quickly forward, fearing ambushes.

He remembered the bogey’s size, like the starstation itself. Hurling that into jump took more power than any engine had a right to use; and for the rest, for technology that could tear a mind apart and reconstitute it inside an android—that was the stuff of suppositions and what-ifs, spacers’ yarns and books. No one did such things.

No one jumped a station-sized mass. By the laws he knew, nothing could, that did not conform to the conditions of a black hole. And it did it from virtual standstill.

He did not run when he had home in sight; he restrained himself, but his knees were shaking.

He sat down when he had gotten there, in the chair before the disjointed console, in the insane debris of Lindy’s corpse, and bowed his head onto his arms, because it ached.

Ached as if something were rent away from him.

He wiped his eyes and idly flipped a switch, jumped when a screen flared to life and gave him star-view.

He tried the controls, and there was nothing.