It’s worse than that: the duplicates-who look and sound the same as the real thing but express no capacity for feeling or having emotions or individual personality-have taken over all of Santa Mira. Miles injects air into the veins of the forming bodies which causes them to turn into gray wispy figures they deemed “tumbleweeds.” When Miles tries to phone the FBI, it becomes obvious that the duplicates have taken over the phone lines. Miles, Becky, Theodora and Jack head to the doctor’s house to see if he can offer any explanation for the macabre duplicates, but instead they find four bodies that being forming into the four of them. The small town’s resident psychiatrist, Manfred Kaufman, has been helping those who have made complaints that the people they love aren’t really the people they love. He goes to get help, but upon returning, the copy of Becky has disappeared. Mile takes Becky home and finds that she also a duplicate of herself in her home. Sure enough, the body is taking shape and the form is going to look just like Jack. As they try to figure out what to do about it, Theodora screams that it is Jack. The body is not just unformed, but doesn’t even possess fingerprints. Seems that the Belicecs are not busy cheating at football, but are instead trying to figure out what is the deal with a half-formed body on their billiards table. Mile Bennell thinks so until, one night he and his one-time girlfriend Becky Driscoll are called to visit their friends Jack and Theodora Belicec. Oh, sure, they may look like the people they know, but they aren’t the people they know.

What is described as a “contagious neurosis” has several townspeople behaving strangely with their insistence that loved ones and friends are not really their loved ones and friends. A few short months later, something strange seems to be happening to some of the town’s residents. From the skies over Santa Mira, California drift pods from outer space.

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Jack finney novel