"I warn you that what you're starting to read is full of loose ends and unanswered questions."
The opening line of the novel immediately sets the stage for all the ambiguity to come. Eventually, the characters in the story will be asking questions that are, ultimately, never actually answered because by the time they learn the answers the people asking the questions are no longer who they were. By the time the reader closes the book, he will know a lot of about what happened, but will be remain just as ignorant about why it all happened.
“She says he looks exactly like Uncle Ira, talks just like him, acts just like him—everything. She just knows it isn’t Ira, that’s all.”
Miles is introduced to the body snatchers by his old flame Becky who has come to him with concern about her cousin Wilma. It will very quickly become a recurring pattern that soon verges on an epidemic: people fervently insisting on a vaguely supported argument that people they’ve know all their lives may look exactly the same, but are unquestionably not the same person.
“There is no emotion---none. Only the pretense of it.”
Wilma is having trouble convincing Miles of her outrageous claims that her Uncle Ira is no longer actually the man who was her Uncle Ira because all the available evidence points to the contrary. The alien process of creating exact duplicates of human beings is almost perfect: they look exactly alike and they even retain all the memories of the earthlings. The one thing they lack—the essential quality the absence of which dooms them—is the one thing their species apparently cannot duplicate: human emotion. Wilma points out that her Uncle Ira is capable of recalling every single fact and memory without fault, but it is not the facts of history that make a person who they are, it is their emotional recall of that memory.
I think it must actually be possible to lose your mind to lose your mind in an instant, and that perhaps I came very close to it.
Miles has just see for himself for the first time the duplication process in action. There before his eyes, developing like a photographer image in a darkroom, is an exact physical twin of Becky Driscoll. The full horror of such a scene is put into context with a succinct realization. One really can be driven to madness simply by looking a sight so unnatural and abominable to the human experience that in many cases the perceptual process breaks down and refuses to start up again in normal fashion. It would be almost impossible to accurately describe the emotional response to witnessing such a hideously monstrous assault on everything you thought you do and Miles situates the scenario in really the only possible way. To see it would be the test of one’s ability to withstand insanity.
“Hell, the Salem witch hunt, flying saucers – they're all part of this same amazing aspect of the human mind. People live lonely lives, a lot of them; these delusions bring attention and concern."
Mannie the psychiatrist arrives after Miles and his friends have caught onto the pods, but when they go back to show him, it has mysteriously disappeared. Somewhat surprisingly, Mannie has arrived armed with a passel of information about curious cases involving unexplained cases that mass hypnosis similar to what is happening in his town. He mentions a nearby case called the Mattoon Maniac and then makes reference to an obscure real life European epidemic known as Dancing Sickness. From there it’s a leap to witch hunts and reports of alien invaders all to prove a point he seems pretty confident in: all the stories of people not being who they are—and strange unformed duplicates disappearing—are just hogwash. In fact, Mannie almost seems to be overconfident in this assertion.
“The truth is what I say. It did happen. The pods arrived, drifting onto our planet as they have onto others, and they performed, and are now performing, their simple and natural function – which is to survive on this planet. And they do so by exercising their evolved ability to adapt and take over and duplicate, cell for cell, the life this planet is suited for."
Budlong—or rather the pod person who has taken the place of biology Professor Budlong—fills in one of the gaps of missing information for Miles. He lays out with a precision that comes with being part Bernard and pod-Bernard the full skinny on what, exactly, is happening. He also gives a strong hint as to why they are doing it, but remains vague on the details of exactly what went wrong with their planet. When Miles pushes for details on how the duplication process, Budlong is also ill-equipped to give specifics.
It didn't even reach the papers, this particular story. Drive across Golden Gate bridge into Marin County today, make your way to Santa Mira, California, and you'll simply see a town, shabbier and more run-down than most others, but – not startlingly so. The people, some of them, may seem to you listless and uncommunicative, and the town may impress you as unfriendly. You'll see more homes empty and for sale than can quite be accounted for; the death rate here is rather higher than the county average, and sometimes it's hard to know just what to write down on a death certificate. On and around certain farms west of town, clumps of trees, patches of vegetation, and occasional farm animals sometimes die from no apparent cause.
The pods leave and humanity is saved. But most of humanity has no idea just how close to total devastation their world came. The invasion turns out to have been a strictly limited affair and Miles provides a glimpse into a planet that might have been with his sketch of how his town—the epicenter of the short-lived invasion—fared.
