THE DO-IT-YOURSELF PLANET
Link Denham had spent
most of his adult life
trying to avoid
boredom. But sometimes there can
be too much adventure for any
man. One morning Link awoke, battling a fierce hangover,
to find
himself aboard a rickety
old spaceship,
with a strange little man named Thistlethwaite. It seemed
they were bound for an unexplored
planet to collect unexplained riches.
The last ship that had tried
to land
on Sord
III, their unprepossessing destination,
had been
warned off at
risk of destruction. And Link
was about
to encounter
a strange
welcome. First, there were the
small pink piglike animals, who spoke
in a
surprisingly human, insultingly sarcastic manner. But the
second half of the reception committee
was a
good deal more formidable.
Turn this book over for second complete novel
MURRAY
LEINSTER, whose
real name is Will F. Jenkins, has been entertaining the public with his
exciting fiction for several decades. Called the dean of modern
science-fiction, he was writing these amazing super-science adventures back in
the early twenties before there ever was such a thing as an all-fantasy
magazine. His short stories, novelettes, and serial novels have appeared in
most of the major American magazines, both slick and pulp, and many have been
reprinted all over the v~3ild.
He has made a distinguished
name for himself (or rather two names) in the fields of adventure, historical,
western, sea, and suspense stories.
Ace Books has still available the following
Murray Leinster novels: CITY ON THE MOON (D-277), THE PIRATES OF ZAN and THE
MUTANT WEAPON (D^03), THE FORGOTTEN PLANET (D-528), and THIS WORLD IS TABOO
(D-525).
MURRAY LEINSTER
ACE BOOKS, INC. 1120 Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y. 10036
THE DUPLICATORS
Copyright Š, 1964, by Murray Leinster All Rights Reserved
NO TRUCE WITH
TERRA
Copyright Š, 1964, by Ace Books, Inc.
Printed in U.S.A.
It occurred to Link Denham, as a matter for mild regret,
that he was about to wake up, and he'd had much too satisfactory a pre-slumber
evening to want to do so. He lay between sleeping and awake, and he felt a
splendid peace-fulness, and the festive events in which he'd relaxed after six
months on Claeth ran pleasantly through his mind. He didn't want to think about
Claeth any more. He'd ventured forth for a large evening because he wanted to
forget that man-killing world. Now, not fully asleep and very far from wide-awake,
snatches of charming memory floated through his consciousness. There had been
song, this past evening.
There had been conversation, man-talk upon matters of great interest and no importance whatever. And things
had gone on to a remarkably
enjoyable climax.
He did not stir, but he remembered that one
of his newfound intimate friends had been threatened with ejection from the
place where Link and others relaxed. There were protests, in which Link joined.
Then there was conflict, in which he took part. The intended ejectee was
rescued before he was heaved into the darkness outside this particular spaceport
joint. There was celebration of his rescue. Then the spaceport cops arrived,
which was an insult to all the warm friends who now considered that they had
been celebrating together.
Link drowsily and pleasurably recalled the
uproar. There were many pleasing items it was delightful to review. Somebody'd
defied fate and chance and spaceport cops from a pyranSoTof piled-up chairs and tables. Link himself, with many loyal comrades, had
charged the cops who tried to pull him down. He recalled bottles spinning in
the air, spouting their contents as they flew. Spaceport cops turned fire hoses
on Link's new friends, and they and he heaved chairs at spaceport cops. Some
friends fought cordially on the floor and others zestfully at other places, and
all the tensions and all the tautness of nerves developed on Glaethwhere the
death rate was ten per cent a month
among carynth-hunterswere relieved and smoothed out and totally erased. So
Link now felt completely peaceful and beatifically content.
Somewhere, something mechanical clicked
loudly. Something else made a subdued grunting noise which was also
mechanical. These sounds were reality, intruding upon the blissful tranquility
Link now enjoyed.
He remembered something. His eyes did not
open, but his hand fumbled at his waist. He was reassured. His stake-belt was
still there, and it still contained the gritty small objects for which he'd
risked his life several times a day for some months in succession. Those
pinkish crystals were at once the reason and the reward for his journey to
Glaeth. He'd been lucky. But he'd become intolerably tense. He'd been unable to
relax when the buy-boat picked him up with other carynth-hunters, and he hadn't
been able to loosen up his nerves at the planet to which the buy-boat took him.
But here, on this remoter planet, Trent, he had relaxed at last. He was soothed.
He was prepared to face reality with a cheerful
confidence.
Remembering,
he had become nearly awake. It occurred to him that the laws of the planet
Trent were said to be severe. The cops were stern. It was highly probable that
when he opened his eyes he would find himself in jail, with fines to be paid
and a magistrate's lecture on proper behavior to be listened to. But he
recalled unworriedly that he could pay his fines, and that he was
ready^tw^Cfchave like an angel, now that he'd relaxed.
The
loud clicking sound repeated. It was followed again by the grunting noise. Link
opened his eyes.
Something
that looked like a wall turned slowly around some six feet away from him. A
moment later he found himself regarding a comer where three walls came together.
He hadn't moved his head. The wall moved. Again, later, a square and more or
less flat object with a billowing red cloth on it floated into view. He deduced
that it was a table.
He was not standing on his feet, however. He
was not lying on a bunk. He floated, weightless, in mid-air in a cubicle
perhaps ten feet by fifteen and seven feet high. The thing with the red cloth
on it was truly a table, fastened to what ought to be a floor. There were
chairs. There was a doorway with steps leading nowhere.
Link
closed his eyes and counted ten, but the look of things remained the same when
he reopened them. Before his relaxation of the night before, such a waking would have disturbed him. Now he contemplated his surroundings
with calm. He was evidently not in jail. As evidently, he was
not aground anywhere. The only possible explanation was unlikely to the
point of insanity, but it had to be true. He was in a spaceship, and not a
luxurious one. This particular compartment was definitely shabby. And on the evidence
of no-grayity, the ship was in free fall. It was not exactly a normal state of things to wake up to.
There
came again a loud clicking, followed by another subdued mechanical grunt. Link
made a guess at the origin of the sounds. It was most likely a
pressure-reduction valve releasing air from a high-pressure tank to maintain a
lower pressure somewhere else. If Link had taken thought, his hair would have
stood on end immediately. But he didn't.
The
cubicle, moving sedately around him, brought one of its wji& within reach of his foot. He kicked. He
floated away from the ceiling to a gentle
impact on the floor. He held on, more or less, by using the palms of his hands
as suction-cupsa most unsatisfactory systemand got within reach of a
table-leg. He swung himself about and shoved for the doorway. He floated to it
in slow motion, caught hold of a stair-tread,
got a grip on the door frame, and oriented himself with respect to the room.
He
was in the mess room of a certainly ancient and obviously small ship of space.
All was shabbiness. Where paint had not peeled off, it stayed on in blisters.
The flooring was worn through to the metal plates beneath. There were other
signs of neglect. There had been no tidying of this mess room for a long time.
He
heard a faint, new, rumbling sound. It stopped, and came again. It was
overhead, in the direction the stairway led to. The rumbling came once more. It
was rhythmic.
Link
grasped a hand-rail and heaved himself gently upward. He arrived at a landing,
and the rumbling noise was louder. This level of the ship contained cabins for
the crew. The rumbling came from a higher level still. He went up more steps,
floating as before.
He
arrived at a control-room which was antiquated and grubby and of very doubtful
efficiency. There were ports, which were covered with frost.
Somebody
snored above his head. That was the rumbling sound. Link lifted his eyes and
saw the snorer. A small, whiskery man scowled portentiously even in his sleep.
He floated in mid-air as Link had floated, but with his knees drawn up and his
two hands beside his cheek as if resting on an imaginary pillow. And he snored.
Link reflected, and then
said genially,
"Hello!"
The
whiskery man snored again. Link saw something familiar about him. Yes. He'd
been involved in the festivity of the night before. Link remembered having seeS him scowling ferociously from the side lines while tumult raged and
firehoses played.
"Ship ahoy!" said
Link loudly.
The
small man jumped, in the very middle of a snore.
He choked and blinked and made astonished movements, and of course began to
turn eccentric half-circles in mid-air. In one of his turnings he saw Link. He
said peevishly,
"Dammit,
don't stand there starin'l Get me down! But don't turn on the gravity! Want me
to break my neck?"
Link
reached up and caught a foot. He brought the little man down to solidity and
released him.
"Huh!" said the
little man waspishly. "You're awake."
"Apparently,"
admitted Link. "Are you?"
The
little man snorted. He aligned himself and gave a shove. He floated through the air to the control board. He caught its
corner. He looked it over and pushed a button. Ship gravity came on. There was
a sudden slight jolt, and then a series of lesser Jolts, and then the fine
normal feeling of gravity and weight and up and down. Things abruptly looked
more sensible. They weren't, but they looked that way.
Tm
curious," said Link. "Have you any idea where we are?"
The
whiskery man said scornfully, "Where we are? How'd I know? That's your
business!" His air grew truculent as Link didn't grasp the idea. "My business?"
"You're
the astrogator, ain't you? You signed on last night; I had to help you hold the
pen, but you signed on! Astrogator, third officer's ticket, and you said you
could astro-gate a wash bucket from Sirius Three to the Rim with nothin' but a
root-rule and a logarithm table. That's what you said! You said you'd
astrogated a Norse spaceliner six hundred Iightyears tail-first to port after
her overdrive unit switch^ poles. You said"
Link held up his hand.
"I ...
er ... I recognize the imaginative
style," he said painfully. "It's mine, in my more exuberant moments.
But how did that land me . . . wherever I am?"
"You
made a deal with me," said the little man, truculently.
"Thistlethwaite's the name. You signed on this ship, the Glamorgan, an' you said you were an astrogator and I made the deal on that
representation. It's four years in jail, on Trent, to sign on or act as a astrogator unless you're duly licensed."
"Morbid
people, the lawmakers of Trent," said Link. "What else?"
"You
don't draw wages," said the whiskery man, as truculently as before.
"You're a junior partner in the business I'm startin'. You agreed to leave
all matters but astrogation to me, on penalty of forfeitin' all moneys due or
accrued or to accrue. It's a tight contract. I wrote it myself."
"I
am lost in admiration," said Link politely. "But" "We're
goin'," said Thistlethwaite sternly, "to a planet I know. Another fella and me, we landed there in a spaceboat
after the
ship we was in got wrecked. We made a deal with the . . . uh . . . authorities.
We took off again in the space-boat. It was loaded down with plenty valuable
cargol We was to go back, but my partnerhe was the astrogator of the
spaceboathe took his share of the money and started cele-bratin'l Two weeks
later he jumped out a window because he thought pink gryphs was coming out of
the wall after him. That left me sole owner of the business, but strapped for
cash. I'd been celebratin' too. So I bought the Glamorgan with what I had, an' bought a cargo for
her."
"A
very fine ship, the Glamorgan," said Link, politely. "But I'm a little
dense this morning, or evening, or whatever it may be. How do I fit into the
picture of commercial enterprise aboard this splendid ship the Glamorgan?"
The whiskery man spat,
venomously.
"The
ship's junk," he snapped. "I couldn't get psf^rs for her to go
anywheres but to a junk yard on Bellaire to be scrapped. I hadda astrogator and
a fella to spell me in the engine room. They believed we was
going to the junk yard, but we had some trouble with the engines layin' down,
and she leaked air. Plenty! So when we got to Trent those two run off. They're
liable to two years in jail for runnin' out on a contract concemin' personal
services. Hell! They didn't think we'd make Trent! They wanted to take to the
spaceboat and abandon ship halfway there! And me with all my capital tied up in
it!"
Link
regarded his companion uncomfortably. Thistleth-waite snapped,
"So
I was stuck on Trent with no astrogator an' port-dues pilin' up. Until you came along."
"Ah!"
said Link. "I came along! Riding a white horse, no doubt, and kissing my
hand to the ladies. Then what?"
"I asked you if you was a astrogater, and you told me yes."
"I
hate to disappoint people," said Link regretfully. "I probably wanted
to brighten up your day, or evening. I tried."
"Then," said Thistlethwaite
portentiously, "I told you enough about what I'm goin' after so you said
it was a splendid venture, befittin' such men as you
and me. You'd join me, you said. But you wanted to fight some more policemen
before liftin' off. I'd already drug you out of a fight where the spaceport cops was usin' fire-hoses on both sides. I told you fightin'
policemen carries six months in jail, on Trent. But
you wouldn't listen. Even after I told you why we had to take
off quick."
"And that reason
was"
"Spaceport
dues," snapped the little man. "On the Glamorgan] Landin'-grid
fees. On the Glamorgan! I run out of money! Besides, there was grub
and some parts for the engines that'd been givin' trouble. I bought 'em and
charged 'em, like a business man does, expectin' to come back some day and pay
fc7r 'em. But the spaceport people got suspicious. They were goin'
to seize the ship tomorrowtodayand sell her if they could for the port bills
and grub bills and parts bills."
"I see!" said
Link. "And I probably sympathized with you."
"You
said," said the little man grimly, "that it was a conspiracy against
brave an' valiant souls like us two, an' you'd only fight two more
policemensix months more on top of what you was already liable toand then
we'd defy such crass and commercial individuals and take off into the wild blue
yonder."
Link reflected. He shook his head in mild
disapproval "So what happened?"
"You
fought four policemen," said his companion succinctly. "In two
separate scraps, addin' a year
in jail to what you'd piled up before."
"It
begins to look," said Link, "as if I may have made myself unpopular
on Trent. Is there anything else I ought to know?"
"They started to use tear gas on
you," the whiskery man told him, "so you set fire to a police truck. To let the flames lift up the gas, you said. That would be
some more years in jail. But I got you in the Glamorgan"
"And
got the grid to lift us off?" When the little man shook his head, Link
asked hopefully. "I got the grid to lift us off? . . . We persuaded"
"Nope,"
said Thistlethwaite. "You just took off. On emergency
rockets. Off the spaceport tarmac. With no clearance. Leavin' the oiled
tarmac on fire." Link winced. The little man went on inexorably,
"We hit for space at six gees accelleration and 'near as I can make out
you kept goin' at that till the first rockets burned out. And then you went
down into the mess room."
"I
suppose," said Link unhappily, "that I'd
worked up an appetite. Or was there some way I could pile up a few more years
to spend in jail?"
"You went to sleep," said the
little man. "And P-wasn't goin' to bother youl" Link thought it over.
"No,"
he agreed. "I can see that you mightn't have wanted to bother me. Do you
intend to turn around and go back to
Trent?"
"What for?" demanded the little man
bitterly. "For jail? An' for them to sell off the Glamorgan for
port dues and such?"
"There's that, of course,"
acknowledged Link. "But I'd rather believe you wouldn't leave a friend in
distress, or jail. All right. I don't want to go back
to Trent either. I'm an out-doorsy sort of character and I wouldn't like to
spend the next eighteen years in jail."
"Twenty-two,"
said Thistlethwaite. "And six months."
"So,"
finished Link, "I'll play along. Since I'm the astro-gator 111 try to find out where we are. Then you'll tell me where you want to go.
And after that, some evening when there's nothing special to do, you'll tell me
why. Right?"
"The why," snapped the whiskery
man, "is I promised to make you so rich y'couldn't spend the interest on
y'moneyl And you a junior partner!"
"Carynths?" suggested Link.
Carynths
were the galaxy's latest and most fabulous status1 gems. They
couldn't be synthesizedthey were said to be the result of meteoric impacts on
a special peach-colored oreand they were as beautiful as they were rare. So
far they'd only been found on Glaeth. But if a woman had a carynth ring, she
was somebody. If she had a carynth bracelet, she was Somebody.
And if she had a carynth necklace, she ruled society on the planet on which she
was pleased to reside. But
"Carynths
are garbage," said Thisthethwaite contemptuously, "alongside of
what's waitin' for us! For each one of what-^m tradin' for, to bring it away
from where we're goin', I'll get a hundred million credits an' half the profits
after that! An' I'll have a shipload of e'm! And it's all set! Now you do your
stuff and I'll check over the engines."
He
headed down the stairwell. He reached the first landing below. The second. Link heard a faint click and then a mechanical
grunting noise. At the sound, the little man howled enragedly. Link jumped.
"What's the
matter?" he asked anxiously.
"We're
leakin' air!" roared the little man. "Bleedin* it! You musta started
some places, takin' off at six gees! All the air's pourin' out!"
His
words became unintelligible, but they were definitely profane. Doors clanged
shut, cutting off his voice. He was sealing all compartments.
Link
surveyed the control room of the ship. In his younger days he'd aspired to be a
spaceman. He'd been a cadet in the Merchant Space Academy on Malibu for two
complete terms. Then the faculty let him go. He liked novelty and excitement
and on occasion, tumult. The faculty didn't. His grades were all right but they
heaved him out. So he knew a certain amount about astrogation. Not much, but
enough to keep from having to go back to Trent.
A
door closed below. The little man's voice could be heard, swearing sulfurously.
He got something from somewhere and the door clanged behind him again, cutting
off his voice once more.
Link
resumed his survey. There was the control board, reasonably easy to understand.
There was the computer, simple enough for him to operate. There were reference
books. A Galactic Directory for this sector. Alditch's Practical Astrogation. A luridly bound volume of Space-Commerce Regulations. The Directory was brand new. The others were old and
tattered volumes.
Link
went carefully over the ship's log, which contained every course steered, time
elapsed, and therefore distance run in parsecs and fractions of them. He could
take the Glamorgan back to the last three ports she'd visited by
reversing the recorded maneuvers. But that didn't seem enterprising.
He
skimmed through the Astrogator. He'd be somewhere not too many millions of
miles from the sun of the planet Trent. He'd
take a look at the Trent listing in the Directory, copy out its coordinates and proper motion, check the galactic poles
and zero galactic longitude by observation out the ports, and then get at the
really tricky stuff when he learned the ship's destination.
He
threw on the heater switch so he could see out the ports and observe the sun
which shone on Trent. Instantly an infuriated bellow came up from below.
"Turn
off the heatl" raged Thistlethwaite from below. "Turn it offl"
"But the ports are frosted," Link
called back. "I need to see outl We need the
heaters!" "I was sittin' on one! Turn 'em off!"
A door clanged below. Link
shrugged. If Thistlethwaite had to sit on a heater, the heater shouldn't be on.
Delay was indicated.
He
wasn't worried. The mood of tranquility and repose he'd waked with still stayed
with him. Naturally! His current situation might have seemed disturbing to
somebody else, but to a man who'd just left the planet Glaeth, with its
strictly murderous fauna and flora and climatic conditions, to be aboard a
merely leaking spaceship of creaking antiquity was restful. That it was only
licensed to travel to a junk yard for scrapping seemed no cause for worry. That
it was bound on a mysterious errand instead seemed interesting. With no cares
whatever, Link was charmed to find himself in a situation where practically
anything was more than likely to happen.
He thought
restfully of not being on Glaeth. There were animals' there which looked like
rocks and acted like stones until one got within reach of remarkably extensible
hooked claws. There were trees which dripped a corrosive fluid on any moving
creature that disturbed them. There were gigantic flying things against which
the only defense was concealment, and things which tunneled underground and
made traps into which anything heavier than a rabbit would drop as the ground
gave way beneath it. And there was the climate. In the area in which the best
finds of carynths had been made, there was no record of rain having- ever
fallen, and noon temperature in the most favorable season hovered around a
hundred forty in the shade. But it was the only world on which carynths were to
be found. The carynth-prospectors who landed there, during the most favorable
season, of course, sometimes got rich. Much more often they didn't. Only forty
per cent of those set aground at the beginning of the prospecting season met
the buy-boat which came for them at its close. Link had been one of that lucky minority. Naturally he did not feel alarm on the Glamorgan. He'd almost gotten used to Glaeth! So he
waited peacefully until Thisthlethwaite said it was all right to turn on the
heaters and melt the frost off the ports.
He
began to set up for astrogation. The coordinates for Trent would go into the
computer, and then the coordinates for the ship's destination. The computer
would figure the course between them and its length in parsecs and fractions of
parsecs. One would drive on that course. One could, if it was desirable, look
for possible ports of call on the way. Link took down the Directory to set up the first figures.
He
happened to notice a certain consequence of the Directory's newness. It was the only un-shabby, un-wom object on the ship. But even
it showed a grayish, well-thumbed line on the edge of certain pages which had
been often referred to. The grayishness should be a guide to the information
about Trent, as the Glamorgan's latest port of call. Link opened the grayest
page, pleased with himself for his acuteness.
But
Trent wasn't listed on that page. Trent wasn't even in that part of the book.
The heading of this particular chapter of listings was, "Non-Cluster Planets Between Huyla and Glaire." It described the maverick solar systems not
on regular trade-routes and requiring long voyages from commercial spaceports
if anybody was to reach them. People rarely wanted to.
Link
stared. He found signs that this Tiad been repeatedly referred to by somebody
with engine-oil on his fingers. One page had plainly been read and re-read and
re-read. The margin was darkened as if an oily thumb had held a place there while the item was gloated over.
From any normal standpoint
it was not easy to understand.
"SORD"
said the Directory. There followed the galactic coordinates to
three places of decimals. "Yel. sol-type approx. 1.4 sols mass, mny faculae all times, spectrum"
The
spectrum-symbols could be skipped. If one wanted to be sure that a particular
sun was such-and-such, one would take a spectrophoto and compare it with the Directory. Otherwise the spectrum was for the birds. Link labored over the
abbreviations that compilers of reference books use to make things difficult.
"3rd. pi. hived, hab. ox aim. 2/3 sea nml brine, usual icecaps cloud-systems hab. est. 1."
Then came the interesting part. In the clear language that informative books
use with such reluctance, he read:
"This1 planet is said to have
been colonized from Surheil 11 some centuries since, and may be inhabited but
no spaceport is known to exist. The last report on this planet was from a
spaceyacht some two centuries ago. TTie yacht called down asking permission to
land and Was threatened with destruction if it did. The yacht
took pictures from space showing specks that could be villages or the ruins of
same, but this is doubtful. No other landings or communications are known. Any
records which might have existed on Suheil 11 were destroyed in the Economic
Wars on that planet."
In the Glamorgan's control
room, Link was intrigued. He went back to the abbreviations and deciphered
them. Sord was a yellow sol-type sun with a mass of 1.4 sols and many faculae.
Its third planet was believed habitable. It had an oxygen atmosphere,
two-thirds of its surface was sea, the sea was normal brine and there were the
usual ice caps and cloud systems of a planet whose habitability was estimated
at one.
And
two centuries ago its inhabitants had threatened to smash a spaceyacht which
wanted to land on it.
According
to Thistlethwaite, the bill for last evening's relaxation, for Link, amounted
to twenty-some years to be served in jail. Even with some sentences running
concurrently, it was preferable not to return to Trent. On the other hand
But it didn't really need to be thought
about. Thistle-thwaite plainly intended to go to Sord Three, whose inhabitants
strongly preferred to be left alone. But they seemed to have made an exception
in his favor. He was so anxious to get there and so confident of a welcome that
he'd bought the Glamorgan and loaded her up with freight, and he'd
taken an unholy chance in his choice of a ship. He'd taken another in depending
onXink as an astrogator. But it would be a pity to disappoint him!
So
Link carefully copied down in the log the three coordinates of Sord Three, and
hunted up its proper solar motion, and put that in the log, and then put the
figures for Trent in the computer and copied the answer in the log, too. It
seemed the professional thing to do. Then he scraped away frost from the ports
and got observations of the Glamorgan's current heading, and went back to the board and adjusted that. He was
just entering the last item in the log when Thistlethwaite came in. His hands
were black from the work he'd done, and somehow he gave the impression of a man
who had used up all his store of naughty words and still was unrelieved.
"Well?" asked
Link pleasantly.
"We're
leakin' air," said the whiskered man bitterly. "It's whistlin' out!
Playin' tunes as it goes! I had to seal off the spaceboat blister. If we need
that spaceboat we'll be in a fix! When my business gets goin', I'll never use
another junk ship like this! You raised hell in that take-off!"
"It's very bad?" asked Link.
"I shut off all the compartments I
couldn't seal tight," said Thistlethwaite bitterly. "And there's
still some leakage in the engine room, but I can't find it. I ain't found it so
far, anyways!"
Link said,
"How's the air
supply?"
"I pumped up on Trent," said the little
man. "If they'd known, they'd ha' charged me for that, tool"
"Can we make out for two weeks?"
asked Link.
"We
can make out for ten!" snapped the whiskery one. "There's
only two of us an' we can seal off everything but the control room an' the
engine room an' a way between 'em. We can go ten weeks!"
"Then,"
said Link relievedly, "we're all right." He made final adjustments.
"The engines are all right?"
He looked up pleasantly,
his hand on a switch.
"With
coddlin'," said Thistlethwaite. "What're you doin'?" he demanded
suspiciously. "I ain't give you"
Link
threw the circuit-completing switch. The universe seemed Jo reel. Everything
appeared to turn inside out, including Link's stomach. He had the feeling of
panicky fall in a contracting spiral. The lights in the control
room dimmed almost to extinction. The whiskery man uttered a strangled howl.
This was the normal experience when going into overdrive travel at a number of
times the speed of light.
Then,
abruptly, everything was all right again. The vision-ports were dark, but the
lights came back to full brightness. The Glamorgan was
in overdrive, hurtling through emptiness very, very much faster than theory
permitted in the normal universe. But the universe immediately around the Glamorgan was not normal. The ship was in an overdrive field, which does not occur
normally, at all.
"What
the hell've you done?" raged Thistlethwaite. "Where you headed for? I
didn't tell you"
"I'm
driving the ship," said Link pleasantly, "for a place called Sord
Three. There ought to be some good business prospects there. Isn't that where
you want to go?"
The little man's face
turned purple. He glared.
"How'd you find that
out?" he demanded ferociously.
"Why, I've got friends
there," said Link untruthfully.
The little man leaped for
him, uttering howls of fury.
Link turned off the ship's gravity.
Thistlethwaite wound up bouncing against the ceiling. He clung there, swearing.
Link kept his hand on the gravity button. At any instant he could throw the
gravity back on, and as immediately off again.
'Tut,
tut!" said Link reproachfully. "Such naughty words.
And I thought you'd be pleased to find your junior partner displaying energy
and enthusiasm and using his brains loyally to further the magnificent business
enterprise we've started!"
H
The Glamorgan bored on through space. Not normal space, of course. In the ordinary
sort of space between suns and planets and solar systems generally, a ship is
strictly limited to ninety-eight-point-something per cent of the speed of
light, because mass increases with speed, and inertia increases with mass. But
in an overdrive field the properties of space are modified. The effect of a
magnet on iron is changed past recognition. The effect of electrostatic stress
upon dielectrics is wholly abnormal. And inertia, instead of multiplying itself
with high velocity, becomes as undetectable as at zero velocity. In fact,
theory says that a ship has no velocity on an overdrive field. The speed is of
the field itself. The ship is carried. It goes along for the ride.
But there was no thinking about such
abstractions on the Glamorgan. The effect of overdrive was the same as if
the ship did pierce space at many times the speed of light. Obviously, light
from ahead was transposed a great many octaves upward, into something as
different from light as longwave radiation is from heat. This radiation was
refracted outward from the ship by the overdrive field, and was therefore
without effect upon instruments or persons. Light from behind
was left there. Light from the sides was also refracted outward and
away. The Glamorgan floated at ease in a hurtling, unsubstantial
space-stress center, and to try to understand it might produce a headache, but
hardly anything more useful.
But
though the Glamorgan in overdrive attained the end of speed
without the need for velocity, the human relationship between Link and
Thistlethwaite was less simple. The whiskery little man was impassioned about
his enterprise. Link had guessed his highly secret destination, and Thistlethwaite
'was outraged by the achievement. Even when Link showed him how Sord Three had
been revealed as the objective of the voyage, Thistlethwaite wasn't mollified.
He clamped his lips shut tightly. He refused to give any further intimation
about what he proposed to do when he arrived at Sord Three. Link knew only that
he'd touched ground there in a space-boat with one companion and they'd left
with a valuable cargo, and now Thistlethwaite was bound back there again, if
Link could get him there.
There
were rimes when it seemed doubtful. Then Link blamed himself for trying it.
Still, Thistlethwaite had chosen the Glamorgan on
his own and had gotten as far as Trent in her. But there were times when it
didn't appear that the ship would ever get anywhere else. The log book had a
plenitude of emergencies written in its pages as the Glamorgan went onward.
She
leaked air. They didn't try to keep the inside pressure up to the standard 14.7
pounds. They compromised on eleven, because they'd loose less air at the lower
pressure. Even so, the fact that the Glamorgan leaked
was only one of her oddities. She also smelled. Her air system was patched and
her generators were cobbled, and at odd moments she made unrefined noises for
no reason that anybody could find out. The water pressure system sometimes
worked and sometimes did not. The refrigeration unit occasionally turned on
when it shouldn't and sometimes didn't when it should. It was wise to tap the
thermostat several times a day to keep frozen stores from thawing.
The
overdrive field generator was also a subject for nightmares. Link didn't
understand overdrive, but he did know that a field shouldn't be kept in
existence by hand-wound outer layers on some of the coils, with wedges driven
in to keep contacts tight which ought to be free to cut off in case of
emergency. But it could be said that everything about the ship was an
emergency. Link would hane come to have a very great respect for
Thistlethwaite because he kept such tinkered wreckage working. But he was
appalled at the idea of anybody deliberately trusting his life to it.
The
thing was, he realized ultimately, that Thistlethwaite was an eccentric. The
galaxy is full of crackpots, each of whom has mysterious secret information
about illimitable wealth to be found on the non-existent outer planets of
rarely visited suns, or in the depths of the watery satellites' of Cepheids.
But crackpots only talk. Their ambition is to be admired as men of mystery and
vast secret knowledge. They will never try actually to find the treasures they
claim to know about. If you offer to provide a ship and crew to pick up the
riches they describe in such detail, they'll impose impossible conditions.
They don't want to risk their dreams by trying to make them come true.
But
Thistlethwaite wasn't that way. He wasn't a crackpot. In his description of the
wealth awaiting him, Link considered that he must be off the beam. There was
no such treasure in the galaxy. But he'd been on Sord Three, and he'd had some
moneyenough to buy the Glamorgan and her cargoand he was trying to get back.
He'd cut Link in
out of necessity, because
the Glamorgan had to get off Trent when she did, or not get off at all. So
Thistlethwaite was not a crackpot. But an eccentric, that he was!
Fuming
but resolute, the little man tried valiantly to make the ship hold together
until his project was completed. From the beginning four compartments besides
the spaceboat blister were sealed off because they couldn't be made airtight.
A fifth compartment lost half .a pound of air every hour on the hour. Thistlethwaite labored over it, daubing extinguisher-foam on
joints and cracks until he found where the foam vanished first. Then he
lavishly applied sealing-compound. This was not the act of a crackpot who only
wants to be admired. It was consistent with a far-out mentality wjaich would
run the wildest of risks to carry out a purpose. Moreover, when after days of
labor he still couldn't bring the air loss down below half a pound a day, he
sealed off that compartment too. The Glamorgan had
been a tub to begin with. Now she displayed characteristics to make a
reasonably patient man break down and cry.
Link
offered to help in the sealing-off process. Thistlethwaite snapped at him.
"You
tend to your knitting and I'll tend to mine," he said acidly. "You're
so smart at working out things I want to keep
to myself."
"I
only found out where we're going," said Link. "I didn't find out
why."
"To get rich," snapped Thistlethwaite.
"That's why! I want to get
rich! I spent my life bein' poor. Now I want to get kowtowed to! My first
partner got money and he couldn't wait to enjoy
it. I've waited. I'm not telling anybody anything! I know what I'm goin' to do. I got a talent for business. I never had a chance to use it. No capital. Now I'm going to get rich and do things like I always wanted to do."
Link asked more questions and the little man
turned waspishly upon him.
"That's
my business, like runnin' this ship to where we're goin' is yours! You leave me
be! I'm not riskin' you knowin' what I know. I'm not takin' the chance of you
figurin' youll do better cheating me than playin' fair."
This
was shrewdness, after a fashion. There are plenty of men who quite simply and
naturally believe that the way to profit in any enterprise is to double-cross
theft- associates. The whiskery man had evidently met them. He
wasn't sure Link wasn't one of them. He kept his mouth shut.
"Eventually,"
said Link, "I'm going to have to come out of overdrive to check my course.
Is that all right with you?"
"That's
your business!" rasped Thistlethwaite. "You tend to your business and
I'll tend to mine!"
He
disappeared, prowling around the ship, checking the air pressure, spending long
periods in the engine room and not unfrequently coming silently and secretly up
the stairway to the control room to regard Link with inveterate suspicion.
It
annoyed Link. So when he determined that he should break out of overdrive to
verify his positiona dubious business considering the limits of his
knowledgehe did not notify Thistlethwaite. He simply broke out of overdrive.
There
should have been merely an instant of intolerable vertigo and of intense
nausea, and then the sensation of a spiral fall toward infinity, but nothing
more. Those sensations occurred. But as they began there was also a wild,
rasping roar in the engine room. Lights dimmed. Thistlethwaite howled with fury
and flung himself down into an inferno of blue arcs and stinking scorched
insulation. In that incredible nightmare-like atmosphere he hit something with
a stick. He pulled violently on a rope. He spun a wheel rapidly. And the arcs
died. The ship's ancient air system began to struggle with the smoke and
smells.
It took him two days to
make repairs, during which he did not address one syllable to Link. But Link
was busy anyhow. He was taking observations and checking the process with the Practical Astrogator as
he went along. Then he used the computer to make his observations mean
something. He faithfully wrote all these exercises in the ship's log. It helped
to pass the time. But when determination of the ship's position by three
different methods gave the same result, he arrived at the astonishing
conclusion that the Glamorgan was
actually on course.
He
was composing a tribute to himself for the feat when Thistlethwaite came
bristling into the control room.
"I
fixed what you messed up," he said bitterly. "We can go on now. But
next time you do something, don't do it till you ask 5he, and I'll fix it so
you can. You could've wrecked us."
Link
opened his mouth to ask what could be a more complete wreck than the Glamorgan right now, but he refrained. He arranged for Thistlethwaite to go down
into the engine room. He shouted down the stairways. Thistlethwaite bellowed a
reply. Link checked the ship's heading again, glanced at the ship's
chronometer, and threw the overdrive on.
Nothing happened except vertigo and nausea
and the feeling of falling in a spiral fashion toward nowhere at all. The Glamorgan was again in overdrive. The little man came in, brushing off his hands.
"That's the way,"
he said truculently, "to handle this ship!"
Link
scribbled a memo of the instant the Glamorgan had
gone into overdrive.
"In two days, four hours, thirty-three
minutes and twenty seconds," he observed, "we'll want to break out
again. We ought to be somewhere near Sord, then."
"If,"
said Thistlethwaite suspiciously, "if you're
not tryin' to put something over on me!"
Link shrugged. He'd begun
to wonder, lately, why he'd come on this highly mysterious journey. In one
sense he'd had good reason. Jail. But now he began to
be restless. He wore a stake-belt next to his skin, and in it he had certain
small crystals. There were people who would murder him enthusiastically for
those crystals. There were others who would pay him very large sums for them.
The trouble was that he had no specific idea of what he wanted to do with a
large sum. Small sums, yes. He could relax with them. But large ones He felt a
need for the pleasingly unexpected. Even the exciting.
One
day passed and he was definitely impatient. He was bored. He couldn't even
think of anything to write in the log book. There'd been a girl about whom he'd
felt romantic, not so long ago. He tried to think sentimentally about her. He
failed. He hadn't seen her in months and she was probably married to somebody
else now. The thought didn't bother him. It was annoying that it didn't. He
craved excitement and interesting happenings, and he was merely heading for a
planet that hadn't made authenticated contact with the rest of the galaxy in
two hundred years, and then had promised to shoot anybody who landed. He was
only in a leaky ship whose machinery broke down frequently and might at any
time bum out.
He was, in a word, bored.
The
second day passed. Four hours, thirty-three minutes remained. He tried to hope
for interesting events. He knew of no reason to anticipate them. If
Thistlethwaite were right, there would be only business dealings aground, and
presently an attempt to get to somewhere else in the Glamorgan, and after that
The
whiskery man went down into the engine room and bellowed that everything was
set. Link sat by the control board, leaning on his elbows, in a mood of deep
skepticism. He didn't believe anything in particular was likely to happen.
Especially he didn't believe in Thistlethwaite's story of fabulous wealth.
There was nothing as valuable
as Thistle-thwaite
described. Such things simply didn't
exist. But since he'd come this
far-Two minutes to go. One
minute twenty seconds. Twenty seconds. Ten . . .
five . . . four
. .
. three
. .
. two
. .
. onel
He flipped the
overdrive switch to off. There
were the customary sensations
of dizzy
fall and vertigo and nausea.
Then the Glamorgan floated in normal space, and there
was a sun not unreasonably far away, and
all the
sky was
stars. Link was even pessimistic about the identity of
the sun,
but a spectro-photo identified
it. It
was truly
Sord. There were planets. One. Two. Three. Three had
ice-caps; it looked as if two-thirds
of its
surface was sea, and in
general it matched the Directory's description. It might . . .
just possibly . . . be
inhabited.
A tediously long
time later the Glamorgan floated in orbit around the third planet
out from
its sun.
Mottled land masses whipped by below.
There were seas, and more
land masses.
Thistlethwaite watched
in silence.
There could be no communication
with the ground, even if
the ground
was prepared
to communicate. The Glamorgan's communication-system didn't work. Link waited for the
little man to identify his
destination. When it was
named there would probably be
trouble.
"No maps,"
said Thistlethwaite bitterly,
on the
second time around. "I asked Old
Man Addison
for a
map but
he hardly knew what I meant.
They never bothered to make
'em! But Old Man Addison's Household
is near
a sea.
Near a bay, with mountains
not too
far off."
Link was not
relieved. It isn't easy to
find a landmark of limited size on a large
world from a ship in
space that has no maps or
even a working communicator. But on
the fourth orbital circuit, clouds that had
formerly hidden a certain place had moved away. Thistlethwaite
pointed.
"That's
itl" he said, scowling as if to cover his own doubts. "That's itl Get
her down yonderl"
Link
took a deep breath. Standard spaceport procedure is for a ship to call down by
communicator, have coordinates supplied from the ground, get into position, and
wait. Then the landing grid reaches out its forcefields and lets the ship down.
It is neat, and comfortable, and safe. But there was no landing grid here.
There was no information. And Link had no experience, either.
He
made one extra orbit to fix the indicated landing point in his mind and to try
to guess at the relative speed of ship and planetary surface. On the seventh
circling of the planet, he swung the ship so it traveled stem-first and its
emergency rockets could be used as retros. The drive-engine would be useless
here. Thistlethwaite stayed in the control room to watch. He chewed agitatedly
on wisps of whisker.
The
ship hit atmosphere. There was a keening, howling sound, as if the ancient hull
were protesting its own destruction. There were thumpings and bumpings. Loose
plates rattled at their rivets and remaining welds.
Something
came free and bartered thunderously at other hull-plates before it went crazily
off to nowhere. Vibration began. It became a thoroughly ominous quivering of
all the ship. Link threw over the rocket lever, and the vibration ceased to
increase as the emergencies bellowed below. He gave them more power, and more,
until the decelleration made it difficult to stand. Then, at very long last,
the vibration seemed to lessen a very little.
The
ship descended into a hurricane of wind from its own motion. Unbelievable
noises sounded here and there. The hole where a plate had torn away developed
an organ tone with the volume of a baby earthquake's roar.
The ship hurtled on. Far ahead there was blue
sea. Nearer, there were mountains. There was a sandy look to the surface of the
soil. Clouds enveloped the ship, and she came out below them, bellowing, and
Link gave the rockets more braking power. But the ground still seemed to race
past at an intolerable speed. He tilted the ship until her rockets did not
support her at all, but only served as brakes.
Then
she really went down, wallowing. He fought her, learning how to land by doing
it, but without even a close idea of what it should feel like. Twice he
attempted to check his descent at the cost of not checking motion toward the
now-not-so-distant shoreline. He began to hope. He concentrated on matching
speed with the flowing landscape.
He
made it. The ship moved almost imperceptibly with respect to such landmarks as
he could see. Something vaguely resembling a village appeared, far below, but
he could not attend to it. The ship suddenly hovered, no more than five
thousand feet high. Then Link, sweating, started to ease down.
Thistlethwaite protested
agitatedly,
"I saw a villagel Get
her down! Get her down!"
Link
cut the rockets entirely; the ship began to drop like a stone, and he cut them in again and out and in.
The Glamorgan landed with a tremendous crash. It teetered back and forth, making loud
grinding noises. It steadied. It stopped.
Link mopped his forehead. Thistlethwaite said
accusingly,
"But
this ain't where we shoulda landed! We shoulda stopped by that village! And
even that ain't the one I want!"
"This
is where we did land," said Link, "and lucky we made it! You don't
know how lucky!"
He
went to a port to look out. The ship had landed in a sort of hollow, liberally sprinkled with boulders of various shapes and
sizes. Sandy hillocks with sparse vegetation on their slopes appeared on every
hand. Despite the ship's upright position, Link could not see over the hills
to a true horizon.
"Ill
go over to that village we saw comin' down," said Thistlethwaite
importantly, "an' arrange to send a message to my friends. Then well get down to business. And there's never been a
business like this one before in all the time since us men stopped swappin'
arrowheadsl You stay here an' keep ship."
He
swung the ship's one weapon, a stun
gun, over his shoulder. It gave him a rakish air. He put on a hat
"Yep. You keep ship till I come back!"
He
went down the stairs. Link heard him go down all the levels until he came to
the exit port in one of Ae ship's landing fins. From the control room he saw
Thistlethwaite stride grandly to the top of the nearest hill, look exhaustively
from there, and then march away with an air of great and confident composure.
He went out of sight beyond the hillcrest.
Link
went down to the exit port himself. The air in the opening was fresh and
markedly pleasant to breathe. He felt that it was about time that something
interesting happened. This wasn't it. Here was only commonplace landscape,
commonplace sky, and commonplace tedium. He sat on the sill of the open exit
port and waited without expectation for something interesting to happen.
Presently he heard tiny clickings. Two small
animals, very much like pigs in size and appearance, came trotting hurriedly
into view. Their hoofs had made the clicking sounds. They saw the ship and
stopped short, staring at it They didn't look
dangerous.
"Hi, there," said
Link companionably.
The small creatures vanished instantly. They
plunged behind boulders. Link shrugged. He gazed about him. After a little, he saw an eye peering at him around a boulder. It was the eye of one of the pig-like animals. Link moved
abruptly and the eye vanished.
A voice spoke, apparently from nowhere. It
was scornful.
"Jumpy,
huh?
Scared?"
"I was startled," said Link mildly,
"but I wouldn't say I was scared. Should I be?" The voice said
sardonically, "Huhl"
There
was silence again. There was stillness. A very sparse
vegetation appeared to have existed where the Glamorgan came down on her rockets. Those scattered
bits of growing stuff had been burned to ash by the rocket flames, but at the
edgeŤ-of the burned area some few small smouldering fragments sent threads of
smoke skyward to be dissipated by wind that came over the hilltops. On a
hillcrest itself a tiny sand-devil whirled for a moment and then
vanished.
The voice said abruptly and
scornfully,
"You
in the door there! Where'd you come from?/'
Link said agreeably,
"From
Trent."
"What's
that?" demanded the voice, disparagingly. "A planeta world like
this," explained Link. The voice said,
"Huh!" There was
a long pause. It said, "Why?"
Link
had no idea what or who his unseen questioner might be, but the tone of the
questioning was scornful. He felt that a certain
impressiveness on his own part was in order. He said,
"That is something to be disclosed only
to proper authority. The purpose of my companion and myself,
however, is entirely admirable. I may say that in time to come it is probable
that the anniversary of our landing will be celebrated over the entire
planet."
Having made the statement, he rather admired
it. Almost anything could be deduced from it, yet it
did not mean
a thing.
There was again a silence.
Then the voice said cagily,
"Celebrated by
uffts?"
Here
Link made a slight but natural error. The word "uffts," which was unfamiliar, sounded very much like "us," and he
took it for the latter. He said profoundly,
"I would say that that
is a reasonable assumption."
Dead
silence once more. It lasted for a long time. Then the same voice said sharply,
"Somebody's
coming."
There
came a scurrying behind the boulders. Little click-ings sounded. There were
flashes of pinldsh-whiteiJiide. Then the two pig-like creatures darted back
into view, galloping madly for the hillcrest over which they'd come. They vanished
beyond it. Link spoke again, but there was no reply.
For
a long time silence lay over the hollow in which the Glamorgan had come to rest. Link spoke repeatedlychattily, seriously. The
silence seemed almost ominous. He began to realize that Thistlethwaite had been
gone for a long time. It was well over an hour, now. He ought to be getting
back.
He
didn't come. Link was genuinely concerned when, at least another half-hour later, a remarkably improbable cavalcade came leisurely
over the hillcrest, crossed by Thistlethwaite to begin with, and the pig-like
animals later. The members of the cavalcade regarded the ship interestedly, and
came on at a deliberate and unhurried pace. There were half a dozen men,
mounted on large, splay-footed animals which had to be called unicorns because
from the middle of their foreheads drooped flexible,
flabby, hom-shaped appendages. The appendages looked discouraged. The facial
expression of the animals who wore them was of complete, inquiring idiocy.
That was the first impression. The second was
less pleasing. The leader of the riders wore Thistlethwaite's hatit was too
small for himand had Thistlethwaite's stun gun slung over his shoulder.
Another rider wore Thistlethwaite's shirt and a third wore the whiskery man's
pants. A fourth had his shoes dangling as an ornament from his saddle. But of
Thistlethwaite himself there was no sign.
All
the newcomers carried long spears, lances, and wore at their belts large knives
in decorated scabbards half the length of a sword.
The
cavalcade came comfortably but ominously toward the Glamorgan. It came to a halt, its members regarding Link with expressions whose
exact meaning it was not easy to decide. But Thistlethwaite had marched away
from the ship with tks- only weapon on board, a stun rifle. The leader of this
group carried it, but without any sign of familiarity with it. Link considered
that he could probably get inside the ship with the port door closed before
anything drastic could happen to him. He should, too, find out what had
happened to Thistlethwaite. So he said,
"How
do you do?
Nice weather, isn't it?"
HI
There was a movement among the members of the cavalcade.
The leader, wearing Thistlethwaite's hat and carrying his stun rifle, looked
significantly at his followers. Then he turned to Link and spoke with a certain
painful politeness. There was no irony in it. It was manners. It was the most
courteous of greetings.
"I'm
pretty good, thank you, suh. And the weather's pretty good too, only we could
do with a mite of rain." He paused, and said with an elaborate
stateliness, "I'm the Householder of the Household over yonder. We heard
your ship come down and we wondered about it. An' then . . . uh . . . somethin'
happened and we come to look it over. We never seen a ship like this before,
only o'course there's the tales from old times about 'em."
His
manner was one of vast dignity. He wore Thistle-thwaite's hat, and his
companions or followers wore everything else that Thistlethwaite had had on in
the Glamorgan.
But he ignored the fact. It
appeared that he obeyed strict rules of etiquette. And of course, people who
follow etiquette are bound by it even in the preliminaries to homicide. Which is important if violence is in the air. Lank took advantage
of the known fact.
"It's
not much of a ship," he said deprecatingly, "but such as it is I'm
glad to have you see it."
The
leader of the cavalcade was visibly pleased. He frowned, but he said with the
same elaborate courtesy,
"My
name's Harl, suh. Would you care to give me a name to call you by? I wouldn't
presume for more than that."
Out
of the comer of his eye Link saw that two pig-like animals had appeared not far
away. They might be the same two he'd seen before. They squatted on their
haunches and watched curiously what went on as between men. He said,
"My name's Link. Link Denham, in fact. Pleased to meet you."
"The same, suh! The same!" The leader's tone became warm
while remaining stately. "I take that very kindly, Link, tellin' me your
last name, too. And right off! Denham . . . Denham ... I never met none of your Household before, but I'll remember
it's a mannerly group. Would you . . . uh . . . have
anything else to say?"
Link thought it over.
"I've come a long
way," he observed. "I'm not sure what to say that would be most
welcome."
"Welcome!" said the man who called
himself Harl. He beamed. "Now, that's right nice! Boys, we been welcomed
by this here Link and he's told us his last name and that's manners! This here
gentleman ain't like that other fella! We're guestin'."
He slipped from his saddle, hung
Thistlethwaite's stun gun on his saddle hom, and leaned his spear against the Glamorgan. He held out his hand cordially to Link. Link shook it. Harl's followers
similarly divested themselves of weapons. Tb,ey
solemnly shook hands with Link. Harl rapped on one of the Glamorgan's hull-plates and said admiringly,
"This here ship's iron, ain't it?
M-m-m-h! I never saw so much iron to one place in all my lifetime!"
A scornful voice from somewhere said indignantly,
"We saw it first! It's ours!"
"Shut up," said
Harl to the landscape at large. "And stay shut up." He turned.
"Now, Link-"
"We saw it first!" insisted the
voice furiously. "We saw it first! It's ours!"
"This gentleman,"
said Harl firmly, and again to the landscape, "is maybe thinkin' of
settin' up a Household here! You uffts clear out!"
Two voices, now, insisted stridently,
"It's ours! We saw it first! It's ours!"
Harl said apologetically,
"I'm real sorry, Link, but you know how it is with uffts! Uh ... I'd like to ask you something
private." "Come inside," said Link. He rose.
Harl and his companionsLink thought of the
word "retainers" for no special reasoncame trooping-into the port.
Link was very alertly interested. He didn't understand this state of things at
all, but men with inhospitable intentions do not disarm themselves. These men
had. Men with unpleasant purposes tend to cast furtive glances from one to
another. These men didn't. If one ignored the presence of Thistlethwaite's
garments, and the absence of Thistlethwaite himself, the atmosphere was almost
insanely cordial and friendly and uncalculating. It verified past question that
this planet had very little contact with other worlds. People of brisk and
progressive cultures feel a deep suspicion of strangers and of each other. With reason. Yet Thistlethwaite
Link
let the small group precede him up the steps inside the landing fin. He could
get down and outside before any of them, and very probably lock them in. Then
he'd be armed and mounted, which in case of unfriendliness might be an
advantage. But in spite of whatever had happened to Thistlethwaite, the feel of
things was in no sense ominous. The visitors to the ship were openly curious
and openly astonished at what they saw.
They
commented almost incredulously that the long flight of steps was made of iron.
Link tactfully did not refer to the sealed-off cargo compartmentsthe lifeboat
was sealed off, toonor to Thistlethwaite's garments worn so matter-of-factly
by his guests. They passed the engine room without recognizing the door to it
as what it was. They marvelled to each other that iron showed through the worn
floor-covering of the mess room. They were astounded by the cabins. But the
control room left them entirely uninterested except for small metal
objectsinstrumentsfastened to the control board and fitted into the walls.
The
man wearing Thistlethwaite's pants took a deep
breath. He caught Link's eye and said wistfully,
"Mistuh Link, that's a
right pretty little thing!"
He pointed to the ship's
chronometer. Harl said angrily;
"You
shut up! What kinda guest-gift have you brought?
I beg y'pardon, Link, for this fella!" He glared at his following. "Sput! You fellas go downstairs an' wait outside, so's
you won't shame me again! I got to talk confidential to Mistuh Link,
anyway."
His
followers, still flaunting Thistlethwaite's garments, went trooping down and
out. Silence fell, below. Then Harl said,
"Link,
I'm right sorry about that fella! Admirin' something of yours to get it,
without givin' you a gift first! I'd ought to chase
him outa my Household for bad manners! I hope you'll excuse me for him!"
"No
harm done," said Link. "He just forgot." It was evident that
etiquette played a great part in the lives of the people of Sord Thr^e. It
looked promising. "I'd like to ask"
Harl said confidentially,
"Let's
talk private, Link. Do you know a little fella with whiskers that cusses
dreadful an' insults people right an* left an' says" his voice dropped to
a shocked tone "an' says he's a friend of Old Man Addison? A fella like
that come to my Household andyou maybe won't believe this, Link, but it's
sohe offered to pay me for sendin' a message
to Old Man Addison! He . \ . offered
to . . . pay me! Like I was a ufft! I'm beggin' your
pardon for askin' such a thing, but we're talkin' private. Do you know
a fella like that?"
"He ran the engines of this ship,"
said Link. "His name's Thistlethwaite. I don't know what he has to do with
Old Man Addison."
"Natural!" said Harl hastily.
"I wouldn't suspect you of anything like that! But . . . uh . . . the
womenfolks said his clothes wasn't duplied. Is that a
fact, Link? They went crazy fingerin' the cloth he was wearin'. Was it
unduplied, Link?"
"I wouldn't know anything about his
clothes," said Link. "I did notice your men were wearing them. I
wondered."
"But
you didn't say a word," said Harl, warmly. "Yes,
suh! You got manners! But did you ever hear anything like what
I
just told you? Offerin' to pay meand me a Householderfor sendin' a message
to Old Man Addison! Did you ever, Link?"
"It's bad?" asked
Link, blinking.
"I
left word," said Harl indignantly, "to hang him as soon as enough
folks got together to enjoy it. What else could I do? But I'd heard the noise
when this ship came down, and it was you, landin' here! It's a great thing
havin' you land here, Link! And think of havin' clothes that ain't dupliedl If
you set up a Household"
Link
stared. He'd always believed that he craved the new and the unpredictable. But
this talk left him away behind. He felt that it would be a good idea to go off
by himself and hold his head for a while. Yet
Thistlethwaite
"Sput!"
said Harl, frowning to himself. "Here I am,
guestin' with you, an' no guest-gift! But in a way you're guestin' with me,
being this is on my Household land. And I ain't been hospitable! Look, Link!
I'll send a ufft over with a message to hold up the
hangin' till we get there and we'll go watch with the rest. What say?"
For
perhaps the first time in his life, Link felt that things were a good deal more
unexpected than he entirely enjoyed. There was only one way to stay ahead of
developments until he could sort things out.
"That
suggestion," he said profoundly, "is highly consistent with the
emergency measures I feel should be substituted for apparently standard
operational procedures with reference to discourteous space-travelers." He
saw that Harl looked at once blank and admiring, which was what he'd hoped. "In other words," said Link, "yes."
"Then let's get started," said Harl
in a pleased tone. "Y'know, Link, you not only got manners, you got words!
I got to introduce you to my sister!"
He descended the stairs, Link following. The
situation was probably serious. It could be appalling. Bat T.ink- Bad been
restless for days, now, from a lack of things to interest his normally active
brain. He felt himself challenged. It appeared that Sord Three might turn out
to be a very interesting place.
When
they reached the open air, the two pig-like animals had joined the party of
waiting unicorns and men. They moved about underfoot with the accustomed air of
dogs with a hunting party of men. But they did not wear dogs* amiable
expressions. They looked distinctly peevish.
"I
want somebody to take a message," said Harl briskly. 'It's worth two
beers."
A
pig-like animal looked at him scornfully. Link heard a voice remarkably
resembling that of the invisible conversationalist he'd talked to before these
men arrived.
"This
is our ship!" said the voice stridently. "We saw it first!"
"You
didn't tell us," said Harl firmly. "And we found it without you.
Besides, it belongs to this gentleman. You want two beers?"
"Tyrant!"
snapped the voice. "Robber! Grinding down the
poorl Robbing"
"Hush
up!" said Harl. "Do you take the message or not?" A second voice
said defiantly, "For four beers! It's worth ten!"
"All right, four beers it is,"
agreed Harl. "The message is not to hang that whiskery fella till we get
there. We'll be right along."
The first scornful voice
snapped,
"Who gets the
message?"
"Tell my sister,"
said Harl impatiently. "Shoo!"
The two pig-like animals broke into a gallop
together and went streaking over the nearest hill crest. As they went,
squabbling voices accused each other, the one because the bargain was for only
two beers apiece, and the other for having gotten himself included in the bargain
out of all reason. Link stared after them, his jaw dropped open. The voices
dwindled, disputing, and ended as the piggish creatures disappeared.
Link
swallowed and blinked. Harl appointed one of his followers to remain in the Glamorgan as caretaker. That left a splay-footed animal with a drooping nose-horn
as a mount for Link. Bemused and almost incredulous, he climbed into the saddle
on a signal from Harl. The completely improbable cavalcade moved briskly away
from the landed spaceship. It was not an indiscretion on Link's part. A caretaker
remained with the ship, and Thistlethwaite was in trouble. Link went to try to
get him out. Also, it appeared to be definite that Link had somehow made
himself a guest in Harl's Householdwhatever that might beand etiquette
protected him from ordinary peril so long as he did nothing equivalent to
offering to pay to have a message delivered, or rather, so long as he did
nothing equivalent to offering to pay Harl for
having a message delivered. It was approvable to offer to pay small animals
like pigs who
"My
fella back there," said Hail reassuringly as they mounted a hillock and
from its top saw other hillocks stretching away indefinitely, "my fella,
hell take good care of your ship, Link. I warned him not to touch a thing but
just keep uffts out and if any human come by to say you're guestin' with
me."
"Thanks,"
said Link. Then he said painfully, "Those small fat animals"
"Uffts?"
said Harl. "Don't you have 'em where you come from?"
"No," said Link. "We don't. It
seems that. . . they talk!"
"Natural,"
Harl agreed. "They talk too much, if you ask me. Those two will stop on
the way an' tell all the other uffts all about the message, and about you, an*
everything. But they were on this world when the old-timers came an' settled
here. They were the smartest critters on the planet.
Plenty
smart! But they're awful proud. They got brains, but they've got hoofs instead
of hands, so all they can do is talk. They have big gatherin's and drink beer
and make speeches to each other about how superior 1 they are to
human beta's because they ain't got paws like us."
The
motion of the splay-footed unicorns was unpleasant. The one Link rode put down
each foot separately, and the result was a series of swayings in various
directions which had a tendency to make a rider sea-sick. Link struggled with
that sensation. Harl appeared to be thinking deeply, and sadly. The unicorns
were not hoofed animals so there was no sound of hoofbeats. There was only the
creaking of saddle leather and very occasionally the clatter of a spear or some other object against something else.
"YTcnow,"
said Harl presently, "I'd like to believe that you comin' here, Link, is
meant, or something. I've been getting pretty discouraged, with things seemin'
to get worse all the time. Time was, the old folks say, when uffts was polite
and respectful and did what they was told and took thank-you gifts and was glad
to've done a human a favor. But nowadays they won't work for anybody without a agreement of just how much beer they're goin' to get for doin' it. And
the old folks say there used to be unduplied cloth an' stuff that was better
than we got now. And knives was better, an' tools was
better, and there was lectric and machines and folks lived real comfortable.
But lately it's been gettin' harder an' harder to get uffts to bring in
greenstuff, an' they want more an' more beer for it. I tell you, it ain't
simple, bein' a Householder these days! You got people to
feed an' clothe, and the women fuss and the men get sour and the uffts set back
and laugh, and make speeches to each other about how much smarter they are than
us. I tell you, Link, it's time for something to happen, or things are goin' to
get just so bad we can't stand them!"
The cavalcade went on, and Hart's voice
continued. The thing he deplored came out properly marshalled, and it was
evident that responsibilities in an imperfect universe had caused him much
grief, of which he was conscious.
Link
caught an idea now and then, but most of Harl's melancholy referred to
conditions Harl took as a matter of course and Link knew nothing about. For
example, there was the idea that it was disgraceful to pay or be paid for
anything that was done, except by uffts. On no other planet Link had heard of
was commerce considered disreputable. He knew of none on which work was not
supposed to be performed in exchange for wages. And there was, irrelevantly,
the matter of Thistlethwaite's clothing. It was not "duplied." What
was "duplied"? Everywhere, of course, the good old days are praised
by those who managed to live through them. But when cloth was duplied it was
inferior, and tools were inferior, and there was no more lectricthat would be
electricityand there were no more engines.
Link
almost asked a question, then. The ancestors of Harl and his followers had
colonized this planet from space. By spaceship. It was
unthinkable that they hadn't had electricity and engines or motors. And when
the way to make things is known and they are wanted, they are madel The way to make them is not forgotten! It simply isn't! But
according to Harl they'd had those things and lost them. Why?
Harl
murmured on, with a sort of resigned unhappiness. The state of things on Sord
Three was bad. He hoped Link's arrival might help, but it didn't seem really
likely. He named ways in which times had formerly been better. He named matters
in which deterioration had plainly gone a long way. But he gave no clue to what
made them worse, except that everything that was duplied was inferior, and
everything was duplied. But what duplying was
They
passed over the top of a rolling hill. Below them the ground was disturbed. An
illimitable number of burrows broke its surface, with piles of dirt and stones
as evidence of excavations below ground. An incredible number of pink-skinned,
pig-like creatures appeared to live here.
"This,"
said Harl uncomfortably, "this is a ufft town.
It's shortest to get back to the Household if we ride through it. They fuss a
lot, but they don't ever actual do more than yell at humans goin' through.
Bein' uffts, though, and knowing from those two I sent ahead that you're a
stranger, they may be extra noisy just to show off."
Link shrugged.
"You
fellas," said Harl sternly to his following, "don't you pay any
attention to what they say! Hear me? Ignore 'em!"
The
cavalcade rode down the farther hillside and entered the ufft metropolis. The
splay-footed unicorns walked daintily, avoiding the innumerable holes which
were exactly large enough to let full-grown uffts pop in and out with great
rapidity. Had Link known prairie-dogs, he would have said that it was much like
a much-enlarged prairie-dog town. The burrows were arranged absolutely without
pattern, here and there and everywhere. Uffts sat in their doorways, so to
speak, and regarded the animals and men with scornful disapproval. It seemed to
Link that they eyed him with special attention, and not too much of cordiality.
A voice from somewhere
among the burrows snapped,
"Humans! Huh! And here's a new one. Pth-th-th-th!"
It was a Bronx cheer. Another voice said icily, "Thieves! Robbers! Humans!" A third voice cried shrilly, "Oppressors!
Tyrants! Scoundrels!"
The
six riders, including Link, gazed fixedly at the distance. They let their
mounts pick their way. The scornful voices increased their clamor. Ufftsthey
did look astonishingly like pigspopped out of burrows practically under the
feet of the unicorns and cried out enragedly,
"That's
right! That's right! Tread on us! Show the stranger! Tread on usl"
Uffts seemed to boil around
the clump of unicorns. They dived out of sight as the large splay feet of the
riding-animals neared them, and then popped up immediately behind them with
cries of rage, "Tyrants! Oppressors! Stranger, tell the galaxy what you
see!" Then other confused shoutings, "Go ahead! Crush us! Are you
ashamed to let the stranger see? It's what you want to do!"
There
was a chorus of yapping ufft voices a little distance away. One of them,
squatted upright, waved a fore-paw to give the cadence for choral shouts of,
"Men, go home! Men, go home! Men, go home!"
Harl looked unhappily at
Link.
"They
never had manners, Link. But this is 'fcorse than I've seen before. Some of
it's to make you think bad of us, you bein' a
stranger. I'm right sorry, Link."
"Humans
seem pretty unpopular," said Link. "They aren't afraid of you,
though."
"I
can't afford to be hard on 'em," admitted Harl. "I need 'em to bring
in greenstuff. They know it. They work when they feel like they want some beer.
They get enough beer for a party an' then they make speeches to each other
about how grand they are an' how stupid us humans are.
If I was to try to make 'em act respectful, they'd go get their beer from
another Household, an' we wouldn't have any greenstuff brought in. An' they
know I know it. So they get plenty fresh!"
"Yah!" rasped a voice almost
underfoot. "Humans! Humans have paws! Humans have
hands! Shame! Shame! Shame!"
The
unicorns plodded on, their flaccid upside-down homs
drooping and wabbling. They climbed over mounds of dirt and stones, and down to
level ground between burrows, and then over other mounds. Their gait was
incredibly ungainly. The clamor of ufft voices increased. The nearby tumult was
loud enough, but the ufft city stretched for a long way. It seemed that for
miles to right and left there were shrilling, pink-skinned uffts galloping on
their stubby legs to join in the abuse of the human party.
"Yah! Yahl Humansl Men, go homel Hide your paws, Humans!" A
small group yelled in chorus, "The uffts will rise again! The uffts will
rise again!" Yet another party roared, although some of the voices were
squeaky, "Down with Households! Down with tyrants! Down
with Humansl Up with uffts!"
The
cavalcade was the center of a moving uproar. At the beginning there'd been some
clear space around the feet of the unicorns. But uffts came from all
directions, shrilling abuse. Swarms of" rotund bodies scuttled up and over
the heaps of dug-out dirt and stones, and they ran into other swarms, and they
crowded each other closer to the mounted men. Some were unable to dart aside,
and dived down into burrows to escape trampling. They popped out behind the
unicorns to yap fresh insults. Then one popped out directly underneath a
unicorn, and the unicorn's pillowy foot sent him rolling, and squealing, but
unhurt, and then there was an uproar.
"Dirty
humans!
Tyrants! Now you kill us."
"Hold
fast to your saddle, Link," said Harl bitterly. "They'll be bitin'
the unicorns' feet in a minute. That'll be the devil! They'll run away and
y'don't want to get thrown! Not down among them!"
Link
reined aside and held up his hand for attention. He was a stranger and part of
this demonstration was for him. He knew something about demonstrators. For one
thing, they are always attracted, almost irresistibly, to new audiences. But
there is another and profound weakness in the psychology of a mob. When it is
farthest from sane behavior, it likes to be told how intelligent it is.
"My
friends!" boomed Link, in a fine and oratorical carrying voice. "My
friends, back at the ship I had a conversation with two of your cultured and
brilliant race, which filled me with even increased respect for your known
intellectuality!"
There
was a slight lessening of the tumult nearby. Some uffts had heard pleasing
words. They listened.
"But
that conversation was not necessary," Link announced splendidly, "to
inform me of your brilliance. On my home planet the intellect of the uffts of
Sord Three has already become a byword! When a knotty problem arises, someone
is sure to say, 'Ah, if we could ask the uffts of Sord Three about this, they'd
settle it!' "
The
nearer uffts were definitely quieter. They shushed those just behind them. Then
they shouted to Link to go on. There was still babbling and abuse, but it came
from farther away.
"So
I came here," Link announced in ringing tones, "to carry out a
purpose which, if accomplished, will make it probable that the anniversary of
my arrival will be celebrated over the entire surface of at least one planet!
My friends, I call upon you to bring this about! I call upon you to cause such
rejoicing as indubitably will modify the future of all intellectual activities!
Which will bring about a permanent orientation ufftward of
the more abstruse ratiocinations of the intellectuals of the galaxy! I
call upon you, my friends, to give to other worlds the benefit of your
brains!"
He
paused. He knew that Harl listened with startled incomprehension. He could see
out of the comer of his eyes that the other halted men were bemused and uneasy,
but the uffts within hearing cheered. Those too far away to hear clearly were
trying to silence those behind them. They cheered to make the balance listen. Link
bowed to the applause.
"I
bring you," he boomed with a fine gesture, "I bring you a
philosophical problem, which is also a problem in sophistic logic,
that the greatest minds of my home planet have not been able to solve! I
have come to ask the uffts of Sord Three to use their superlative intellects
upon this baffling intellectual question! There must be an answer! But it has
eluded the greatest brains of my home system. So I ask the uffts of Sord Three
to become the pedagogues of my world. You are our only hope! But I do not feel
only hope! I feel confidence! I am sure that uffrian intellect will find the
answer which will initiate a new era in intellectual processes!"
He
paused again. There were more cheers. Much of the cheering came from uffts who
cheered because other uffts were cheering.
"The
problem," said Link impressively, and with ample volume, "the problem
is this! You know what whiskers are. You knowŤwhat shaving is. You know that a
barber is a man who shaves off the whiskers of other men. Now, there is a
Household in which there is a barber. He shaves everybody in the Household who
does not shave himself. He does not shave anybody who does shave himself. The
ineluctible problem is, who shaves the barber?"
He
stopped. He looked earnestly at all parts of his audience.
"Who shaves the barber?" he
repeated dramatically. "Consider this, my friends! Discuss it! It has
baffled the philosophers and logicians of my home world! I have brought it to
you in complete confidence that, without haste and after examining every aspect
of the situation, you will penetrate its intricacies and find the one true
solution! When this is done I shall return to my home world bearing the triumphant
result of your cerebration and a new field of intellectual research will be
opened for the minds of all future generations!"
He
made a gesture of finality. There was really loud cheering now. Link was a
stranger. He had flattered the uffts and those near him were charmed by his
tribute, and those farther away cheered because those near him had cheered, and
those still farther away
"Let's get
going," said Link briefly.
The cavalcade took up its march again. But
now there were groups of uffts running alongside Link's unicorn, cheering him
from time to time and in between beginning to argue vociferously among
themselves that the barber did or didn't shave himself because if he didn't, or
if he did, why? And if he wore whiskers he would not shave himself and
therefore would have to shave himself and therefore couldn't have whiskers.
The
angular, ungainly unicorns moved in their slab-sided fashion across the
remaining dirt piles and burrows of the ufft city. Behind them, a buzz of
argument began and rose to the sky. Uffts by thousands zestfully discussed the
problem of the barber. He shaved everybody who didn't shave himself. He didn't
shave anybody who did shave himself. Therefore
Harl
rode in something like a brown study for a long way after the ufft metropolis
was left behind. Then he said heavily,
"Uh
. . . Link, did you sure-enough come here to ask the uffts that there
question?"
"No,"
admitted Link. "But it seemed like a good
idea to ask it."
Harl considered for a long
time. Then he said,
"What did you come
here for, Link?"
Link
considered in his turn. Viewing the matter dispassionately, he didn't seem to
have had any clear-cut reason. One thing had led to another, and here he was.
But a serious-minded character like Harl might find
the truth difficult to understand. So Link said with a fine air of regret,
"111 tell you, Harl.
There was a girl named Imogene"
"Uh-uh,"
said Harl regretfully. "I'm gettin' kind of troubled about you, Link.
You're guestin' with me, an' all that, but that whiskery fella that cussed so
bad an' insulted me, he came on the spaceship with you. And that speech you
made to those ufftsI don't understand it, Link. I just don't understand it!
You seem like a right nice fella to me, but I'm a Householder and I got
responsibilities. And I'm gettin' to think that with times like they are, and
the uffts cheering you like they did, an' all my other troubles"
"What?" asked Link.
"I
hate to say it, Link," said Harl apologetically, "an* it may not seem
mannerly of me, but honest I think I'd better get you hung along with that
whiskery fella that wanted to send a message to Old Man Addison. I won't like
doin' it, Link, and I hope you won't take it unkindly, but it does look like I
better hang you both to avoid trouble."
Hart's
followers rearranged themselves, closing Link in so there was no possibility of
his escape.
IV
They reached the village which Harl pointed to with the
comment that it was his Household. They rode into it, and there were a good
many women and girls in sight. They were elaborately clothed in garments at
once incredibly brilliant and sometimes patched. But only a few men were
visible. There were no dogs, such as properly belong in a small human
settlement, but there were uffts in the streets sauntering about entirely at
their ease. Once the cavalcade passed two of them, squatted on their haunches
in the position of quadrupeds sitting down, apparently deep in satisfying
conversation. It overtook a small cart loaded with a remarkable mixture of
leaves, weeds, roots, grass, and all manner of similar debris. It looked like
the trash from a gardening job, headed either for a compost heap or for a
place where it would be burned to be gotten rid of. But there were four uffts
pulling it by leather thongs they held in their teeth. It had somehow the look
of a personal enterprise of the uffts, personally carried out.
A
little way on there was a similar cart backed up to a wide door in the largest building of the village. That cart was empty,
but a man in strikingly colored, but patched,
clothing was putting plastic bottles into it. The contents looked like beer. An
ufft supervised the placing, counting aloud in a sardonic voice as if
ostentatiously guarding against being cheated. Three other uffts waited for the
tally to be complete.
The
cavalcade drew rein at a grand entrance to this largest building. Harl
dismounted and said heavily,
"Here's
where I live. I don't see anything else to do but hang you, Link, but there's
no need to lock you up. Come along with me. My fellas will be watchin' all the
doors an' windows. You can't get away, though I mighty near wish you
could."
The
four other riders dismounted. There'd been no obvious sign of Link's change of
status, from warmly-approved guest to somebody it seemed regrettably necessary
to hang, but after Harl's decision his followers had matter-of-factly taken
measures to prevent his escape. There was no hope of a successful dash now, nor
was there any place to dash to.
Link
climbed down to the ground. During all his life, up to now, he'd craved the
novel and the unexpected. But it hadn't happened that the prospect of being hanged, had ever been a part of his life. In a way, without
realizing it, he'd taken the state of not being hanged for granted. He'd never
felt that he needed to work out solid reasons against his hanging as a project. But Harl appeared to be wholly in earnest. His air of regret
about the necessity seemed sincere, and Link rather startledly believed that
he needed some good arguments. He needed them both good and quick.
"Come inside," said Harl gloomily.
"I never had anything bother me so much, Link! I don't even know what it's
mannerly to do about your ship. You ain't given it to me, and you welcomed me
in it, so it would be disgraceful to take it. But it's the most iron I ever did
see! And things are pretty bad for iron, like most other things. I got to think
things out."
Link
followed him through huge, wide doors. It looked like a ceremonial entrance
way. Inside there was a splendid hall hung with draperies that at some time had
been impressive. They were a mass of embroidery from top to bottom and the
original effect must have been one of genuine splendor. Bux they were ancient, now, and they showed it. At the end of the hall there
was a grandiose, stately, canopied chair upon a raised dais. It looked like a
chair of state. The entire effect was one of badly faded grandeur. The present
effect was badly marred by electric panels which obviously didn't light, and by
three uffts sprawled out and sleeping comfortably on the floor.
"Most
of my fellas are away," said Harl worriedly. "An ufft came in
yesterday with -some bog-iron and said he'd found the biggest deposit of it
that ever was found. But y'can't trust uffts! He wanted a thousand bottles of
beer for showin' us where it was, and five bottles for every load we took away.
So I got most of my fellas out huntin' for it themselves. The ufft'd think it
was a smart trick to get a thousand bottles of beer out of me for nothing, and
then laugh!"
One
of the seemingly dozing uffts yawned elaborately. It was not exactly derisive,
but it was not respectful, either.
Harl
scowled. He led the way past the ceremonial chair and out a small-sized door
just beyond. Here, abruptly, there was open air again. And here, in a space
some fifty by fifty feet, there was an absolutely startling garden. It struck
Link forcibly because it made him realize that at no time on the journey from
the landed Glamorgan to the village had he seen a sign of
cultivated land. There was very little vegetation of any sort. Isolated threads
of green appeared here and there, perhaps, but nothing else. There'd been no
fields, no crops, no growing things of any sort. There
was literally no food being grown outside the village for the feeding of its
inhabitants. But here, in a space less than twenty yards across, there was a
ten-foot patch of wheat, and a five-foot patch of barley, and a row of
root-plants which were almost certainly turnips. Every square inch was cultivated.
There were rows of plants not yet identifiable. There was a rather straggly row
of lettuce. It was_ strictly a kitchen-garden, growing foodstuffs, but
on so small a scale
that it wouldn't markedly improve the diet of a single small family. In
one comer there was an apple tree showing some small and probably wormy apples
on its branches. There was another tree not yet of an age to bear fruit, but
Link did not know what it was.
And
there was a. girl with a watering can, carefully giving water to a row of radishes.
"Thana,"
said Harl, troubled. This's Link Denham. He came down in that noise we heard a
while ago. It was a spaceship. That whiskery fella came in it
too. I'm goin' to have to hang Link along with himI hate to do it, because he
seems a nice fellabut I thought I'd have you talk to him beforehand. Coming
from far-off, he might be able to tell you some of those things you're always
wishin' you knew."
To Link he added,
"This's
my sister Thana. She runs this growin' place and not many Households eat as
fancy as mine does! See that apple tree?"
Link
said, "Very pretty" and looked carefully at the girl. At this stage
in his affairs he wasn't overlooking any bets. She'd be a pretty girl if she
had a less troubled expression. But she did not smile when she looked at him.
"You'd better talk to that whiskery
man," she said severely to her brother. "I had to have him put in a
cage."
"Why
not just have a fella watch him?" demanded Harl.
"Even if a man is goin' to be hung, it ain't manners not to make him
comfortable."
The
girl looked at Link. She was embarrassed. She moved a little distance away.
Harl went to her and she reported something in a low tone. Harl said vexedly,
"SputI
I never heard of such a thing! I . . . never . . . heard of such a thing! Link,
I'm goin' to ask you to do me a favor."
Link
was. in a state of very considerable confusion. It
seemed settled that he faced a very undesirable experience. Hanging.
But he was not treated as a criminal. Harl, in fact, seemed to feel rather
apologetic about it and to wish Link well in everything but continued
existence. But now he returned to Link, very angry.
"I'm
going to ask you, Link," he said indignantly, "to go see that
whiskery fella and tell him there's a end to my
patience! He insulted me, an' that's all right. He'll get hung for it and
that's the end of it. But you tell him he's got to behave himself until he does
get hung! When it comes to tryin' to send a message to my sistermy sister, Link
offerin' to pay her for sendin' a message to Old Man Addison, I'm
not goin' to stand for it! He's gettin' hung for sayin' that to me! What more
does he want?"
Link
opened his mouth to suggest that perhaps Thistle-thwaite wanted to get a
message to Old Man Addison. But it did not seem tactful.
"You
see him," said Harl wrathfully. "If I was to go I'd probTy have him
hung right off, and all my fellas that didn't see it would think it was
unmannerly of me not to wait. So you talk to him, will
you?"
Link swallowed. Then he
asked,
"How will I find
him?"
"Go in yonder," said Harl,
pointing, "and ask an ufft to show you. There'll be some house-uffts
around. Ask any one of 'em."
He
turned back to his sister. Link headed for the pointed-out door. He heard Harl,
behind him, saying angrily,
"If
he don't behave himself, sput! 'Hangin's too good for
him!"
But
then Link passed through the door and heard no more. Uffts in their own village
were openly derisive of Harl. But they sauntered about his house and slept on
his floors and he certainly tolerated it. He found himself in a hallway with
doors on either side and an unusually heavy^oor at the
end. It occurred to him that he was nearly in the same fix as Thistlethwaite,
though Thistlethwaite had wanted to send a message, while he'd only made a
speech to the uffts. He groped for something that would make sense out of the situation.
An
ufft slept tranquilly in the hall. It was very pig-like indeed. It looked like
about a hundred-pound shote, with pinkish hide under a sparse coating of hair.
Link stirred the creature with his foot. The ufft waked with a convulsive,
frightened scramble of small hoofs.
"Where's
the jail?" asked Link. He'd just realized that he couldn't make plans for
himself alone, since Thistlethwaite was in the same fix. It made things look
more difficult.
The ufft said sulkily,
"What's a jail?"
"In
this case, the room where that man who's to be hung is locked up," said
Link. "Where is it?"
"There
isn't any," said the ufft, more sulkily than before. "And he's not
locked up in a room. He's in a cage."
"Then where's the
cage?"
"Around
him," said the ufft with an air of extreme fret-fulness. "Just
because you humans have paws isn't any reason to wake people up when they're
resting."
"You!" snapped Link. "Where's
that cage?" The ufft backed away affrightedly.
"Don't
do that!" it protested nervously. "Don't threaten me! Don't get me
upset!"
It
began to back away again. Link advanced upon the ufft. "Then tell me what
I want to know!"
The
ufft summoned courage. It bolted. Some distance away it halted at a branching
passage to stare at Link in the same extreme unease.
"He's in the cellar," said the
ufft. "Down there!"
It pointed with a fore-hoof.
"Thanks," *aid Link, with irony.
The ufft protested, complainingly,
"It's
all very well for you to say thanks after you've scared a person."
Link
moved forward, and the ufft fled. But Link's intentions were not offensive. He
was simply following instructions. He moved doggedly down the hallway. It was
carpeted. But the carpet was worn and frayed, though once it had been
luxurious. He noted that the plastering was the work of a less than skilled
workman.
He
came to a corner in the hallway wall. A flight of steps went downward, to the
left. He went down them. He heard voices. One of them had the quality of an
ufft's speech.
"Now, we can do it. The fee will be five
thousand beers."
Thistlethwaite sounded enraged.
"Outragious! Robbery! One thousand
bottles!"
"Business
is business," said the other voice. "Four. After all, you're a
human!"
Link's
foot made a scraping sound on the floor. There was an instant scuffling and
low-voiced whispers and mutter-ings of alarm. Link went toward the sound and
came to a place where a wick burned in a dish of oil. The light played upon an
oversized cage of four-by-four timbers', elaborately lashed together with rope.
Inside the cage, Thistle-thwaite glared toward the sound of the interruption.
Beyond
the cage there was a very neat pile of vision-receivers, all seemingly new and
every one dusty. The combination of unused vision-receivers and a wick
floating in a disk of oil for light was startling. The light was primitive and
smoky. The vision-sets were not. But the light worked and the vision-sets
didn't. Evidently. There were electric-light panels.
But they wouldn't work either, or the oil lamp would not exist. Thistlethwaite
didn't see Link, as yet.
"You'd
better tell your boss," rasped Thistlethwaite to the sound that was Link,
"that if he ever expectsTo do any business with Old Man Addison he'd
better let me loose and give me back my clothes and"
He
stopped short. He and Link could see each other now. Thistlethwaite was bare
and hairy and caged. At sight of Link he uttered a bellow of rage through
the-heavy wooden bars.
"You!"
he roared. "What' you doin' here? I told you to
keep ship! You go back there! You want the ship to be claimed as jetsam, an
abandoned ship with no representative of the owner on board? You get there!
Lock y'self in! You stay on board till I finish my business dealin' and come
an' tell you what to do next!"
"There's
someone in charge," said Link mildly. "One of Harl's retainers is
acting as watchman. For me. There've been developments
since then, but that's that about the ship. I've got a message for you from
Harl."
Thistlethwaite
sputtered naughty words in naughtier combinations.
"It
seems," said Link, "that to offer to pay a Householder for something
is insult amounting to a crime. That's what you're to be hung for. Offering to
pay a Householder's sister for something is a worse crime. It appears that
doing business, except with uffts, is considered disgraceful. I don't see how
they make it work, but there you are. If you'll apologize, I think there's a chance."
Thistlethwaite cried out,
furiously,
"How can you do business without doin' business? You go tell him"
"I'd
like to get you off," said Link mildly. "I'm supposed to be hanged,
too. But if I get you a pardon I might get one for myself as a particept
noncriminus. So"
He heard faint sounds. He
said,
"If
you've a better way of getting out of being hanged than apologizing, I'd like
to join you. I have an idea that there are persons of /larger views than . . .
ah . . . the humans on Sord Three. I refer to that brilliantly intellectual
race, the uffts. With their cooperation"
He
definitely heard faint sounds. There had been voices before he arrived at
Thistlethwaite's cage. He waited hopefully.
"Look herel" snapped
Thistlethwaite, "I'm the senior partner in this business! You signed a
contract leavin' all decisions to me an' you doin' only astrogatin'! You leave
this Jdnda business to me! I'll tend to it!"
There
was a slight scraping noise. An ufft came out from behind the pile of
vision-sets. Other uffts appeared from other places. The first ufft said,
"You
said you are to be hanged. Would you be interested in a deal with us? We can do
all sorts of jail-deliveries, strikes, sabotage,
spying and intelligence work, and we specialize in political
demonstrations." The ufft grew enthusiastic. "How
about a public demonstration against hanging visitors from other worlds?
Mobs shouting in the streets! Pickets around the Householder's home! Chanted
slogans! Marching students! And demonstrators lying on the ground and daring
men to ride unicorns over them! We can"
"Can you guarantee
results?" asked Link politely.
"It'll be known all
over the planet!" said the ufft proudly.
"Public opinion will be mobilized!
There'll probably be sympathetic demonstrations at other Households. There'll
be indignation, meetings! Therell be petitions! Therell be"
"But
what," asked Link as politely as before, "just what will be the
actual physical result? Will Thistlethwaite be released? And I'm supposed to
be hanged too. Will I be pardoned? What will Harl actually do in response to
all these demonstrations?"
"His
name will go down in history as among the most despicable of all tyrants who
tried to keep us uffts in bondage!"
"Not
in human histories," said Link. "Not "5T histories' written by men!
Actually, Harl will go his placid way and hang Thistlethwaite and me. And I
hate to say it, but our ghosts won't get the least bit of comfort out of even
the most violent of public reactions after the event."
The ufft made no reply.
"I
have a thought," said Link. "Everybody has a weakness. You have
yours, Harl has his, I have mine. Harl's is that he is
hell on manners. Fix things so hell be unmannerly if he doesn't pardon both of
us, and hell be like putty. If Thistlethwaite apologizes elaborately enough,
pleading ignorance of the local customs"
Thistlethwaite protested
bitterly,
"Apologize
for a straight business proposal? A sound business
transaction? I offered to pay him liberal"
"Exactly the
point," said Link. "Exacdy!"
"Mobs
in the streets, shouting to shame him," said the first ufft,
enthusiastically. "Pickets around his house, chanting
slogans! Uffts lying in the streets, daring men to ride over them."
"No,"
said Link patiently. "Thistlethwaite apologizes. He didn't know the local
customs. He asks Harl to forgive him and permit him to make a guest-gift of the
clothes and the stun rifle Harl has already taken. No expense there! Then he
asks Harl to instruct me in local etiquette so he can observe it in future
contacts with Harl, whom he hopes to make his guide, mentor, friend, and most
intimate companion when he has made himself worthy of Harl's friendship."
"I
won't do itl" raged Thistlethwaite ferociously. "I won't do itl I'm
goin' to run this in a businesslike wayl That ain't
business!"
"It's
sense," observed Link.
"You're
fired!" bellowed Thistlethwaite. "You're fired! You ain't a junior
partner any morel Your contract with me says I can
heave you out any time I wantl You're heaved! I'm runnin' this my way!"
Link
looked at him earnestly, but the little man glared furiously at him. Link
shrugged and went away. He returned to the garden, where Harl paced up and
down and up and down, and where his sister again watered a row of not
over-prosperous plants.
"Thistlethwaite,"
said Link untruthfully, "had an unhappy childhood, practically surrounded
by people with the manners, morals, and many of the customs of uffts. It
warped his whole personality. He is aware that he ought* to apologize for
having insulted you. But he's ashamed. He feels that he should be punished.
Also he feels that he should make reparation. At the moment he is struggling
between a death-wish and an inferiority complex. He will offer no more insults
unless the struggle goes the wrong way."
Harl scowled.
"But
there is a reasonable probability," added Link, "that he will end up
by making the spaceship and its cargo his guest-gift to you. That would get you
out of an unpleasant dilemma. It would be very mannerly to accept it. You'd
have the ship and your manners in getting it would be above reproach."
Harl said suspiciously,
"How much time is he likely to
take?"
"When were you planning to hang
us?" asked Link.
"After
the fellas get back," said Harl. "They may be a while having their suppers. Then I was figurin' we'd have the hangin' by
torch-light. It'll make a right interestin' spec-table, flamin' torches an'
such and a hangin' by their light My fellas will talk
about it for years!"
"Just
take it easy," advised Link. "Don't hurry things. Hell come around before anybody gets too sleepy to appreciate
his hanging!"
He
hoped it was true. It ought to be. But HarL paced up and down.
"I
wouldn't want to do anything unmannerly," he said grudgingly. "All right. Ill give him until
hangin' time." Then he seemed to rouse himself. "Thana, you pick
the-stuff for supper and I'll get it duplied while you ask Link questions about
the things you want to know."
The
girl plucked half a dozen lettuce plants. A handful of peas.
She examined the apples on the tree and picked one. It was a small and scrawny
apple. Link saw a worm-hole near its stem. She handed the vegetation to her
brother. Then she said to Link,
"I'll show you."
He
followed her. She went into the building, and they were in the great hall with
the canopied chair. She led the way across the hall and into a smaller room. It was lined with shelves, and ranged upon them were all
the objects a Householder could desire or feel called on to supply to his
retainers. There were shelves of tools, but only one of each. There were
shelves of cloth. Much of it was incredibly beautiful embroidery, but it was
age-yellowed and old. There were knives of various shapes and sizes, plates,
dishes, and glassware, bits of small hardware, and sandals, purses, and
neckerchiefs, although these last categories were in poor condition indeed. In
general, there was every artifact of a culture which had made vision-sets and
now was used floating wicks in oil for illumination.
Link
suddenly knew that this was in a sense the treasury of the Household. But there
was only one of each object on display.
Thana
pulled out a drawer and showed Link an assortment of rocks and stones of every
imaginable variety. She searched his expression and said,
"When
you make a stew, you put in meat and flour and what vegetables you have. That's
right, isn't it?"
"I
suppose so," agreed Link. He was baffled again by his surroundings and, of
all possible openings for a conversation, the subject she'd just mentioned.
"But,"
said Thana uncomfortably, "it doesn't taste very good unless you put in
salt and herbs. That's right too, isn't it?"
"I'm sure it is,"
said Link. "But"
"Here's
a knife." It was in the drawer with the rocks. She handed it to him. It
was a perfectly ordinary knife; good steel, of a more or less antique shape,
with a mended handle. It had probably had a handle of bone or plastic which by
some accident had been destroyed, so someone had painstakingly fitted a new
one of wood. She reached to a shelf and picked up another knife. She handed it
to Link, too.
He
looked at the pair of them, at first puzzled and then incredulous. They were
identical. They were really identical! They were identical as Link had never
seen two objects before. There was a scratch on the handle of each. The
scratches were identical. There was a partly broken rivet in one, and the same
rivet was partly broken in precisely the same fashion in the other. The
resemblance was microscopically exact! Link went to a window to examine them
again, and the grain of the wooden handles had the same pattern, the same
sequence of growth-rings, and there was a jagged nick in one blade, and a
precise duplicate of that nick in the other. Perhaps it was the wood that most
bewildered Link. No two pieces of wood are ever exactly alike. It can't happen.
But here it had.
"This knife is duplied from that,"
said Thana. "This one is duplied. That one isn't. The unduplied one is
better. It's sharper and stays sharper. Its edge doesn't turn. I . . She hesitated a moment, "I've been wondering if
it isn't something like a stew. Maybe the unduplied knife has something in it
like salt, that's been left out of the duplied one. Maybe we didn't give it
something it needs, like salt. Could that be so?"
Link gaped at her. She didn't looked troubled now. She looked appealing and anxious
andwhen she didn't look troubled she was a very pretty girl. He noticed that
even in this moment of astonishment. Because he began to make a very wild guess
at what might explain human society on Sord Three.
His
limited experience with it was baffling. From the moment when he sat on the
exit port threshold of the Glamorgan and chatted with an invisible conversationalist, to the moment he'd
been told regretfully by Harl that he'd have to be hanged because of a speech
he'd made about a barber, every single happening had confused him. It seemed
that beer was currency. It seemed that a fifty-foot-square garden somehow
supplied food for an entire village, though its plants seemed quite ordinary.
Right now, dazedly surveying the whole experience, he recalled that there was
no highway leading to the village. No road. It was not irrelevant. It fitted
into the preposterous entire pattern.
"Wait
a minute!" said Link, astounded and still unbelieving. "When you
duply something you . . . furnish a sample and the material for it to something
and it . . . duplicates the sample?"
"Of course," said Thana. Her
forehead wrinkled a little as she watched his expression. "I want to know
if the reason some duplied things aren't as good as unduplied ones is that we leave something out of the material we give the
duplier to duply unduplied things with." His expression did not satisfy
her.
"Of
course if the sample is poor, the duplied thing will be poor quality too.
That's why our cloth is so weak. The samples are all old and brittle and weak.
So duplied cloth is brittle and weak too. But," she asked unbelievingly,
"don't you have dupliers where you come from?"
Link
swallowed. If what Thana said was trueif it
was truean enormous number of things fell into place, including
Thistlethwaite's scornful conviction that wealth in carynths was garbage
compared with the wealth that could be had from one trading-voyage to Sord
Three. If what Thana said was true, that was true, too. But there were other
consequences. If dupliers were exported from Sord Three, the civilization of
the galaxy could collapse. There was no commerce, no business on Sord Three.
Naturally! Why should anybody manufacture or grow anything if raw material
could be supplied and an existent specimen exactly reproduced. What price
riches, manufactures, crops, . . . civilization
itself? What price anything?
Here,, the price was manners. If someone admired something you
owned, you gave it to him, it or a duplied, microscopically
accurate replica. Or maybe you kept the replica and gave him the original. It
didn't matter. They'd be the same! But the rest of the galaxy wouldn't find it
easy to practise manners, after scores of thousands of years of rude and
uncouth habits.
"Don't
they have dupliers where you come from?" repeated Thana. She was
astonished at the very idea.
"N-no," said
Link, dry-throated. "N-no, we d-don't."
"But
you poor things!" said Thana commiseratingly. "How do you live?"
For the first time in his life, Link was
actually terrified. He said the first thing that came into his mind.
"We don't," he said thinly.
"At least, we won't live long after we get dupliers!"
V
There was movement in the great hall next door, but
Thana paid no attention. She put one knife back on the shelf from which she'd
taken it. She began to show Link the collection of small rocks and stones she'd
accumulated.
"Here's
a piece of rock we call bog-iron," she said ab-sorbedly. "It has iron
in it. Put this rock, with some wood, in the duplier, and a sample knife for it
to duply, and the duplier takes iron out of the bog-iron and wood out of the
wood and makes another knife. Of course the rock crumbles because part of it
has been taken away. So does the wood, for the same reason. But then we have
another knife. Only it's only so good. So I thought that if an unduplied knife
has something besides iron in it, like a stew has salt, maybe if I found the
right kind of rock the duplier would take something out of it, and if it was
the right land of . . . of whatever-it-is, the duplied knife would be as good
as the original because it had everything in it the original knife had."
"Yes,"
said Link, still dizzy. "It would. It should. If you get
the right kind of rock."
"Do
you know what kind that would be?" asked Thana eagerly. "Can you show
me the right kind?"
Link shook his head.
"Not I," he said wrily. "It's
a special profession to know what rocks are ores and which aren't. Some of
these rocks I do recognize. That blue one may have copper in it. I've seen it
but I'm not sure. This pink one I know. I spent months digging it out in
mountain-size masses, looking for a place where a meteor might have struck it
on a world where they used to have severe meteor-showers. But
the rest, no."
She looked distressed.
"Then
there's not much use in having guessed something right, is therrf When you go
away in your spaceship could you send somebdy back who does know about rocks?
We might even have lectric again!"
"I'm
supposed to be hung," said Link more wrily still. "And even if I
could, I don't think I'd do it. Because he'd go away again and tell the outside
worlds that you have dupliers on Sord Three. And men would come here to take
them away from you. They'd rob you at least, more likely murder you to get your
dupliers and then they'd take them and destroy themselves."
He
made a rather absurd gesture. When one had been raised in a galaxy where every
world has its own government, but they are so far apart that they can't fight
each other, patriotism as loyalty to a given place or planet tends to die out.
It has no function. It serves no purpose. But Link knew now that when men no
longer cherished small nations, whether they knew it or not they were loyal to
mankind. And dupliers released to mankind would amount to treason.
If
there can be a device which performs every sort of work a world wants done,
then those who first have that instrument are rich beyond the dreams of
anything but pride. But pride will make riches a drug upon the market. Men will
no longer work, because there is no need for their work. Men will starve
because there is no longer any need to provide them with food. There will be no
way to earn necessities. One can only take them. And presently nobody will
attempt to provide them to be taken. Thana said interestedly,
"There
are stories about the fighting back on Suheil Two before our ancestors ran
away. Everybody was trying to kill them because they had dupliers. They had to
flee. It seems ridiculous, but they did run away, in spaceships, and they came
here. There were only a few hundreds of them. The uffts made quite a fuss about
their setting up Households, but the men had beer and the uffts couldn't make
it. They had no hands. So things got straightened out^jn time. But for a long,
long while it was believed that nobody from any other world must ever be
allowed to land here. I'm glad you landed, though."
"To be hanged,"
said Link.
But
he understood the history of Sord Three better than she did. He could imagine
the Economic Wars on Suheil Two, after the ancestors of Thana had fled. There
were dupliers that weren't taken away by the fugitives. A
few. So men fought to possess them, and other men fought to take them
away, and ultimately they'd be destroyed by men who couldn't defend them. And
then there'd be wholesale murder for food, and brigandage for what scraps were
left. And at last civilization would have to start all over again with starving
people and unplanted fields for a beginning. But no dupliers.
Here
the disaster had taken a different form. While dupliers worked there was no
need to learn useful things, such as the mechanical arts, and chemistry, and
mineralogy. So such knowledge was forgotten. The art of weaving would vanish,
too, when dupliers could make cloth to any demand. The
composition of alloys. Electrical apparatus could not work without rare
metals nobody knew how to find for the dupliers. So when the original units
wore out there was no more electricity. And all cloth grows old and yellow and
brittle, so old cloth, duplied, merely meant more old cloth, and alloy steel
objects could not be reproduced, but only duplied, without the alloying
materials, so there were only soft-iron knives and patched garments. And since
the smallest of gardens, with any land of vegetable matter for raw material,
could have its produce duplied without limit, only the smallest of gardens were
cultivated. Wherefore Harl's Household was hung with rich drapery which was
falling apart, the carpets on its floors were threadbare, and he was proud that
his Household had one scrawny apple tree with wormy fruit on it. Because on
Sord Three men were not needed to make things or grow
things or do things. And Harl's Household was ready to break apart.
"I
begin," said Link unhappily, "to agree with Harl. Since
Thistlethwaite can't hope to astrogate his ship if I'm
hanged, he can't report the state of things without me. So it's probably wise
to hang me. On the other hand I couldn't run the ship's engines, so I couldn't
take the news if he were hanged. But one or the other of us should be disposed
of."
Thana said sympathetically,
"You
feel terrible, don't you? Let's go see Harl. Maybe you'll feel better. No,
wait!" An idea had occurred to her. She surveyed a shelf of elaborately
embroidered garments. She picked out one. "Do you think this is
pretty?"
"Very,"
said Link forlornly. There hadn't been too many things he'd taken seriously, in
his lifetime, but he did know that if dupliers got loose in the galaxy, there'd
be no man certain of his life if he hadn't a duplier, nor any man whose life
was worth a pebble if he did.
"Fine!" said
Thana brightly. "Come along!"
She
picked up a bundle of what looked like ancient, yellowed, cloth scraps, plus a lump of bog-iron. She led the way into the great hall.
Her
brother Harl was there, wearing an expression of patient gloom. There were two
retainers, working at something which gradually became clear. A third man
rolled in a large wheeled box from somewhere. It was
filled to the brim with a confused mass of leaves and roots and branches and weeds.
It was the mixture uffts had been dragging into the village in a wheeled cart
some little while ago. As a mixture, it belonged on a compost-heap or on a
brush-pile to be burned. But instead it was brought into the hall with the
incredible, falling-apart, floor-to-ceiling draperies.
There
was a stirring. The dais and the canopied chair moved. Together, chair and dais
rose ceilingward. A deep pit was revealed where they
had stood. And something rose in the pit, like a freight-elevator. It came
plainly into view, and it was a complex metal contrivance with three hoppers on
top which were plainly meant to hold things. One of the hoppers contained a
damp mass of greenish powder in a highly irregular mound. One of Harl's
retainers began to brush that out into a box for waste. The middle hopper
contained a pile of apples, all small, all scrawny, and each with a wormhole
next its stem. It contained a bushel or more of lettuce heaped up with the
apples. The rest of the hopper was filled with peas.
The
third of the hoppers contained an exact duplicate of the contents of the middle
hopper. Each leaf of lettuce in the third hopper was a duplicate of one in the
middle hopper. Each apple was a duplicate of an apple in the middle hopper.
Each pea
"Pyramid it once
more," said Harl, "and it'll be enough."
His
retainers piled the contents of the third hopper into the second. They piled
the first one high with the contents of the box of vegetable debris. Link knew
the theory now. The trash was vegetation. There were the same elements and same
compounds in the trash as in apples, lettuce leaves, and peas. The proportions
would be different, but the substance would be there. The duplier would take
from the trash the materials needed to duplicate the sample edibles.
The
same thing could more or less be done with roasts and steaks. Or elaborate
embroidery, provided one had a sample for the duplier to work from. There would
be leftover raw materials, of course, but a duplier could duplicate anything. Including a duplier.
And that was the thought
which was frightening.
Harl said,
"All
right."
The
men moved back. The contrivance descended into the pit. The chair of state
descended until its dais rested on the floor, .covering the pit. Harl said
casually,
"How'd
you make out, Thana? Does Link know some of the things you were wonderin'
about?"
"Most of them,"
said Thana confidently. "Nearly all!"
It
was less than an accurate statement, and Link wondered morosely why she made
it. But then Harl pressed the button. The chair of state rose. The deep pit was
revealed. The metal contrivance rose to floor-level. The pile of assorted
fragments in the first hopper had practically vanished. The fruit and lettuce
and peas in the second hopper were unchanged. The third hopper was full of an
exact duplicate of the assortment of edibles in the middle one.
"We
don't need any more," observed Harl. "Just clean up and"
"Wait!"
said Thana. "I was showing Link things, and he admired this shirt."
She
unfolded the garment she'd asked Link's opinion on. It was a shirt. It was
lavishly embroidered. Link opened his mouth, but Harl said indulgently,
"All
right."
Thana
put the shirt in the middlesamplehopper. Then she said,
"He
told me the knife you've got is the prettiest he's seen, too!"
Harl said, "Sputl" His tone was not
entirely pleased. Then he said, "I got to have manners, huh?"
"Of course," said Thana.
With
a grimace, Harl unbuckled his belt and handed the belt and knife to Thana. She
put them into the middle hopper. Then she put bog-iron, wood, and the scraps
of cloth from the treasury room into the raw materials place. She nodded
confidently to her brother.
He
pressed something, the chair of state sank down, following the duplier
mechanism, the room looked normal for a moment, and then the chair of state
rose^oip, the pit appeared, and then the duplier.
There
was much less bog-iron in the materials hopper. There was some sand on the
hopper bottom. The embroidered shirt and the knife and belt were, as they'd
been before, in the middle hopper. Exact duplicates of both knife and shirt
were in the third hopper.
Thana
handed her brother his knife. She took out and put aside the sample garment.
She spread out its duplicate and said to Link,
"Do put it on!
Please!"
Harl
watched imaptiently, as Link took off his own shirt and donned the embroidered
one. He was embarrassed by his own decorative appearance in the new apparel.
Thana picked up the shirt he'd taken off.
"Look!
This is unduplied, Harl!" she said with extravagant admiration. "Have
you ever seen anything so wonderful?"
"Sput!" said Harl
angrily. "What you tryin' to do?"
"I'm
saying that this is a wonderful shirt," said Thana, beaming. "It
isn't duplied. It's the nicest, newest shirt I've ever seen. Don't you think
so? I dare you to lie and still pretend you've manners!"
Harl said, "Sput!" again, and then,
"All
right," he admitted peevishly. "It's true. I never saw a new,
unduplied shirt before. It's a nice shirt."
Thana turned triumphantly to Link. He didn't
see any reason for triumph. But she waited, and waited. Harl glared at him.
Suddenly, Link understood. He might be scheduled to hang, but he was expected
to be mannerly.
"The shirt is
yours," he said dourly to Harl. "It's a gift."
Harl hesitated for what
seemed a long time. Then,
"Thanks,"
he said reluctantly. "It's a right nice guest-gift. I appreciate it."
Thana
looked radiant. She sent one of the retainers, standing by, for all the cloth
on the treasury- room shelves. She fairly glowed with enthusiasm. She put
Link's former shirt in the sample hopper and filled another with scraps, and
sent the duplier down. It came up and there were two shirts. It went down again
with two shirts in the sample hopper. When it came up there were four. The
chair of state and the duplier went down and up and down and up and down and
up. When the last morsel of raw material was exhausted, there were one hundred
twenty-seven duplicates of Link's own shirt, besides the original shirt itself.
"I
guess that'll do," said Harl, ungraciously. "I'll be sendin' gifts to
all my friends, and all my own fellas will have new shirts, an' their wivesll
be takin' 'em apart to make dresses and sheets and stuff." He nodded to
Link. "I appreciate that shirt a lot, Link. Thanks."
He
went away, and Link stirred stiffly. He'd watched the entire process. Objects
could be duplicated without labor or skill or industry. He'd observed what his
mind told him was the doom of human civilization unless he or Thistlethwaite
were hung. Or both. But now he saw something more.
Even that would not preserve the galaxy from destroying itself by riches out of
dupliers. Eventually, certainly, another ship must land on Sord Three. It might
be by accident. But some day another ship would come. And then this same
intolerable situation would exist again.
"Til see about dinner now," said
Thana. She turned warm, grateful, admiring eyes upon Link, and vanished.
Harl shook his head as she
disappeared.
"Smart
girl, that! I wouldn't ha' thought of usin' manners to get your shirt off your
back so's I could admire it and have the first new cloth since the old days! Mighty smart girl, Link!"
Link said stiffly,
"If you're through with taking my shirt in vain, what now?"
Harl
looked surprised. ^
"Oh,
you go off somewheres and set down and rest yourself, Link," he said
kindly. "I got things to do. Excuse me!"
He
departed. Link was left alone in the great hall, morbidly weighing the
alternatives, himself or Thistlethwaite or both of them hanged against the
collapse of all the economy of all the galaxy, with
wars, murders, lootings and rapine as a necessary consequence. He didn't have
to ask what Thistlethwaite had planned to trade for, on Sord Three. It was
dupliers. And dupliers could obviously duplicate each other as well as more
commonplace objects. Thistlethwaite wanted to make contact with Old Man Addison
to trade unduplied objects for dupliers. Old Man Addison was evidently so disreputable
a Householder that he would do business, if tempted. He'd provide a shipload of
dupliers, especially duplied for the off-planet trade, in exchange for objects
that dupliers couldn't duplicate on Sord Three. It would seem to him an
excellent bargain.
It
would seem an excellent bargain to business men elsewhere, too, to pay a
hundred million credits and half the profits for a duplier. Thistlethwaite was
right. Carynths were garbage in comparative value. A business man could begin
with the luxury trade and undersell all other supplies, dispensing duplied
luxury items. Then he could undersell any manufacturer of any other line of
goods. He could undersell normally grown foodstuffs. Any
supplier of meat products. Any supplier of anything
else men needed or desired. All factories would become unprofitable.
They'd close. All working men would become unemployed. All wages would cease to
move except into a duplier-owner's pockets. And then there would be disaster,
calamity, collapse, destruction, and hell to pay generally.
And
Thistlethwaite couldn't foresee it. He was incapable of looking beyond an
immediate, enormously profitable deal.
Link
scowled. He alone could envision the coming disaster. He alone could think of
measures to prevent it. And he was supposed to be hanged presently for a speech
about an imaginary barber! It was wrong! It was monstrous! He had to stay alive
to save the galaxy from the otherwise inevitable!
There
was an ufft seemingly asleep in the far comer of the hall. As Link approached,
the ufft opened its eyes.
"Why
didn't you tell Harl you admired Thana when he said she was a smart girl?"
The
ufft had evidently been eavesdropping. It occurred to Link that there probably
weren't many human secrets unknown to the uffts. They lounged about the
village streets and they casually napped or seemed to doze in the Householder's
home itself.
"Why should I say
that?" asked Link irritably.
"If
you want to marry her," said the ufft, "that's the start of it."
"But I just met
her!" said Link.
The
ufft stirred, in a manner suggesting a shrug
by a
four-footed animal lying
prone on the floor.
"And
what are you going to do about Thistlethwaite?" the ufft demanded.
"He's going to escape. It's all arranged. Three
thousand bottles of beer, payable by written contract when he gets to Old Man
Addison's. But he's mad with you. He says you're not part of his
organization any more. You're fired for disobeying orders to stay in the ship.
He says he got you for an astrogatorwhat's an astrogator?
because he couldn't get anybody better. He says he can astrogate
the ship to where he wants to go by doing everything you did, backwards."
Link thought sulfurous thoughts. The ufft went on, "He says he and Old Man
Addison will make history on Sord Three. Why is Sord Three Sord Three? Why not just Sord?"
"Sord's
the sun," said Link grimly, thinking of something else. "This is the
third world from it."
"That's
silly!" said the ufft. "What did you come here for, anyway? What did
you expect to get out of it?"
"In spite," said Link, "of the
remarkable similarity between your interrogation and those of other
individuals with equally dubious justification, I merely observe that my motivation
is only to be revealed to properly constituted authorities, and refrain from
telling you to go fly a kite."
"What's a kite?"
asked the ufft.
Link said,
"Look!
I'm supposed to be hung presently. I disapprove of the idea. How about
arranging for me to escape along with Thistlethwaite?"
The ufft said,
"Five
thousand beers?"
"I haven't got
them," admitted Link.
"Three? Will Old Man
Addison pay them for you?"
"I've never met
him," said Link.
"What
else have you to offer, then?" asked the ufft in a businesslike tone.
"I have to get a commission, of course."
"I
made a speech in the ufft city," said Link hopefully, "on the way
here from the ship. It was very well received. I may have some . . . hm . . .
friends among my listeners who would think it unfortunate if I were
hanged."
The
ufft got to its four feet. It stretched itself. It yawned. Then it said,
"Too bad!"
It trotted out of the hall.
Link found himself
angry. In fact, he raged. Thistleth-waite, if he escaped, might actually try to
astrogate the Glamorgan back
to Trent by the careful notes Link had made in the ship's log. It wasn't too
likely he'd manage it, but it was possible. If he did, then Link would have
died in vain. He went storming about the building. He hadn't realized it, but
it was now near sunset and what of the sky could be seen through windows was a
flaming, crimson red. He came upon an ufft sauntering at ease from one room to
another, and a second settling down for a tranquil nap. But he saw no human
until he blundered into what must be a kitchen.
There Thana bustled about in what must once have been a completely electrified
kitchen, nqw with lamps which were simply floating wicks for illumination.
There were two retainer-girls assisting her. They used the former equipment as
tables, and the cooking was done over a fire
of dried-out leaves and twigs.
"Oh," said Thana cordially. "Hello."
"Listen!" said Link, "I want to make a protest!"
"I'm terribly busy," said Thana
pleasantly, "and anyhow Harl's the one to tell about anything that's
missing in the treatment of a guest. Would you excuse me?"
Link changed his approach.
"I've got an idea," he said rather
desperately. "I think I know how to identify the kind of ... of salt you want to add to bog-iron to
make good knives from your unduplied sample."
"For that!" said Thana warmly,
"I'll stop cooking! What is it, Link?"
"When you put bog-iron in the
duplier," said Link har-assedly, "and the duplier makes a knife, the
bog-iron crumbles because the iron's been taken away." Link was
irritated, now. "The idea is to make a series of knives, adding different
rock-samples to each one, until you get a good knife. Then the rock that
contained the alloy-metal you wanted will be crumbled like the iron. See?"
"Wonderful!"
said Thana, pleased. "I should have thought of it! I'll try it
tomorrow!"
There
was a faint noise outside. It was a shrill, ululating sound. Link paid no
attention. Instead, he said urgently,
"And
I think I can work out some ways that might get electricity back!"
"That
would be marvelous," said Thana. "You must tell Harl what they are! At dinner, Link. Tell him about them at dinner. He's busy
now, arranging about the torchlight for the hanging. But I thank you very
kindly for telling me the trick to make better knives. I'm sure it will work!
But I really do have to get dinner ready!"
The
noise outside grew louder. There were shouts. It sounded like a first-class
riot beginning. Thana tilted her head on one side, listening.
"The
uffts are putting on a demonstration," she said without particular interest.
"Why don't you go watch it, Link? You can tell Harl all your new ideas
when we have dinner! I think it's wonderful of you to think of things like
this! You've no idea how important it will be! Excuse me now?"
She
bustled away. Link ground his teeth. If Thistlethwaite escaped, he must, too.
Thistlethwaite might carry out the bargain with Old Man Addison and try to
astrogate back to Trent. The emergency wasn't that he might not make it, but
that he might.
Link made his way in the general direction of
the tumult. It was dark inside the big building, now. Once away from the feeble
oil-wick lamps, he seemed merely to run into walls and partly-opened doors and
heavy, misplaced furniture. Once he heard a heavy clattering of small hoofs indoors,
somewhere inside the building. A remarkable number of uffts seemed to be racing
madly up stairs and down a hallway to the open air. The sound of their hoofs
changed as they went out-of-doors. The noises from outside changed as they left
the door open behind them. Link had heard only the back-ground noise, a continual shrill yapping, but now he heard individual voices.
"Down with humans! Down With the Murderers of Interstellar Travelers! Uffts forever! Men go home!" There
was a
particularly loud outburst.
"We want freedom! We want freedom!" Then a squealing from a myriad voices from
small pig-like throats. "Yah! Yah! Yah! Men have hands! Yah! Yah! Yah!"
Link reached the open door. Darkness had
fallen with the suddenness only observable in the tropics of some ten thousand
planets. It occurred to him that the troop of uffts he'd heard in the building
was probably Thisdethwaite's special rescue squad. If they'd had to rush past
or through a human
guard at the doorway, such a guard would now be in poor condition to resist his
own exit. And it was dark and there was enough confusion to cover one man, even
a man supposed to be hung, while he left the householder's residence.
He
was right. Starlight showed hundreds of small, rotund bodies galloping madly up
and down the street, shrilling squealed insults at the human race in general
and Harl in particular. There was one especial focus of tumult. Three men on
unicorns were its center. They were apparently Harl's retainers returning from
a hunt for an alleged new deposit of bog-iron. They'd been caught in the
village street by the suddenly erupting disorder. They were surrounded by
uffts, running around them like a merry-go-round, squealing denunciations at
the tops of their voices.
"Men have hands. Shame! Shame! Shame! Down with murderers of interstellar travelers! Uffts forever! Down with men! Down"
The retainers' ungainly mounts tried to find
a way through the squealing mob of uffts. But they were timorous. They lifted
their large splay feet with a certain fearful suddenness and put them down with
an attempt at delicacy. They managed to make their way along the ufft-covered
street until they were almost opposite the doorway in which Link waited for a chance to leave without being instantly bowled over.
Then
a unicom made a misstep. A foot came down on an
ufft. The galloping small animal squealed, "He tramped on me!" and ran away shrieking its complaint.
The
sound of uproar doubled. Link went out into the darkness, to escape. He saw
torches burning where men were at work building something which was plainly a
gallows. Until this instant they had taken the noise and galloping calmly.
They'd continued to work, though from time to time they looked with mild
interest at the milling, racing small creatures which raced up and down the
street, making all the noise they possibly could.
But
the stepped-on shrieking ufft, complaining to high heaven of the indignity put
upon him, which did not lessen his speed or his voice, changed everything.
Uffts came swarming more thickly than ever about the mounted men. They seemed
to climb over each other to get closer to the unicorns and squeal more
ferociously than before.
And
the unicorns panicked. Link saw a huge,
pillowy forefoot lift with an ufft clinging to it, biting viciously. The ufft
let go and bounced off its fellows on the ground. Other uffts bit at the
unicorns' feet. One of them went down to its knees and its rider toppled off.
The three awkward animals bolted. All three fled crazily from the village with
gigantic, splay-footed strides. The man who'd been thrown was buried under
squealing uffts, while the greater number of the demonstrators went galloping
after the runaway unicorns. The riders of two unicorns tried frantically to
control them, but the saddle of the third was empty.
Link heard the covered-up man swearing
blood-curdlingly.
He
found himself plunging toward his fellow-human. Quite automatically, his hands
grasped two ufftian hind-legs and threw two uffts away over the heads of their
fellows. Two more. Two more.
Squealings from the thrown uffts seemed suddenly to terrify those who had been
most valiant and most vocal in the attack.
Link
again threw away two more and two more still, and suddenly the creatures were
running insanely in all directions. Some ran between his legs in wild, shrill
terror. They jammed that opening and Link went down with a crash, still-hanging
on to a kicking hindleg. The man he'd come to rescue continued to swear, now
without uffts to muffle his words, which were remarkable. And there were men
running to the scene with torches.
Link
let go of the ufft he held captive. He had to, to get up. The ufft went
streaking for the far horizon at the top of his voice. Harl came out of the
Household, fuming.
"Sputl"
he fumed. "Those uffts! They bit through"
the lashin's of that whiskery man's cage an' let him loose! All this fuss was
gettin' him escaped! Sput! I was figurin' on havin' a real spectacular hangin'I
An' he's got away!"
The
man to whose rescue Link had gone now got to his feet. He spoke, with a depth
of feeling and aptness of expression that put Harl's indignation in the shade.
His garments were shreds. He'd been nipped at until he was practically nude.
The arriving torches even showed places where blood flowed from deeper nips
than usual.
"And
it was goin' to be a swell hangin'," mourned Harl indignantly. "Torchlight an' stuff! I was just waitin' for all the
fellas to get back, and the fella had to escape! But there's"
He stared.
"Link!"
VI
"This," said Link, at once with dignity and with passion,
"this is no time to be fooling around with hangings!" Harl blinked at
him in the starlight.
"What's
the matter, Link? What' you doin outside the house? That fella got away, but
there's"
"Me,
yes!" snapped Link. "But we can't spare the time for that now! Get
some men mounted! We've got to catch Thistlethwaite!"
"We don't know where
he went," objected Harl.
"I
do!" Link snapped at him. "He went to the ship! If for nothing else,
to get some pants! Then he'll go to Old Man Addison's. The uffts'll take him. Hell make a business deal with him! A trade! A bargain!"
It
was an absurd time and place for an argument. Men with torches lighted one
small part of the street. They'd come to help a fellow-human momentarily buried
under swarming, squealing uffts. Link had gotten there first. Then Harl. Now Link, with clenched fists, faced Harl in a
sort of passionate frustration.
"Don't
you see?" he demanded fiercely. "He was on Sord Three last year! He
made a deal with Old Man Addison then! He's brought a shipload of unduplied
stuff to trade with Old Man Addison for dupliers! Don't you see?"
Harl wrinkled his forehead.
"But
that'd be . . . that wouldn't be mannerly!" he objected. "That'd
besput, Link! That'd be . . . business!"
He used the term as if it
were one only to be used in
strictly private consultation with a physician, as if
it were a euphemism for something unspeakable.
"That's exactly what it is!" rasped
Link. "Business! And bad business at that! He'll
sell the contents of his ship to Old Man Addison and be paid in dupliers! And
with the dup-liers"
"Sput!" Harl waved his hands. He bellowed,
"Everybody out! Big trouble! Everybody out! Bring y'spears!"
Men came out of houses. Some of them wore
shirts such as Link wore no longer. They were pleased with them. Since the
article duplicated was relatively new, the replicas of it had all the properties
of new shirts, though the raw stuff of the thread involved had previously had
the properties of the centuries-old sample from which it had been duplied, and
which hadn't been new since before the art of weaving was forgotten.
New-shirted retainers came out of houses to hear Link's commands.
"Get mounted!" roared Harl.
"We* ridin' to that ship that come down today. What's in it's goin' to Old
Man Addison if we don't get there first! Take y'spears! Get movin'l The uffts are goin' too far!"
There was confusion. More
men appeared and ran out of sight. Some of them came back riding unicorns. Some
led them. The three animals that had been ringed in and whose tender feet had
been bitten by the uffts now came limping back into the village. The two riders
had somehow managed to subdue their own beasts, and then had overtaken and
caught the riderless animal.
"A unicom for Link!" roared Harl,
in what he evidently considered a military manner. "Get him a spear!"
"Hold
it!" said Link grimly. "That stun-gun you took from Thistlethwaite!
You were carrying it. I'll take that, Harl! I know how to use it!"
"I ain't had time to figure it out," said
Harl, agreeing.
He
roared. "Get that funny dinkus the whiskery man was carryin' this mornin'!
Give it to Link!"
Confusion developed further. Since his first
sight of Harl, riding up to the ship with five unicorn-mounted men at his back,
Link had made innumerable guesses about the social and economic system of Sord
Three. Most of them had been wrong. He'd been sure, though, that the
organization into Households was a revival or reinvention of a feudal system,
in which a Householder was responsible for the feeding and clothing of his
retainers, and in return had an indefinite amount of power. Harl had the power,
certainly, to order strangers hung.
But it became clear that whether it was
feudal or not, the system was not designed for warfare. Harl was in command,
but nobody else had secondary rank. There were no under-officers or
non-commissioned ones. Harl's howled and bellowed orders got a troop of mounted
men assembled. Confusedly and raggedly, they grouped themselves. They carried
spears and wore large knives. Harl bellowed additional orders and whoever heard
them obeyed them more or less. With great confusion, the group of armed and
mounted men got ready to start out in the moonlight.
Just as he was about to
give the order to march, Thana's voice came from the building which was the
Householder's residence.
"Harl! Harl! If you go off now, dinner will get
cold!" "Let it!" snapped Harl. "We got to catch that
whisker) fella!"
He roared for his followers to march, and march they did in a straggling column behind him.
Somebody confusedly searched for and found Link, riding next to Harl, to give
him the stun gun which was the only weapon that had been aboard the Glamorgan. He felt it over in the darkness.
"It
seems to be in working order," he told Harl. "Thanks.'*
"What" Then Harl saw the stun gun. The starlight was moderately
bright, but it was not possible to see the details of anything, whether of the
armed party or the landscape. "Oh. You got that thing. I was layin' off to
figure out what it was, but I didn't have time. What's it do, Link?"
"It
knocks a man or an animal out," said Link curtly. "It shoots an
electric charge. But you can set the charge not to stun him, but only sting him
up more or less."
" 'Lectric?" asked Harl. "That's interestin'l How far does it
throw?"
"That depends,"
said Link.
"Mmmmm-
Uh, Link, how did you find out that that whiskery fella is makin' a deal with
Old Man Addison?"
"Uffts
told me," said Link grimly. "Old Man Addison is going to pay three
thousand bottles of beer for Thistle-thwaite's delivery to him. It's a written
contract. Thistle-thwaite wouldn't promise anything like that if he didn't know
his value to Old Man Addisonl"
Harl shook his head.
"You
spoiled a good hangin' by not tellin' mel" he
said reproachfully. "He got away. But how d'you know he's head-in' for the
ship?"
"I
told you!" said Link. "He wants pants. He wants a shirt. He wants
clothes. He wants to be dressed like a business man when he does business with
Old Man Addison!"
Harl considered.
"It looks
reasonable," he admitted. "Right reasonable!"
"I
was offered a deal to escape, too," said Link sourly. "The uffts
wanted five thousand bottles of beer to take me to Old Man Addison's
Household."
"You
wouldn't like him," said Harl sagely. "He's hardly got any more
manners than an ufft. Anybody who's mannerly like you are couldn't get along
with him, Link. You showed sense in stayin' with me."
"To be hanged!"
said Link bitterly. "But"
"Hold on!" said
Harl in astonishment. "Didn't I admire that shirt o' yours? An' didn't I
accept it as a gift? I could make a gift to a man I was goin' to hang, Link.
That'd be just manners! But I couldn't accept a gift an' then hang himl That'd be disgraceful!" He paused and said in an
injured tone, "I've heard of Old Man Addison doin' things like that, but I
never thought anybody'd suspect it of me!"
Link
waved his hand impatiently. It was remarkable that the discovery that plans for
his hanging were changed should make so little
difference in this thinking. But right now he was concerned with the prevention
of a disaster vastly more important than any concern of his own.
"I
doubt," he said, "that we'd better go through the ufft city. We'd
better circle it. We'd be delayed at best, and Thistlethwaite is in a hurry to
settle his bargain with Old Man Addison. He'll hurry."
Harl
cleared his throat and bellowed toward the skies. The trailing cavalcade of
ungainly unicorns changed direction to follow him.
The
mounted party was probably fifty men and animals strong. In the dimness of
starlight alone, it was an extraordinary sight. The men rode in clumps of two
or three or half a dozen, on steeds whose gait was camel-like and awkward. The
unicorns wabbled as they strode. Their limp and fleshy horns swayed and swung.
Link, looking back and observing the total lack of discipline, felt an enormous
exasperation.
He didn't like the situation he was in, even
when immediate hanging was no longer included. In all his
life before he'd been carefree and zestfully concerned only with doing things
because they were novel or exciting, and on occasion because they involved some
tumult. In anybody his age, that was a completely normal trait. But now
he had a responsibility of intolerable importance. The future of very
many--millions of human beings would depend on what he did, but he'd get no
thanks for his trouble. It went against the grain of Link's entire nature to
dedicate himself to a tedious -and exacting task like this. If he were
successful it would never be known. In fact, it was a condition of success that
it must never be known anywhere off of Sord Three. And it mustn't be understood
there!
At
least an hour after their starting out a high, shrill clamor set up, very far
away.
That's
uffts," said Harl. "Somethin's happened an' they feel all happy an'
excited."
"It's
Thistlethwaite," said Link. "He got to the ship. He probably pasted
out some gifts to the uffts."
The cavalcade went on. The
faint shrill clamor continued.
"Uh,
Link," said Harl, in a tone at once apologetic and depressed, "I
thought of somethin' that might make the uffts feel good. If like you said he
gave presents to the uffts, maybe it was unduplied things. They couldn't use
'em, havin' hoofs instead of hands. But they'd know us humans 'ud have to buy
'em. They like to bargain. They enjoy makin' humans pay too much. It makes 'em
feel smart and superior. He could ha* made a lot of trouble for us humans! A lot o' trouble!"
The
long, somehow lumpy line of men and animals went on through the darkness. Harl
said unhappily,
"The
uffts were tryin' to make me pay 'em for news of where there was a lot of
bog-iron. You figure what they'd make me pay for somethin' unduplied! If that
fella's passin' out that kinda gifts, the uffts feel swell. They feel happy.
But I don't!"
Link said nothing. It would be reasonable for
Thistlethwaite to feel that he' had to get samples of his cargo aground to
ensure his deal with Old Man Addison, and then to have a train of armed men and
animals come to unload the Glamorgan and
carry its specially purchased cargo away. If he opened a cargo-compartment to
get samples, the uffts could well have demanded samples for themselves. Or they
could simply take them.
"And," Harl fumed, "when they
got something they'll ask fifty bottles of beer for, they won't bother bringin'
in greenstuff, and how'll I get the beer to pay 'em? They'll bring in knives
an' cloth and demand beer! And if I don't have the beer, they'll take the stuff
to another Household."
"Then you'll probably
have to pay it."
"Without greenstuff, I
can't," said Harl bitterly.
There
was an addition to the faint, joyous clamor beyond the horizon. Link began to
discount any chance of success in this expedition. If Harl was right,
Thistlethwaite had gotten to the ship, had gotten more clothing, -fflid had
very probably passed out in lieu of cash or beer, such objects of virtu as mirrors, cosmetics, cooking pots made of other metals than iron,
crockery, small electric appliances like flashlights, pens, pencils, and
synthetic fabrics. None of these things could be duplied on Sord Three, because
the minerals required as raw materials had been forgotten if they were ever
known.
And
all this would put Harl in a bad situation, no doubt Every Householder would
need to deal with Old Man Addison for such trinkets, which he must supply to
his retainers or seem less than a desirable feudal superior. But to Link the
grim fact was that Thistlethwaite must have gotten to the ship before the
mounted party. If he suspected pursuit he'd waste no time. He'd go on. And if
he had gone on-Dead ahead, now, there were peculiar small sounds. It took Link
seconds to realize that it was the hoofs of uffts on metal stair-treads and
metal floors, the sound coming out of an opened exit port.
"Harl,"
said Link in a low tone, "Thistlethwaite may still be
in the ship. There are certainly plenty of uffts rummaging around in there! Can
you get your men"
But
Harl did not wait for such advice as a self-appointed
chief of staff might give to his commander-in-chief on the eve of battle. He
raised his voice,
There they are, boys!" he bellowed.
"Come along an' get 'em! Get the whiskery fella! If we don't get him
there'll be no hangin' tonight!"
Roaring
impressively, he urged his awkward mount forward. He was followed by all his undisciplined troop. It was a wild and furious and
completely confused charge. Link and Harl led it, of course. They topped a
natural rise in the ground and saw the tall shape of the Glamorgan against the stars.
There
was a wild stirring of what seemed to be hordes of uffts, cluste/ed about the
exit port and swarming in and swarming out again. A light inside the port cast
an inadequate glow outside and in that dim light, rotund,
piglike shapes could be seen squirming and struggling to get into the
ship, if they were outside, 01 to
get out if they happened to be in. Link saw the glitter of that light upon
metal. Evidently the uffts were making free with at least the contents of one
cargo compartment. They were bringing out what small objects they could carry.
Harl
bellowed again, and his followers dutifully yelled behind him, and the whole
pack of them went sweeping over the hillcrest and down upon the aggregation of
uffts. The unicorns were apparently blessed with good night-vision, because
none of them fell among the boulders that strewed the hillside.
The charge was discovered. Squeals and
squeaks of alarm came from the uffts. It was not as much of a tumult as so many
small creatures should make, however. Those with aluminum pots and pans, or
kitchen appliances, or small tools or other booty, those of them with objects
carried in their mouths simply bolted off into the dark, making no outcry
because it would have made them drop their loot. Link saw one of them with an
especially large pot dive into it and roll over, and pick it up again and run
ten paces and then trip and dive into it again before it found a way to hold
the pot safely and go galloping madly away.
The
other uffts scattered. But there were boulders here. They shrilled defiant
slogans from behind them. "Down with men! Uffts forever!" They yapped at the men on their unicorns. So
far as combat was concerned, however, the charge on the spaceship was
anticlimactic. The uffts outside either fled with whatever they'd picked up in
their teeth, or scattered to abuse the men from lurking-places among the
boulders all round about. But there were very many more inside
the ship. They came streaming out in -Ť struggling, squabbling flood.
The riders did not try to stop them. They seemed satisfied and even pleased with
themselves over the panicky flight of the uffts. They clustered about the exit
port, but they allowed the uffts through as they fled.
"Whatll we do
now?" asked Harl.
"See if
Thistlethwaite's inside," said Link curtly.
He
got the stun gun ready. There'd been no effort by any of the riders to use
their spears on the uffts. Link could understand it. Uffts talked. And a man
can kill a dangerous animal, or even a merely annoying one, but it would seem
like murder to use a deadly weapon on a creature which was apparently incapable
of anything more dangerous than nipping at a unicorn's foot or tearing the
clothes of a man buried under a squealing heap of them. A man simply wouldn't
think of killing a talking animal which couldn't harm him save by abuse.
Harl swung from his saddle and strode inside
the ship. Link heard him climb the metal stairs inside. There was a wild
squealing sound, and something came falling down the steps with a clatter as of
tinware. An ufft rolled out of the door and streaked for the horizon,
squealing.
There were more yellings.
"Down with murderers of interstellar
travelers!" squeaked
an invisible ufft somewhere nearby. "Men have hands!
Shame! Shame! Shame!" yapped another. Then a chorus set up, "Men go home! Men go home! Men go home!"
The
men on the unicorns seemed to grow uneasy. They were bunched around the exit
port of the ship. There were very many uffts concealed nearby. They made a
racket of abuse. Sometimes they shouted whatever of competing outcries caught
their fancy, as in the rhythmic, "Men go home!" effort. Then there
was merely a wild clamor until some especially strident voice began a more
attractive phrase of insulting content.
There
wei thumpings inside the ship. Harl bellowed somewhere.
More thumpings. The yellings of abuse grew louder and
louder. Apparently the burdenless uffts had ceased to flee when they found
themselves not pursued. The torrent of insult became deafening. At the very
farthest limit of the light from the port, round bodies could be seen, running
among the boulders as they yelled epithets.
The
riders stirred apprehensively. The military tactics of the uffts, it could be
said, consisted of derogatory outcries for moral effect and the biting of
unicorns' feet as direct attack. Agitated running in circles had prefaced the
attack on three unicorns, most tender parts in the village street. The riders
in the starlight, here, were held immobile because Harl was inside the ship.
But they showed disturbance at the prospect of another such attack on their
mounts. More, there came encouraging, blood-thirsty cries from across the
hilltop as if a war party from the ufft city were on the way to reinforce the
uffts making a tumult about the ship.
Footsteps. Two pairs of them. Harl came out the exit port, very angry,
with a woe-begone retainer following him.
"This
fella," said Harl, fuming, "is the one I left to watch the ship for
you, Link. The whiskery fella came here with a crowd of uffts. He hadn't any
clothes on and he told this fella he'd got in trouble and needed to get his
clothes. The fella thought it was only mannerly to let a man have his own
clothes, so he let him in. An' then the whiskery fella hit him from behind with
somethin', an' locked him in a cabin an' let the uffts in."
Link said curtly,
"Too bad, but"
"We'd
better get movin'," said Harl angrily. "We missed him. He musta got
away before we found it out. He opened up a door somewheres,
this fella says, and he heard him cussin' the uffts like they were just takin'
anything they could close their teeth on. Then he heard some noise."
An
ufft leaped a boulder and darted at -the uneasily stamping unicorns. He hadn't
quite the nerve to make it all the way. He swerved back. But other uffts made
similar short rushes. Presently there'd be one underfoot, nipping at the
animals' feet, and they'd stampede.
"We'd
better get movin'," said Harl. "They're gettin' nervy."
"No," said Link,
grimly. "Wait a minutel"
He
swung the stun gun around. He opened the cone-of-fire aperture. He adjusted the
intensity-of-shock stud. He raised it. The yells were truly deafening. "Scoundrels! Villains" yapped the racing, jumping
small creatures.
Link
pulled the trigger. The stun gun made a burping noise. Electric charges sped
out of it, scattering. The gun would carry nearly a hundred yards at widest
dispersion of its fire. Within the cone-shaped space it affected, any flesh
unshielded by metal would receive a sharp and painful but totally uninjurious
electric shock. To men who knew nothing of electricity it would have been
startling. To uffts it would be unparalleled and utterly horrifying. They
squealed.
Link fired it again, at another area in the
darkness. Shrieks of ufftian terror rose to the stars.
"Murderers!"
cried ufft voices. "Murderers! You're killing
I |
d
Link aimed at the voices
and fired again. Twice.
The
uffts around the spaceship went away from there, making an
hysterical outcry in which complaints that the complainer had been killed were
only drowned out by louder squealings to the effect that the squealers were
dead.
"Sput!"
said Harl, astounded. "What're you doin', Link? You ain't killin' 'em, are
you? I need 'em to bring in greenstuff!"
"They'll
live," said Link. "Wait here. I want to see what Thistlethwaite did.
Anyhow he didn't try to lift the ship off to Old Man Addison's Household!"
He
went in. He climbed the stairway. He saw a cargo compartment door. It had been
sealed. It was now welded shut. Thistlethwaite had used an oxygen torch on it. A second cargo door. Welded shut.
The third door was open. It was apparently the compartment from which the loot
of the uffts had come. It appeared to be empty. The engine room door was welded
shut, and the spaceboat blister. The control room was sealed off from any entry
by anybody without at least a cold chisel, but preferably a torch. And the oxygen
torch was gone.
Link went down the stairs again, muttering.
Thistlethwaite had made the Glamorgan useless
to anybody possessing neither a cold chisel nor an oxygen torch. Harl couldn't
seize the materials Thistlethwaite planned to trade for dup-liers. Old Man
Addison might
In the one gutted cargo spacehe looked into
it again with no hope at allhe found a plastic can of beans, toppled on the
floor. He picked it up. It was too large for the jaws of uffts to grasp.
He went down to the exit port again, piously
turning out the electric lights that Thistlethwaite had left burning. He was
deeply and savagely disappointed. He was almost at the exit port when an idea
came to him. He climbed back up and touched the bottom-most weld. It scorched
his fingers.
Thistlethwaite hadn't done it long ago. He
couldn't be far off.
Link
turned on the lights again and searched. The only loose object left anywhere
was an open can of seal-off compound, for stopping air-leaks such as the Glamorgan had a habit of developing. It was black and tarry
and even an ufft would not want it. Link did.
He reached the open air
again. He said briefly,
"Hold this,
Harl."
He
handed over the container of beans and worked on the landing fin in which the
exit port existed. He had only the narrow bristle brush used to apply the
seal-ofTeompound, and only the compound to apply. The light was starlight
alone. But when he'd finished he read the straggling letters of the message
with some satisfaction. The message read:
"THISTLETHWAITE,
HOUSEHOLDERS DELIGHTED WITH TEST OF
WEAPONS
TO MAKE UFFTS WORK WITHOUT PAY.
LEAD YOUR GANG INTO AMBUSH
AS PLANNED
FOR
LARGE SCALE USE OF WEAPON. WATCH OUT
FOR
LINK. HE
IS PRO-UFFT AND SECRETLY AN
UFFT
SYMPATHIZER.
"What'd
you do, Link?" demanded Harl. "The uffts've all run away, squealing.
What'd you do? And what's that writing for?"
"That
writing," said Link, "is to end the Thistlethwaite problem on
Sord.Three. You may not realize that there is such a problem, Harl, but that's
to take care of it. And what I did was use a stun gun at maximum dispersion and
minimum power. And I'm going to ask you, Harl, to go back to the Household
straight through the ufft city. If they try to object 111 give them more of
what they've had. I think the psychological effect will be
salutary."
Harl
thought it over. His followers did not look very military in the starlight.
"Wel-1-1-1," said Harl, "I'm
not sure what those words mean, Link, but I was thinldn' we'd have a tough time
gettin' home, with uffts bitin' the unicorns' feet all the way. But you say we
won't. Or do you?"
"Yes," said Link.
"I say we won't. I guarantee it."
"Then
we'll try it," said Harl heavily. "Uh . . . what's this you gave me
to hold?"
"It's a guest-gift for
Thana," said Link.
Harl bellowed.
"Come
on, fellas! Back to home! We're ridin' through the ufft city! There's a dinkus
with maximum dispersion an' minimum power that drove off the uffts just now,
an' we want to use it on them some more."
The
cavalcade set out upon another long, shambling journey underneath the stars.
It was some time before the unicorns reached the ufft city. It was not silent,
even though all was darkness. There were shrill babblings everywhere. The
agitated stories of uffts who'd experienced stun gun stings were being
discussed by uffts who hadn't experienced them. Those who'd
felt the shocks couldn't describe them, and those who hadn't couldn't
believe them. The discussions tended to grow acrimonious. Then there were
squealings that men were about to pass through the city. Those who hadn't been
shocked went valiantly to oppose the passage, or at least make it as unpleasant
as possible by abuse.
Link
let the congregation of zestfully vituperative uffts grow very large and get
very near. "Murderers!" and "Mas-sacrers!" were the least of the epithets thrown at the men. "The world will hear of this massacre!" shouted an ufft. Another took it up, "They'll know how many of our comrades you murdered tonight!" The unicorns picked their way onward in
their loose-jointed, wabbling fashion. Voices found an easier word. "Killers!" they shouted from the darkness. "Killers! Killers!" Actually, and Link knew it, no ufft in all the city would be able to
find so much as a spot on his hide that was pinker than the rest, come tomorrow
morning.
But now Presently
there was1 a huge, milling, madly galloping and wildly yelling
barrier of uffts before the cavalcade. If the animals went into it, their feet
would suffer. They'd be bitten. If they turned back, the uffts would be
encouraged to follow and close in on them and again bite large splay feet.
Harl
bellowed a halt. The cavalcade came to a standstill. Link gave the running,
tumbling' aggregation of abusive creatures two more shots from the stun gun.
Individuals suffered the equivalent of bee-stings for the fraction of a second.
They shrieked and ran away.
The
rest of the travel through the city was without incident, save that very
occasionally very brave uffts squealed insults from not less than half a mile
away, and then fled still farther from the shambling line of mounts and men.
Then
there were the undulating miles beyond, to where very faint and feeble lights
showed through the darkness. And then eventually the houses of the village
loomed up on either side.
Thana
welcomed Harl and Link, but she was inclined to be distressed that their dinner
now had to be warmed over and was inferior in quality for that reason. They
dined. Link presented Thana with the plastic can of beans. Harl asked what they
were. When Link told him, he said absorbedly,
"I've
heard that there's a Household over past Old Man Addison that has beans. But I
never tasted 'em myself. We'll duply some an' have 'em for breakfast. Right?"
And
Link was ushered into a guest-room, with a light consisting of a wick floating
in a dish of oil. He slept soundly, until an hour after sunrise. Then he was
waked by the sound of shoutings. He could see nothing from his window, so he
dressed and went leisurely to see from the street.
There
were many villagers out-of-doors, staring at the distance. From time to time
they shouted encouragement. Link saw what they shouted at
A small, hairy figure, chastely clad in a
red-checked tablecloth around his middle, ran madly toward the Household. The
figure was Thistlethwaite. The red-checked cloth had once been draped over a
table in the Glamorgan's mess room. Thistlethwaite ran like a deer and
behind him came uffts yapping insults and trying to nip his heels.
He
reached safety and the uffts drew off, shouting "Traitor!" and "Murderer!" as
the mildest of accusations. But now and then one roared shrilly at him. "Agent provocateur!"
t
VH
The situation developed in a strictly logical fashion. The
uffts remained at a distance, shouting insults and abuse at all the humans in
the village which was Harl's Household. Hours passed. No small, ufft-drawn
carts came in bringing loads of roots, barks, herbs, berries, blossoms and
flowers. Normally they were brought in for the duplier to convert in part to
beer, with added moisture, and in part into such items as slighdy wormy apples,
legumes like peas, and discouraged succulents like lettuce. There were all
sorts of foodstuffs duplied with the same ufft-cart loads of material, of
course. Wheat, and even flour, could be synthesized by the duplier from the
assorted compounds in the vegetation the carts contained. Radishes,
could be multiplied. Every product of Thana's garden could be increased
indefinitely. But this morning no raw material for beer or victuals appeared.
The uffts remained at a distance, shrilling insults.
Thistlethwaite
revealed the background events behind this development. He'd escaped from the
Household, surrounded by
a scurrying guard of uffts,
while the political demonstration in the street was at its height. That tumult
continued while he was hurried to the ufft city. There he was feted, but not
fed. The uffts did not make use of human food. They were herbivorous' and had
no provisions for him. But they did make speeches about bis escape.
He
stood it so long, but he was a business man. He wanted food and he wanted
clothing and he wanted to get to Old Man Addison's Household to proceed with
his business deal to end all business deals. He did nofjhink of it
in such accurate terms. But
he insisted on being taken first to the Glamorgan for
food and clothing. He spoke with pride of his talent for business. The uffts
mentioned, as business men, that the contract for his1 rescue and
escort did not include food, clothing, or a trip west of the ufft city. There
would be a slight extra charge. He was indignant, but he agreed.
He'd been taken to the
ship. The watchman left by Harl admitted him. He overpowered that watchman and
put him in a cabin for crew members. He stuffed himself, because
food was more urgent than clothing. He admitted uffts, because they were
clamoring below. They wanted the extra fees they'd charged him. They announced that they were not interested in human
artifacts. They wanted the usual currency, beer. The whiskery man didn't have
it. They Suggested that they would accept cargo at a proper
discount The discount was for the fact that they'd have to trade human goods to
humans for the beer they preferred. The discount would be great
Thistlethwaite
had to yield, though he raged. He opened a cargo compartment and the uffts
began to empty it Thistlethwaite wept with fury because circumstances had put
him at the mercy of the uffts. In business matters they were businesslike. They
didn't have any mercy. He was expressing his indignation at their attitude when
they spoke of demurrage to be paid for the delay he was causing. Strangling upon his wrath, he took
measures. He was still taking measures when the expedition of men and unicorns
charged down into the hollow where the Glamorgan rested.
Thistlethwaite got out among the first, and was well away before the stun gun
was put into use. And then, back in the ufft city, the uffts demanded
compensation for the injury of an exaggerated number of their fellows in his employ.
Telling
about it later, even returned to Harl's Household and
presumably the prospect of being hanged, even later Thistlethwaite purpled with
fury over the ufft demands. They'd have stripped him of all the Glamorgan's cargo if not the ship itself, and he'd have reached Old Man Addison
without a smidgin of trade-goods with which to deal. His entire journey would
have been in vain. It was even unlikely that Old Man Addison would pay for his
delivery, when he had nothing to offer that feudal chieftain in the way of
trade.
Listening to the account, Harl said safely,
"Uffts
haven't got any manners. You shoulda known better then to deal with theml You did right to come back." Then something occurred to
him. "Why'd they chase you?"
Thistlethwaite turned burning, bloodshot eyes
upon Link.
"Somebody,"
he said balefully, "somebody painted a note on the Glamorgan's fin. It was addressed to me! So the uffts read it an" it said I'd
brought guns for Householders to use on uffts to make 'em work for free! And
the note said for me to lead the uffts into a ambush
as previous arranged so's they'd get shot up! So they decided that me gettin'
put in a cage an' gettin' them to escape me was a trick so's you'd get a chance
to try out that stun gun on 'em last night!"
Link said mildly,
"Now, I wonder who could have done such
a thing!" Thistlethwaite strangled on his fury. He was speechless.
"It begins to look," said Link with
the same mildness, "like the uffts are really wrought up. I doubt that
they're hanging around the Household just for the pleasure of calling us names.
What do you think they want, Harl?"
"Plenty!" said
Harl gloomily. "Plenty!"
"I suggest," said
Link, "that you find out."
""Might
as well," said Harl, more gloomily still. "If
they don't bring in greenstuff, we don't eat. You can't duply what Thana grows
unless you've got something to duply it with!"
He rose and went morosely out of the room
where the conference had taken place. Thistlethwaite said bitterly,
"I'd ha' done better
if I'd astrogated here myself!"
"Question,"
said Link. "You say the uffts believe you brought guns for them to be
enslaved with. Did you?"
"No!" snapped
Thistlethwaite.
"Did the uffts mention
me?" asked Link.
Thistlethwaite practically
foamed at the mouth.
"They said y'were
their friend!" he raged. "They said"
"I
made them a speech," said Link modestly. "It was about a barber who
shaved everybody in his village who didn't shave himself, and didn't shave
anybody who did shave himself. There's been some trouble deciding who shaved
the barber. They may like me for that."
Thistlethwaite made
incoherent noises.
"Tut
rut!" said Link. "There's one more question, but you haven't got the
answer to it. I'll get Thana to help me find it out. I don't think you'll run
away to the uffts again, and I don't think they'll
hang you before I have a chance to protest. I shall hope not, anyhow."
He
went in search of Thana. He found her ruefully regarding the plants in her
kitchen-garden.
"There's
not been an ufft-cart of greenstuff come in today!" she told Link
unhappily, "and the uffts are shouting such bad language I don't know when
they'll start bringing carts in againl"
"You've
got food stored ahead?" asked Link. "Not much," admitted Thana.
"The uffts always bring in greenstuff, so there's been no need to store
food." Link shook his head.
"It
looks bad," he observed. "Will you duply that gun I used last night
and see if it works? It might be a solution to the problem. An
unwelcome solution, but still a solution."
"Of
course!" said Thana.
She
led the way. To the great hall and across it, and into the room with
innumerable shelves that served the purpose of a treasury. She lifted down the
stun gun from a high shelf, which Link realized no uffts with hoofs instead of
hands could ever climb to. She gave Link some large lumps of bog-iron. She
brought out a ready-cut billet of wood.
Into the great hall again. She pressed a button and the chair of state and its dais rose
ceilingward. The contrivance which was the duplier came up out of the pit the
chair and dais ordinarily covered. Thana put the bog-iron and the wood in the
raw-material hopper. She put the stun gun in the hopper holding the object to
be duplicated. She left the third hopper empty. The duplicate to be produced
should appear there.
She
pressed the button. The duplier descended. The chair of state came down. She
pressed the button again. The chair of state went up and the duplier arose, at
a different rate of rising. The bog-iron in the first hopper was visibly
diminished and there was much sand on the hopper bottom. The sample, authentic,
original stun gun remained where it had been placed, in the middle hopper. But
a seemingly exact duplicate remained in the last hopper.
Link took the duplied object. He examined it.
He aimed it skyward and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened, not even the
slight hiccough which accompanies a stun gun's operation.
He twisted the disassembly screw and the gun
opened up for inspection. Link looked, and shook his head.
"No
transistors," he reported regretfully. "They're made of germanium and
stuff, rare metals at the best of times. We haven't any. So the gun is
incomplete. A duplied stun gun needs germanium and without it it's no good,
just like a duplied
knife. No dice. I'm very glad of it."
Harl came in, indignant.
"Link!"
he said in a tone expressing something like shock at
something appalling and outrage at something crushing, "I sent a coupla
fellas to find out what the"*uffts wanted, and the uffts chased 'em
backl"
"Did they mention
their reason?" asked Link.
"They
yelled I was a conspirator. They yelled that the whiskery man was goin' to lead
'em into a ambush last night to be massacred. They
yelled I was goin' to try to make 'em work all the time without payin' 'em
beerl They yelled down with me. Me!" said Harl
incredulously. "They said they were makin' a general strike against mel No greenstuff! No carrying messages from me to anywhere!
No anything! I got to get rid of the thing they say killed 'em by hundreds last
night. Did it kill 'em, Link?"
"Not
a one," said Link. "They got stung a bit, but that's all. Nothing worse than a sting for the fraction of a second."
"They
say," finished Harl astonishedly, "that the
strike keeps up till I hang the whiskery fella and get rid of the gun that was
used on 'em, an' let uffts search the whole Household to see if there are any
more, an' repeat that search any time they please! They got to read all
messages to me from anybody else, and from me to
anybody! And I got to give 'em four more bottles of beer for each cartload of
greenstuff they bring in from now on!"
Link considered for a
moment. Then he said,
"What have you
decided?"
"I couldn't if I wanted to!" said
Harl. "Sput, Link! If I hung that whiskery fella because the uffts wanted
it, I'd be disgraced! Not a fella in the Household would stay here! If I let
the uffts search anybody's house any time they wanted, not a woman would let
her husband stay! If I agreed to that, Link, there wouldn't be a livin' soul
here by sundown!"
Link
somehow felt relieved. The human economy here on Sord Three
had defects, even to his tolerant eyes. The humans were utterly dependent upon
the uffts for the food they ate and the clothes they wore, in the sense that
they depended on ufft-cart loads of raw material. At any time the uffts could
shut down and starve out a human household. It was a relief to discover that
humans would not submit.
"Whatll you do?"
"Send
a messenger to my next neighbor," said Harl angrily. "Ill say I'm comin' guestin'. Ill take
half a dozen men an' forty or fifty unicorns. I'll go to his household. Ill make him a guest-gift
of a duplied new shirt and a duplied can of beans. Then he can have all the
shirts an' beans he wants from now on. Thats' a right grand gift, Link! So he'll be anxious to make a mannerly host-gift
to me. So I'll admire how much ready-duplied food he has stored away. So hell
duply enough food to load up my train of unicorns and 111 bring it back here!"
"And then what? Suppose the uffts stage a political demonstration in the street while you're gone?"
Harl scowled.
"They better not!" he said darkly.
"They . . . uh . . . they'd better not! I'll go send my messenger."
He hurried away. Thana said,
"You don't think
that's going to work out."
"It might," said
Link. "But it needn't."
Thana said in a practical
tone of voice,
"Let's see what we can
do with that unduplied knife, Link."
She went into the room Link considered the
Household treasury. She came back with the alloy-steel knife, of which duplied
copies so far had been only soft iron. She had her collection of variegated
rocks.
She duplied the knife with bog-iron alone in the raw materials hopper. The contrivance went down in the pit, the
canopied chair descended and covered the pit, then rose again and the
contrivance came up once more. There was a second knife in the products hopper. She handed it to Link. He tested
its edge. It turned immediately. It was soft iron. He handed it back. She
cleaned out the materials hopper of sand and bog-iron, and put the
just-duplied, soft-iron knife in for raw material. She added a dozen of the
stones and pebbles of which some might be ores.
The
duplier descended and rose. The knife had again been duplied. Its edge was
still useless. The duplier had not been able to extract from the rock samples
the alloying elements the original knife contained in addition to iron, and
which a true duplicate would have to contain. They weren't in the rocks. Thana
cleared out the useless rock specimens with a professional air.
"I'm afraid you're
right, Link, about the uffts."
"How?" asked
Link.
"Harl
thinks about manners all the time. He's not practical, like you."
"I've never been accused of being
practical before," said Link drily.
Thana
put the re-duplied knife in the materials hopper. She added more rocks. When
the chair descended she said,
"What
did you do with yourself before you came here, Link?"
"Oh,
I went hither and yon," said Link, "and did this and that."
The
chair rose and the duplier reappeared. There was again another knife. It, also,
was soft-iron. Thana cleared away these unsatisfactory rock samples also. She
shifted the soft-iron knife to the first hopper and put in more pebbles. When
the duplier went down and came up again, the re-re-duplied knife had vanished
from the materials hopper and reappeared in the third hopper where duplied
products did appear. There was no crumbling among the pebbles which might be
ores. She replaced them with still others and the duplication cycle began
again. "Where's your home, Link?"
"Anywhere."
said Link. He watched the duplier descend and the chair-of-state come down to
cover the pit. It rose again to disclose a re-re-re-duplicated knife. This
time, too, the edge was not good. She substituted still other pebbles and sent
the duplier down to do its duplying all over again.
"Where's
anywhere?" asked Thana. She looked at him intently.
He
told her. As the duplier went through the process of making and re-making the
knife according to the provided sample, but without the alloy-material that
would turn it to steel, he answered seemingly idle questions and presently was
more or less sketching out the story of his life. He told her about Glaeth. He
told her about his two years at the Merchant Space Academy on Malibu. He found
himself saying,
"That's where I met
Imogene."
"Your girlfriend?" asked Thana with
possibly exaggerated casualness.
"No," said Link. "Oh, for a
while I suppose you'd say she was. I wanted to marry her. I don't know why. It
seemed like a good idea at the time. But she asked me business-like questions
about did I have any property anywhere and what were my prospects, and so on.
She said we were congenial enough, but marriage was a girl's career and one had
to know all the facts before deciding anything so important. Very pretty girl,
though," said Link.
Thana removed the assortment of stones that
still again had been proved to contain no metaliferous steel-hardening alloy.
She put in more. Among the ones to be tested this time there was a sample of a
peach-colored rock he'd noted earlier as familiar. Link stiffened for a moment.
Then he reached inside his shirt and into a pocket of his stake-belt. By
feeling only, he selected a small, gritty crystal. He placed it beside the
sample knife.
The
dais and the chair-of-state descended. He waited for it to rise up again.
"What
happened?" asked Thana. Again she. was unconvincingly casual.
"Oh,"
said Link, "I went back to where I was lodging and counted up my assets.
I'd been toying with the idea of going to Glaeth to get rich. I had enough for
that and about two thousand credits over. So I bought the necessary tickets and
stuff, and reserved a place on a spaceship leaving that afternoon. Then I went
to a florist."
Thana said blankly,
"Why?"
"I wanted to put her
on ice."
The
duplier came up. An irregular lump of grayish-black rock had visibly
disintegrated. It was not all gone, but a good tenth of its substance had
disappeared. There were glittering scales to prove its
crumbling. The peach-colored stone had dropped a fine dust, too.
"This looks
promising!" said Link.
He tested the edge of the duplied knife. It
was excellent, equivalent to the original. It should have been. Tungsten steel
does take a good edge, and hold it, too. He handed the knife to Thana, and
fumbled in the bottom of the product hopper. There was a small, very bright
crystal there. He picked it up, together with the other sample crystal from his
stake-belt.
Very, very calmly he put two gritty crystals
into the stake-belt pocket from which he'd extracted one. Thana held the
duplied but this time tungsten-steel knife. She should have been enraptured.
But instead she asked, almost urgently,
"Why did you go to a
florist?"
"I
bought two thousand credits worth of flowers," said Link. "I ordered
them delivered to Imogene. They'd fill every room in her parents' home with
some left over to hang out the windows. I wrote a note with them, bidding her
goodbye."
Thana
stared at him with a remarkable amount of interest.
"She
wanted a rich husband and I hated to disappoint her," he explained.
"And also, there was a chance that I might get rich on Claeth. So I told
her in my note that my multi-millionaire father had consented for me to roam
the galaxy until I could find a girl who would love me for myself alone, not
knowing of his millions. And I'd found her. And she was the only woman I could
ever love. It was a fairly long note," Link added.
"But . . . but-"
"I said I was going away for a year to
see if I could live without her. If I couldn'teven though she considered my
father's millionsI'd come back and sadly ask her to marry me though my
father's millions counted. If I could, I said, I'd spend the rest of my life
exploring strange planets and brooding because the one woman I could love could
not love me for myself, as I loved her. A very nice piece of
romantic literature."
Thana said blankly,
"Then
what?"
Harl appeared for the second time in the
doorway. He was' enraged. His hands were clenched. He scowled formidably.
"They
wouldn't let my fella ride through," he said in an ominous tone.
"They bit his unicorn's heels. They'd ha' pulled it down and him tool So he came back. Uffts never dared try a trick like that
before! Not in this household! An' they never will again!"
"What-"
"I'm
going to duply that gun you used last night, Link," said Harl ferociously,
"and me and a bunch of my fellas will go out an' sting them up like you
did, only plenty! When uffts say a man's got to be hung and a householder can't
send a message, that ain't just no manners! That's . . . that's-"
He
stopped, at a loss for a word to express behavior more reprehensible than bad
manners. Link noted that on Sord Three
"manners" had come to imply all that was admirable, as in other
places and other times words like "honour" and
"intellectual" and "piety" and "patriotic" had
become synonyms for "good." And, as in those other cases, something
was missing. But he said,
"Thana and I already tried duplying it, Harl. The duplied one doesn't work, just as
duplied knives don't hold an edge."
Harl stared at him.
"Sput! Y'sure?"
"Quite
sure," said Link. "We solved the problem of the knife, but the raw
material to make a duplied stun gun is rare everywhere. We haven't got it and I
wouldn't know it if I saw it."
Harl
said "Sput!" again, and began to pace up and down. After a minute and
more he said bitterly;
"I'm
not goin' to let my Household starve! So far's I know no man has ever killed an
ufft in a hundred years. They act crazy, but they can't hold a spear to fight
with, even if they could make 'em. So it'd be a disgrace to use a spear on them.
But it'd be a disgrace to hang a man just because the uffts wanted him hung!
And to let 'em search our houses any time they felt like it, just because they
can't fight! Anyhow I'm not goin' to let my household go hungry because uffts
say they've got to!"
He stamped his feet. He ground his teeth. He
started for the doorway. Link said,
"Hold
it, Harll I've got an idea. You don't want to use spears on uffts."
"I got to!"
"No. And if you use the only stun gun on
the planet, it'll make them madder than ever." "Can I help
that?"
"You
don't even want them to stop trading with your Household, greenstuff for
beer."
"I
want," said Harl savagely, "for things to be like they was in the old days, when the old folks were polite to the
uffts and the uffts to them! When humans didn't need uffts and tools were good
and knives were sharp."
"And
everybody had beans for breakfast," Link finished for him. "But I've
got an idea, Harl. Uffts like speeches."
Harl scowled at him.
"They like my
speeches," added Link.
Harl's scowl did not
diminish.
"I,"
said Link, "will go out and make a speech
to them. If they won't listen, I'll high-tail it back. But if they do listen
I'll gather them in a splendid public meeting with a program and orations about . . . oh, work
hours and fringe benefits or something like that. Ill organize
them into committees. Then I'll adjourn them to a more convenient place."
Harl said cagily,
"Then
what?"
"They'll have adjourned away from any
place near your Household, and you and your forty or fifty unicorns can go
guesting and come back with your food. And," said Link,
"meanwhile the uffts will be talking. And talking is thirsty work.
That will be an urge toward negotiations by which the uffts can get themselves
some beer."
Harl
continued to frown, but not as deeply. After a time he said heavily,
"It might fix things for now. But things
are bad, Link, an' they keep gettin' worse. This'd be only for right now."
"Ah!"
said Link briskly. "Just what I was coming to! In
your guesting, Harl, you will talk to your hosts about the good old days.
You'll point out how superior they were to now. Youll propose an assembly of
Householders to organize for the bringing back of the Good Old Days. That, all
by itself, is a complete program for a political party of wide and popular
appeal!"
"Mmmmmmh!"
said Harl slowly. "It's about time somebody started that!"
"Just
so," said Link. "So if Thana will fix me up a light lunchthe uffts
had no food for Thistlethwaite to eat-Ill go out and try a little
silver-tongued oratory. With all due modesty, I think I can sway a crowd. Of uffts."
Hart's frown was not wholly
gone, yet. But he said,
"I like that idea of
goin' back to the good old days!"
"If
you're allowed to define them," agreed Link. "But in the meantime
we'll let the uffts talk themselves thirsty so they'll have to bring in
greenstuff to get beer to lubricate more talk."
Harl said, very heavily
indeed,
"Well
try it. You got words, Link. Ill get you a unicom
ready. That's a good idea about the good old days."
He disappeared. Thana said,
"You didn't finish
telling me about Imogene."
"Oh,
she must be married to somebody else by now," Link told her. "I'd
wonder if she wasn't. Anyhow"
"I'll
fix you a lunch," said Thana. "I think you're going to accomplish a
lot on Sord Three, Link!"
He looked startled.
"Why?"
"You,"
said Thana, "look at things in such a practical way!" She vanished,
in her turn. Link spread out his hands in a gesture there was nobody around to
see. He heard a faint,
faint
noise. He pricked up his ears. He went to an open door and listened. A shrill
ululation came from somewhere beyond the village. It was the high-pitched
voices of uffts. A rhythm established itself. The uffts were chanting, "Death .. .to ... men! Death to men! Death to
menT
VIII
An
hour later,
Link went streaking away from the Household, urging his unicorn to the utmost,
while Harl led shouts of anger and irritation among the houses. Another rider
came after Link. His mount had been carefully selected, and it had no chance at
all of overtaking Link. Then came two other riders, one
shortly after another, and then a knot
of nearly a dozen, as if pursuit of Link had begun as fast as men could get
unicorns saddled for the chase. They rushed after Link with seeming
fury. But he had a faster mount, a distinctly, pre-arrangedly faster animal.
But
it was not the most comfortable of all animals to ride. Unicorns jolted. They
put down their large and tender feet with lavish and ungainly motions, the
object of which seemed to be to shake their riders' livers loose. The faster
they traveled, the more lavish the leg-motions and the more violent the jarring
of the man riding them. The drooping fleshy appendages which dangled from their
foreheads flapped and bumped as they ran.
Link's
pursuers seemed to strive desperately to overtake him. They shook fists and
spears at him as he increased his lead. He topped a hillside half a mile from
the Household, went down its farther slope, and squealed insults from uffts'
throats seemed to give the Household posse pause. When Link
was out of sight the voices of invisible uffts hurled epithets at his pursuers.
The chase-party slackened speed and finally halted. They seemed to confer.
Uffts shouted at them. "Murderers!" was
a mild word. "Assassins!" was
more frequent. "Shame! Shame! Shame!" was commonplace.
The
men from the Household, as if reluctandy, turned their mounts homeward, and
uffts came scuttling across the uneven ground to shout, "Cowards!" after them, and more elaborately, "Scared to fight! Yah! Yah! Yah!" M the
riders pressed their mounts, the uffts became more daring. Rotund small animals
almost caught up with the retreating spear-bearers, yapping at their unicorns'
heels and shouting every insult an ufftish mind could conceive.
When
the mounted men reentered the village, however, the uffts went racing and
bounding to see what had happened to Link. The painted message on the Glamorgan's fin had represented him as pro-ufft, while Thistlethwaite was represented
as having villainous intentions toward them. And Link had made them a noble
speech, presenting a problem that could be aruged about indefinitely. The
important thing, though, was that he had fled from the Household, with pursuers
hot on his trail. If the humans of the Household disliked him enough to chase
him, uffts were practically ready to make him an honorary member of their race.
He kept up his headlong flight for a full
mile. Then he gradually slackened speed, as repeated glances to the rear showed
no sign of his pursuers. Presently he ceased altogether to urge the unicorn he
rode, and proceeded at a leisurely, bumpy walk.
He
became aware that uffts trotted or galloped on parallel courses to see what he
would do. At first they did not show themselves, and he only caught fugitive
glimpses of one or two at a time. But there were evidently some hundreds of
them, staying out of sight but keeping pace with him on either side.
He reined in and waited.
Uffts'
voices murmured. There were even squabblings in low tones, as if uffts behind
boulders and just behind hilltops were arguing with each other over who should
go out into plain view and open a conversation. The buzzing voices became
almost angry. Then Link let his unicorn move very slowly to one side while
voices mumbled indignantly. "Who's afraid of him?" "You are, that's who." "That's a lie! You're the scared one!" ". . . Then if you aren't scared, go out and talk to him!" "You do it! . . . Huh! I dare you to go out and talk to him!" "But I double-dare you!" "I triple-dare you .... I quadruple-dare"
Then
Link's head appeared above a hilltop, and the uffts knew that he could see a close-packed mass of them trying to insult each other into making the
first contact with him.
"My
friends!" said Link in a carrying voice. "I put myself in your hands!
I ask political asylum from the Householders and tyrants who are your enemies
no less than the enemies of every person in favor of your being favored!"
Every
ufft gazed at him. Those nearest him tended to look scared. But Link waved his
arms.
"On
a previous occasion," he said splendidly, "I spoke to you of the
galaxy-wide admiration of your intellect, and presented to you a problem the
logicians and metaphysicians of other worlds have found unsolvable, though some
solution must exist. At that time I did not realize that the
sociological-economic conditions of your life had driven you to revolt. I was
not aware that you were actually and un-thinkably expected to earn the beer so
necessary to the higher functions of the intellect. I did not know that you,
the most brilliant race in the galaxy, were frustrated by a caste system of
which you were less than the highest grade. But I began to suspect it last
night, when you made a political demonstration in the Household streets. I
confirmed it this morning. And when I expressed by indignation that ufits,
here uffts, my friends!were not gladly supported by the humans who should
listen to them with reverence, when I learned of the unbelievable withholding
of the subservience due you"
Link listened interestedly
to himself. A man who doesn't believe too firmly in his own importance can
often overhear remarkable things if he simply starts to talk and then leans
back to listen. One's mouth, allowed to say what it pleases, sometimes
astonishes its owner. Of course, it sometimes gets him into trouble, too.
Link found himself waving his arms splendidly
while he passed from mere flattery to exhortation, and from
exhortation to the outlining of a plan
of action. He didn't like to disappoint anybody, and the uffts were capable of
disappointment.
A part of his mind said wrily that he was
making a fool of himself when all he needed was to get the uffts to move off so
Harl could get away with a pack-train of unicorns and return with some
unicom-loads of groceries. But another part of his mind went on grandly, not
disappointing the uffts.
"Your revolution," he told them
eloquently, "has the sympathy of every lover of liberty, of license, and
of uffts! I look to see the spontaneous uprising you have already made become
the partem for a planet-wide defiance! I look to see committees formed for
correspondence with uffts on all this world! A
committee to coordinate the publicity which will draw all uffts to your
standards! I look to see committees for the organization of revolutionary
units! Every talent possessed by uffts must be thrown into the struggle! Why
not a committee of poets, to phrase in deathless words the aspirations of the
ufftian race? My friends, I ask you! Who favors a committee of correspondence, to
inform the whole planet of your intolerable grievances! Who favors it?"
There was some cheering. Nearby uffts cheered
raggedly. Those farther away cheered because those nearer cheered. Those quite
beyond the reach of Link's voice cheered because there was cheering going on.
But those far-away ones were not following developments closely. A
more-than-usually-fanatical ufft cried shrilly, "Death to all
humans!"
"Splendid!"
shouted Link valorously. "Now, who favors a committee to form
revolutionary units for the liberation of the uffts?"
Those
nearby cheered more loudly. Again, from the fringes of the gathering, there
came bloodthirsty outcries.
"The
ayes have it!" Link cried triumphantly. "Who's for a propaganda
organization to stimulate the patriotism and the resolution of all uffts,
everywhere?"
There were more cheers.
"Who
volunteers for the Ufftian Revolutionary Council, to determine the policies
which are to make uffts independent of all humans and raise them to their
proper, inalienable position of superiority?"
Cheers. Yells.
Uproar.
"My
friends!" roared Link. "It is not befitting the glorious traditions
of ufftdom that the Ufftian Provisional Government meet on the edge of a human
Household, spied upon by humans! Let us march to some strictly ufftian area where the ufftian world-capital will presendy appear!
Let us plan this metropolis! Let us organize our revolt! Let us march forward,
shouting the slogans of ufftian freedom! Who marches?"
There
was an uproar of cheering which was distinctly heard and
unfavorably reacted upon in the Household from which Link had seemingly fled a
short time before.
With
a grandiose gesture, Link set his unicom in motion, headed in a distinctly
general direction. There was a stirring, and presently innumerable plump animals,
with pinkish skin showing through the sparse hairiness, came trotting and galloping
to be close to him. He leaned in his saddle and addressed those nearest him on
the right.
"Will
someone volunteer to lead the cadence of the march?" he asked. "We should
have marching units, chanting the principles of this splendid revolt. Leaders, please!"
Voices
clamored to be appointed. He appointed them all, with definitely non-specific
wavings of his hand. He gave them a march-cadence chant. They tried it as a group
and almost instantly abandoned the group to lead other groupings. Link knew by
intuition that anybody who wants to talk like the uffts, would want to lead
others of" his land. It seemed that immediately there were half a dozen
assemblages of uffts gathered about voluble, self-appointed leaders, giving
out a rhythmic outcry,
"Brackety-ax, co-ax, co-axl Onward, onward, uffts! Brac-kety-ax, co-ax, co-ax! Onward, onward, uffts!"
"That
for the right wind of the Army of Liberation," he observed profoundly to
those on his left. "Chant leaders? Who will lead the chants?"
Uffts
by dozens vociferously demanded to be appointed. He appointed them all. He
furnished them with slogans. Shortly there were bands of the pig-like creatures
swarming over the countryside shrilling,
"Uffts triumphant! Uffts supreme! Uffts are now a single team!" There
was another, "Uffts have risen up to fight! Tremble, tremble at their might!" A simpler one was still more successful, "Uffts, uffts, on our way! Uffts, uffts, rise and slay!"
The
aboriginal population of Sord Threethe uffts spread over an astonishing area
as they scrambled up hillsides and flowed down the descending slopes. Those
with satisfactory slogans to chant tended to stay more closely together, and to
shout more loudly. Link's inventiveness gave out, and he appointed a Committee
for Marching Recitatives to create other slogans and to pass on words of genius
devised by anybody who happened to consider himself a
genius.
There was much squabbling, and some
remarkably bloodthirsty marching chants were devised, but the committee
throve.
With
a fine disregard for practicality but a completely sound estimate of the
voluble mind, Link established all committees in an admirably vague state so
any ufft who wanted to belong to any committee ex officio became
a member. He tossed off committee titles with abandon. The
Committee on Logistics for the Army of Liberation. The
Joint Chiefs cf Staff.
The Strategy Council of the Ufftian Army. The Committee for Propaganda. The
Committee on the Ufftian National Constitution. The Committee of Committeemen
for the Coordination of the War Effort. . . .
There
were hills in the distance, and Link more or less headed for them. The
afternoon sun was hot. The ground was only thinly covered with vegetation. It
was probably a good idea to head for an area where herbivorous creatures like
the uffts could find something to eat. The hills looked green. And they might
be cooler.
He
set the marching pace at a comfortable strolling rate. He was leading the uffts
who earlier had been besieging Harl's household and shouting insults at its
inhabitants. He was creating the diversion needed for Harl to take a pack-train
to a neighbor's Household and stock up with foodstuffs to endure a siege.
He found his role congenial. He liked
novelty. He liked excitement. On occasion he enjoyed tumult. The present situation
supplied all three.- He was almost regretful that it
wouldn't last. He considered it certain that when the Ufftian Army of
Liberation got tired of walking, it would sit down on its haunches as
quadrupeds do, and rest, and get discouraged, and eventually go home.
Meanwhile, though, he was a generalissimo of a strictly improvised army.
There
were troops of uffts scrambling up hillsides and down again, shrilling, "Brackety-ax, co-ax, co-ax! Uffts! Uffts!
Uffts!" The original marching-slogan had been modified. Link admitted to himself
that it was improved. His Committee for Marching Recitatives had,
astonishingly, turned out some others. As time passed they began to appear
spontaneously in ever-forming and ever-re-forming groups of uffts. They
continued to appear in new forms as the afternoon wore on. There were other
signs of initiative. Uffts came galloping to his side to identify themselves
asself-appointedcommanders of the rear-guard, the scouts, the Undefeatable
Reserves, the Ufftian Commandos, the Rangers^ the Guerillas and other military
groups, and to tell him that all went well with their commands. They went away
with their appointments confirmed by his acceptance of their reports. In some
cases they simply went off to form the units they had just designed for
themselves.
Sunset
approached. The hills grew higher and steeper. The vegetation grew less sparse.
Link began to be astonished by the persistence of the uffts in what he'd
thought would be not much more than an hour or so of dramatic make-believe. He
began, indeed, to worry a little.
There
were deep shadows on the hillsides when an ufft from the self-appointed
advance-guards came galloping back from the leading part of the march. He
pranced splendidly in a half-circle, came alongside Link's unicorn, and said in
a strictly military manner,
"General,
sir, the colonel in command of the advance-guard asks if you wish to occupy the
abandoned human Household in the valley to the left, sir. He suggests that for
logistic reasons it may be a suitable temporary headquarters. There's a large
spring, sir, with good water. What are your orders?"
"By all means occupy it," said
Link. "We'll at least bivouac there for the night."
But he blinked at the now-steep hillsides
around him. It was almost dark. The situation began to seem less than merely amusing. The uffts really meant this revolt business! He hadn't
taken them seriously. It was not easy to do so now. They acted like children,
to be sure. But children would have gotten tired of this play-acting and
marching long ago. Children, indeed, would have abandoned the encirclement of
Harl's Household.
It
occurred to Link that the uffts had more brains than he'd credited them with.
They were desperately concerned about the stun gun with which they'd been
peppered the night before. If such weapons were to be available to the humans
on Sord Three, the uffts would be in a very bad fix. They couldn't fight back.
They had little hoofs instead of hands, and their brains were of no use to them
because they lacked fingers and especially an opposable thumb.
Naturally,
in the presence of human co-inhabitants of Sord Three, they had to lie to
themselves to be able to endure their handicap. They pretended to despise
humans. They were childishly bitter. They scornfully said that to have hands
instead of hoofs was a shameful thing. But they knew, just the same, that the
introduction of stun guns on Sord Three would make them utterly helpless as
against humans. So with a naive desperation they were taking the only action
they could imagine, under the only leadership they could consider qualified. It
was not wise action. It could hardly be effective action. But Link felt
obscurely ashamed of himself. He'd started it.
The hillsides to right and left became
steeper and the valley in which the Army marched became deeper. Link saw his
following more or less as a mass for the first time. There were some thousands
of the uffts. They would have covered an acre or more in the closest possible
marching order. Spread out, they were an impressive lot of creatures.
Here
there was a band of a hundred or more, keeping close together and silent for
the time being. There was a knot of twenty or thereabouts, chanting a slogan as
they
marched. He noticed that they looked weary. They
also looked absurd. And they were totally unsophisticated in such practical
matters as self-defense against men mounted on unicorns and carrying spears.
They could be hunted down as corresponding creatures have been hunted down on
ten thousand colonized worlds. The only difference between them and the wild
lower animals of other planets was the uffts had brains. But brains in the
absence of an opposable thumb left them ridiculous.
The
swarming, now leg-weary small horde of uffts swung into a narrower valley which
entered this one ^rom the left. Far up this second valley there were human
structures. Even in the gathering dusk they could be seen to be abandoned. The
valley walls were almost precipitous. Rock strata of varying colors alternated
in slanting streaks of stone. Link saw a stratum of extremely familiar
peach-colored stone. He shrugged his shoulders.
The
uffts flowed on, in small clumps and big ones, some few as individuals, many
in. pairs. Weariness was breaking down the undisciplined bunching of the march.
They were now merely a very large number of very weary small animals, sturdily
following Link's leadership because he'd made a speech, and they couldn't do
much but make speeches themselves, and so could not estimate the uselessness of
speechmaking.
Some of them began to hurry, now. There was a
small stream, which dwindled to a thread down the valley up which Link now rode
morosely. Near the deserted and crumbling structures it was larger. At its
source it was a considerable spring. Link saw crowds of the uffts drinking
thirstily, and moving away, and being replaced by others.
His
own escorthe realized suddenly that some uffts had appointed themselves his
personal escort and staffmoved on to the human structures. The roofs of the
smaller buildings had collapsed. The household or village must
lie
have
been abandoned for many years. The largest structure would correspond with
Hart's residence. It had been the residence of the Householder of this place.
Doors had fallen. Windows gaped.
Link's escort stopped
before it.
"I
suppose," said Link, "that I'd better take this over as my
headquarters."
"Yes,
sir," said an ufft'S voice.
"You'll give us more orders in the morning, sir? You've plans for the War
of Liberation, sir?"
"Ill make them," said Link. He was vexed.
He
dismounted, and many small aches and pains reminded him that a unicorn is not
the most comfortable of riding animals. He went into the
abandoned Householder's residence
to survey it while some little light remained.
Inside
was desolation. There was furniture remaining, but some of it had collapsed,
and some was ready to fall of its own weight at any instant. There was a great
hall, with an imposing chair of state like the one in Hart's great room. The
flooring of the great hall was stone. Link gathered bits of dry-rotted
furniture and kicked them. They fell apart. He built a fire, as much to cheer
himself as for warmth.
Thana
had prepared a lunch for him. He hadn't had time to consume it. It was bread
and beans, but there were three plastic bottles of beer. Link ate a part of the
bread-and-beans lunch. He started to drink one of the bottles of beer.
Then he looked up at the chair of state upon
its dais. He shrugged, and again started to open the beer. But again he stopped.
With the flickering fire for light, he went
over to the chair of state. He searched, and found a button. He pressed it.
There were creaking, groaning sounds. The chair of state rose toward the
ceiling. Something excessively dusty rose out of the pit beneath it. It was a
duplier. Link stared at it.
"It won't work," he told himself
firmly. "It can't! They abandoned this place because it stopped
working!"
It
would have been sufficient reason. If the art of alloying steel had been lost,
and even the art of weaving, and if agriculture had been practically abandoned,
certainly nobody would have remembered how a duplier worked, to repair it when it broke down.
But
Link tried the device. He put a scrap
of wood in the middle bin, for a sample, and another scrap of wood in the raw
materials bin, and pressed the button. The^_duplier sank into the pit and the
chair-of-state, creaking, descended to the floor. The button
again. The process reversed. The duplier came back into view.
It hadn't worked. Nothing
had happened.
Link
went back to his tiny fire. He brooded. He liked novelty and excitement and
sometimes tumult. He had none of these things about him now. He scowled at the
firelight.
Presently
he took a burning brand and went back to the duplier.
He looked it over. It was complex. It utilized principles that he could not
even guess. But there were wires threading here and there. He blew away the
dust and stared at them.
One
had rusted through. At another place a contact
was badly rusted. Insulation was gone from a wire, which thereby must be
shorted. He shifted the wires to find out how many were broken or whose
contacts were loose.
He
was irritated with himself, but the reasoning was sound. If nobody remembered
even vaguely how electrical apparatus workedand Harl said that there used to
be lectric but it existed no longerand if nobody bothered to understand, maybe
they didn't know what a short-circuit would do! They might not even understand
what a loose contact could do!
He used up four torches, fumbling with
obvious defects which any ten-year-old boy on another planet would have
observed. Eventually he went back to the button. He pressed it. The duplier and
after it the chair of state descended. He pressed the button once more and they
rose in their established sequence.
The
duplier worked. A scrap of wood in the materials hopper had almost disappeared.
Another scrap of wooda duplicate of the one in the sample binhad
appeared.
Link
went out and barked orders. Uffts came tiredly in the darkness. Link took off
the embroidered shirt he wore.
"I
want some greenstuff," he said firmly, "and I want this shirt soaked
in water and brought back dripping wet."
He
hunted for more furniture to build up his fire while his orders were obeyed.
Presently he put his dripping shirtuffts could hardly carry water in any other
mannerwith branches and weeds into the duplier. He put one of his three
bottles of beer in the sample hopper. He pressed the button.
Shortly
he owned four bottles of beer. The plastic containers were made out of the
cellulose of the greenstuff stems. The beer was made out of the organic
compounds involved and the water brought in the saturated shirt.
There
was, then, a very, very great stirring in the darkness about the abandoned
household. Uffts excitedly foraged for greenstuff about the buildings. Weeds
grew high. There were trees. Some were small, but some were of considerable
size because this human Household was abandoned. Link necessarily duplied his
shirt so that more water could be brought by uffts who had no other way to
carry it. The chair of state ascended and descended and rose and sank down
again.
When
Link lay down to sleep on a very hard floor, it was late at night. The morale
of the Ufftian Army of Liberation was high. Excessively high.
He'd taught some uffts how to keep the duplier in operation with thirty-two
bottles of beer in the sample hopper. The duplier worked steadily.
Outside,
in the darkness, uffts chanted gloriously, in splendid confidence of all the
future:
"General Link, what do you think? Brought his army here! When he stopped, up he popped Passing out bottles of beerl" Link went to sleep with various uncoordinated choruses chanting it. But
he wasn't easy in his mind. In fact, he had nightmares.
ix
Link made a speech next morning. He'd hammered out,
very painfully, the^only possible action he could advise or command his
followers to take. Essentially, it was to take no action at all. But he
couldn't put it that way. It was obvious that if the culture of the human
inhabitants of Sord Three had deteriorated because of the lack of contact with
the galactic civilization, the status of the uffts had diminished, too. But it
was also absolutely certain that if there had been contact with the rest of the
galaxy, there'd have been hell to pay.
At
the least, every duplier on Sord Three would have been taken forcibly away by
adventurers landing with modem weapons and no scruples whatever. As a side
line, such space-rovers would have come upon the uffts. They'd have kidnapped
them and sold them as intelligent freaks on a thousand worlds while one planet
after another collapsed into chaos as a result of the dupliers. Ultimately, in
fact, the citizens of Sord Three would have starved for the lack of dupliers
while the rest of the galaxy went hungry because it possessed them. Transported
and enslaved uffts would have been involved in the collapse of human
civilization, and the galaxy at large would have gone to hell in a hand-basket.
It
was still a strong probability. Link was the only person
anywhere who realized it. If it was to be prevented, he had to do the
preventing. The responsibility was overwhelming.
Therefore he made his
speech.
"My friends!" he said resoundingly,
from an extremely rickety balcony in the outer wall of the householder's
crumbling residence. "My friends, it is necessary to decide upon a policy of action for the realization of the objectives of the Ufftian
Revolution. Let me say that when I came here to ask your help in the solution
of an abstract question, I did not realize the emergency that existed here. I
urge that the problem, my problem, of the barber and who shaves him be put
aside for the duration of the emergency. All the resources of the ufftian
race, including its unbelievable intellect, should be devoted to the single
purposefreedom!"
There
were cheers. They were more prompt and louder than the day before, because Link
had appointed a Committee for Emphasizing the Unanimity of Ufftian Opinion,
and they cheered whenever he paused in the course of an oration.
"You are here as an army," said
Link, oratorically, "and an army you should remain. But you are the most
intelligent race in the galaxy. Therefore it is natural for you to adopt the
most intelligent strategy for the achievement of your ends. Your master
strategists have undoubtedly discussed that classic of military doctrine, Tower in Space and
have determined to apply the principle of the space fleet in being to the basic
problem of this war, so ensuring ufftian victory."
He paused, and cheers rose confusedly in the
morning sunlight.
"An
army in being," announced Link profoundly, "is an undefeated army. By
the fact that it is in being, it has proved that it is undefeatable. To be an
army in being is to be a victorious army, because if it were not victorious it
could not continue to bel Therefore the first item of Ufftian policy is to keep
the army in being and therefore to keep it undefeated and victorious, an
inspiration of uffts everywhere, drawing them to join it and share in its glosy
and its tri-umphl"
Cheers.
The Committee for Emphasizing the Unanimity of Ufftian Opinion took its cue more
promptly, and there was a high, shrill tumult of approval, much greater than
before.
"Specifically," said Link with a
fine precision, "the policy of the Ufftian Provisional Government is to
maintain its army in being, to spread propaganda everywhere to cause uffts
everywhere to join and increase that army, to cause its enemies to realize the
futility of conflict, and ultimately to make a generous and equitable peace
which shall realize all Ufftian national aspirations and establish the Ufftian
Nation in permanent, unquestioned, and unquestionable solidity!"
Cheers
now echoed and reechoed from the walls of the valley. Link held up his hand for
attention.
"In
pursuance of this policy," he said valiantly, "we shall immediately
organize the Committee for Propaganda upon a new scale. We shall enlarge the
organization of G-l and G-2, our intelligence and counter-intelligence groups.
More volunteers for this necessary work are needed. We shall need volunteers
to explain the policies of the Ufftian National Constitution to the uffts who
will shortly join the Ufftian Revolutionary Army. We must have volunteers for
security services, for communications, for espionage, for education, and for a
survey of the cultural monuments and purposes to be preserved and obeyed, and
for the preparation of a historya
detailed historyof this epoch-making and unanimous uprising of all uffts for
the realization of these traditional aims! And"
It
was an admirable speech. When he'd finished, his hearers were almost hoarse
from their cheering. He retired into the tumble-down householder's residence
with a forlorn kind of satisfaction. He was still the leader of the revolution.
The uffts believed they were going to accomplish something unique unde: his
guidance. It was conceivable that they might. No ufft could possibly topple him
from his post as leader, because all uffts knew that they were inexorably restricted
in achievement by the fact that their hands were hoofs. They could only believe
in accomplishment associated with hands. There could be uffts wrought up to
sabotage or crime by a purely ufftian leader, but Link alone could be the
nucleus around which a genuinely large number of uffts would gather.
There
were two main reasons for it. One was his psychological advantage in that he
could make speeches and had hands besides. The other was discretion. He'd asked
for volunteers for innumerable committees and high-sounding boards and
councils. But he hadn't even referred to the organization of combat units. The
Ufftian Revolutionary Army was prepared for propaganda, espionage, education,
counter-espionage, and probably social services and psychoanalysis. But Link
had at no time suggested that anybody get ready to fight.
An important but subsidiary reason was the
free beer issued by the Quartermaster Corps to any ufft or group of uffts who
came into the great hall of state, dragging a reasonable amount of greenstuff and a
sufficient number of water-soaked shirts, ready-duplied for the transport of
water required in beer. Unquestionably, the free beer helped.
Its appeal showed up on the second day of the
revoluntionary movement. A little knot of traveling uffts, some twenty in
number, were halted by security uffts as they crossed the mountains on private
business of their own. They were questioned, given beer, and turned loose. Half
of them did not leave. The rest went on to tell their friends and bring them
back. Various of the original marchers appointed themselves
recruiting officers of glamorously named organizations and went home after new
members. They got them.
By
the third day there was a steady trickle of volunteers for the army and
especially the civil serviCS of the provisional government. They came through
mountain passes or across the rolling foothills toward the formerly human
household. By the fourth day, the loss of ufft-power was noticeable in human
households as much as fifty miles in every direction. Harl's household reposed
in a vast tranquility. Groups of pack-animals could go and come between neighboring
households without even a shouted "Murderers!" flung at them along the way. But all the
householders were faced with the need to go guesting to get needed foodstuffs.
There were no more ufft-carts coming in with greenstuff. There was no general
strike, of course, but the result was the same. Uffts were gathering at thé Ufft
Future World-Capital up a rather steep small valley, where anybody could have
all the beer he wanted for the greenstuff required to make it. Link had
started out with perhaps two or three thousand followers. Four days later there
were twenty thousand about the former human settlement. Some of the uffts,
females, no doubt, disapproved of the bivouac idea. Permanent burrows began to
appear here and there.
From
time to time Link performed some ritual to remind the uffts that they were a
revolutionary army. On one occasion he presided over a marching-recitative
competition, when small bands of uffts marched past his residence chanting
vainglorious doggerel for inspirational purposes. The slogans, of course,
stressed loyalty to the principles of the
Provisional
Government, the National Constitution, the Declaration of Freedom, the Appeal
to Intellects, and so on.
On
another occasion he solemnly led an organization down the valley to where a
vein of very familiar peach-colored rock showed in the valley wall. He picked
up a fist-sized bit of it, fallen out of the vein, and carried it back to the
Household. He placed it as the first stone in a six-foot-high cairn of
peach-colored rocks to mark the place where the Ufftian National Bill of Rights
would presently be adopted. It hadn't been drawn Ojjť yet. Discussion of its details required much beer, and the
self-appointed committee to compose it had to spend so much time hauling the
necessary greenstuff that not much time was left for deliberation. It was
already apparent to Link that in the absence of ufft-carts, the beer dragged
to the duplier cost more time and effort per bottle than when it could be
hauled on wheels and humans took a toll of it.
But
matters in households nearby had become serious. There were practically no
uffts remaining as hangers-on about human villages in a very large area. A
space roughly two hundred miles across was denuded of uffts. It extended from
the sea to the eastward of Link's headquarters, well beyond the mountains in
which he commanded. In some of those households, men had actually been forced
to gather greenstuff or go hungry. The fact caused anti-ufft feeling to run
high. Already it had occurred to Link that if he could find another abandoned
household with a duplier as readily repairable as this first one, he could
start a new center of ufftian independence. Given dupliers and shirts or their
equivalents to carry water in, uffts could have beer at will, or almost so.
They gained no other tangible benefit from their association with humans.
Paradoxically,
it was Link's own doing that counter-measures against the Revolution began.
When Harl had spoken so bitterly in favor of the good old days, Link had agreed with him.
He'd suggested that Harl call
an assembly
to bring
about their return. It
was a
suggestion with infinite appeal. Everybody can think of good
old days
they'd like to recall. No two people will want
to recall
the same
good old days, but the theory
is attractive.
Harl fumed at
the desertion
of the
uffts who had made his household
a liveable
place. He argued the matter
with other householders forlornly traveling about
trying to get food without working
for it
They tended to
agree more furiously as the number
of uffts
on their
hcTiseholds dim-minished, and the conditions
more nearly approached the real
good old days when
Sord Three was first colonized.
Link continued depressedly
to be
the acting
head of the Ufftian Provisional Government, the Ufftian Army
of Liberation,
the Coordinator
of the
War Effort,
and a
considerable number of other
things. He drank a bottle
of beer
occasionally. For other
subsistance he had to depend
on duplied
repetitions of the lunch
Thana had made for him.
It was
a fair lunch, but it was
a horribly
monotonous diet. But there was nothing
he could
do about
it He
was followed
everywhere by devoted uffts whoit
was irritatingly
touching-seemed honestly to
believe that they were getting
somewhere.
Perhaps they were.
At any
rate, by the fact of
their absence they impressed the
humans with the necessity for
their presence. They made
endless speeches to each other.
They drank innumerable bottles of beer. And
they stripped the valley of greenstuff.
At the
end of
a week
they were dragging branches two miles
to get
beer. In nine days the
production and consumption of beer began to
fall off. The work required was
more than even beer was
worth.
Link envisioned a change in the
food-provision policies of
human households on Sord
Three. Given agricultural machines, and seed of modern
breeding, one not-too-skilled man
could plough, cultivate and make
ready for harvesting an enormous acreage.
Uffts could weed it. Uffts
could harvest it.
They could enter into a real symbiotic relationship with humanity. And he was
beginning to think of a way to secure the alloy materials and rare-element
supplies needed for the restoration of lectric and vision-casts, synthetic fibres
and fabrics, and probably means of transportation superior to unicorns. He grew
wistful as he pictured it to himself. Sord Three could become a paradise, and
dupliers could be used for a new purpose so effectively that their original
function would become forgotten. The economic system of Sord Three
could -gently be diverted to something really "intelligent.
Link
felt himself qualified to design an intelligent economic system. He'd have
liked to talk to somebody about it. But the only suitable listener on Sord
Three would be Thana. Making his plans, he imagined himself explaining them to
her.
When
disaster came, Link was absorbed in the design of a flexible new economic order
which would eventually be able to stand visitors without disturbance, and the visitors
would not be disturbed by what they found. Dupliers would not be recognizable
as such, and so would be harmless. Designing such a system was an appalling
problem, but Link attacked it valiantlyuntil disaster arrived.
A
party of uffts brought a newcomer to the tumbledown building Link inhabited
alone. The newcomer was abusive and rebellious.
"Sir," said a Security ufft in a
stern voice, "here's a spy, sir. He came from Old Man Addison's Household.
He was sent to spy out our military secrets."
"Yah!"
snarled the spy. "You haven't got any military secrets! There's dozens of
us, and we. know all about everything you do! We're a
tight organization and Old Man Addison knows every secret of every household
and every ufft town, and if you hurt me he'll know who did it and get
even!"
He glared defiantly about
him.
"Hell know, eh?" said Link.
"Maybe somebody's already telling him about your capture, eh?"
"That's right!" snapped the spy.
"You don't dare hurt mel"
Link
reflected. This was in a way a court martial, except that Link was the only
judge. The great hall with its chair of state was dusty and Uttered.
The plump and angry uffts who'd brought in the prisoner made indignant noises.
"Now,"
said Link pleasantly, "you have a chance to be a double-spy, a very high rank in your
profession. You begin by telling us everything you know about what the Householders
are planning in this war."
The
spy-ufft made raucous noises of derision. So Link said sternly,
"We'll
assemble the army. It will march past where you're held fast. Every member of
the army will take one nip at you. Just one. Nobody
will kill you, but somewhere in the process of receiving some tens of thousands
of nips"
The
spy squealed. Link had expected it There were not less
than forty thousand uffts either in the Army of Liberation or the committees
associated with it. The total might be as high as fifty thousand. The spy
instantly agreed, shaking with terror, to tell everything, everything, everything.
"Take
him away and question him," said Link in an official voice.
An
hour later he received the report. The spy had told everything. On demand, he'd
identified other spies. They'd been questioned separately, under the same
threat. Their stories checked. So far as the revolt was concerned, the disaster
was absolute.
Harl
had begun the organization of Householders for the Restoration of the Good Old
Days. There was great, grim approval and much disparity in the definitions of
the good old days, but there was unanimity about present days. An ufftian army
of liberation in being, equipped with a Household
with a working duplier and able to supply beer with no benefit to humans, that could not be enduredl Householders had
mobilized their retainers. They were armed with spears. Some four or five
hundred humans were gathered at Old Man Addison's household. On the morrow they
would march on the Provisional Capital of the Ufftian Provisional Government.
They were prepared to kill uffts with spears. They would.
That
report to Link had not been completed when the Committee for Counter-Espionage
clamored for his ear. Their operatives had reported substantially the same
appalling facts. Members of G-l and G-2 came
galloping. The news had been brought to them. There was agitation. There was
tumult There was terror.
"My
friends," said Link in stately sadness, "the cause for which we were
prepared to suffer and die has had a setback. The immediate success of the
Revolution is now questionable, but its final success is certain! It would not
be intelligent for uffts, who are the most intelligent beings in this galaxy,
to throw away their lives with anything less than certainty of its sheer
necessity. But this is not true of this moment. There is action by which the
Revolution can continue. There is work to be doneorganization, propaganda,
planning! We shall . . . we shall go underground!"
It
was the most lucid and most convincing of all possible phrases. Uffts lived in
burrows. Underground. They preferred them. They meant safety, uffishness, the
familiar, the norma], and the most satisfying way of
life. Underground? Uffts cheered . Spontaneously!
"From
this time on until the next occasion for rising," said Link splendidly,
"the Provisional Government will exist in secret. The Army of Liberation
will exist in the hearts of its members! And all uffts, everywhere, will
remember that time marches on, life is short but war is long, in union there is
strength, and the uffts will rise again! The Army will scatter. Its members
will hold close the secrets of its association. And presently"
He
waved them out. Naturally, though privately, he was very much relieved. He knew
that Harl, certainly, would not dream of trying to single out individual uffts
for punishment for their part in the revolt. For one thing, it would be impossible.
For another if he did the uffts would run away again. The other Households
would have the same imperative reason for ignoring so far as possible the
revolt of the uffts. It was even likely that they'd take some plains to keep
from having much discontent among the uffts who at their own will could move
from Household to Household or settle where they were best satisfied.
There
was one matter in which Link was less than satisfied. He wasn't sure that
householders like Harl would be moved to reestablish agriculture to the point
where food could be had without dupliers. It was necessary for the far-away
plans Link already debated. But he wasn't sure it was going to happen. Yet.
But
he had one personal reason for overwhelming relief that he could resign as
generalissimo of the revolt. He'd been living on duplied rations, replicas of
the lunch Thana had prepared for him days ago. In the nine days since, that
lunch had gotten deplorably stale. But it was worse than that. In nine days of
the same eatables, Link had gotten almost hysterically sick of beans.
He
watched a ceremonial march-past of the Army of Liberation before it dissolved
into individuals and family groups headed for their home burrows and a
vociferous denial that they'd been in the Army at all.
But he'd reserved one unit of some two
hundred uffts, privately asked to volunteer for a last item of military service
against their oppressors, in case they should be needed. They were members of
the Ufftian Diehard Regiment. They listened sternly and even devotedly when he
gave them their instructions. They seemed to disperse like the rest. But When they were gone, he was alone in the decaying Household.
There was something that needed to be done, and only he could do it. He worked
nearly all night by very indifferent torchlight. When dawn came he cleared
away the evidence of his labor. He brought up the duplier from its pit for the
last time. Painstakingly, he re-shorted a formerly shorted wire. Wires that had
been broken he re-separated. Loose contacts he turned into no contacts at all. The duplier would/duply no more.
And
in the early morning he rode to meet the army of householders and their
retainers. In a sense, of course, he was going to surrender. But he felt sure
that his explanation would satisfy Harl and therefore the rest. But as he rode,
his mind was not on such matters. It dwelt hungrily upon pictures of food that
would not be beans.
He
met the approaching army a dozen miles from his former headquarters. He was
mistaken about his explanation satisfying the householders, however. Harl was
visibly distressed both by his explanation and its reception. Thana, riding
with Harlshe was the only girl with the armed expeditionlooked at Link
inscrutibly.
The
human army halted to pass upon Link's behavior. Thistlethwaite glowered at Link
and loudly disclaimed any association with him at all. He was no longer
Thisdethwaite's junior partner. He was
They
made camp, to discuss the situation in detail. Then Thistlethwaite was
astonished to be placed in the dock as Link's fellow-criminal. The head of this
court martial would be Old Man Addison. He was not an amiable character, and
Link took an instant dislike to him. His air was authoritative and offensive.
His speech was very far from cordial. Link found that his objection to Old Man
Addison could be summed up in the statement that he didn't have any manners.
But he knew what he intended the court martial to do, and he plainly meant to
see that it did it Against Thistle-thwaite's arguments he said acidly,
"You
stuck me once. I gave you a spaceboat cargo on your promise to come back an'
pay me adequate for some dup-liers. You're back. Where's the stuff you was to
bring?"
Thistlethwaite protested
despairingly.
"You*
goin' to be hung," said Old Man Addison, as acidly as before. "An' I
take your ship to pay me for what you cheated me out of. And any more strangers
land on Sord Three get hung right off, no questions an' no ft?olin' around
1"
The
court martial convened. Link explained lucidly that the uffts around Harl's
household were already nearly in revolt that they'd besieged Harl's Household,
and that with Harl's approval he'd gone out to persuade them to go off somewhere
and let pack-trains of unicorns relieve the food shortage. He pointed out that
he had accomplished exactly that. He even pointed out that no human had been
insulted or injured by uffts following his oratorical suggestions. He'd assumed
leadership of the uffts as a favor to HarL
Harl
cast the only vote in the court martial in favor of Link. The decision was that
Link and Thistlethwaite were to be hanged the next morning. The delay was to
allow other householders, hurrying to the scene, to watch the pleasant
spectacle.
Link
remained composed. Especially after the number of uffts usually to be seen
about a gathering of humans appeared, one by one, and moved casually about the
encampment. Nobody bothered them. It was the habit of humans to tolerate
uffts. By midday there were at least fifty uffts moving about among the men and
tents and animals. Later there were more.
Near
sundown, Thana was admitted to the closely guarded place where Link and
Thistlethwaite waited for morning and their doom. Thana looked at once indignant
and subdued.
"I'm . . . sorry, Link," she said
unhappily, "Harl's still arguing, trying to get them to change their
minds. But it doesn't look like he's going tol He's even told them that you
showed me how to duply a knife so it's as good as an un-duplied onel He's
promised to make them all presents of shirts and beans and unduplied knives!
But they listen to Old Man Addison."
"Yes,"
admitted Link. "He has a certain force of character. But his
manners" He shook his head. "Even Thistlethwaite doesn't approve of
Old Man Addison now!"
Thana caught her breath as
if trying not to cry.
"I
... I brought you a shirt, Link. I .
. . guess you didn't like that embroidered one. You took it off. This is
duplied from the one you gave Harl."
"Hm," said Link. "Fine! Thanks, Thana."
She wept. He patted her
shoulder.
"Is
there anything . . ." she whispered, "is there anything I can do? Anything, Link!" She sobbed.
"I . . . feel like its my fault, you being in
trouble. If I'd had more food stored away you wouldn't have had to lead the
uffts away and . . . and"
Link said helpfully,"
"If
you feel that way, why ... a couple
of unicorns up the valley at midnight If you could
manage that, I'd appreciate it a lot!"
She was silent. Then she
said bitterly,
"You . . . you want to
go back to Imogene!"
Link stared at her.
"Look,
Thana, I didn't tell you the end of the story! After I got on the spaceship, and that's nearly a year ago, I looked at the
receipt the florist had given me. And he'd written down Imogene's address on
the back of the receipt. So he couldn't send the flowers or the note. So
Imogene never heard from me again, and if I know her
she's married long ago!"
She looked at him earnesdy.
"Honestly, Link?"
"Of
course," Link said with dignity. "Have you ever known me to
lie?"
"Where shall I have the unicorns?"
she asked. "And how?"
"Influence," said Link. "I've
got influence. Now"
He
told her a place it would not be easy to miss, perhaps a mile up the valley from the camp. She went away.
He
seemed absorbed in thought for a long time after that. He didn't even pay
particular attention to the uffts which near sunset seemed to increase in
number. But once an ufft winked reassuringly at him.
Thistlethwaite was bitter, but Link consoled him as well as he could.
"You,"
he said kindly, "mistake the courtesies of business life for sentiments of
deeper importance. You should reform."
Thistlethwaite swore
despairingly at him.
Darkness
fell. Stars shone. The camp quieted. Then, at midnight, there was sudden and
dithering uproar. Tents collapsed. Unicorns made dismal noises, tried to bolt,
and finding their tethers bitten through by uffts, high-tailed it for the
mountain slopes, with heel-nips to urge them on. Men swore, under blanketing
canvas. Men tried to run after the unicorns and uffts ran between their legs
and upset them. Those who tried to haul collapsed tents off their fellows
suffered similarly irritating upsets. When swearing men crawled out to the
open air, uffts nipped their legs and they leaped madly. There was a swarm of
shouting uffts all about, ripping at any human or other heel within reach,
biting through any ropes that remained intact, and bellowing contradictory orders
in fairly good imitations of human voices. They turned the camp into something
close to primordial chaos.
Link
grunted as one of his own guards was bowled over. He
grabbed at Thistlethwaite. He led the way. A small party of uffts formed around
them, clearing the path. Twice, householders or their retainers seemed about to
blunder into them, but each time they toppled as running uffts hit their knees
from behind. Then the entire escort ran zestfully over them in what they
considered the fine tradition of the Diehard Regiment. Before disbanding his
army, Link had picked them out, dramatically, for possible secret military
action. This was it.
He
and Thistlethwaite arrived where the unicorns should be. Around them, their
escort boasted of their achievement in releasing Link. He had to warn them that
these unicorns, dimly seen in tie starlight, were not to be stampeded.
Then
he discovered that there were three unicorns, not two. Thana flung reins to
Link.
"Come onl" she
said fiercely. "Maybe they'll follow!"
"I've
got a rear guard," said Link, tranquilly, "and you'd better not come
with us, Thana. Better turn your unicorn loose and get back to the camp."
"I
won't!" said Thana. "I told Harl what I was going to do. He asked me
to apologize for not coming to see us off."
"Us?" Link's mouth dropped open. Then he felt good. Remarkably
good. He said warmly, "Harl has the best manners of anybody I
know!"
They
headed up the pass down which Link had come to surrender. The unicorns climbed.
Thistlethwaite fumed and sputtered. He'd built a most extensive structure of
dreams upon a supposedly firm business engagement with Old Man Addison. It was
now wrecked. And Old Man Addison considered that he should be hanged. And the gait of riding-unicorns was excessively unpleasant. But he followed,
dismally, the resolute figure of Thana, silhouetted against the stars. Link's
figure was often close to it. Very close.
In an hour they were over the pass. Thana
would have led the way on past the narrow valley in which the Provisional Government
had functioned for nine days. But Link turned the animals into the
valley-bottom and took the others up to the Ufftian Provisional National
Capital.
"There's something in the former
Householder's home that I want to pick up," said Link. "I worked all
night at it."
By
the time they reached the dreary building, Link had solved the fastening of the
saddlebags before him on the unicom. They were quite large enough for his
purpose. He dismounted and pointed out where a cairn of peach-colored rocks had
been considerably reduced in size. He explained to Thana why it had been partly
pulled down, and what he wanted to carry away. When they entered the great hall
of the chair of state she was with him. He showed her what he'd used the
peach-colored rocks to be raw material for.
"Pretty!"
said Thana.
She
helped him with his burden. They had to make two trips, filling up the
saddlebags. They remounted and headed down the valley again. Thana said
interestedly,
"They're beautiful! I
never saw anything like that before!"
They
went on. And on. And on. When
the hills were well behind, Link said,
"Thistlethwaite,
you welded up everything, including the lifeboat blister.
Where's the oxygen torch?"
Thistlethwaite sputtered a
reply.
"We
can't use the ship," said Link cheerfully. "With at least one
hull-plate torn off and general structural weakness all over, we'll have to use
the lifeboat."
Thistlethwaite
mumbled. A faint, faint light glowed, far away.
"That's the
Household," said Link. "Harl's Household."
"Y-yes," said
Thana in a singularly small voice.
"We can take you
there."
"Do you want to?"
"No!" said Link
explosively. "No!"
The
feeble light in the Household was a guide. Presently they came to the ufft city
and the unicorns' night-vision helped them avoid both the burrows and the
mounds of dirt dug out from them. They heard querilous, frightened voices
around them. Link stopped.
"My
friends," he said profoundly, "this is Link Denham, escaped from your
oppressors. I go to function as a government in exile and to prepare for the
resurgence of the Ufitian race! I will be back with the means to resume the
struggle of the uffts to attain that recognition, that status, that independence
of humanity which is their justified aspiration!"
There were cheers, but they
were only half-hearted.
"Meanwhile,"
boomed Link, "follow us. In the ship there are gifts and treasures. You
might call them the treasury of the Ufftian Republic. We will distribute them.
You may use them in bargains with men! Follow us!"
To Thistlethwaite he said
cheerfully,
"I'll pay for the
cargo."
Thistlethwaite said
bitterly,
"If
I can't get it away, I don't want Old Man Addison to have it!"
They
went across the city. They were accompanied, escorted, surrounded by a swarm
of uffts. They went beyond the city to the ship. Thistlethwaite swearing corrosively, produced the oxygen torch.
There
came squealings from the distance. Men on unicorns were headed for the ship.
They would be, of course, pursuers of Link and Thistlethwaite, who hadn't spent
any time in a diversion like a trip to the Ufftian National Capital. Link
reassumed command. He ordered the uffts to bite the heels of the
riding-unicorns, to try to disperse and in any case to delay their pursuers.
With a fine, brisk competence he took the oxygen torch and cleared the lifeboat
blister so it could be entered and the lifeboat used. He heaved the saddlebags
into the boat. He began to open the cargo compartments for the uffts. They
swarmed into the ship. As a compartment door came open, they rushed in. They
would be rich. They could make beautifully insulting bargains with the humans
of Sord Three. They could
There
was faint, faint gray light to the east. Link cut his way into the control room
to get the Galactic Directory. He came back.
"Where's Thana?
Where's Thana?" He grew alarmed.
She appeared, scared but
smiling.
"I . . . wanted to be
sure you'd . . . miss me."
He
bundled her into the spaceboat with the directory.
He shoved Thistlethwaite in after her. He opened the outer doors of the
lifeboat blister and shouted to the swarming uffts below.
"I shall return! I
shall return!"
There
was a knot of riding-animals coming from the west. Uffts scurried and raced
about them. The men on the unicorns advanced only very slowly in consequence.
Link
leaped into the spaceboat. He pressed appropriate buttons and moved
appropriate levers. The lifeboat seemed to topple outward. Its rockets roared
furiously, it surged ahead.
It
was a near thing. Lifeboats are designed to be launched in space. But the nose
of this one swung skyward, and its rockets thrust steadily and violently
upward, and presendy their roaring changed in that subtle fashion indicating
pure emptiness outside the spaceboat. Then it leaped toward the star-filled
firmament.
Days later Thistlethwaite worked zestfully,
with a porten-tious scowling, upon a new contract he proposed to Link. It was
to form a new organization, the Sord Three Development Corporation. Link was to
provide the entire working capital. Thistlethwaite was to have the final say in
all business decisions. The details of the operation had been thrashed out in
conversation, and Thistlethwaite was putting them into business phraseology,
with at least one booby-trap in each two paragraphs of the contract. Link would
purchase and lead up a first-class modem spaceship. He would carry back to Sord
Three samples of all needed alloying materials. He would establish a duplier by
the seashore to remove from flowing sea wateras raw materialthe rare minerals
needed to duply the large inventory of new, currently undupliable objects and
instruments needed on Sord. Link, privately, had designed beer-making equipment
intended to be run by uffts. There would be enormous dislocations of the
present economy when uffts didn't need to trade with humans for beer. Humans
would start to grow vegetation. They would, in fact, start to grow crops. Their
dupliers would be more valuable extracting alloying metals than duplying
roots, barks, herbs, berries, blossoms and flowers.
There would be hell to pay on Sord Three when
Link went back. It would provide novel experiences. Exciting
ones. From time to time there would doubtless be tumult. But if no Other ship landed on Sord Three for just a very few years,
when another ship landed there'd be no disaster. There'd be no dupliers in
action. Nobody would recognize the galaxy-wide disaster that could be brought
about if certain mineral-extracting devices, working on sea-water, were put to
other uses. Everything would be swell!
Link pointed out a small crescent against the
stars to be seen from the lifeboat's ports.
"We're going to land there?" asked Than
a.
Link nodded. Thana said in a low tone,
"Link, are you going to sign that
contract he's drawing up?"
"Of course not!" said Link.
"But it makes him happy to write it. Actually, he'll like the deal I'll
give him better than the trick one he's contriving."
Thana said uneasily,
"When we land"
"I'll
go to see a jeweller," said Link mildly. "Ill sell him a few
carynths, a quart or so. I'll start things working for our return trip. And
then Do you mind a quiet wedding?"
"N-not
at all."
He
nodded. They held hands as the lifeboat headed for the planet before them.
There were seas, and continents, and ice-caps. There were cities. Four
saddlebags full of carynths would hardly all be sold on one planet without
breaking the price, but a discreet distribution by spaceship to responsible
jewelers in other worlds
"We can start
back," Link promised, "in a month or so."
And
they did. But they were delayed a few days, at that. Link had arranged for
something special and they had to wait for Thana's second carynth necklace to
be finished. It was said that she was the only woman in the galaxy who owned
more than one.
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