The Duplicators Read online

  The Duplicators

  Murray Leinster

  The Duplicators

  by Murray Leinster

  Chapter 1

  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 peacefulness, and the festive events in which he’d relaxed after six months on Glaeth ran pleasantly through his mind. He didn’t want to think about Glaeth 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 new-found 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 pyramid of 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 Glaeth—where the death rate was ten per cent a month among carynth hunters—were 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 to behave 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 corner 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-gravity, 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 walls 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-cups—a most unsatisfactory system—and 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 handrail 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 seen him scowling ferociously from the sidelines 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’! 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 a
nd 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.

  “I’m 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 astrogate 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 lightyears tail-first to port after her overdrive unit switched 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 spaceboat. It was loaded down with plenty valuable cargo! We was to go back, but my partner—he was the astrogator of the spaceboat—he took his share of the money and started celebratin’. 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 papers 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 junkyard, 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 concernin’ 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. Thistlethwaite 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 astrogator, 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 portentously, “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 for ’em. But the spaceport people got suspicious. They were goin’ to seize the ship tomorrow—today—and 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 policemen—six months more on top of what you was already liable to—and 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 acceleration 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 I wasn’t goin’ to bother you!”

  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 outdoorsy 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 astrogator I’ll 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’money! And you a junior partner!”

  “Carynths?” suggested Link.

  Carynths were the galaxy’s latest and most fabulous status gems. They couldn’t be synthesized—they were said to be the result of meteoric impacts on a special peach-colored ore—and 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 b
racelet, 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 Thistlethwaite contemptuously, “alongside of what’s waitin’ for us! For each one of what I’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 ’em! 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 Astrogator. A luridly bound volume of Space-Commerce Regulations. The Directory was brand new. The others were old and tattered volumes.