'Take a good look,' said Kay. She indicated the man on the concrete flooring. 'Isn't the face familiar?'
'There's a swell resemblance to that old rascal, Sir Mallory Gaffney. You mean it?'
'Nothing but that. What's it signify?'
'You have me there. What is it, Hoe?'
'It is the besiegers—can be no others. They come!'
There was the clump of boots outside, up the stairs.
Ballister slipped Bazasch the gun: 'Can you hold them, Hoe? Hold them by yourself? Because we're going to be busy down here. Will you?'
The Basque took the gun, sighted along its barrel for a moment before slowly replying: 'They must have killed my whole family, which I disgraced by becoming sheep-thief. I will no longer disgrace.'
'Good man,' gasped Ballister, holding his wounded shoulder. 'Go get
'em!'
The little man scrambled up the stairs, chose a shallow niche. A big grin spread over his face as he raised his gun-muzzle and fired once through the door. He commanded the position completely; while his ammunition lasted —he neatly caught the pouch Kay unhooked from the man and tossed up to him—he was impregnable.
With feverish speed Ballister stripped the man on the flooring. Kay went through the pockets; came up triumphantly with a slim pamphlet.
'In German!' she explained.
'Let me.' He took the little book and ruffled through it, then cast a despairing glance at the monstrous mechanism that nearly filled the room. 'It's a handbook for this thing—the German for it is duplo-atomic-radexic- multiplic-convertor. What do you suppose that means?
The wiring's beyond me completely. I couldn't repair an electric bell.'
She took the thing and unfolded the gatefold wiring-diagram, studied it with wrinkled brows. 'Sweet Lord of Creation!' she muttered. 'I have to crack this on an empty stomach!' Whipping out a pencil she traced—
tried to trace—the wires and tubes to their source. Finally she snapped:
'There's a switchboard somewhere on the side of the thing. Find it, please.'
Ballister hunted, finally climbing the rickety iron ladder that led to the summit of the machine. 'Got it!' he said. 'And it makes sense!'
'Turn on the power,' she called at him.
He threw the switch that seemed appropriate. His reward was a shock that nearly threw him from the structure. But the power went through; tubes lit here and there.
Eagerly Kay hunted in the vitals of the mechanism, comparing it with the diagram. 'See a hopper-opening?' she asked.
Jose fired three times in rapid succession, brought four dead 'Basques'
tumbling down the stairs. He waved cheerily at Ballister.
'There's a switch for it,' he said, throwing it down. A metal shutter opened; its cavernous maw led into blackness. Kay, shuddering a little, peered in. 'Ought to light,' she said desperately. 'There should be a battery of tubes that the raw material—whatever it is—passed under.
Fish for it, will you?'
Ballister stabbed at a switch; gears began to clank like a windmill's crushers. He tried another. 'Okay!' yelled the girl. 'They light!'
He scrambled down, squatted beside her. She had cast the book aside and was weeping. 'Here,' she sobbed, 'all the power we need, a machine that does something terrible and wonderful to it, and we can't use it! We don't know how!'
Ballister, before replying, administered a mercy-kick to one of the
'Basques' who was trying to reach his gun, wounded as he was. Jose caught the weapon. He was grinning with fiendish delight as he fired another burst through the door.
Ballister and Kay rose. The girl's tears dried on her face as she studied the three new corpses.
'Spitting images,' said Ballister, his throat hoarse. This was something uncanny, something that transcended warfare and science. Except for minor details of hair-line and clothes, the four bodies were alike—all the image of Sir Mallory.
'I get it,' said the girl briskly. 'There was talk of it in a Sunday feature I did. It's the only simple, logical explanation for your city of the future built as if by one man. It was built by one man, and he was Sir Mallory.'
'That's what the machine does,' snapped Ballister. 'Rearranges molecules to suit the pattern. Set the pattern for a man and feed in your raw material, and out come as many copies as you want. Perfect war-unit, perfect rapport between and among the slew of them. Perfect for spy-systems. And the Gestapo flair for disguises took care of enough variations to satisfy us. Hell, who'd look for a thing like that?'
The girl was scrambling up the stairs again. 'Excuse me,' she barked rudely at Bazasch. 'Not at—' he was beginning to reply. He shut his mouth with a snap as she began to undress him without ceremony.
She pulled from his chest his home-made undershirt, fingered the soft, short-cropped fur. 'Go right ahead,' she said. 'Thanks.'
'Brilliant,' admitted Ballister after a moment's thought. 'Utterly brilliant. Very sure you can make it work?'
'For a simple thing like this, yes. After all, dead flesh-tissue ought to be fairly simple. Now where is the pattern-maker or whatever they call it?'
'Maybe this?' asked the man, indicating a sort of scanning-disk, like an old-style television set's.
'Nothing else!' she declared triumphantly as she set the hunk of clothing in the area covered by the disc.
Ballister picked up the corpses one by one and chucked them into the hopper.
Another hinged door raised itself and soft scraps of fur began to pour from it in a stream that ended in a few minutes, when the weight of the pile equalled about seven hundred pounds.
'Thank God for Hoe's dainty taste in undergarments,' said the girl.
'Nothing less than mouse-fur for his skin!'
'Open the door, Hoe!' called Ballister. The little man obeyed, dumb and. surprised. There was an immediate influx of the duplicates of Sir Mallory, an influx that turned into a helpless pile of dying men, strangling in the last extremes of allergic reaction.
Grimly contemplating the last of the twitching Mallories, Ballister said:
'We'll clear the city by spreading these mouse-skins neatly through the streets. We can rain them on the forest, in case anybody's escaped.'
'We can detect spies with them,' said the girl.
'Right. A load will be useful when we fly back to Oslo in the morning.'
'It's morning now,' she said, indicating the ray of dawn that streaked through the door and splashed down the stairs.
'It is. Morning,' said Ballister. 'Morning over the world.'
The Events Leading Down to the Tragedy
Being the First Draft of a Paper to be Read before the Tuscarora Township Historical Society by Mr. Hardeign Spoynte, B.A.
Madame President, members, guests:
It is with unabashed pride that I stand before you this evening. You will recall from your perusal of our Society's Bulletin (Vol. XLII, No. 3, Fall, 1955, pp. 7-8) [pp. correct? check before making fair copy. HS] that I had undertaken a research into the origins of that event so fraught with consequences to the development of our township, the Wat-ling-Fraskell duel. I virtually promised that the cause of the fatal strife would be revealed by, so to speak, the spotlight of science [metaphor here suff. graceful? perh. 'magic' better? HS]. I am here to carry out that promise.
