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 back!”
“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 beer! They yelled down with me. Me!” said Harl incredulously. “They said they were makin’ a general strike against me! 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.
’What’ll you do?”
“Send a messenger to my next neighbor,” said Harl angrily. “I’ll say I’m comin’ guestin’. I’ll take half a dozen men an’ forty or fifty unicorns. I’ll go to his household. I’ll 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. That’s 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 he’ll duply enough food to load up my train of unicorns and I’ll 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 dryly.
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-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 businesslike 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 metalliferous 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.
