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 Harl’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 worked—and Harl said that there used to be lectric but it existed no longer—and 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 wood—a duplicate of the one in the sample bin—had 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 shirt—uffts could hardly carry water in any other manner—with 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:
Link went to sleep with various uncoordinated choruses chanting it. But he wasn’t easy in his mind.
In fact, he had nightmares.
Chapter 9
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 modern 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 handbasket.
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 purpose—freedom!”
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.
