The Duplicators

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, too!”

“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 to 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.

“Well, 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!”

Chapter 2

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 long wave 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 spaceboat 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 times 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 lose 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 have 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 nonexistent 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 money—enough to buy the Glamorgan and her cargo—and 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