Dimensiion X

by Jerry eBooks

  Twinning himself would provide the necessary practice in a familiar medium. Ideal. He’d have to take careful notes so that if anything went wrong he’d know just where to avoid going off the track in making his own personal Tina.

  And maybe the old geezer wasn’t interested in the set at all. Even if he were, Sam could take his landlady’s advice and not be at home when he called. Silver linings wherever he looked.

  Lew Knight stared at the instrument in Sam’s hands. “What in the sacred name of Blackstone and all his commentaries is that? Looks like a lawn mower for a window box!”

  “It’s uh, sort of a measuring gadget. Gives the right size for one thing and another and this and that. Won’t be able to get you the wedding present I have in mind unless I know the right size. Or sizes. Tina, would you mind stepping out into the hall?”

  “Nooo.” She looked dubiously at the gadget. “It won’t hurt?”

  It wouldn’t hurt a bit, Sam assured her. “I just want to keep this a secret from Lew till after the ceremony.”

  She brightened at that and preceded Sam through the door. “Hey counselor,” one of the other young lawyers called at Lew as they left. “Hey counselor, don’t let him do that. Possession is nine points, Sam always says. He’ll never bring her back.”

  Lew chuckled weakly and bent over his work.

  “Now I want you to go into the ladies’ room,” Sam explained to a bewildered Tina. “I’ll stand guard outside and tell the other customers that the place is out of order. If another woman is inside wait until she leaves. Then strip.”

  “Strip?” Tina squealed.

  He nodded. Then very carefully, emphasizing every significant detail of operation, he told her how to use the Junior Biocalibrator. How she must be careful to kick the switch and set the tape running. How she must cover every external square inch of her body. “This little arm will enable you to lower it down your back. No questions now. Git.” She gat.

  She was back in fifteen minutes, fluffing her dress into place and studying the tape with a rapt frown. “This is the strangest thing—According to the spool, my iodine content—”

  Sam snaffled the Biocalibrator hurriedly. “Don’t give it another thought. It’s a code, kind of. Tells me just what size and how many of what kind. You’ll be crazy about the gift when you see it.”

  “I know I will.” She bent over him as he kneeled and examined the tape to make certain she had applied the instrument correctly. “You know, Sam, I always felt your taste was perfect. I want you to come and visit us often after we’re married. You can have such beautiful ideas! Lew is a bit too . . . too businesslike, isn’t he? I mean it’s necessary for success and all that, but success isn’t everything. I mean you have to have culture, too. You’ll help me keep cultured, won’t you, Sam?”

  “Sure,” Sam said vaguely. The tape was complete. Now to get started! “Anything I can do—glad to help.”

  He rang for the elevator and noticed the forlorn uncertainty with which she watched him. “Don’t worry, Tina. You and Lew will be very happy together. And you’ll love this wedding present.” But not as much as I will, he told himself as he stepped into the elevator.

  Back in his room, he emptied the machine and undressed. In a few moments he had another tape on himself. He would have liked to consider it for a while, but being this close to the goal made him impatient. He locked the door, cleaned his room hurriedly of accumulated junk-remembering to sniff in annoyance at Aunt Maggie’s ties: the blue and red one almost lighted up the room—ordered the box to open—and he was ready to begin.

  First the water. With the huge amount of water necessary to the human body, especially in the case of an adult, he might as well start collecting it now. He had bought several pans and it would take his lone faucet some time to fill them all.

  As he placed the first pot under the tap, Sam wondered suddenly if its chemical impurities might affect the end product. Of course it might! These children of 2153 would probably take absolutely pure H20 as a matter of daily use; the manual hadn’t mentioned the subject, but how did he know what kind of water they had available? Well, he’d boil this batch over his chemical stove; when he got to making Tina he could see about getting aqua completely fura.

  Score another point for making a simulacrum of Sam first.

  While waiting for the water to boil, he arranged his supplies to positions of maximum aVallability. They were getting low. That baby had taken up quite a bit of useful ingredients; too bad he hadn’t seen his way clear to disassembling it. That meant if there were any argument in favor of allowing the replica of himself to go on living, it was now invalid. He’d have to take it apart in order to have enough for Tina II. Or Tina prime?

  He leafed through Chapters VI, VII and VIII on the ingredients, completion and disassembling of a man. He’d been through this several times before but he’d passed more than one law exam on the strength of a last-minute review.

  The constant reference to mental instability disturbed him. “The humans constructed with this set will, at the very best, show most of the superstitious tendencies, and neurosis-compulsions of medieval mankind. In the long run they are not normal; take great care not to consider them such.” Well, it wouldn’t make too much difference in Tina’s case—and that was all that was important.

  When he had finished adjusting the molds to the correct sizes, he fastened the vitalizer to the bed. Then—very, very slowly and with repeated glances at the manual, he began to duplicate Sam Weber. He learned more of his physical limitations and capabilities in the next two hours than any man had ever known since the day when an inconspicuous primate had investigated the possibilities of ground locomotion upon the nether extremities alone.

  Strangely enough, he felt neither awe nor exultation. It was like building a radio receiver for the first time. Child’s play.

  Most of the vials and jars were empty when he had finished. The damp molds were stacked inside the box, still in their three-dimensional outline. The manual lay neglected on the floor.

  Sam Weber stood near the bed looking down at Sam Weber on the bed.

  All that remained was vitalizing. He daren’t wait too long or imperfections might set in and the errors of the baby be repeated. He shook off a nauseating feeling of unreality, made certain that the big disassembleator was within reach and set the Jiffy Vitalizer in motion.

  The man on the bed coughed. He stirred. He sat up.

  “Wow!” he said. “Pretty good, if I do say so myself!”

  And then he had leaped off the bed and seized the disassembleator. He tore great chunks of wiring out of the center, threw it to the floor and kicked it into shapelessness. “No Sword of Damocles going to hang over my head,” he informed an open-mouthed Sam Weber. “Although, I could have used it on you, come to think of it.”

  Sam eased himself to the mattress and sat down. His mind stopped rearing and whinnied to a halt. He had been so impressed with the helplessness of the baby and the mannikin that he had never dreamed of the possibility that his duplicate would enter upon life with such enthusiasm. He should have, though; this was a full-grown man, created at a moment of complete physical and mental activity.

  “This is bad,” he said at last in a hoarse voice. “You’re unstable. You can’t be admitted into normal society.”

  “I’m unstable?” his image asked. “Look who’s talking! The guy who’s been mooning his way through his adult life, who wants to marry an overdressed, conceited collection of biological impulses that would come crawling on her knees to any man sensible enough to push the right buttons—”

  “You leave Tina’s name out of this,” Sam told him, feeling acutely uncomfortable at the theatrical phrase.

  His double looked at him and grinned. “O.K., I will. But not her body! Now, look here, Sam or Weber or whatever you want me to call you, you can live your life and I’ll live mine. I won’t even be a lawyer if that’ll make you happy. But as far as Tina is concerned, now that there are no ingre
dients to make a copy—that was a rotten escapist idea, by the way—I have enough of your likes and dislikes to want her badly. And I can have her, whereas you can’t. You don’t have the gumption.”

  Sam leaped to his feet and doubled his fists. Then he saw the other’s entirely equal size and slightly more assured twinkle. There was no point in fighting—that would end in a draw, at best. He went back to reason. “According to the manual,” he began, “you are prone to neurosis—”

  “The manual! The manual was written for children of two centuries hence, with quite a bit of selective breeding and scientific education behind them. Personally, I think I’m a—”

  There was a double knock on the door. “Mr. Weber.”

  “Yes,” they both said simultaneously.

  Outside, the landlady gasped and began speaking in an uncertain voice. “Th-that gentleman is downstairs. He’d like to see you. Shall I tell him you’re in?”

  “No, I’m not at home,” said the double.

  “Tell him I left an hour ago,” said Sam at exactly the same moment. There was another, longer gasp and the sound of footsteps receding hurriedly.

  “That’s one clever way to handle a situation,” Sam’s facsimile exploded. “Couldn’t you keep your mouth shut? The poor woman’s probably gone off to have a fit.”

  “You forget that this is my room and you are just an experiment that went wrong,” Sam told him hotly. “I have just as much right, in fact more right . . . hey, what do you think you’re doing?”

  The other had thrown open the closet door and was stepping into a pair of pants. “Just getting dressed. You can wander around in the nude if you find it exciting, but I want to look a bit respectable.”

  “I undressed to take my measurements . . . or your measurements. Those are my clothes, this is my room—”

  “Look, take it easy. You could never prove it in a court of law. Don’t make me go into that cliché about what’s yours is mine and so forth.”

  Heavy feet resounded through the hall. They stopped outside the room. Cymbals seemed to clash all around them and there was a panic-stricken sense of unendurable heat. Then shrill echoes fled into the distance. The walls stopped shuddering.

  Silence and a smell of burning wood.

  They whirled in time to see a terribly tall, terrible old man in a long black overcoat walking through the smoldering remains of the door. Much too tall for the entrance, he did not stoop as he came in; rather he drew his head down into his garment and shot it up again. Instinctively, they moved close together.

  His eyes, all shiny black iris without any whites, were set back deep in the shadow of his head. They reminded Sam Weber of the scanners on the Biocalibrator: they tabulated, deduced, rather than saw.

  “I was afraid I would be too late,” he rumbled at last in weird, clipped tones. “You have already duplicated yourself, Mr. Weber, making necessary unpleasant rearrangements. And the duplicate has destroyed the disassembleator. Too bad. I shall have to do it manually. An ugly job.”

  He came further into the room until they could almost breathe their fright upon him. “This affair has already dislocated four major programs, but we had to move in accepted cultural grooves and be absolutely certain of the recipient’s identity before we could act to withdraw the set Mrs. Lipanti’s collapse naturally stimulated emergency measures.”

  The duplicate cleared his throat. “You are—?”

  “Not exactly human. A humble civil servant of precision manufacture. I am Census Keeper for the entire twenty-ninth oblong. You see, your set was intended for the Thregander children who are on a field trip in this oblong. One of the Threganders who has a Weber chart requested the set through the chrondromos which, in an attempt at the supernormal, unstabled without camuplicating. You therefore received the package instead. Unfortunately, the unstabling was so complete that we were forced to locate you by indirect methods.”

  The Census Keeper paused and Sam’s double hitched his pants nervously. Sam wished he had anything—even a fig leaf—to cover his nakedness. He felt like a character in the Garden of Eden trying to build up a logical case for apple eating. He appreciated glumly how much more than “Bild-A-Man” sets clothes had to do with the making of a man.

  “We will have to recover the set, of course,” the staccato thunder continued, “and readjust any discrepancies it has caused. Once the matter has been cleared up, however, your life will be allowed to resume its normal progression. Meanwhile, the problem is which of you is the original Sam Weber?”

  “I am,” they both quavered—and turned to glare at each other. “Difficulties,” the old man rumbled. He sighed like an arctic wind. “I always have difficulties! Why can’t I ever have a simple case like a carnuplicator?”

  “Look here,” the duplicate began. “The original will be—”

  “Less unstable and of better emotional balance than the replica,” Sam interrupted. “Now, it seems—”

  “That you should be able to tell the difference,” the other concluded breathlessly. “From what you see and have seen of us, can’t you decide which is the more valid member of society?”

  What a pathetic confidence, Sam thought, the fellow was trying to display! Didn’t he know he was up against someone who could really discern mental differences? This was no fumbling psychiatrist of the present; here was a creature who could see through externals to the most coherent personality beneath.

  “I can, naturally. Now, just a moment.” He studied them carefully, his eyes traveling with judicious leisure up and down their bodies. They waited, fidgeting, in a silence that pounded.

  “Yes,” the old man said at last. “Yes. Quite.”

  He walked forward.

  A long thin arm shot out.

  He started to disassemble Sam Weber.

  “But listennnnn—” began Weber in a yell that turned into a high scream and died in a liquid mumble.

  “It would be better for your sanity if you didn’t watch,” the Census Keeper suggested.

  The duplicate exhaled slowly, turned away and began to button a shirt. Behind him the mumbling continued, rising and falling in pitch.

  “You see,” came the clipped, rumbling accents, “it’s not the gift we’re afraid of letting you have—it’s the principle involved. Your civilization isn’t ready for it. You understand.”

  “Perfectly,” replied the counterfeit Weber, knotting Aunt Maggie’s blue and red tie.

  Time and Again

  H. Beam Piper

  To upset the stable, mighty stream, of time would probably take an enormous concentration of energy. And it’s not to be expected that a man would get a second chance at life. But ah atomic might accomplish both—

  Blinded by the bomb-flash and numbed by the narcotic injection, he could not estimate the extent of his injuries, but he knew that he was dying. Around him, in the darkness, voices sounded as through a thick wall.

  “They mighta left mosta these Joes where they was. Half of them won’t even last till the truck comes.”

  “No matter; so long as they’re alive, they must be treated,” another voice, crisp and cultivated, rebuked. “Better start taking names, while we’re waiting.”

  “Yes, sir.” Fingers fumbled at his identity badge. “Hartley, Allan; Captain, G5, Chem. Research AN/73/D. Serial, SO-23869403J.”

  “Allan Hartley!” The medic officer spoke in shocked surprise. “Why, he’s the man who wrote ‘Children of the Mist’, ‘Rose of Death’, and ‘Conqueror’s Road’ !”

  He tried to speak, and must have stirred; the corpsman’s voice sharpened.

  “Major, I think he’s part conscious. Mebbe I better give him ’nother shot.”

  “Yes, yes; by all means, sergeant.” Something jabbed Allan Hartley in the back of the neck. Soft billows of oblivion closed in upon him, and all that remained to him was a tiny spark of awareness, glowing alone and lost in a great darkness.

  The Spark grew brighter. He was more than a something that merely knew
that it existed. He was a man, and he had a name, and a military rank, and memories. Memories of the searing blue-green flash, and of what he had been doing outside the shelter the moment before, and memories of the month-long siege, and of the retreat from the north, and memories of the days before the War. back to the time when he had been little Allan Hartley, a schoolboy, the son of a successful lawyer, in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

  His mother he could not remember; there was only a vague impression of the house full of people who had tried to comfort him for something he could not understand. But he remembered the old German woman who had kept house for his father, afterward, and he remembered his bedroom, with its chintz-covered chairs, and the warm-colored patch quilt on the old cherry bed, and the tan curtains at the windows, edged with dusky red, and the morning sun shining through them. He could almost see them, now.

  He blinked. He could see them!

  For a long time, he lay staring at them unbelievingly, and then he deliberately closed his eyes and counted ten seconds, and as he counted, terror gripped him. He was afraid to open them again, lest he find himself blind, or gazing at the filth and wreckage of a blasted city, but when he reached ten, he forced himself to look, and gave a sigh of relief. The sunlit curtains and the sun-gilded mist outside were still there.

  He reached out to check one sense against another, feeling the rough monk’s cloth and the edging of maroon silk thread. They were tangible as well as visible. Then he saw that the back of his hand was unscarred. There should have been a scar, souvenir of a rough-and-tumble brawl of his cub reporter days. He examined both hands closely. An instant later, he had sat up in bed and thrown off the covers, partially removing his pajamas and inspecting as much of his body as was visible.