The Duplicators

by Murray Leinster

  There were deep shadows on the hillsides when an ufft from the self-appointed advance-guards came galloping back from the leading part of the march. He pranced splendidly in a half-circle, came alongside Link’s unicorn, and said in a strictly military manner:

  “General, sir, the colonel in command of the advance-guard asks if you wish to occupy the abandoned human Household in the valley to the left, sir. He suggests that for logistic reasons it may be a suitable temporary headquarters. There’s a large spring, sir, with good water. What are your orders?”

  “By all means occupy it,” said Link. “We’ll at least bivouac there for the night.”

  But he blinked at the now-steep hillsides around him. It was almost dark. The situation began to seem less than merely amusing. The uffts really meant this revolt business! He hadn’t taken them seriously. It was not easy to do so now. They acted like children, to be sure. But children would have gotten tired of this play-acting and marching long ago. Children, indeed, would have abandoned the encirclement of Harl’s Household.

  It occurred to Link that the uffts had more brains than he’d credited them with. They were desperately concerned about the stun gun with which they’d been peppered the night before. If such weapons were to be available to the humans on Sord Three, the uffts would be in a very bad fix. They couldn’t fight back. They had little hoofs instead of hands, and their brains were of no use to them because they lacked fingers and especially an opposable thumb.

  Naturally, in the presence of human co-inhabitants of Sord Three, they had to lie to themselves to be able to endure their handicap. They pretended to despise humans. They were childishly bitter. They scornfully said that to have hands instead of hoofs was a shameful thing. But they knew, just the same, that the introduction of stun guns on Sord Three would make them utterly helpless as against humans. So with a naive desperation they were taking the only action they could imagine, under the only leadership they could consider qualified. It was not wise action. It could hardly be effective action. But Link felt obscurely ashamed of himself. He’d started it.

  The hillsides to right and left became steeper and the valley in which the Army marched became deeper. Link saw his following more or less as a mass for the first time. There were some thousands of the uffts. They would have covered an acre or more in the closest possible marching order. Spread out, they were an impressive lot of creatures.

  Here there was a band of a hundred or more, keeping close together and silent for the time being. There was a knot of twenty or thereabouts, chanting a slogan as they marched. He noticed that they looked weary. They also looked absurd. And they were totally unsophisticated in such practical matters as self-defense against men mounted on unicorns and carrying spears. They could be hunted down as corresponding creatures have been hunted down on ten thousand colonized worlds. The only difference between them and the wild lower animals of other planets was the uffts had brains. But brains in the absence of an opposable thumb left them ridiculous.

  The swarming, now leg-weary small horde of uffts swung into a narrower valley which entered this one from the left. Far up this second valley there were human structures. Even in the gathering dusk they could be seen to be abandoned. The valley walls were almost precipitous. Rock strata of varying colors alternated in slanting streaks of stone. Link saw a stratum of extremely familiar peach-colored stone. He shrugged his shoulders.

  The uffts flowed on, in small clumps and big ones, some few as individuals, many in pairs. Weariness was breaking down the undisciplined bunching of the march. They were now merely a very large number of very weary small animals, sturdily following Link’s leadership because he’d made a speech, and they couldn’t do much but make speeches themselves, and so could not estimate the uselessness of speechmaking.

  Some of them began to hurry, now. There was a small stream, which dwindled to a thread down the valley up which Link now rode morosely. Near the deserted and crumbling structures it was larger. At its source it was a considerable spring. Link saw crowds of the uffts drinking thirstily, and moving away, and being replaced by others.

  His own escort—he realized suddenly that some uffts had appointed themselves his personal escort and staff—moved on to the human structures. The roofs of the smaller buildings had collapsed. The Household or village must have been abandoned for many years. The largest structure would correspond with Harl’s residence. It had been the residence of the Householder of this place. Doors had fallen. Windows gaped.

  Link’s escort stopped before it.

  “I suppose,” said Link, “that I’d better take this over as my headquarters.”

  “Yes, sir,” said an ufft’s voice. “You’ll give us more orders in the morning, sir? You’ve plans for the War of Liberation, sir?”

  “I’ll make them,” said Link. He was vexed.

  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:

  “General Link, what do you think?

  Brought his army here!

  When he stopped, up he popped

  Passing out bottles of beer!”

  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.

  “You are here as an army,” said Link, oratorically, “and an army you should remain. But you are the most intelligent race in the galaxy. Therefore it is natural for you to adopt the most intelligent strategy for the achievement of your ends. Your master strategists have undoubtedly discussed that classic of military doctrine Power in Space and have determined to apply the principle of the space fleet in being to the basic problem of this war, so ensuring ufftian victory.”

  He paused, and cheers rose confusedly in the morning sunlight.

  “An army in being,” announced Link profoundly, “is an undefeated army. By the fact that it is in being, it has proved that it is undefeatable. To be an army in being is to be a victorious army, because if it were not victorious it could not continue to be! Therefore the first item of Ufftian policy is to keep the army in being and therefore to keep it undefeated and victorious, an inspiration of uffts everywhere, drawing them to join it and share in its glory and its triumph!”

  Cheers. The Committee for Emphasizing the Unanimity of Ufftian Opinion took its cue more promptly, and there was a high, shrill tumult of approval, much greater than before.

  “Specifically,” said Link with a fine precision, “the policy of the Ufftian Provisional Government is to maintain its army in being, to spread propaganda everywhere to cause uffts everywhere to join and increase that army, to cause its enemies to realize the futility of conflict, and ultimately to make a generous and equitable peace which shall realize all Ufftian national aspirations and establish the Ufftian Nation in permanent, unquestioned, and unquestionable solidity!”

  Cheers now echoed and reechoed from the walls of the valley. Link held up his hand for attention.

  “In pursuance of this policy,” he said valiantly, “we shall immediately organize the Committee for Propaganda upon a new scale. We shall enlarge the organization of G-1 and G-2, our intelligence and counter-intelligence groups. More volunteers for this necessary work are needed. We shall need volunteers to explain the policies of the Ufftian National Constitution to the uffts who will shortly join the Ufftian Revolutionary Army. We must have volunteers for security services, for communications, for espionage, for education, and for a survey of the cultural monuments and purposes to be preserved and obeyed, and for the preparation of a history—a detailed history—of this epoch-making and unanimous uprising of all uffts for the realization of these traditional aims! And—”

  It was an admirable speech. When he’d finished, his hearers were almost hoarse from their cheering. He retired into the tumble-down Householder’s residence with a forlorn kind of satisfaction. He was still the leader of the revolution. The uffts believed they were going to accomplish something unique under his guidance. It was conceivable that they might. No ufft could possibly topple him from his post as leader, because all uffts knew that they were inexorably restricted in achievement by the fact that their hands were hoofs. They could only believe in accomplishment associated with hands. There could be uffts wrought up to sabotage or crime by a purely ufftian leader, but Link alone could be the nucleus around which a genuinely large number of uffts would gather.

  There were two main reasons for it. One was his psychological advantage in that he could make speeches and had hands besides. The other was discretion. He’d asked for volunteers for innumerable committees and high-sounding boards and councils. But he hadn’t even referred to the organization of combat units. The Ufftian Revolutionary Army was prepared for propaganda, espionage, education, counter-espionage, and probably social services and psychoanalysis. But Link had at no time suggested that anybody get ready to fight.

  An important but subsidiary reason was the free beer issued by the Quartermaster Corps to any ufft
or group of uffts who came into the great hall of state, dragging a reasonable amount of greenstuff and a sufficient number of water-soaked shirts, ready-duplied for the transport of water required in beer. Unquestionably, the free beer helped.

  Its appeal showed up on the second day of the revolutionary movement. A little knot of traveling uffts, some twenty in number, were halted by security uffts as they crossed the mountains on private business of their own. They were questioned, given beer, and turned loose. Half of them did not leave. The rest went on to tell their friends and bring them back. Various of the original marchers appointed themselves recruiting officers of glamorously named organizations and went home after new members. They got them.

  By the third day there was a steady trickle of volunteers for the army and especially the civil service of the provisional government. They came through mountain passes or across the rolling foothills toward the formerly human household. By the fourth day, the loss of ufft-power was noticeable in human households as much as fifty miles in every direction. Harl’s household reposed in a vast tranquility. Groups of pack-animals could go and come between neighboring households without even a shouted “Murderers!” flung at them along the way. But all the householders were faced with the need to go guesting to get needed foodstuffs. There were no more ufft-carts coming in with greenstuff. There was no general strike, of course, but the result was the same. Uffts were gathering at the Ufft Future World Capital up a rather steep small valley, where anybody could have all the beer he wanted for the greenstuff required to make it. Link had started out with perhaps two or three thousand followers. Four days later there were twenty thousand about the former human settlement. Some of the uffts, females, no doubt, disapproved of the bivouac idea. Permanent burrows began to appear here and there.

  From time to time Link performed some ritual to remind the uffts that they were a revolutionary army. On one occasion he presided over a marching-recitative competition, when small bands of uffts marched past his residence chanting vainglorious doggerel for inspirational purposes. The slogans, of course, stressed loyalty to the principles of the Provisional Government, the National Constitution, the Declaration of Freedom, the Appeal to Intellects, and so on.