The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  Next day, we started right away to provide ourselves with adequate living quarters. Eight semi-skilled men can accomplish a lot more than eight times as much as one green hand, and to our surprise, by quitting time we had a site cleared of brush and largely leveled.

  After we had knocked off work, one of us drove the jeep over to the workshop of a young Italian, who lived not far away, and who earned his living by providing and servicing band instruments for a number of high schools within a twenty-five-mile radius. Instruments that the schools had discarded—and public schools have gotten very particular about such things—he sold to the general public at very moderate prices. I had had occasion to take my trombone to him for repairs a couple of times, and found him both sympathetic to impoverished amateur musicians, and a conscientious craftsman. He loved his work—he had learned the trade as a boy, most of his family being involved with musical instruments in some capacity—but the rough treatment the instruments received from the school children caused him endless pain, however good it was for his business.

  Our man picked out a fairly new clarinet, made a down payment—I had been working fairly regularly and had accumulated a small cash reserve—and brought it back to our cabin. It was doubled, and about a week later—we didn’t want to give the instrument dealer an impression of hopeless frivolity—the original was returned and traded in on a cornet.

  Meanwhile, our new building was progressing rapidly. In a few days we finished leveling the site, dug it out to a depth of about two feet, and filled the hole with broken stone, this operation being vastly simplified by doubling. Then one of us went to the local lumber yard, and bought one each of all the materials we needed: a small bag of cement, a two-by-six, a two-by-four, a few different kinds of board, roofing, insulation, nails, a window and so forth. I don’t know what the lumber dealer made of the order, but he certainly couldn’t have suspected we were going to build a house with it, so there was no danger of gossip from that source revealing, our plans.

  We all felt that complete secrecy was vital. Now that we had each other, we had no further need of even the small amount of social life I had maintained, and we didn’t want outsiders coming around and perhaps asking awkward questions. For all we knew, magic was still illegal: they used to burn and hang witches in the old days, and laws have a way of staying on the books long after they cease to be enforced. We all looked exactly alike, but as long as we took care to go out singly, no one could tell that there were more than one of us.

  We mixed a bucket of cement, poured it into the hole we had dug, and by rapid doubling filled the hole with a solid block of concrete. When it was hard, we built the wall frames on it, and raised them as units—like an old-fashioned barn-raising. We only had to cut one master rafter to double from, but even so, inexperienced as we were, putting up the roof was a big job.

  Once the rafters were set, the rest of the work on the building went quickly. It was a large barnlike structure, with a high ceiling, and good acoustics. There were plenty of double windows, and a big wood stove, the kind they used to have in the elevated stations, which we picked up cheap in a junk shop. For illumination, we had a whole lot of big hanging kerosene lamps and a few small ones; we were too far from the power line to make electrification feasible, and anyhow, we didn’t see how we could double electricity.

  Inside, we left the walls unfinished, and put up no partitions. There was a wide shelf at one end, where we set all our mattresses side by side; a big table built out of heavy lumber, with benches on either side of it, sat in the middle of the room, and a sort of bar was placed near it, against the wall. On the bar was a three-burner alcohol stove—on which pots of soup, beans, and coffee were constantly simmering—a number of platters loaded with cold cuts, cheese, pickles, sauerkraut, and sliced bread, and a tub of bottled beer—imported German beer: since we had to buy only one bottle, we felt we might as well have the best—and a box of good cigars. At the other end of the room from the bed shelf, we arranged eight chairs in a semicircle, for our band practice.

  We had returned the original of the cornet and traded it in on a baritone horn, but our building was so nearly finished that we decided against using any more trickery on the instrument dealer—we had been feeling pretty shabby about it anyhow, he was such a nice guy—and pay cash for whatever other instruments we wanted. We had used up all our cash reserve, what with down payments at the instrument store, buying building materials and food, but we had a fine oak tree on our property, tall, straight, and free of branches for at least thirty feet. We felled it, cut it into saw logs, snaked them out to the road with the jeep, and there doubled them into a substantial pile, which we sold to a sawmill for considerably more than all the instruments we wanted would cost—the mark-down of second-hand band instruments being approximately as large as that on cars. The sawmill man had his own woodlot, and didn’t like to lay out money for other people’s logs, but when he found we were willing to take an absurdly low price, he bought readily enough. We weren’t commercially minded—had we been, we could have easily made a fortune in almost any manufacturing or merchandising business—and the price we asked was more than adequate compensation for the relatively trifling amount of actual labor we had done. Unfortunately, in our enthusiasm we unthinkingly let him take every last log in the pile, thus preventing us from doubling any more lumber out of it to meet future contingencies. Timber was our only natural resource, and apart from that one tree, all we had was second-growth stuff, useful only for firewood.

  We wanted the same instrumentation as the traditional New Orleans marching bands, lacking only the second cornet—all of us were determined to play different instruments: it was our only claim to individuality. We already had the trombone, cornet, clarinet and baritone horn, so we needed an alto, a tuba, and bass and snare drums. The alto cost only two dollars—the instrument dealer had an old one, that he said would require at least twenty dollars worth of his labor to take out the dents, and was willing to, let us have it for what it had cost him, since used alto horns are slow sellers. We didn’t mind the dents, and were well satisfied with the horn, which was otherwise in good working order. An E-flat tuba was twenty dollars, and the two drums came to thirty, complete with sticks.

  It took us a while to get the feel of playing together, but we enjoyed it right from the beginning. The cornet and clarinet, although they had gotten their instruments first, and had a slight headstart on the rest of us, had trouble mastering the unfamiliar instruments—the three saxhorns were enough like the trombone, for which we all had a pretty good embouchure, that we could play them fluently right away. The cornet got his lip into shape in a couple of weeks, and this gave the band a tremendous lift. The clarinet took longer, that instrument being completely different from any of the brasses. He was able to provide an accompaniment of sorts in a month or so, but the solo from “High Society” continued to elude him for the better part of a year, the two drummers had, in a way, the hardest time, since my sense of rhythm was the weakest side of my musical ability, but they persevered, and in time got pretty good, at least by our not very exacting standards.

  I’m sure the ensemble would have sounded terrible to an expert, even at its best, but there is an exhilaration to playing in a group, even one composed entirely of dubs, and we were playing only for ourselves. Our tastes were identical, and our enthusiasm keen, so our technical shortcomings didn’t bother us. Then, too, there was an unlimited supply of beer, and that helped us not to be too critical.

  By conventional standards, our life was impossibly disorderly. We ate and drank when we felt like it, slept when we had to, and spent the rest of the time playing, or loafing around, reading and talking. We didn’t even bother to wash the dishes—we kept a master set in a cupboard, and doubled from it when we needed any. Dirty dishes were tossed on the dump, which gradually reached monumental proportions. We solved the laundry problem the same way. Sometimes, when one of us came back from a trip to the dump, there would be talk of the advi
sability of working up the spell for making things vanish, but nothing came of it. We just couldn’t be bothered.

  It was, in most respects, a thoroughly satisfying life. The food was good, better than I’d ever had before. The soup and beans, from constant simmering, acquired a flavor that was unbeatable; the coffee, by the same token, was usually terrible—we were usually too lazy to start a fresh pot— but we didn’t drink much coffee, and the beer was excellent. The only serious lack was sex. We kidded around about finding the most beautiful girl in the world and doubling her up for all of us, but we didn’t really mean it. We were much too nervous about letting outsiders into our little world, and anyhow, we felt that the presence of women would probably take away more than it added. I had become accustomed to abstinence over the years, so I don’t believe we suffered too intensely on that score. We had no particular ambition about our music. We periodically discussed the possibility of going on the road if we ever got good enough, but that seemed a long way off, and wasn’t important. We were having enough fun playing for ourselves not to need an audience.

  We had little occasion to go out. Each of us took a turn doing a day’s work every week, to maintain our cash reserve for replenishing food that had gotten too stale to be worth doubling, and paying the land taxes and repair bills on the jeep. None of these expenses was heavy. The tax assessors had not been around since I had completed my original cabin, and the day they had come, in the early spring, the trail had been like a creek, and they gave me a very low assessment. The new building was sufficiently concealed by trees and brush to be invisible from the road, so they never knew it was there. By judicious doubling of spare parts, tires and fuel, we managed to keep the expense of operating the jeep down to a minimum. On various trips to local garages, we had succeeded in doubling ourselves a rather impressive collection of tools, when the garage men weren’t looking, and a couple of us had become pretty good at using them. Occasionally we had to resort to expert help, when something major broke down, but we didn’t use the jeep very much, and it had been in good condition when I bought it.

  The necessity of going out to work at all got irksome after a while, but this problem was eventually solved for us by the cornet player. When his turn came around one time, instead of making the rounds of prospective employers, as we ordinarily did, he drove to New York, where he pawned duplicates of his horn—which was by far the best instrument we owned—all along Third Avenue. He returned the next day, his pockets bulging with enough money to provide all our needs for several years, at the rate we were spending it. And when that was gone, we could always repeat the operation.

  Just because I was able to work one spell successfully, I don’t pretend to be an expert on magic, but I do know that the results one achieves are no more precise than those from any other form of reproduction. Whenever we doubled anything, the double seemed exactly the same as the original, although there were probably subtle differences we couldn’t notice, even in the simplest objects. When it came to highly complicated organisms like ourselves, however, the differences were easily discernible.

  In appearance, we were identical enough to fool anybody, but our personalities showed marked dissimilarities. The cornetist and the clarinetist were by far the most accomplished musicians—I believe they must have acquired the largest share of my magical streak, but they poured it into their horns, and kept the band jumping. I guess I got most of my early scientific temperament, and the bass drummer clearly got the heaviest dose of whatever it was that kept me so long in the radical movement. He seemed like a throwback to my most ardent revolutionary phase.

  For some time, these differences served to make our life together more interesting: our reactions were far from uniform, and this made our discussions livelier. But by degrees the bass drummer became more and more antagonistic to the rest of us. At first we thought that perhaps his instrument wasn’t giving him enough scope, and several of us offered to spell him on the drum, and let him take a turn playing a horn, but this wasn’t what he wanted at all. He had soured on our whole way of life, and this set up an unbearable tension.

  He stopped playing with us, almost entirely, and one of the horn men had to take his place on the drum, while he sat around moodily, reading books on guerrilla warfare, or went out and did target practice with an old .22 he’d picked up somewhere. When the rest of us weren’t playing, he’d almost invariably start an argument about the folly of wasting our priceless gift. We tried kidding him along, pointing out that we weren’t harming or exploiting anybody, and the world would probably make a mess of the gift if we offered it, but this merely enraged him. “You’re just a bunch of lousy renegades,” he’d shout, “Bourgeois decadents. You could be out saving the world, and here you sit, fiddling while it burns.” The only way we could stop it was to take up our instruments and drown him out.

  We were neither surprised nor disappointed when he left, early one morning, before anyone else was awake. We couldn’t be entirely sure he was really gone, at first, since the jeep was still there. Then one of us recalled being awakened briefly by the sound of the jeep’s motor starting, and we decided he must have doubled it—none of us had ever dared attempt anything so ambitious before, but presumably it had worked. We waited for a few days to make sure he wasn’t coming back, then the snare drummer doubled himself, bringing the band back to full strength again. The new bass drummer was fine, and we were all relieved to be rid of the old one, who had turned into such a drag.

  He never wrote, but we picked up a few hints about his activities. One day, our tuba player was idly glancing through a New York newspaper at the store—we didn’t read the papers with any regularity, but from time to time one of us would feel an urge to catch up on the news— and found an item about someone being arrested for soap-boxing without a permit and giving away samples of merchandise without a peddler’s license.

  It could be only our ex-drummer: who else would combine those activities? He must have been distributing a foretaste of the abundance to come. It surprised us all that he could be naive enough to believe the police would let him get away with it. Of course, he hadn’t given his right name, but the name mentioned in the item was one that I had once used in my politically active days.

  The item didn’t mention what kind of a sentence he had received, and although we looked in the papers for the next few days, we couldn’t find any further mention of the incident. But a month or so later, a local gun-dealer, with whom I had been fairly intimate for a time when I first came to live in the country, ran into our clarinetist in town and upbraided him with mock, indignation.

  “What are you, a buyer or a creamer?” he had shouted. “You rush into the shop, demand that I bring out all my rare goodies, and the minute I turn my back, you’re gone like a turkey in the corn.”

  Translated from our friend’s jargon, this meant that our drummer, having presumably served his time, had come back, doubled himself a supply of weapons when the dealer was out of the room, and left with them for an unknown destination. We didn’t at all like the implications of that, but did our best to put it out of our minds.

  After that we stopped looking at the papers, and almost entirely stopped going out. I guess we were all afraid of what might be happening, and concentrated on our music with what was close to desperation, avoiding any mention of the probable activities of our former colleague.

  Then one day, when we were taking a break between sessions, and were scattered around the room, eating, drinking, tuning our instruments or just resting, we heard the sound of a jeep coming up the trail. The cornet man peeked out of a window cautiously—we were more apprehensive than ever about visitors—and the rest of us gathered in a worried crowd behind him, taking care to keep out of sight.

  The sound of the motor came closer, and our lookout shouted, “Hey, dig this. Big Skin has doubled himself some playmates, and they’re coming on like gangbusters.”

  We all rushed to the windows and watched the jeep drive up to the house an
d stop. It wasn’t the double of our battered civilian jeep—it was a fairly new looking army model —but the four men in it were unmistakably the ex-drummer’s doubles. They were dressed in semi-military fashion, with steel helmets of some foreign type, and were heavily armed. Their faces, though familiar enough in their general outlines, were considerably altered, when we got a closer look. They seemed misshapen, coarser, somehow; their mouths were tight and cruel, and their eyes had an expression of almost animal malignancy.

  As they got out of their jeep and advanced toward the house, all the others piled out the door to greet them, with, I thought, rather forced joviality. I hung back a little; I didn’t like their looks, and doubted their mission was friendly.

  Sure enough, as soon as the seventh man was outside the house, the four of them opened fire with some kind of machine pistol. At that range they couldn’t miss, but they continued to pour bullets into the bodies for a long time. I cowered in a corner, expecting that they would presently hunt me out and shoot me too. Instead, they intoned, in a strange, harsh voice—in unison, so help me—’Thus perish traitors to the revolution,” turned on their heels and marched back to the jeep, which left immediately.

  It was then that it occurred to me that they had no way of knowing about the substitute bass drummer, and must have believed they had finished us all.