Murray Leinster - The Duplicators

“When were you planning to hang us?” asked Link.

“After the fellas get back,” said Harl. “They may be a while having their suppers. Then I was figurin’ we’d have the hangin’ by torch-light. It’ll make a right interestin’ spectacle, flamin’ torches an’ such and a hangin’ by their light. My fellas will talk about it for years!”

“Just take it easy,” advised Link. “Don’t hurry things. He’ll come around before anybody gets too sleepy to appreciate his hanging!”

He hoped it was true. It ought to be. But Harl paced up and down.

“I wouldn’t want to do anything unmannerly,” he said grudgingly. “All right. I’ll give him until hangin’ time.” Then he seemed to rouse himself. “Thana, you pick the stuff for supper and I’ll get it duplied while you ask Link questions about the things you want to know.”

The girl plucked half a dozen lettuce plants. A handful of peas. She examined the apples on the tree and picked one. It was a small and scrawny apple. Link saw a worm-hole near its stem. She handed the vegetation to her brother. Then she said to Link:

“I’ll show you.”

He followed her. She went into the building, and they were in the great hall with the canopied chair. She led the way across the hall and into a smaller room. It was lined with shelves, and ranged upon them were all the objects a Householder could desire or feel called on to supply to his retainers. There were shelves of tools, but only one of each. There were shelves of cloth. Much of it was incredibly beautiful embroidery, but it was age-yellowed and old. There were knives of various shapes and sizes, plates, dishes, and glassware, bits of small hardware, and sandals, purses, and neckerchiefs, although these last categories were in poor condition indeed. In general, there was every artifact of a culture which had made vision-sets and now was used floating wicks in oil for illumination.

Link suddenly knew that this was in a sense the treasury of the Household. But there was only one of each object on display.

Thana pulled out a drawer and showed Link an assortment of rocks and stones of every imaginable variety. She searched his expression and said, “When you make a stew, you put in meat and flour and what vegetables you have. That’s right, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so,” agreed Link. He was baffled again by his surroundings and, of all possible openings for a conversation, the subject she’d just mentioned.

“But,” said Thana uncomfortably, “it doesn’t taste very good unless you put in salt and herbs. That’s right too, isn’t it?”

“I’m sure it is,” said Link. “But—”

“Here’s a knife.” It was in the drawer with the rocks. She handed it to him. It was a perfectly ordinary knife; good steel, of a more or less antique shape, with a mended handle. It had probably had a handle of bone or plastic which by some accident had been destroyed, so someone had painstakingly fitted a new one of wood. She reached to a shelf and picked up another knife. She handed it to Link, too.

He looked at the pair of them, at first puzzled and then incredulous. They were identical. They were really identical! They were identical as Link had never seen two objects before. There was a scratch on the handle of each. The scratches were identical. There was a partly broken rivet in one, and the same rivet was partly broken in precisely the same fashion in the other. The resemblance was microscopically exact! Link went to a window to examine them again, and the grain of the wooden handles had the same pattern, the same sequence of growth-rings, and there was a jagged nick in one blade, and a precise duplicate of that nick in the other. Perhaps it was the wood that most bewildered Link. No two pieces of wood are ever exactly alike. It can’t happen. But here it had.

“This knife is duplied from that,” said Thana. “This one is duplied. That one isn’t. The unduplied one is better. It’s sharper and stays sharper. Its edge doesn’t turn. I…” She hesitated a moment. “I’ve been wondering if it isn’t something like a stew. Maybe the unduplied knife has something in it like salt, that’s been left out of the duplied one. Maybe we didn’t give it something it needs, like salt. Could that be so?”

Link gaped at her. She didn’t looked troubled now. She looked appealing and anxious and—when she didn’t look troubled she was a very pretty girl. He noticed that even in this moment of astonishment. Because he began to make a very wild guess at what might explain human society on Sord Three.

His limited experience with it was baffling. From the moment when he sat on the exit port threshold of the Glamorgan and chatted with an invisible conversationalist, to the moment he’d been told regretfully by Harl that he’d have to be hanged because of a speech he’d made about a barber, every single happening had confused him. It seemed that beer was currency. It seemed that a fifty-foot-square garden somehow supplied food for an entire village, though its plants seemed quite ordinary. Right now, dazedly surveying the whole experience, he recalled that there was no highway leading to the village. No road. It was not irrelevant. It fitted into the preposterous entire pattern.

“Wait a minute!” said Link, astounded and still unbelieving. “When you duply something you… furnish a sample and the material for it to something and it… duplicates the sample?”

“Of course,” said Thana. Her forehead wrinkled a little as she watched his expression. “I want to know if the reason some duplied things aren’t as good as unduplied ones is that we leave something out of the material we give the duplier to duply unduplied things with.”

His expression did not satisfy her.

“Of course if the sample is poor, the duplied thing will be poor quality too. That’s why our cloth is so weak. The samples are all old and brittle and weak. So duplied cloth is brittle and weak too. But,” she asked unbelievingly, “don’t you have dupliers where you come from?”

Link swallowed. If what Thana said was true—if it was true—an enormous number of things fell into place, including Thistlethwaite’s scornful conviction that wealth in carynths was garbage compared with the wealth that could be had from one trading voyage to Sord Three. If what Thana said was true, that was true, too. But there were other consequences. If dupliers were exported from Sord Three, the civilization of the galaxy could collapse. There was no commerce, no business on Sord Three. Naturally! Why should anybody manufacture or grow anything if raw material could be supplied and an existent specimen exactly reproduced. What price riches, manufactures, crops,… civilization itself? What price anything?

Here, the price was manners. If someone admired something you owned, you gave it to him, it or a duplied, microscopically accurate replica. Or maybe you kept the replica and gave him the original. It didn’t matter. They’d be the same! But the rest of the galaxy wouldn’t find it easy to practice manners, after scores of thousands of years of rude and uncouth habits.

“Don’t they have dupliers where you come from?” repeated Thana. She was astonished at the very idea.

“N-no,” said Link, dry-throated. “N-no, we d-don’t.”

“But you poor things!” said Thana commiseratingly. “How do you live?”

For the first time in his life, Link was actually terrified. He said the first thing that came into his mind.

“We don’t,” he said thinly. “At least, we won’t live long after we get dupliers!”

There was movement in the great hall next door, but Thana paid no attention. She put one knife back on the shelf from which she’d taken it. She began to show Link the collection of small rocks and stones she’d accumulated.