Murray Leinster: The Duplicators

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 labored over it, daubing extinguisher foam on joints and cracks until he found where the foam vanished first. Then he lavishly applied sealing compound. This was not the act of a crackpot who only wants to be admired. It was consistent with a far-out mentality which would run the wildest of risks to carry out a purpose. Moreover, when after days of labor he still couldn’t bring the air loss down below half a pound a day, he sealed off that compartment too. The Glamorgan had been a tub to begin with. Now she displayed characteristics to make a reasonably patient man break down and cry.

Link offered to help in the sealing-off process. Thistlethwaite snapped at him.

“You tend to your knitting and I’ll tend to mine,” he said acidly. “You’re so smart at workin’ out things I want to keep to myself.”

“I only found out where we’re going,” said Link. “I didn’t find out why.”

“To get rich,” snapped Thistlethwaite. “That’s why! I want to get rich! I spent my life bein’ poor. Now I want to get kowtowed to! My first partner got money and he couldn’t wait to enjoy it. I’ve waited. I’m not telling anybody anything! I know what I’m goin’ to do. I got a talent for business. I never had a chance to use it. No capital. Now I’m going to get rich and do things like I always wanted to do.”

Link asked more questions and the little man turned waspishly upon him.

“That’s my business, like runnin’ this ship to where we’re goin’ is yours! You leave me be! I’m not riskin’ you knowin’ what I know. I’m not takin’ the chance of you figurin’ you’ll do better cheating me than playin’ fair.”

This was shrewdness, after a fashion. There are plenty of men who quite simply and naturally believe that the way to profit in any enterprise is to double-cross their associates. The whiskery man had evidently met them. He wasn’t sure Link wasn’t one of them. He kept his mouth shut.

“Eventually,” said Link, “I’m going to have to come out of overdrive to check my course. Is that all right with you?”

“That’s your business!” rasped Thistlethwaite. “You tend to your business and I’ll tend to mine!”

He disappeared, prowling around the ship, checking the air pressure, spending long periods in the engine room and not infrequently coming silently and secretly up the stairway to the control room to regard Link with inveterate suspicion.

It annoyed Link. So when he determined that he should break out of overdrive to verify his position—a dubious business considering the limits of his knowledge—he did not notify Thistlethwaite. He simply broke out of overdrive.

There should have been merely an instant of intolerable vertigo and of intense nausea, and then the sensation of a spiral fall toward infinity, but nothing more. Those sensations occurred. But as they began there was also a wild, rasping roar in the engine room. Lights dimmed. Thistlethwaite howled with fury and flung himself down into an inferno of blue arcs and stinking scorched insulation. In that incredible nightmare-like atmosphere he hit something with a stick. He pulled violently on a rope. He spun a wheel rapidly. And the arcs died. The ship’s ancient air system began to struggle with the smoke and smells.

It took him two days to make repairs, during which he did not address one syllable to Link. But Link was busy anyhow. He was taking observations and checking the process with the Practical Astrogator as he went along. Then he used the computer to make his observations mean something. He faithfully wrote all these exercises in the ship’s log. It helped to pass the time. But when determination of the ship’s position by three different methods gave the same result, he arrived at the astonishing conclusion that the Glamorgan was actually on course.

He was composing a tribute to himself for the feat when Thistlethwaite came bristling into the control room.

“I fixed what you messed up,” he said bitterly. “We can go on now. But next time you do something, don’t do it till you ask me, and I’ll fix it so you can. You could’ve wrecked us.”

Link opened his mouth to ask what could be a more complete wreck than the Glamorgan right now, but he refrained. He arranged for Thistlethwaite to go down into the engine room. He shouted down the stairways. Thistlethwaite bellowed a reply. Link checked the ship’s heading again, glanced at the ship’s chronometer, and threw the overdrive on.

Nothing happened except vertigo and nausea and the feeling of falling in a spiral fashion toward nowhere at all. The Glamorgan was again in overdrive. The little man came in, brushing off his hands.