Murray Leinster: The Duplicators

“That’s the way,” he said truculently, “to handle this ship!” Link scribbled a memo of the instant the Glamorgan had gone into overdrive.

“In two days, four hours, thirty-three minutes and twenty seconds,” he observed, “we’ll want to break out again. We ought to be somewhere near Sord, then.”

“If,” said Thistlethwaite suspiciously, “if you’re not tryin’ to put something over on me!”

Link shrugged. He’d begun to wonder, lately, why he’d come on this highly mysterious journey. In one sense he’d had good reason. Jail. But now he began to be restless. He wore a stake-belt next to his skin, and in it he had certain small crystals. There were people who would murder him enthusiastically for those crystals. There were others who would pay him very large sums for them. The trouble was that he had no specific idea of what he wanted to do with a large sum. Small sums, yes. He could relax with them. But large ones—He felt a need for the pleasingly unexpected. Even the exciting.

One day passed and he was definitely impatient. He was bored. He couldn’t even think of anything to write in the log book. There’d been a girl about whom he’d felt romantic, not so long ago. He tried to think sentimentally about her. He failed. He hadn’t seen her in months and she was probably married to somebody else now. The thought didn’t bother him. It was annoying that it didn’t. He craved excitement and interesting happenings, and he was merely heading for a planet that hadn’t made authenticated contact with the rest of the galaxy in two hundred years, and then had promised to shoot anybody who landed. He was only in a leaky ship whose machinery broke down frequently and might at any time burn out.

He was, in a word, bored.

The second day passed. Four hours, thirty-three minutes remained. He tried to hope for interesting events. He knew of no reason to anticipate them. If Thistlethwaite were right, there would be only business dealings aground, and presently an attempt to get to somewhere else in the Glamorgan, and after that—

The whiskery man went down into the engine room and bellowed that everything was set. Link sat by the control board, leaning on his elbows, in a mood of deep skepticism. He didn’t believe anything in particular was likely to happen. Especially he didn’t believe in Thistlethwaite’s story of fabulous wealth. There was nothing as valuable as Thistlethwaite described. Such things simply didn’t exist. But since he’d come this far—

Two minutes to go. One minute twenty seconds. Twenty seconds. Ten… five… four… three… two… one!

He flipped the overdrive switch to off. There were the customary sensations of dizzy fall and vertigo and nausea. Then the Glamorgan floated in normal space, and there was a sun not unreasonably far away, and all the sky was stars. Link was even pessimistic about the identity of the sun, but a spectro-photo identified it. It was truly Sord. There were planets. One. Two. Three. Three had ice-caps; it looked as if two-thirds of its surface was sea, and in general it matched the Directory’s description. It might… just possibly… be inhabited.

A tediously long time later the Glamorgan floated in orbit around the third planet out from its sun. Mottled land masses whipped by below. There were seas, and more land masses.

Thistlethwaite watched in silence. There could be no communication with the ground, even if the ground was prepared to communicate. The Glamorgan ’s communication system didn’t work. Link waited for the little man to identify his destination. When it was named there would probably be trouble.

“No maps,” said Thistlethwaite bitterly, on the second time around. “I asked Old Man Addison for a map but he hardly knew what I meant. They never bothered to make ’em! But Old Man Addison’s Household is near a sea. Near a bay, with mountains not too far off.”

Link was not relieved. It isn’t easy to find a landmark of limited size on a large world from a ship in space that has no maps or even a working communicator. But on the fourth orbital circuit, clouds that had formerly hidden a certain place had moved away. Thistlethwaite pointed.

“That’s it!” he said, scowling as if to cover his own doubts. “That’s it! Get her down yonder!”

Link took a deep breath. Standard spaceport procedure is for a ship to call down by communicator, have coordinates supplied from the ground, get into position, and wait. Then the landing grid reaches out its force fields and lets the ship down. It is neat, and comfortable, and safe. But there was no landing grid here. There was no information. And Link had no experience, either.

He made one extra orbit to fix the indicated landing point in his mind and to try to guess at the relative speed of ship and planetary surface. On the seventh circling of the planet, he swung the ship so it traveled stern-first and its emergency rockets could be used as retros. The drive engine would be useless here. Thistlethwaite stayed in the control room to watch. He chewed agitatedly on wisps of whisker.

The ship hit atmosphere. There was a keening, howling sound, as if the ancient hull were protesting its own destruction. There were thumpings and bumpings. Loose plates rattled at their rivets and remaining welds.

Something came free and battered thunderously at other hull plates before it went crazily off to nowhere. Vibration began. It became a thoroughly ominous quivering of all the ship. Link threw over the rocket lever, and the vibration ceased to increase as the emergencies bellowed below. He gave them more power, and more, until the deceleration made it difficult to stand. Then, at very long last, the vibration seemed to lessen a very little.

The ship descended into a hurricane of wind from its own motion. Unbelievable noises sounded here and there. The hole where a plate had torn away developed an organ tone with the volume of a baby earthquake’s roar.

The ship hurtled on. Far ahead there was blue sea. Nearer, there were mountains. There was a sandy look to the surface of the soil. Clouds enveloped the ship, and she came out below them, bellowing, and Link gave the rockets more braking power. But the ground still seemed to race past at an intolerable speed. He tilted the ship until her rockets did not support her at all, but only served as brakes.

Then she really went down, wallowing. He fought her, learning how to land by doing it, but without even a close idea of what it should feel like. Twice he attempted to check his descent at the cost of not checking motion toward the now-not-so-distant shoreline. He began to hope. He concentrated on matching speed with the flowing landscape.

He made it. The ship moved almost imperceptibly with respect to such landmarks as he could see. Something vaguely resembling a village appeared, far below, but he could not attend to it. The ship suddenly hovered, no more than five thousand feet high. Then Link, sweating, started to ease down.

Thistlethwaite protested agitatedly:

“I saw a village! Get her down! Get her down!”

Link cut the rockets entirely; the ship began to drop like a stone, and he cut them in again and out and in.

The Glamorgan landed with a tremendous crash. It teetered back and forth, making loud grinding noises. It steadied. It stopped.

Link mopped his forehead. Thistlethwaite said accusingly:

“But this ain’t where we shoulda landed! We shoulda stopped by that village! And even that ain’t the one I want!”

“This is where we did land,” said Link, “and lucky we made it! You don’t know how lucky!”

He went to a port to look out. The ship had landed in a sort of hollow, liberally sprinkled with boulders of various shapes and sizes. Sandy hillocks with sparse vegetation on their slopes appeared on every hand. Despite the ship’s upright position, Link could not see over the hills to a true horizon.