Judith Merril: The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6

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 and 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.