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

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.

I spent the next couple of days in a state of shock, digging a mass grave and burying the rest of the band without ceremony. Then I packed a small bundle of provisions, and left. I was perhaps foolish to leave the one place where I was reasonably safe from reprisals, but I couldn’t stand it there any more, and the thought that I could double myself another band and start all over again positively sickened me. I left everything as it was—even abandoning the jeep. I don’t think I had any special motive. I was still pretty dazed.

The first few miles of my hike, everything looked about the same as it always had, but once I reached the center of the village, I realized that the violence against us had not been an isolated phenomenon. Most of the houses were scarred by gunfire, several had been burned to the ground, and there were no people around at all.

I continued through the devastated countryside, passing, to my utter astonishment, wrecked army vehicles of various kinds, and numerous corpses, both military and civilian. A good many looked as though they might have been my doubles, and were dressed roughly the same as the four who had visited us, but the majority seemed to be either regular army men or local residents. Obviously a running battle of some proportions had been fought over this terrain, and it seemed incredible that we hadn’t been aware of it. However, our house was isolated, and most of the time we were making so much noise ourselves that we wouldn’t be likely to hear anything else.

After some days of aimless wandering, I finally encountered a small group of ragged survivors. But they took one look at me, screamed, “There’s another one,” and ran off in terror. Since the next people I met might well be armed, I decided I had better lie low for a while, and holed up in an abandoned house. In the cellar I found a pile of newspapers for the past few months, and to pass the time, began to read through them. They told me all I needed to know about the situation, and confirmed my worst fears. Inasmuch as I am probably the only person in a position to read between the lines, and explain what really happened, I am writing all this down, and plan to double it into millions of copies. It may be too late to save the country, but if not, surely an accurate understanding of the nature of the enemy ought to be more useful than the wild conjectures and speculations I find in the press.

I won’t bother to reproduce the newspaper’s version of events, since anyone who gets to see this will undoubtedly be already familiar with it, but here, as nearly as I can work it out, is a rough account of my double’s actions to date.

After his visit to the gun-shop, he appears to have driven to Washington—the dates check to the best of my recollection. Once there, he must have doubled himself a few times, and made his way, armed with pistols, into the visitor’s galleries of the House of Representatives and the Senate. There he did a lot of rapid doubling, and proceeded to clear out both chambers. I guess he sustained heavy casualties from the Secret Service men, but continued to double reinforcements until he was master of the Capitol. He must have been quite an army by the time he moved on the White House and took possession. To judge from the text of the manifesto he issued at this time—”The Bourgeois Government Is No More: The New Regime of Freedom and Plenty Is Now Beginning”—I would surmise that his mind had already begun to deteriorate as the result of excessive doubling.

During the next week or so, he was occupied pacifying the city of Washington, and trying to establish an emergency distribution system. This was his most benevolent phase; I believe he was completely in good faith when he offered free food and clothing to anyone who came to his distribution centers—it wouldn’t have been any trick at all for him to produce unlimited quantities of merchandise. However, the population of the city didn’t know that, and it is hardly surprising that they suspected a trap, and left the city rather than take a chance on his generosity. This, I am sure, so infuriated him, that his already weakened mind broke down altogether.

Those congressmen who had escaped the massacre in the Capitol, together with those who had been absent that day, set up a provisional government in Virginia, and launched the army against the usurper—they apparently thought he was an invasion from Russia. I hope they didn’t retaliate on the Russians with atomic weapons as the newspaper suggests they intended to do. This counter-revolutionary attack, as he calls it in his second manifesto, caught him in a grim mood; he doubled himself into a vast horde, which seems to call itself the People’s Volunteers for National Liberation, and fought back furiously.

To judge by the newspaper reports on the early battles in the campaign, he must have depended entirely on force of numbers to overrun the regular army’s position, and his losses were enormous. Subsequently, having captured, and undoubtedly doubled, heavier weapons, he began to fight more conservatively, but the prodigious amount of doubling that went on during the first few weeks of fighting had presumably reduced his forces to the brutal automatons that wiped out my comrades, and seem to be advancing steadily along the Eastern Seaboard. I don’t know where they are now, the last paper in my collection being several days old.

This is an army that puts the ancient Mongols to shame. Not only is it able to do without any service of supply; since each man can carry all his own provisions and ammunition, doubling more as needed, but the supply of troops is inexhaustible, as long as just one of them remains alive, and they fight with a blind, savage fanaticism which has lost every trace of the idealism with which he started.

After reading some of the reports of wanton massacre, I have been strongly tempted to double myself into an army, and go out to try to destroy these monsters, but am deterred by one consideration. What is to prevent me from degenerating into their likeness, if I follow their example? Were not these fiends—and not so very long ago—myself?

It is of Interest to note that the calling card of the author of the preceding story reads: “Holley Cantine—Writer ... Agitator . . . Editor . . . Publisher . . . Printer . . . Carpenter & Builder ... Brewer... Trombone & Tuba (funerals a specialty) ... rates on request.” Further investigation by your editor has revealed that Mr. Cantine also lives in a house in the woods which he built himself—for himself, his wife, and child.

Bernard Wolfe’s approach to the Great Deception of the Carbon Copy lies clearly across the nebulous and shifting line that currently divides the possible from the distinctly improbable. His setting, treatment, and outcome all differ radically from Mr. Cantine’s. I cannot vouch for Mr. Wolfe’s experience with demons, imps, or well-dwellers in general, but his Mexican background should be authentic: his eminently readable biography of Leon Trotsky came out of the years he spent in Mexico as Trotsky’s secretary. He is also the author of the memorable s-f novel, “Limbo.”