Over the River and Through the Woods Page 11

  It had been easy, he assured himself, much easier than he had thought. The puudly was dead or dying and the Earth and its millions of unsuspecting citizens were safe, and, best of all, Henderson James was safe…safe from indignity, safe from being stripped naked of the little defenses he had built up through the years to shield him against the public stare. He felt relief flood over him and it left him pulseless and breathless and feeling clean, but weak.

  “You fool,” the dying puudly said, death clouding its words as they built up in his mind. “You fool, you half-thing, you duplicate…”

  It died then and he felt it die, felt the life go out of it and leave it empty.

  He rose softly to his feet and he seemed stunned and at first he thought it was from knowing death, from having touched hands with death within the puudly’s mind.

  The puudly had tried to fool him. Faced with the pistol, it had tried to throw him off his balance to give it the second that it needed to hurl the mind-blasting thought that had caught at the edge of his brain. If he had hesitated for a moment, he knew, it would have been all over with him. If his finger had slacked for a moment, it would have been too late.

  The puudly must have known that he would think of the zoo as the first logical place to look and, even knowing that, it had held him in enough contempt to come here, had not even bothered to try to watch for him, had not tried to stalk him, had waited until he was almost on top of it before it moved.

  And that was queer, for the puudly must have known, with its uncanny mental powers, every move that he had made. It must have maintained a casual contact with his mind every second of the time since it had escaped. He had known that and…wait a minute, he hadn’t known it until this very moment, although, knowing it now, it seemed as if he had always known it.

  What is the matter with me, he thought. There’s something wrong with me. I should have known I could not surprise the puudly, and yet I didn’t know it. I must have surprised it, for otherwise it would have finished me off quite leisurely at any moment after I climbed out of the moat.

  You fool, the puudly had said. You fool, you half-thing, you duplicate…

  You duplicate!

  He felt the strength and the personality and the hard, unquestioned identity of himself as Henderson James, human being, drain out of him, as if someone had cut the puppet string and he, the puppet, had slumped supine upon the stage.

  So that was why he had been able to surprise the puudly!

  There were two Henderson Jameses. The puudly had been in contact with one of them, the original, the real Henderson James, had known every move he made, had known that it was safe so far as that Henderson James might be concerned. It had not known of the second Henderson James that had stalked it through the night.

  Henderson James, duplicate.

  Henderson James, temporary.

  Henderson James, here tonight, gone tomorrow.

  For they would not let him live. The original Henderson James would not allow him to continue living, and even if he did, the world would not allow it. Duplicates were made only for very temporary and very special reasons and it was always understood that once their purpose was accomplished they would be done away with.

  Done away with…those were the words exactly. Gotten out of the way. Swept out of sight and mind. Killed as unconcernedly and emotionlessly as one chops off a chicken’s head.

  He walked forward and dropped on one knee beside the puudly, running his hand over its body in the darkness. Lumps stood out all over it, the swelling buds that now would never break to spew forth in a loathsome birth a brood of puudly pups.

  He rose to his feet.

  The job was done. The puudly had been killed—killed before it had given birth to a horde of horrors.

  The job was done and he could go home.

  Home?

  Of course, that was the thing that had been planted in his mind, the thing they wanted him to do. To go home, to go back to the house on Summit Avenue, where his executioners would wait, to walk back deliberately and unsuspectingly to the death that waited.

  The job was done and his usefulness was over. He had been created to perform a certain task and the task was now performed and while an hour ago he had been a factor in the plans of men, he was no longer wanted. He was an embarrassment and superfluous.

  Now wait a minute, he told himself. You may not be a duplicate. You do not feel like one.

  That was true. He felt like Henderson James. He was Henderson James. He lived on Summit Avenue and had illegally brought to Earth a beast known as a puudly in order that he might study it and talk to it and test its alien reactions, attempt to measure its intelligence and guess at the strength and depth and the direction of its non-humanity. He had been a fool, of course, to do it, and yet at the time it had seemed important to understand the deadly, alien mentality.

  I am human, he said, and that was right, but even so the fact meant nothing. Of course he was human. Henderson James was human and his duplicate would be exactly as human as the original. For the duplicate, processed from the pattern that held every trait and characteristic of the man he was to become a copy of, would differ in not a single basic factor.

  In not a single basic factor, perhaps, but in certain other things. For no matter how much the duplicate might be like his pattern, no matter how full-limbed he might spring from his creation, he still would be a new man. He would have the capacity for knowledge and for thought and in a little time he would have and know and be all the things that his original was…

  But it would take some time, some short while to come to a full realization of all he knew and was, some time to coordinate and recognize all the knowledge and experience that lay within his mind. At first he’d grope and search until he came upon the things that he must know. Until he became acquainted with himself, with the sort of man he was, he could not reach out blindly in the dark and put his hand exactly and unerringly upon the thing he wished.

  That had been exactly what he’d done. He had groped and searched. He had been compelled to think, at first, in simple basic truths and facts.

  I am a man.

  I am on a planet called Earth.

  I am Henderson James.

  I live on Summit Avenue.

  There is a job to do.

  It had been quite a while, he remembered now, before he had been able to dig out of his mind the nature of the job.

  There is a puudly to hunt down and destroy.

  Even now he could not find in the hidden, still-veiled recesses of his mind the many valid reasons why a man should run so grave a risk to study a thing so vicious as a puudly. There were reasons, he knew there were, and in a little time he would know them quite specifically.

  The point was that if he were Henderson James, original, he would know them now, know them as a part of himself and his life, without laboriously searching for them.

  The puudly had known, of course. It had known, beyond any chance of error, that there were two Henderson Jameses. It had been keeping tab on one when another one showed up. A mentality far less astute than the puudly’s would have had no trouble in figuring that one out.

  If the puudly had not talked, he told himself, I never would have known. If it had died at once and not had a chance to taunt me, I would not have known. I would even now be walking to the house on Summit Avenue.

  He stood lonely and naked of soul in the wind that swept across the moated island. There was a sour bitterness in his mouth.

  He moved a foot and touched the dead puudly.

  “I’m sorry,” he told the stiffening body. “I’m sorry now I did it. If I had known, I never would have killed you.”

  Stiffly erect, he moved away.

  He stopped at the street corner, keeping well in the shadow. Halfway down the block, and on the other side, was the house. A light burned in one of the rooms upstairs and another on the post beside the gate that opened into the yard, lighting the walk up to the door.

  Just as if,
he told himself, the house were waiting for the master to come home. And that, of course, was exactly what it was doing. An old lady of a house, waiting, hands folded in its lap, rocking very gently in a squeaky chair…and with a gun beneath the folded shawl.

  His lip lifted in half a snarl as he stood there, looking at the house. What do they take me for, he thought, putting out a trap in plain sight and one that’s not even baited? Then he remembered. They would not know, of course, that he knew he was a duplicate. They would think that he would think that he was Henderson James, the one and only. They would expect him to come walking home, quite naturally, believing he belonged there. So far as they would know, there would be no possibility of his finding out the truth.

  And now that he had? Now that he was here, across the street from the waiting house?

  He had been brought into being, had been given life, to do a job that his original had not dared to do, or had not wanted to do. He had carried out a killing his original didn’t want to dirty his hands with, or risk his neck in doing.

  Or had it not been that at all, but the necessity of two men working on the job, the original serving as a focus for the puudly’s watchful mind while the other man sneaked up to kill it while it watched?

  No matter what, he had been created, at a good stiff price, from the pattern of the man that was Henderson James. The wizardry of man’s knowledge, the magic of machines, a deep understanding of organic chemistry, of human physiology, of the mystery of life, had made a second Henderson James. It was legal, of course, under certain circumstances…for example, in the case of public policy, and his own creation, he knew, might have been validated under such a heading. But there were conditions and one of these was that a duplicate not be allowed to continue living once it had served the specific purpose for which it had been created.

  Usually such a condition was a simple one to carry out, for the duplicate was not meant to know he was a duplicate. So far as he was concerned, he was the original. There was no suspicion in him, no foreknowledge of the doom that was invariably ordered for him, no reason for him to be on guard against the death that waited.

  The duplicate knitted his brow, trying to puzzle it out.

  There was a strange set of ethics here.

  He was alive and he wanted to stay alive. Life, once it had been tasted, was too sweet, too good, to go back to the nothingness from which he had come…or would it be nothingness? Now that he had known life, now that he was alive, might he not hope for a life after death, the same as any other human being? Might not he, too, have the same human right as any other human to grasp at the shadowy and glorious promises and assurances held out by religion and by faith?

  He tried to marshal what he knew about those promises and assurances, but his knowledge was illusive. A little later he would remember more about it. A little later, when the neural bookkeeper in his mind had been able to coordinate and activate the knowledge that he had inherited from the pattern, he would know.

  He felt a trace of anger stir deep inside of him, anger at the unfairness of allowing him only a few short hours of life, of allowing him to learn how wonderful a thing life was, only to snatch it from him. It was a cruelty that went beyond mere human cruelty. It was something that had been fashioned out of the distorted perspective of a machine society that measured existence only in terms of mechanical and physical worth, that discarded with a ruthless hand whatever part of that society had no specific purpose.

  The cruelty, he told himself, was in ever giving life, not in taking it away.

  His original, of course, was the one to blame. He was the one who had obtained the puudly and allowed it to escape. It was his fumbling and his inability to correct his error without help which had created the necessity of fashioning a duplicate.

  And yet, could he blame him?

  Perhaps, rather, he owed him gratitude for a few hours of life at least, gratitude for the privilege of knowing what life was like. Although he could not quite decide whether or not it was something which called for gratitude.

  He stood there, staring at the house. That light in the upstairs room was in the study off the master bedroom. Up there Henderson James, original, was waiting for the word that the duplicate had come home to death. It was an easy thing to sit there and wait, to sit and wait for the word that was sure to come. An easy thing to sentence to death a man one had never seen, even if that man be the walking image of one’s self.

  It would be a harder decision to kill him if you stood face to face with him…harder to kill someone who would be, of necessity, closer than a brother, someone who would be, even literally, flesh of your flesh, blood of your blood, brain of your brain.

  There would be a practical side as well, a great advantage to be able to work with a man who thought as you did, who would be almost a second self. It would be almost as if there were two of you.

  A thing like that could be arranged. Plastic surgery and a price for secrecy could make your duplicate into an unrecognizable other person. A little red tape, some finagling…but it could be done. It was a proposition that Henderson James, duplicate, thought would interest Henderson James, original. Or at least he hoped it would.

  The room with the light could be reached with a little luck, with strength and agility and determination. The brick expanse of a chimney, its base cloaked by shrubs, its length masked by a closely growing tree, ran up the wall. A man could climb its rough brick face, could reach out and swing himself through the open window into the lighted room.

  And once Henderson James, original, stood face to face with Henderson James, duplicate…well, it would be less of a gamble. The duplicate then would no longer be an impersonal factor. He would be a man and one that was very close to his original.

  There would be watchers, but they would be watching the front door. If he were quiet, if he could reach and climb the chimney without making any noise, he’d be in the room before anyone would notice.

  He drew back deeper in the shadows and considered. It was either get into the room and face his original, hope to be able to strike a compromise with him, or simply to light out…to run and hide and wait, watching his chance to get completely away, perhaps to some far planet in some other part of the Galaxy.

  Both ways were a gamble, but one was quick, would either succeed or fail within the hour; the other might drag on for months with a man never knowing whether he was safe, never being sure.

  Something nagged at him, a persistent little fact that skittered through his brain and eluded his efforts to pin it down. It might be important and then, again, it might be a random thing, simply a floating piece of information that was looking for its pigeonhole.

  His mind shrugged it off.

  The quick way or the long way?

  He stood thinking for a moment and then moved swiftly down the street, seeking a place where he could cross in shadow.

  He had chosen the short way.

  The room was empty.

  He stood beside the window, quietly, only his eyes moving, searching every corner, checking against a situation that couldn’t seem quite true…that Henderson James was not here, waiting for the word.

  Then he strode swiftly to the bedroom door and swung it open. His finger found the switch and the lights went on. The bedroom was empty and so was the bath. He went back into the study.

  He stood with his back against the wall, facing the door that led into the hallway, but his eyes went over the room, foot by foot, orienting himself, feeling himself flow into the shape and form of it, feeling familiarity creep in upon him and enfold him in its comfort of belonging.

  Here were the books, the fireplace with its mantel loaded with souvenirs, the easy chairs, the liquor cabinet…and all were a part of him, a background that was as much a part of Henderson James as his body and his inner thoughts were a part of him.

  This, he thought, is what I would have missed, the experience I never would have had if the puudly had not taunted me. I would have died an empty and u
nrelated body that had no actual place in the universe.

  The phone purred at him and he stood there startled by it, as if some intruder from the outside had pushed its way into the room, shattering the sense of belonging that had come to him.

  The phone rang again and he went across the room and picked it up.

  “James speaking,” he said.

  “That you, Mr. James?”

  The voice was that of Anderson, the gardener.

  “Why, yes,” said the duplicate. “Who did you think it was?”

  “We got a fellow here who says he’s you.”

  Henderson James, duplicate, stiffened with fright and his hand, suddenly, was grasping the phone so hard that he found the time to wonder why it did not pulverize to bits beneath his fingers.

  “He’s dressed like you,” the gardener said, “and I knew you went out. Talked to you, remember? Told you that you shouldn’t? Not with us waiting for that…that thing.”

  “Yes,” said the duplicate, his voice so even that he could not believe it was he who spoke. “Yes, certainly I remember talking with you.”

  “But, sir, how did you get back?”

  “I came in the back way,” the even voice said into the phone. “Now what’s holding you back?”

  “He’s dressed like you.”

  “Naturally. Of course he would be, Anderson.”

  And that, to be sure, didn’t quite follow, but Anderson wasn’t too bright to start with and now he was somewhat upset.

  “You remember,” the duplicate said, “that we talked about it.”

  “I guess I was excited and forgot,” admitted Anderson. “You told me to call you, to make sure you were in your study, though. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “You’ve called me,” the duplicate said, “and I am here.”

  “Then the other one out here is him?”

  “Of course,” said the duplicate. “Who else could it be?”

  He put the phone back into the cradle and stood waiting. It came a moment after, the dull throaty cough of a gun.

  He walked to a chair and sank into it, spent with the knowledge of how events had so been ordered that now, finally, he was safe, safe beyond all question.