"Of course. Are you?"
"I think so. What were you getting at, Tinker? Let's start all over
again."
"You were here an hour ago to bid me hello. We enjoyed our reunion
immensely and affectionately. Then you said you were going home to
change your suit--which you have done. Now you come in, acting as
though this were the first time you'd seen me since Tony and I took off
for Titan three months ago."
Cal growled in his throat.
"What did you say?" asked Tinker.
"Benj."
"Benj! Oh no!"
"I haven't been here before. He's my ... my--"
"I know," said Tinker softly, putting a hand on his. "But no one would
dream of masquerading as anyone else. That's unspeakable!"
"It's ghastly! The idea is beyond revolting. But, Tinker, Benj Blair is
revolting--or worse. We hate each other--"
"I know." Tinker shuddered and made a face that might have resulted
from tasting something brackish and foul. "_Ugh!_ I'm sorry, Cal."
"I'm raving mad! That dupe!"
"Cal--never say that word again. Not about your twin brother."
"Look, my neuropsychiatristic female, I'm as stable as any twin could
be. Dwelling on the subject of duplication is something I won't do. But
the foul, rotten trick. What was he after, Tink?"
"Nothing, apparently. Just up to deviltry."
"Deviltry is fun. He was up to something foul. Imagine anyone trying to
take another's identity. That's almost as bad as persona duplication."
Tinker went pale, and agreed. "Theft of identity--I imagine that Benj
was only trying to be the stinker he is supposed to be. That was a
rotten trick"--Tinker wiped her lips, applied neoform on a cello-cotton
pad and sterilized them thoroughly--"to play on a girl." She looked at
the pad and tossed it into the converter chute. "A lot of good that
will do. Like washing your hands after touching a criminal. Symbolic--"
"Tinker, I feel cheated."
"And I feel defiled. Come here, Cal." The result of his approach was
enough to wipe almost anything from the minds of both. It went a long
way towards righting things, but it was not enough to cover the depths
of their mental nausea at the foul trick. That would take years--and
perhaps blood--to wash away.
* * * * *
"Hello, Cal," she said, as they parted.
"I'm glad you're back."
"I know," she laughed. "Only Dr. Tinker Elliott could drag Specialist
Calvin Blair into anything resembling a hospital, let alone a
neurosurgical laboratory."
"Wild horses couldn't," he admitted.
"That's a left-handed compliment, but I'll treasure it--with my left
hand," she promised.
"Benj--and I can speak without foaming at the mouth now--couldn't have
played that trick on you if you'd seen me during the last three months."
"True. Three months' absence from you made his disguise perfect. I'd
forgotten just enough. The rotter must have studied ... no, he's an
identical twin, isn't he?"
"Right," gritted Cal. "But look, Tinker. This is no place to propose.
But why not have me around all the time?"
"Nice idea," said Tinker dreamily. "You'll come along with us on the
next expedition, of course?"
"You'll not go," said Cal.
"Now we're at the same old impasse. We've come up against it for three
years, Cal."
"But why?"
"Tony and I promised ourselves that we'd solve this mystery before we
quit."
Cal snorted. "You've been following in the footsteps of medical men who
haven't solved Makin's Disease in the last hundred years. You might
never solve it."
"Then you'll have to play my way, Cal."
"You know my opinion on that."
"You persist in putting me over a barrel, Cal. I think a lot of you.
Enough--and forgive me for thinking it--to ignore the fact that you are
a twin. But I'll not marry you unless we can be together--somehow.
I love surgery and medical research. I like adventuring into strange
places and seeking the answer to strange things. Tony is my ideal and
he loves this life too, as did our father. It's in our blood, Tony's
and mine, and saying so isn't going to remove it."
Cal nodded glumly. "Don't change," he said firmly. "Not willingly.
I'm not going to be the guy to send someone to a psychiatrist to have
his identity worked over. I've been hoping that you'd get your fill
of roistering all over the Solar System, looking for rare bugs and
viruses. I've almost been willing to get some conditioning myself so
that I could join you--but you know what that would mean."
"Poor Cal," said Tinker softly. "You do love me. But Cal, don't you
change either! Understand? If you change your identity, you'll not be
the Cal I love. If the change comes normally, good and well, but I'll
not have an altered personality for my husband. You love your ciphers
and your codes and your cryptograms. You are a romanticist, Cal, and
you stick to the rapier and the foil."
"Excepting that I get accused of cowardice every now and then," snorted
Blair.
"Cowardice?"
"I've a rather quiet nature, you know. Nothing really roils me except
Benj and his tricks. So I don't go around insulting people. I've been
able to talk a lot of fights away by sheer reasoning, and when the
battle is thrust upon me, I choose the rapier. There's been criticism,
Tink, because some have backed out rather than cross rapiers with me,
and those that do usually get pinked. I've been accused of fighting my
own game."
"That's smart. That's your identity, Cal, and don't let them ridicule
you into trying drillers."
"I won't. I can't shoot the side of a wall with a needle beam."
"Stay as you are, Cal."
"But that's no answer. You like space flying. I hate space flying. You
love medicine and neurosurgery. I hate the smell of neoform. I hate
space and I hate surgery--and you love 'em both. To combine them? To
call them Life? No man in his right mind would do that. No, Tinker,
I'll have nothing to do with either!"
* * * * *
_The ghost of Hellion Murdoch, pirate, adventurer, and neurosurgeon
stirred in his long, long sleep. Pirates never die, they merely join
their fellows in legend and in myth, and through their minions--the
historians and novelists--their heinous crimes are smoothed over, and
they become uninhibited souls that fought against the fool restrictions
placed upon them by a rotten society._
_Hellion Murdoch had joined his fellows, Captain Kidd, Henry Morgan,
Dick Turpin, and Robin Hood three hundred and fifty years ago. And like
them, he went leaving a fabulous treasure buried somewhere. This came
to be known to all as Murdoch's Hoard, and men sought up and down the
Solar System for it, but it was never found._
_But the words of Cal Blair aroused the ghost of Hellion Murdoch. He
listened again as the words echoed and re-echoed through the halls of
his pirate's citadel in the hereafter. The same halls rang with his
roaring laughter as he heard Calvin Blair's words. He sprang to his
feet, and raced with the speed of thought to a mail chute._
_With his toe, the ghost of Hellion Murdoch dislodged a small
package from where it had lain for years. With his ghostly pencil,
he strengthened certain marks, plying the pencil with the skill of a
master-counterfeiter. The stamp was almost obliterated by the smudged
and unreadable cancellation. The addressee was scrawled and illegible,
but the address was still readable. Water had done its job of work on
the almost imperishable wrapper and ink of the original, and when the
ghostly fingers of Hellion Murdoch were through, the package looked
like a well-battered bundle, treated roughly by today's mail._
_With his toe, he kicked it, and watched it run through the automatic
carrier along the way to an operating post office. It came to light,
and the delivery chute in Cal Blair's apartment received the package in
the due course of time._
* * * * *
Cal Blair looked at the package curiously. He hadn't ordered anything.
He was expecting nothing by mail. The postmark--completely smudged. He
paid no attention to the stamp, which might have given him to think.
The address? The numbers were fairly plain and they were his, Cal
Blair's. The name was scrawled, and the wrapping was scratched across
the name. Obviously some sharp corner of another package had scratched
it off.
He inspected the package with the interest of a master cryptologist,
and then decided that opening the package was the only way to discover
the identity of the owner. Perhaps inside would be a packing slip or
something that might be traced--
Paper hadn't changed much in the last five hundred years, he thought
ruefully. At least, not the kind of paper this was wrapped in. No
store, of course. Someone sending something almost worthless, no doubt,
and wrapping it in the first piece of paper that was handy. He tore the
wrapping carefully, and set it aside for future study.
Inside the package was a tin box, and inside the box was a small cross
standing on a toroidal base. The whole trinket stood two inches tall,
and the crossarms were proportional--though they were cylindrical in
cross-section instead of rectangular.
It would have made a nice ornament for an altar, or a religious
person's desk except for the tiny screw-stud that projected out of the
center of the bottom. That prevented it from standing. Other taped
holes in this flat base aroused his attention.
"This is no ornament," said Cal Blair, aloud. "No mere ornament would
require that rugged mounting."
There seemed to be some microscopic engravings around the surface of
the toroid. Cal set up the microscope and looked. Characters in the
solarian were there, micro-engraved to perfection. But they were in no
order. They had a randomness that would have made no sense to any but
a master cryptologist--a specialist. To Cal Blair they took on a vague
pattern that might be wishful thinking, and yet his reason told him
that men do not microengrave things just to ornament them. A cipher it
must be by all logic.
He was about to take it into the matter-converter and enlarge it
mechanically, when he decided that it might spoil the things for the
owner if he did and was not able to return it to the exact size. He
decided on photographs.
Fully three hours later, Cal Blair had a complete set of photographic
enlargements of the microengravings.
Then with the patience and skill of the specialist cryptologist, Cal
Blair started to work on the characters.
The hours passed laboriously. The wastebasket filled with scrawled
sheets of paper, and mathematical sequences. Letters and patterns grew
beneath his pencil, and were discarded. Night passed, and the dawn
grayed in the east. The sun rose, and cast its rays over Cal's desk,
and still he worked on, completely lost in his work.
And then he looked startled, snapped his fingers, and headed across
the room for an old book. It was a worthless antique, made by the
reproducer in quantity. It was a Latin dictionary.
Latin. A dead and forgotten language.
Only his acquaintance with the folks at the Solarian Medical
Association could have given him the key to recognition. He saw one
word there, and it clicked. And then for four solid hours he cross
checked and fought the Latin like a man working a crossword puzzle
in an unknown language, matching the characters with those in the
dictionary.
But finally the message was there before him in characters that he
could read. It was clear and startling.
"The Key to Murdoch's Hoard!" breathed Cal Blair. "The fabulous
treasure of the past! This trinket is the Key to Murdoch's Hoard!"
A cavity resonator and antenna system, it was. The toroid base was
the cavity resonator, and the cross was the feedline and dipole
antenna. Fitted into the proper parabolic reflector and shock
excited periodically, it would excite a similar antenna at the
site of Murdoch's Hoard. This would continue to oscillate for many
milli-seconds after the shock-excitation. If the Key were switched
to a receiving system--a detector--the answering oscillation
of the sympathetic system would act as a radiator. Directive
operation--scanning--of the parabolic reflector would give directive
response, leading the user to the site of Murdoch's Hoard.
How men must have fought to find Murdoch's Hoard in the days long past!
* * * * *
Cal Blair considered the Key. It would lead him to nothing but
roistering and space travel and the result would be no gain. Yet there
was a certain scientific curiosity in seeing whether his deciphering
had been correct. Not that he doubted it, but the idea sort of
intrigued him.
The project was at least _unique_.
He looked up the history of the gadget in an ancient issue of the
Interplanetary Encyclopedia and came up with the following description:
Murdoch's Hoard: An unknown treasure said to be cached by the
pirate Hellion Murdoch. This treasure is supposed to have been
collected by Murdoch during his years as an illegal neurosurgeon.
For listings of Murdoch's better known contributions to medicine,
see.... (A list of items filled half a page at this point, which
Cal Blair skipped.)
Murdoch's Hoard is concealed well, and has never been found. The
Key to Murdoch's Hoard was a minute cavity resonator and antenna
system which would lead the user to the cache. No one has been able
to make the Key function properly, and no one was ever able to
break the code, which was engraved around the base.
The value of the Key is doubtful. Though thousands of identical
Keys were made on the Franks-Channing matter reproducer, no
scientist has ever succeeded in getting a response. Engravings on
the base are obviously a code of some sort giving instructions as
to the use of the Key, but the secret of the code is no less
obscure than the use of the Key itself. The original may be
identified by a threaded stud protruding from the bottom. This stud
was eliminated in the reproduction since it interfered with the
upright position of the Key when used as an ornament. The original
was turned over to the Interplanetary Museum at the time of
Channing's death from which place it has disappeared and has been
rediscovered several times. At the present time, the original Key
to Murdoch's Hoard is again missing, it having been stolen out of
the Museum for the seventeenth time in three hundred years.
Cal smiled at the directions again. He envisioned the years of
experimentation that had gone on with no results. The directions told
why. Without them, its operation was impossible. And yet it was so
simple.
The idea of owning contraband bothered Cal. It belonged to the
Interplanetary Museum, by rights. It would be returned. Of that, Cal
was definite. But some little spark of curiosity urged him not to
return it right away. He would return it, but it had been gone for
several years and a few days more would make no difference. He was far
from the brilliant scientist--any of the engineers of the long-gone
Venus Equilateral Relay Station would have shone like a supernova
against his own dim light. But he, Cal Blair, had the answer and they
did not.
But it was more to prove the correctness of his own ability as
cryptographer that he took on the job of making the little Key work.
The job took him six weeks. An expert electronics engineer would have
done it in three days, but Cal had no laboratory filled with equipment.
He had neither laboratory technique nor instruments nor a great store
of experience. He studied books. He extracted a mite of information
here and a smidgin there, and when he completed the job, his equipment
was a mad scramble of parts. Precision rubbed elbows with sloppiness,
for unlike the trained technician, Cal did not know which circuits to
let fly and which circuits needed the precise placing. He found out
by sheer out-and-try and by finally placing everything with care. The
latter did not work too good, but continuous delving into the apparatus
disrupted some of the lesser important lines to the point where their
randomness did not cause coupling. The more important lines complained
in squeals of oscillation when displaced, and Cal was continually
probing into the gear to find out which wire was out of place.
He snapped the main switch one evening six weeks later. With childlike
enthusiasm he watched the meters register, compared notes and decided
that everything was working properly. His testing equipment indicated
that he was operating the thing properly--at least in accordance with
the minute engravings on the side.
But with that discovery--that his rig functioned--there came a
let-down. It was singularly unexciting. Meters indicated, the filaments
of the driver tubes cast a ruddy glow behind the cabinet panel, a few
ill-positioned pilot lamps winked, and the meter at the far end of
the room registered the fact that he was transmitting and was being
detected. It was a healthy signal, too, according to the meter, but it
was both invisible and inaudible as well as not affecting the other
senses in any way.
Now that he had it, what could he use it for?
Treasure? Of what use could treasure be in this day and age? With the
Channing-Franks matter reproducer, gold or any rare element could be
synthesized by merely introducing the proper heterodyning signal. Money
was not metal any more. Gold was in extensive use in electrical works
and platinum came in standard bars at a solarian credit each. Stable
elements up to atomic weights of six or seven hundred had been made and
investigated. A treasure trove was ridiculous. Of absolutely no value.
The day of the Channing-Franks development was after the demise of
Hellion Murdoch. And it was after the forty years known as the Period
of Duplication that Identium was synthesized and became the medium
of exchange. Since identium came after Murdoch's demise by years,
obviously Murdoch's Hoard could only be a matter of worthless coin,
worthless jewels, or equally worthless securities.
Money had become a real medium of exchange. Now it was something that
did away with going to the store for an egg's worth of mustard.
So Cal Blair felt a let-down. With his problem solved, there was
no more to it, and that was that. He smiled. He'd send the Key to
Murdoch's Hoard to the museum.
And, furthermore, let them seek Murdoch's Hoard if they wanted to.
Doubtless they would find some uniques there. A pile of ancient coins
would be uniques, all right. But the ancient papers and coins and
jewels would not be detectable from any of the duplicates of other
jewels and coins of that period that glutted the almost-abandoned
museum.
* * * * *
Benj Blair snarled at the man in front of him. "You slinking dupe! You
can't get away with that!"
The man addressed blanched at the epithet and hurled himself headlong
at Benj. Cal's twin brother callously slipped a knife out of his belt
and stabbed down on the back of his attacker. It was brutal and bloody,
and Benj kicked the dead man back with a lifted knee and addressed the
rest of the mob.
"Now look," he snarled, "it is not smart. This loke thought he could
counterfeit. He's a dead idiot now. And anybody that tries to make
identium in this station or any place that can be traced to any one of
us will be treated likewise. Get me?"
There was a growl of absolute assent from the rest.
"Is there anyone who doesn't know why?"
"I'm dumb," grinned a man in the rear. "Make talk, Benj."
"O.K.," answered Benj. "Identium is a synthetic element. It is composed
of a strictly unstable atom that is stabilized electronically.
It starts off all right, but at the first touch of the scanning
beam in the matter-converter, it becomes unstable and blows in a
fission-reaction. Limpy, there, tried it once and it took his arm and
leg. The trouble with identium explosions is the fact that the torn
flesh is sort of seared and limb-grafting isn't perfect. That's why
Limpy is Limpy. Then, to make identium, you require a space station in
the outer region. The manufacture of the stuff puts a hellish positive
charge on the station which is equalized by solar radiation in time.
But the station must be far enough out so that the surge inward from
Sol isn't so high that the inhabitants are electrocuted by the change
in charge.
"Any detector worthy of the name will pick it up when in operation at
a half light-year--and the Patrol keeps their detectors running. That
plus the almost-impossible job of getting the equipment to perform the
operation. I'll have no identium experiments here."
A tiny light winked briefly above his head. It came from a dusty piece
of equipment on a shelf. Benj blinked, looked up at the winking light,
and swore.
"Tom!" he snorted. "What in the name of the devil are you doing?"