“That’s where I met Imogene.”
“Your girlfriend?” asked Thana with possibly exaggerated casualness.
“No,” said Link. “Oh, for a while I suppose you’d say she was. I wanted to marry her. I don’t know why. It seemed like a good idea at the time. But she asked me businesslike questions about did I have any property anywhere and what were my prospects, and so on. She said we were congenial enough, but marriage was a girl’s career and one had to know all the facts before deciding anything so important. Very pretty girl, though,” said Link.
Thana removed the assortment of stones that still again had been proved to contain no metalliferous steel-hardening alloy. She put in more. Among the ones to be tested this time there was a sample of a peach-colored rock he’d noted earlier as familiar. Link stiffened for a moment. Then he reached inside his shirt and into a pocket of his stake-belt. By feeling only, he selected a small, gritty crystal. He placed it beside the sample knife.
The dais and the chair-of-state descended. He waited for it to rise up again.
“What happened?” asked Thana. Again she was unconvincingly casual.
“Oh,” said Link, “I went back to where I was lodging and counted up my assets. I’d been toying with the idea of going to Glaeth to get rich. I had enough for that and about two thousand credits over. So I bought the necessary tickets and stuff, and reserved a place on a spaceship leaving that afternoon. Then I went to a florist.”
Thana said blankly:
“Why?”
“I wanted to put her on ice.”
The duplier came up. An irregular lump of grayish-black rock had visibly disintegrated. It was not all gone, but a good tenth of its substance had disappeared. There were glittering scales to prove its crumbling. The peach-colored stone had dropped a fine dust, too.
“This looks promising!” said Link.
He tested the edge of the duplied knife. It was excellent, equivalent to the original. It should have been. Tungsten steel does take a good edge, and hold it, too. He handed the knife to Thana, and fumbled in the bottom of the product hopper. There was a small, very bright crystal there. He picked it up, together with the other sample crystal from his stake-belt. Very, very calmly he put two gritty crystals into the stake-belt pocket from which he’d extracted one. Thana held the duplied but this time tungsten-steel knife. She should have been enraptured. But instead she asked, almost urgently:
“Why did you go to a florist?”
“I bought two thousand credits worth of flowers,” said Link. “I ordered them delivered to Imogene. They’d fill every room in her parents’ home with some left over to hang out the windows. I wrote a note with them, bidding her good-bye.”
Thana stared at him with a remarkable amount of interest.
“She wanted a rich husband and I hated to disappoint her,” he explained. “And also, there was a chance that I might get rich on Glaeth. So I told her in my note that my multi-millionaire father had consented for me to roam the galaxy until I could find a girl who would love me for myself alone, not knowing of his millions. And I’d found her. And she was the only woman I could ever love. It was a fairly long note,” Link added.
“But… but—”
“I said I was going away for a year to see if I could live without her. If I couldn’t—even though she considered my father’s millions—I’d come back and sadly ask her to marry me though my father’s millions counted. If I could, I said, I’d spend the rest of my life exploring strange planets and brooding because the one woman I could love could not love me for myself, as I loved her. A very nice piece of romantic literature.”
Thana said blankly, “Then what?”
Harl appeared for the second time in the doorway. He wad enraged. His hands were clenched. He scowled formidably.
“They wouldn’t let my fella ride through,” he said in an ominous tone. “They bit his unicorn’s heels. They’d ha’ pulled it down and him too! So he came back. Uffts never dared try a trick like that before! Not in this household! An’ they never will again!”
“What—”
“I’m going to duply that gun you used last night, Link,” said Harl ferociously, “and me and a bunch of my fellas will go out an’ sting them up like you did, only plenty! When uffts say a man’s got to be hung and a householder can’t send a message, that ain’t just no manners! That’s… that’s—”
He stopped, at a loss for a word to express behavior more reprehensible than bad manners. Link noted that on Sord Three “manners” had come to imply all that was admirable, as in other places and other times words like “honor” and “intellectual” and “piety” and “patriotic” had become synonyms for “good.” And, as in those other cases, something was missing. But he said, “Thana and I already tried duplying it, Harl. The duplied one doesn’t work, just as duplied knives don’t hold an edge.”
Harl stared at him.
“Sput! Y’sure?”
“Quite sure,” said Link. “We solved the problem of the knife, but the raw material to make a duplied stun gun is rare everywhere. We haven’t got it and I wouldn’t know it if I saw it.”
Harl said “Sput!” again, and began to pace up and down. After a minute and more he said bitterly:
“I’m not goin’ to let my Household starve! So far’s I know no man has ever killed an ufft in a hundred years. They act crazy, but they can’t hold a spear to fight with, even if they could make ’em. So it’d be a disgrace to use a spear on them. But it’d be a disgrace to hang a man just because the uffts wanted him hung! And to let ’em search our houses any time they felt like it, just because they can’t fight! Anyhow I’m not goin’ to let my household go hungry because uffts say they’ve got to!”
He stamped his feet. He ground his teeth. He started for the doorway. Link said:
“Hold it, Harl! I’ve got an idea. You don’t want to use spears on uffts.”
“I got to!”
“No. And if you use the only stun gun on the planet, it’ll make them madder than ever.”
“Can I help that?”
“You don’t even want them to stop trading with your Household, greenstuff for beer.”
“I want,” said Harl savagely, “for things to be like they was in the old days, when the old folks were polite to the uffts and the uffts to them! When humans didn’t need uffts and tools were good and knives were sharp.”
“And everybody had beans for breakfast,” Link finished for him. “But I’ve got an idea, Harl. Uffts like speeches.” Harl scowled at him.
“They like my speeches,” added Link.
Harl’s scowl did not diminish.
“I,” said Link, “will go out and make a speech to them. If they won’t listen, I’ll high-tail it back. But if they do listen I’ll gather them in a splendid public meeting with a program and orations about… oh, work hours and fringe benefits or something like that. I’ll organize them into committees. Then I’ll adjourn them to a more convenient place.”
Harl said cagily, “Then what?”
“They’ll have adjourned away from any place near your Household, and you and your forty or fifty unicorns can go guesting and come back with your food. And,” said Link, “meanwhile the uffts will be talking. And talking is thirsty work. That will be an urge toward negotiations by which the uffts can get themselves some beer.”
Harl continued to frown, but not as deeply. After a time he said heavily, “It might fix things for now. But things are bad, Link, an’ they keep gettin’ worse. This’d be only for right now.”
“Ah!” said Link briskly. “Just what I was coming to! In your guesting, Harl, you will talk to your hosts about the good old days. You’ll point out how superior they were to now. You’ll propose an assembly of Householders to organize for the bringing back of the Good Old Days. That, all by itself, is a complete program for a political party of wide and popular appeal!”