There was another, longer gasp and the sound of footsteps receding hurriedly.
“That’s one clever way to handle a situation,” Sam’s facsimile exploded. “Couldn’t you keep your mouth shut? The poor woman’s probably gone off to have a fit.”
“You forget that this is my room and you are just an experiment that went wrong,” Sam told him hotly. “I have just as much right, in fact more right… hey, what do you think you’re doing?”
The other had thrown open the closet door and was stepping into a pair of pants. “Just getting dressed. You can wander around in the nude if you find it exciting, but I want to look a bit respectable.”
“I undressed to take my measurements… or your measurements. Those are my clothes, this is my room—”
“Look, take it easy. You could never prove it in a court of law. Don’t make me go into that cliché about what’s yours is mine and so forth.”
Heavy feet resounded through the hall. They stopped outside the room. Cymbals seemed to clash all around them and there was a panic-stricken sense of unendurable heat. Then shrill echoes fled into the distance. The walls stopped shuddering.
Silence and a smell of burning wood.
They whirled in time to see a terribly tall, terribly old man in a long black overcoat walking through the smoldering remains of the door. Much too tall for the entrance, he did not stoop as he came in; rather, he drew his head down into his garment and shot it up again. Instinctively, they moved close together.
His eyes, all shiny black iris without any whites, were set back deep in the shadow of his head. They reminded Sam Weber of the scanners on the Biocalibrator: they tabulated, deduced, rather than saw.
“I was afraid I would be too late,” he rumbled at last in weird, clipped tones. “You have already duplicated yourself, Mr. Weber, making necessary unpleasant rearrangements. And the duplicate has destroyed the disassembleator. Too bad. I shall have to do it manually. An ugly job.”
He came further into the room until they could almost breathe their fright upon him. “This affair has already dislocated four major programs, but we had to move in accepted cultural grooves and be absolutely certain of the recipient’s identity before we could act to withdraw the set. Mrs. Lipanti’s collapse naturally stimulated emergency measures.”
The duplicate cleared his throat. “You are—”
“Not exactly human. A humble civil servant of precision manufacture. I am Census Keeper for the entire twenty-ninth oblong. You see, your set was intended for the Thregander children who are on a field trip in this oblong. One of the Threganders who has a Weber chart requested the set through the chrondromos which, in an attempt at the supernormal, unstabled without carnuplicating. You therefore received the package instead. Unfortunately, the unstabling was so complete that we were forced to locate you by indirect methods.”
The Census Keeper paused and Sam’s double hitched his pants nervously. Sam wished he had anything—even a fig leaf—to cover his nakedness. He felt like a character in the Garden of Eden trying to build up a logical case for apple-eating. He appreciated glumly how much more than “Bild-A-Man” sets clothes had to do with the making of a man.
“We will have to recover the set, of course,” the staccato thunder continued, “and readjust any discrepancies it has caused. Once the matter has been cleared up, however, your life will be allowed to resume its normal progression. Meanwhile, the problem is, which of you is the original Sam Weber?”
“I am,” they both quavered—and turned to glare at each other.
“Difficulties,” the old man rumbled. He sighed like an arctic wind. “I always have difficulties! Why can’t I ever have a simple case like a carnuplicator?”
“Look here,” the duplicate began. “The original will be—”
“Less unstable and of better emotional balance than the replica,” Sam interrupted. “Now, it seems—”
“That you should be able to tell the difference,” the other concluded breathlessly. “From what you see and have seen of us, can’t you decide which is the more valid member of society?”
What a pathetic confidence, Sam thought, the fellow was trying to display! Didn’t he know he was up against someone who could really discern mental differences? This was no fumbling psychiatrist of the present; here was a creature who could see through externals to the most coherent personality beneath.
“I can, naturally. Now, just a moment.” He studied them carefully, his eyes traveling with judicious leisure up and down their bodies. They waited, fidgeting, in a silence that pounded.
“Yes,” the old man said at last. “Yes. Quite.”
He walked forward.
A long thin arm shot out.
He started to disassemble Sam Weber.
“But listennnnn—” began Weber in a yell that turned into a high scream and died in a liquid mumble.
“It would be better for your sanity if you didn’t watch,” the Census Keeper suggested.
The duplicate exhaled slowly, turned away and began to button a shirt. Behind him the mumbling continued, rising and falling in pitch.
“You see,” came the clipped, rumbling accents, “it’s not the gift we’re afraid of letting you have—it’s the principle involved. Your civilization isn’t ready for it. You understand.”
“Perfectly,” replied the counterfeit Sam Weber, knotting Aunt Maggie’s blue and red tie.
Afterword
“Child’s Play” was my second published story and what might possibly be called my first science-fiction “success.” John Campbell accepted it for Astounding the day he received it; Ted Sturgeon asked to be my agent when I showed him the story’s carbon copy; it was the first piece by me to be anthologized (science-fiction anthologies were very rare birds in the 1940s) and it was to be anthologized many more times; finally, and almost miraculously, Clifton Fadiman went out of his way to say something nice about the story in the book review section of The New Yorker.
I started “Child’s Play” while I was a purser on a cargo ship, early in 1946. My brother had sent me the May issue of Astounding, containing my first published story, “Alexander the Bait,” and when it arrived in the port of Antwerp, Belgium, I showed it around quite proudly. My fellow officers, however, wondered why I made such a fuss over a printed tale by someone called William Tenn; again and again, I had to explain the concept of a pen name.
After many explanations they seemed to accept the idea, and the first mate suggested we go into Antwerp that night and have “a beer or two” to celebrate. I felt I had to agree, even though I had been warned by the radio operator that from the beginning of the voyage the three mates had been arguing over just how drunk they could get the Jewish purser.
I don’t know which of them won, but we all got back to the ship utterly, thoroughly, overwhelmingly soused. The first mate carried me up the Jacob’s ladder upside down with my legs locked around his neck and the rest of me over his shoulders. He took me to the purser’s cabin and dumped me in a chair in front of my typewriter desk. “If you are really William Tenn and can write stories that get published,” he said, waving a wobbly forefinger in the air, “prove it. Write one now.”
With the immense dignity of total drunkenness, I said, “I’ll do that. You just sit down here and just watch me do it.” He sat on my bunk and bleared at me.
I typed four pages and had to go to the toilet. When I came back he was sound asleep on my bunk, fully clothed, occupying all of it. He was an enormous Norwegian and there was no chance of moving him even a little. I staggered back to the chair, cradled my arms around the typewriter, and went out cold.