her forehead and
glanced over at him. She had a narrow, pretty face, marred only by a
suggestion of hardness about the mouth--which was a little more than
ordinarily noticeable just now. Phil decided she felt something like his
own tensions, for identical reasons. He was less certain about Major
Wayne Jackson, a big, loose-jointed man with an easy-going smile and a
pleasantly self-assured voice. The voice might be veering a trifle too
far to the hearty side; but that was all.

"I didn't," Celia said. "It belonged to Frank. How he got it shipped in
with him--or after him--from Earth I don't know. He never told me. When
he died a couple of years ago, I took it over."

Phil gazed reflectively at the row of unfamiliar instruments covering
half the table beside her. The "camera" which had taken an imprint of
the Geest gun in Aunt Beulah's living room went with that equipment and
had become an interior section of the largest of the instruments. "What
do you call it?" he asked.

Celia looked irritated. Jackson laughed, said, "Why not tell him? Phil's
feeling like we do--this is the last chance to look everything over,
make sure nobody's slipped up, that nothing can go wrong. Right, Phil?"

Phil nodded. "Something like that."

Celia chewed her lip. "All right," she said. "It doesn't matter, I
suppose--compared with the other." She tapped one of the instruments.
"The set's called a duplicator. This one's around sixty years old.
They're classified as a forgery device, and it's decidedly illegal for a
private person to build one, own one, or use one."

"Why that?"

"Because forgery is ordinarily all they're good for. Frank was one of
the best of the boys in that line before he found he'd been put on an
outtransfer list."

Phil frowned. "But if it can duplicate any manufactured object--"

"It can. At an average expense around fifty times higher than it would
take to make an ordinary reproduction without it. A duplicator's no use
unless you want a reproduction that's absolutely indistinguishable from
the model."

"I see." Phil was silent a moment. "After sixty years--"

"Don't worry, Phil," Jackson said. "It's in perfect working condition.
We checked that on a number of samples."

"How do you know the copies were really indistinguishable?"

Celia said impatiently, "Because that's the way the thing works. When
the Geest gun passed through the model plate, it was analyzed down to
its last little molecule. The duplicat