Copying machines are revolutionizing the way we live. With recording tape plugged into the radio, a person can now create a private musical library far more cheaply than by buying records. With print duplicators, a fetching piece of writing can be quickly reproduced and circulated among hundreds of acquaintances without the expense of paying the writer for his labor.
It is the miracle of the loaves and the fishes made commonplace, and naturally it creates problems. The Journal of the American Duplicating Association reports a typical copying problem experienced by Myra Goltz in one of the Midwestern states.
Mrs. Goltz was so fond of her husband, Hector, that she had four copies of him run off on an experimental machine under development by Spectronics Laboratories. Since the machine is still imperfect, the four additional Hectors were blurred somewhat around the edges and the color was slightly off.
Hector did not resent this. He was, after all, such a splendid husband that he rarely made a fuss about trivialities. He was such a splendid husband, in fact, that Mrs. Goltz was the envy of all the women in town, both nubile and long-married.
Women whose husbands came to the dinner table in their undershirts, snored through the Miss America pageant on television and said that a woman’s place was in the home were galled to see Mrs. Goltz suddenly blessed with Hectors four time over.
Inevitably, while counting her Hectors one night at bedtime, Mrs. Goltz had noticed one was missing. He was not one of the better copies, having come off the machine with a decidedly green tinge to his cheeks and a badly blurred nose. When Mrs. Goltz learned that a divorcee in the next block had left town hurriedly during the night, she was not alarmed.
“Nothing to worry about,” she told the four remaining Hectors at breakfast next morning. “With those green cheeks and that blurred nose, the stolen Hector will be duck soup for the police to locate before the day is out.”
It was not the case. The divorcee took him in disguise to Nervtron, the giant Texas conglomerate which had been developing a high-resolution horse-copying machine. Its plan was to copy the ten fastest horses on the continent and give Nervtron’s sagging stock a shot in the arm by cleaning up at the racetrack.
The engineer in charge of the project was the divorcee’s former husband. In return for being relieved of alimony, he agreed to see if the new horse-copying process could be used to reproduce the stolen Hector in natural color with a neat nose.
When the divorcee picked up the finished copy, she was delighted. His color and nose were so good that Mrs. Goltz herself could not have distinguished him from the original Hector. It was only later that the divorcee discovered the one flaw in the job. Her brand-new Hector with the wonderful color and nose also came with a full-length horse tail.
Severe cropping and some restitching in Hector’s trouser seat dealt very nicely with this difficulty, and the divorcee lived happily ever after, as all wives blessed with a Hector were bound to do.
Unbeknownst to her, however, the engineer had been so entranced by the spectacle of a perfect husband that he had run off several thousand copies, thinking they would make nice presents to his women acquaintances for Christmas and birthdays. The expense of feeding them, however, soon became intolerable. Moreover, the sound of horse tails slapping at flies and mosquitoes kept him awake at night, and he soon turned them loose.
Thinking as one—they were all copies of the same Hector, after all—they slowly gravitated over the years back toward their old hometown for a look at the old homestead.
Mrs. Goltz was out of the country, seeing the Yucatan with the original Hector. Her three remaining copies had long since been hauled off in the night by marriageable women. Imagine her surprise, on returning, to find half the marrying female population of the town enjoying bliss with Hectors.
And such beautiful Hectors. Their charm was not simply in the rich, gracious swelling with which they filled the seats of their trousers. Whereas her own Hector had gone a bit gray and extraneous around the abdomen with the passing years, these were crisp, taut, young Hectors remembered from the early days of marriage when her own Hector was so splendid that she had made four copies of him.
Mrs. Goltz became disgruntled with her own Hector and furious with the women of the town. What right did they have to salad-days Hectors while she, Mrs. Goltz, was left with nothing but the eroding original? Her unhappiness infected the original Hector, who died of a broken heart.
His obituary observed that he had been famous throughout the country as the only Hector in the region to lack a horse tail.