"AMONG THE BETTER SCIENCE-FICTION NOVELS."
—Wilmington News
"Scientific experiments on the moon and
an accidental lunar explosion that seared the earth triggers
another tale from the imaginative pen of Raymond Z. Gallun, a familiar
name to science-fiction readers.
"The
secret of life and the restoring to the living of victims of the holocaust
initiate a conflict for Ed Dukas, Gallun's scientific pioneer of the future. Restoring persons through scientific methods, personality records
and the memories of near kin, leaves one fatal flaw. They lack one
indefinable quality—a divine spark, perhaps a soul.
"Gallun depicts a struggle between the
restored people and the natural living. Life on the asteroids, thought machines,
a journey to Mars and a star ship expedition to Sirius are woven into the plot.
"PEOPLE
MINUS X is packed with action, science-fiction style."
—Detroit Times
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ray
Gallun's stories have appeared in virtually every science-fiction magazine
known to English-speaking man —Galaxy, Astounding Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Marvel Tales,
Startling Stories, etc.,
etc., plus Collier's,
Family Circle, Utopia (Germany),
and various anthologies.
He
was born in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, in 1910, attended the University of
Wisconsin, and has since spent most of his time, when not writing, traveling
through the U. S., Mexico, Hawaii, Europe, and the Middle East.
He is currently a resident of New York City.
PEOPLE MINUS X
by
RAYMOND Z. GALLUN
ACE BOOKS, INC. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.
Copyright
©, 1957, by Raymond Z. Gallun An Ace Book, by
arrangement with Simon and Schuster, Inc. All Rights Reserved
lest we forget thee, earth
Copyright ©, 1958, by Ace Books, Inc.
Ed Dukas was writing letters. Someone or something was
also writing—unseen but at his elbow. It was perhaps fifteen minutes before he
noticed. Conspicuous at the center of the next blank sheet of paper he reached
for, part of a word was already inscribed:
"Nippe . . ."
The writing was faint and wavering but in the
same shade of blue ink as that in his own pen.
Ed Dukas said
"Hey?" to himself, mildly.
The
frown creases between his hazel eyes deepened. They were evidence of strain
that was not new. The stubby forefinger and thumb of his right hand rubbed
their calloused whorls together. Surprise on his square face gave way to a cool watchfulness that, in the last ten years
of guarded living, had been grimed into his nature. Ed Dukas was now
twenty-two. This era was hurtling and troubled. Since his childhood, Ed had
become acquainted with wonder, beauty, hate, opportunity and disaster on a
cosmic level, luxury, adventure, love. Sometimes he had even found peace of
mind.
He
put down his pen, leaving the letter he had been writing suspended in
mid-sentence:
. .
. Pardon the preaching, Les. Human nature and everything else seems
booby-trapped. They drummed the idea of courage and careful thinking into us at school. Because so much that is new
and changing is a big thing to handle.
Still, we'll have to stick to a course of action.
Now Ed sat with his elbows on his table, that
other, no longer quite blank, sheet of paper held lightly in his hands. He sat
there, a stocky young man, his. hair cut short like a hedge, the clues of his existence around him:
student banners on the walls; a stereoptic picture of his track team—in color
of course; ditto for his astrophysics class; his bookcase; his tiny sensipsych
set; and the delicate instruments that any guy who hoped to reach the next
human goal, the nearer stars, had to leam about.
His girl's picture, part of any youth's pattern of life for the last
three centuries, smiled from beside him on the table. Dark. Strong as girls were apt to be, these days. Beautiful in a rough-hewn way. But even with all that
strength to rely on, he was worried about her more than ever now. Times were
strange. He glanced at her likeness once. Then his gaze bounced back to the
paper in his hands.
His
nerves tingled at the eerie thing that was happening there. He didn't know
whether to feel afraid of it or hopeful. Man was stumbling toward ultimate
mastery of his own flesh and the forces of the universe. But the distance
remained enormous, though technical science was moving forward, perhaps too
swiftly, on all fronts. Part of Ed's fear before the unknown was like the stage
fnght of an inexperienced actor. You never quite knew what was ahead or how to
judge anything strange that you saw.
"Nippe . . ."
At
the end of the line which made the "e" there was a tiny speck of blue ink. Almost imperceptibly, like the minute hand of a
clock, it crept on, curving and looping to form another letter.
"Nipper" the word was now.
This
could be somebody's funny gag, Ed thought. Somebody with a
gadget. The world is full of gadgets these days. Maybe
too full.
It occurred
to him that a pal might be playing a joke
with some simple device bought in a novelty store. But probability leaned
toward something deeper and more costly. Who knew? Someone might have invented
a way to make a man invisible. You didn't deny that anything
could be, any more.
"Speak upl" he ordered softly.
But
no answer came, and his wondering gaze found nothing unusual in the room
around him. He froze. "Nipper." It
could be part of a message, an honest attempt to convey vitally important
information. Or it could be the forerunner of violence aimed in his direction.
Through no fault of his own, he had had enemies for ten years. Tonight they
might really act. To die was still possible. In spite of vitaplasm.
Or the more tedious method that employed natural flesh. Or
the tiny cylinders hidden away in vaults. Lives were now in danger
again. Human, and almost human . . .
For
a moment Ed wanted to give a warning and to call others into consultation. He
wanted to shout, "Dad! Moml Come here!"
He
didn't do so. Between him and the precise, benign personality that he called
Dad there was a gradually growing barrier. And for his mother, beautiful and
young by art and science, he had that feeling of male protectiveness that takes
the form of keeping possible dangers hidden.
Ed
decided to work on his own. Being essentially careful and slow moving when it
came to delicate processes, he had not touched that creeping
droplet of ink. Its secret might thus be destroyed. No, he'd never do a thing
so foolish.
Swiftly he folded the paper and fastened the
writing under his microscope. The ink speck was almost dry now, and nothing was
hidden in it. The line of the writing itself was odd under magnification. Here
and there it showed tiny, irregular dots at spaced intervals, connected by
fine, dragging marks. That was all.
Of
course he realized that Nipper
might be only the first
cryptic word of a message and that he had only to wait and see what would
follow.
Until he began to wait, however, the
significance of the word itself eluded him. A child's nickname was all that it
suggested.
But now his mind bore down on it. And he had
the answer almost at once. A small boy climbing the wall of a
pretty garden. And his casual christening by a
pleasant stranger who met him thus for the first time. Among more vivid
and significant details, the memory of the name itself had been mislaid. But Ed
Dukas knew that in his boyhood one person had always called him Nipper: Uncle
Mitch Prell, and nobody else. Now it seemed like a secret sigii.
Ed
gulped, his reaction suspended somewhere between shocked pleasure and a frosty
sense of eeriness. To have a friend, whom he had loved as a child, vanish into
space and into apparent nonexistence after becoming a fugitive, and then to
have what seemed
to be this friend try to
communicate again after ten years, and in this weird manner—well—how would you
say it? Ghosts, of course, were pure superstition. But in this age one could
still react as if to the supernatural—with tingling hide and quickened heartbeats.
In fact, with the vast growth of technology, more than ever was such a feeling
possible.
"Uncle Mitch!" Ed
Dukas called quietly.
Again
there was no reply. The name on the paper still could be somebody else's trick.
Granger's, maybe. There were ways for him to have
learned a nickname. Many people might admire Granger as much as others despised
him. And it was hard to say what he might do, or when. Or
how, for that matter. He was clever. And wrong.
There
was still another thing to remember. Ed did not altogether
love the memory of his uncle, Dr. Mitchell Prell. For this famous
scientist was marked with the stigma of responsibility for a terrific mishap.
No, Prell did not bear the burden alone. There were other scientists, it was
said, who had poked too roughly, and with too sharp a
stick, into Nature's deepest lair. Nature had snarled back. Ed had grown up
with the public hate that had resulted. He had fought against it, yet he had
felt it, until sometimes he did not know where he himself stood.
Now he waited for more writing to be traced
on the paper under the microscope. A minute passed, but there was nothing more.
He did notice, however, that the letters of that one word matched roughly the
austere handwriting of his uncle.
Once
he glanced toward the window with some nervousness. Outside, the night was
glorious. Never again would nights be hideous as they once had been. He saw
lush gardens under silver light. If any devilish thing not known until recent
months slithered through the shadows, it kept hidden. Ed saw other neighboring
houses. New trees had grown to fair size in ten years. Older and larger trees
remained lopsided and gnarled. But their bum scars had healed.
Otherwise
there was nothing left to monument the past-except, perhaps, the sullen mutter
of voices in nearby streets.
But
Ed Dukas's mind, triggered by the name Nipper and
by awareness of Mitchell Prell, slipped briefly away from the present. He had
often explored memory to find understanding. At school, after the catastrophe,
psychiatrists had made every kid do that. So that neuroses might be broken or
lessened or avoided. So that animal terror would not draw a curtain over a
mental record of an interlude. So that memory might not be lodged, like a red
coal of hysteria, in the subconscious.
Like a trained dog leaping through a flaming
hoop, Ed Dukas's thoughts plunged back to that zone where his earliest memories
faded into the mists of infancy:
A birthday cake with two candles. A fountain splashing in
the patio of this same house. A dachshund, Schnitz,
which a little boy put in almost the same category as the flat, rubber-tired
robots that cleaned the rooms. Where was the distinction between
machines and animals?
Flowers,
hummingbirds, and butterflies in the garden. The echoes of
footsteps on stone floors. Toy space ships and star
ships at Christmas. The star ships were things yet to become real. . .
. There was endless interest in life then. But even in those days there were
signs of cautious and puzzled guidance.
There
was the sensipsych, of course. It was a wonderful box of dark wood in the
living room. A soft couch folded down from it. There you lay, and for a moment
strange golden light flickered into your eyes. You went to sleep, but you did
not really go to sleep. For you became someone else. Maybe a
cartoon character in a world where everything looked different. Funny
things happened to you that frightened you at first; but then you laughed when
you found that there was no harm in them.
Or,
instead of being in such a crazy fairyland, you might be a real boy in space
armor jumping across the surface of a huge chunk of rock called an asteroid,
while stars and a blazing white sun stared at you from blackness. You were very
busy helping others to roof the asteroid with crystal, and to put air
underneath, and to build houses and factories where people might live and work.
Always more and more people spreading out and out to populate the empty worlds
of space.
But
you were never on that sensipsych couch for very long, or too often. You would
wake up, and there was Mom saying, "Enough, fella. A little of that sort
of thing goes a great way, even when the experiences are rugged and educational
and not just whimsical nonsense."
Ed
Dukas would be angry and puzzled. For it had seemed that those visions, going
on without end, could bring joy forever.
"Youll
understand sometime, Eddie," his mother would say, consoling him.
"What happens to you by sensipsych is just make-believe. What we call
recorded sensory experience. Some of it really happened to other people. Some
of it is just made up. It can teach you things. But too much is very bad. Not
so long ago folks found out."
There was something tender and hard and even
scared in his mother's words.
Ed's
dad also had his comments. Dad was something called a minerals expert.
"Come
on, Eddie, let's rassle," he'd say. "Stick your chin out, boy. Let's
see how tough you can look. No, not mean-tough. . . . That's better. We've got
to lick the times we live in. And something in ourselves. With machines doing so much for us, life can
be soft. And sensipsych dreams are soft. Everything in
moderation. Dreams can make you feel as helpless as an oyster. Until you
despise yourself and the whole race. Yes, people found out. They were always
meant to feel strong and proud, and they must have tasks equal to their
increasing powers. Otherwise there's spiritual rot. We've got to be ready for
anything, feel our way, try to be ready to keep our
balance for whatever comes. Because life could be terrible, too, if the
wonderful forces we control got out of hand. We've got
to go on progressing—moving out to the planets, and then maybe the stars. Got
to go either ahead or backward. Can't stand still. And
it's easy to go backward nowadays. Got to fight that, Eddie, or else there
might be a kind of death."
"What is death,
Dad?"
Ed's
father would answer his son's serious expression with a gay grin. "A kind of
myth, now, boy. Just going to sleep and never waking up. We hope it's
mostly finished, for everybody. Even the disease of old age turned out to be
something like rust gathering in a pipe. Simple. It
can be fixed up. Some people even let themselves get old. But they can be made
young again. Always."
Eddie had other questions.
"You
were born in the old way, Eddie," his mother said. "But so many people
are needed now to populate the solar system. So everybody can't be bom from his
mother's body. There's another way; almost the same, really. Babies are
born—they're made, really—in a laboratory. Then they live in a youth center,
like the one on the hill."
Eddie
saw its great white spire looming among the trees. Often he could hear voices
in the gardens and playgrounds on the terraced setbacks of its many levels. The
voices seemed mysterious somehow.
Even
then Eddie sensed the groping and confusion that was in his parents' minds.
Sometimes his mother would speak fervently to his father: "Jack, I'd never
choose to live in another age. I love it. Because it's rich,
endlessly varied, exciting. Is that why I'm often scared out of my
wits? Even disgusted often enough with my selfish self and all the automatic
devices? I love my work, the planning of pleasant interiors. I'm so busy there
doesn't even seem to be time for another child. Yet maybe there are centuries
ahead, Jack. How does one fill centuries without getting fed up? And are we supposed
to be something superhuman in the end? Or do we wind up like the ancient
Martians and the beings of the Asteroid Planet, before it was blown to millions
of pieces? Wiped out in super-conflict, before they could progress very much
further than we are now?"
Most
of this went over Eddie's head. But it left a smoky tension to lurk in his mind
behind the peaceful presence of sun and trees. People had made their world more
beautiful for their own relaxed enjoyment. Yet even in those days Eddie sensed
the turbulent undercurrent deep inside them.
Once
his father expressed a vagrant thought: "Maybe we should go out to Venus
sometime, Eileen. Start life over more simply in an uncrowded planet that's
being conditioned to receive our ancient race. Maybe well do it in just a few
years." He grinned.
"Yes,"
Eddie's mother replied. "If being indefinitely young and
alive doesn't fool us before then. If our complicated civilization
doesn't crack open and spit fire, and vaporize everybody. Death by violence is
still definitely possible. You know, lots of our friends are getting their
bodies and minds recorded so that they can be restored in case of serious injury.
Maybe we should have done it long ago."
Jack
Dukas met her concern with a light tease: "A woman's worry matched
against the stubbornness of a man—eh, Eileen? There's something unnatural about
being recorded that I rebel against. Don't be too troubled, though. The centuries
won't slip from our fingers so immediately. I hardly ever touch a dangerous
thing in my work. Besides, safety devices are almost perfect."
Such
serious, troubled thoughts did not dim the optimism and eagerness of young Ed
Dukas. His private dreams soared into the thrills of Someday. His small hands
were impatient to grasp the shadowy shapes of the future, more legendary than
the not-distant past with its still-living heroes: Roland, who was largely
responsible for the rejuvenation process; Schaef-fer, who developed the
sensipsych, brought on the dreamworld period of decay, and in the end helped
Harwell defeat the trap of emasculating visions by urging mankind back toward
a vigorous grip on reality; and the hundreds of others who had taken part.
But
the first visit of Mitchell Prell, when Ed Dukas was five, was, to the boy,
like acquaintance with a legend. "Hi, Nipper!" were the first words
his uncle had spoken to Eddie. Dr. Mitchell Prell was his mother's brother. He
was a much smaller man than Eddie's dad, and dark instead of blond. He was
famous. And he brought gifts.
"A
piece of the Moon, Nipper," he said. "An opal imbedded naturally in
gold. For your mom. And this case of instruments dug
up in Martian ruins, for your dad. Fifty million years old but better than
anything designed by human beings for locating ores far underground. And this for you—also from Mars. I haven't been there for a
long time. But I got an old friend to send me the stuff—to the labs on the
Moon."
Maybe
Eddie's gift had once been a toy for the off-spring of extinct Martian
monsters. It was triangular like a kite, metallic, with a faint lavender sheen.
When you whistled a certain
way, a jet of air made it rise high in the sky. But it always came back. Atomic
power was in it somewhere. For it never ran out of energy.
Uncle
Mitch never seemed to say much. He didn't get deep into philosophy. He set up
queer apparatus in his room, and a kid could look at it if he didn't touch. And to one of Dad's questions
he answered briefly, "Yes, we're making headway in the labs on the Moon.
There'll be a motor for star ships. If, in our experiments,
hyperspace itself doesn't burst at the seams under that level of power.
No, we're not yet trying for speeds of more than a fraction of that of light. A
trip to a star
will take a long time."
It
soon came out that Uncle Mitch had another interest. He kept in a glass tube
something that squirmed and wriggled, and felt like warm flesh though its
natural form, when at rest, was a slender cylinder of pencil size.
About
that he would only say, "Call it alive if you want to. But not like us. Invented and artificial, and far more rugged than our flesh.
For the rest, wait and see if anything comes of it. Maybe it'll become the clay
of the superman. Schaeffer, here on Earth, is working on it, too."
Uncle
Mitch stayed for a week. Then he was gone, rocketing out to the labs, isolated
for safety at the center of a mare on
the always hidden hemisphere of the Moon.
"Mitch
knows what he wants and is direct about it" was Jack Dukas's comment.
"Simple. No conflicts. The scientist's approach. Wise or stupid? Who knows?"
Eddie was six, and then seven. The years moved slowly, but he grew and
hardened with them. By the time he was twelve, sports and study and awareness
of realities had toughened his body and matured his soul considerably. That
was fortunate, for this was his and mankind's fateful year. The day came when
the household robots were fixing up the guestroom specially
for Uncle Mitch again. Dad was afield, a hundred
miles away, to look over a vein
of quartz crystal that was to be shipped to the lunar laboratories. At 9:00 p.m.
Eddie's father had not yet
returned.
Eddie
was sprawled on his bed looking lazily at the translucent blue font of the
lamp beside it. The color was rich and beautiful, the carvings snaky and odd.
Here was another gift, ordered by Uncle Mitch from a friend in the region of
the Asteroids. The font was an artifact of a race contemporary with the
Martians who had also lost their fight to master nature and themselves through
knowledge. The font had been found floating free in space, among the wreckage
of a planet blown to pieces ages back.
Eddie
was thinking of such things. He was also thinking of neighborhood pals, to whom
he had bragged about his uncle and his expected arrival.
As
for what happened at that moment: there was transpa-tial
warning, radioed out fifteen seconds ahead, telling of forces gone hopelessly
out of control in the lunar laboratories. But Eddie's set was not functioning,
and he did not hear it.
Beyond
the windows of his room there was just calm, pale moonlight. The Moon looked
little different than it always looked, except for the blue spots of the
atmosphere domes of the great mining centers.
But
then came the intolerable blue-white light. Perhaps,
somewhere, exposed instruments measured its intensity. On the
roofs of meteorological stations, maybe. Say conservatively that, for
the space of a few seconds, it was five hundred times as strong as full
sunshine.
Night
was broken off. But there was no day like this. For one fragment of a second
Eddie glanced at the window. Shadows seemed gone, utterly. Even dark things
like tree trunks reflected so much light that they all but vanished in the
shimmering glare. As yet, it was a soundless phenomenon.
Eddie
shut his eyes and buried his face in his pillow. This reflex action, partly as
natural as terror and partly the result of training for emergencies at school,
saved his vision. He might have screamed, had he been able to find his voice.
Distantly,
he heard human sounds that increased the sickness in his stomach. A gentle
scene and mood, product of science, had been utterly shattered by forces of the
same origin.
He
did not see the fuzzy blob of incandescence that bloomed in the sky and
expanded slowly for many seconds. In fact, no one saw it; only cameras, fitted
with special dark filters, would have been able to do so. For living eyes would
have been charred by that splendor.
He
heard his mother calling his name. Keeping his eyelids tightly closed and an
elbow bent over them, he fumbled his way to the hall, and to her. They dropped
to the floor and huddled there.
Outside,
voices died away. By then the devilish glory in the sky was fading a little,
too, at the edges. Only the heart of the great blob still blazed supernally,
with its millions of degrees of heat. Around it was a cooling fog of dust and
gases that masked the hell within it.
The
world grew still for a few moments, as it does at the center of a typhoon. Then
there was a great, soft roaring. The shock wave of expanded,
rarefied gases, speeding at many hundreds of miles per second, striking the
upper terrestrial atmosphere, and pressing down. Eddie could feel the
pressure of it, transmitted by the air—a light but definite punching inward of
his flesh, from all sides.
Then
there was a distant sighing of wind—air, superheated and compressed, being
forced outward. Next came the resurgence of human
sounds, if they were truly that any more.
Someone
was yelling, "Oh, God . . . Oh, God . . . Oh, God . . ." There was a
crackle and smell of fire. Something blew up far off.
Then
the earthquakes began. With a sharp snap, rock strata far underground broke.
Then came a jolt. Eddie Dukas and his mother, huddled
on the floor, were engulfed in a swaying sensation, smooth
and vibrationless. Then the ground quivered softly. After that,
there was a pause, as of something hanging precariously for a moment at the
jagged lip of a chasm. Suddenly the pathetic hold seemed to be broken, and the
whole world was seized by a tooth-cracking chatter. A pause . . . Then it began
again.
For
a second Eddie's mother almost lost her control. She tried to rise. "The
house!" she stammered. "It'll fall on us."
Panic and reason fought inside Eddie.
"No, Mom," he gasped. "The house has a steel frame. It'll
probably hold together. Outside, we don't know what would happen to us."
They
both braced themselves for the next seismic burst. They were both creatures of
luxury, science-made. But planning, training, psychology—science it all was,
too—had given them ruggedness and courage, a reserve of strength against
hysteria—while the earth rattled again and again.
Eddie's
mom kept saying things, and it was all something like a formula that had been
learned, a rote, a parroted incantation: "You're right, Eddie. We've got
to think before we do anything. They always tell us that life is an adventure.
We've got to meet a bigger future or be destroyed, Eddie. Everything takes
nerve."
At
last the earthquake shocks lessened both in intensity and frequency. Maybe the
worst was over.
Eddie risk
an eye, and then nudged his mother.
Beyond the undamaged flexoglass of the
windows night had returned, red-lit from both sky and ground. The firmament
was smeared with a ruddy glow extending in a great curve, beaded with more
intense blobs at several points. Dust of the Moon, it had to be. Of its rock
and pumice shell. And of its core of meteoric iron.
But that sullen effulgence was fading now, as matter cooled and began simply to
reflect solar light back to this dark side of Earth.
Yet
everywhere outside there was fire. The towering glow in the
east—that would be the City, fifty miles away. Destruction and
confusion there would be unimaginable. Nearer at hand, trees were aflame—leaves
and branches that minutes ago had been cool with greenness now blazed wildly.
Mixed with the tumult of voices was the clang of robot fire units.
Eddie
rushed to the radio and turned it on, as he had been taught to do in
emergencies. You listened; you obeyed directions. ", . . lunar blowup," someone was saying. "Follow the
usual precautions and measures for radioactive contamination and flesh burns.
Rescue and relief units are already in action. Fortunately most of our
buildings are not made of combustible materials. . . ."
For
minutes Eddie was furiously busy, rubbing special salves and lotions into the
skin of his entire body. Then, dressed in fresh clothes, he and his mother just
stared out of the windows for a while. Outside, metal shapes were at work.
Science and civilization were working efficiently to recapture their balance
after an upset that might have been the end.
Eddie
and his mother explored the house and found it mostly intact. Then incident
piled on incident in quick succession. The first of these began with a whimper
at the door. Masked with respirators against possible radioactive taints in the
outside air, they opened it. A blackened thing without eyes dragged itself
inside, quivered once, and lay still. It was death among supposed immortals.
The passing of a dachshund called Schnitz.
Eddie
was dazed. Child-grief or man-grief had no chance to come to him then. Events
moved too fast. There was too much to be done.
A
half-dozen people in radiation armor came into the house. At once it was
converted into a first-aid station. Hard law and hard drills, blueprinted long
before for disaster, came into play. Eddie's mother joined the crew. Nor was he
left out of it. There was coffee for him to prepare in the kitchen, and rugs
and furniture to be cleared away, and equipment to be set up.
He
saw blood and death, and hysteria-twisted faces. He saw glinting, complex
instruments and apparatus, as the therapeutic methods of the age were applied.
There were blood pumps that could serve as hearts and machines to duplicate the
functions of kidneys and lungs. There were devices to teleport scattered body
cells from a dozen healthy individuals, converting them briefly into mobile
energy, and then back into living tissue in the body of an injured person.
Mostly
the maimed and burned remained stolid and calm. Luxury had not weakened them.
They, too, had known their era and had had some preparation.
Eddie
recognized a child of his own age among those who came into his own house: a
neighbor boy named Les Payten, the son of a noted biologist. He had big ears
and a freckled nose. He wasn't hurt badly. His eyes were inflamed. He hadn't
shut them quite quickly enough. He had turned sullen, and his lip trembled a
bit. Otherwise he was still full of pepper.
"Braggin'
about your Uncle Mitch now,
Eddie?" he taunted. "Great stuff, that guy! He and his pal scientists
nearly got us all. Better luck next time, huh?"
Young
Ed Dukas might have growled back but he did not. As if he too carried a burden
of responsibility, his jaw hardened and his cheeks hollowed. His back
stiffened, as if to bear the load. He returned to the kitchen. He had not yet
noticed any other signs of blame. It was too soon. The shock of cosmic
catastrophe had deadened minds. Sometimes prejudice and hatred need a certain
leisurely brooding to build them up.
But
another raw realization had come to Eddie. As soon as there was a moment to
speak to his mother he said, "Uncle Mitch was supposed to land in the City
spaceport tonight. It's a six-hour run from the Moon. But now hell never get here."
She shook her head. And in her expression
there was fury mixed with her sadness.
He
didn't think about that very long as he helped carry a stretcher. His mind was
on Mitchell Prell—grinning, setting up a lab in the room upstairs, even
modeling wax with his swift fingers. He had once molded little heads of Mom and
Dad. A lump gathered in Eddie's throat for someone who would never be back.
Mitchell Prell. Even the name sounded nice.
Then
slowly another question came into his mind. Where was Dad? He'd gone out to that quartz lode and hadn't
come backl Funny, thought Eddie, I hadn't even thought about that. Well, it
came from taking Dad for granted. Someone never to worry
about. Someone always around, like the hills.
Eddie clenched his fists to steady himself. No use worrying yet.
Now
the torrential rains began. Steam had been boiled out of the ground by heat.
Now it was condensing. Helping, maybe, as the radio said, to wash away the
poison of the radioactive meteorites and dust that were falling to
Earth-wreckage that hours before had been part of the
Moon.
Somewhere
out in the moaning storm a bell chimed out ten o'clock very calmly. It must
have been about then that what was left of Jack Dukas was brought home in a
truck. Eddie didn't see this happen. He was helping again with the injured.
And later, when Les Payten told him, Mom wouldn't let him go into the locked
room where his dad had been taken. He almost told her that he had a right. But
he did not want to disturb her further.
Eddie
was up till 4:00 a.m. By then the rescue crew had left the house
and a tentative calm had been restored in the world. The injured were in
hospitals, rigged in tents and public buildings. But there were far more dead. Anyone caught more than a step from shelter when the
catastrophe had occurred was apt to belong to that endless list. Half a planet
had been scorched by heat and radiation.
While
the guard-robots rumbled through the rain on their caterpillar treads, Eddie
simply passed out from weariness on the floor of the living room. His mother
managed to arouse him a little but not enough to send him to bed. Rather, she
folded down the twin couches from the sensipsych set. She made her husky young
son climb up onto one of them and took the other for herself.
He
slept, and his body was refreshed. And he had dreams —not dreams in which he
was an imaginary cartoon character; nor was he toiling to make dead asteroids
habitable; nor was he enjoying an adventure on some imaginary planet among the
stars. No, for the present he had had enough of strain. Instead he lay in grass
by a little lake. The sun was bright. There were boats with colored sails, and
blue flamingos flying, and odd, elfin music. The sensipsych was not an opiate
to fill the emptiness of soft lives now. It was rest; it was honest, relieving
therapy.
Young
Ed Dukas didn't see the mud-spattered truck arrive, to be parked some distance from the house. He did not see the figure moving
in the dense shadows. It knocked cautiously at the front door, waited for a
reasonable time, and then went around to the porch in the rear. There skillful
fingers worked carefully to release the lock. Massive luggage was lifted
without sound inside the door.
Eddie
awoke with a small, hard hand shaking his shoulder. His mother was already
awake. The light was on. At first only with simple unbelief, they beheld a
slight, disheveled figure.
Uncle
Mitch's cheek was scraped. His hands were filthy. His recently neat business
suit was torn. An old jauntiness about his eyes fought with worry, regret and
wariness.
"Hello, Eileen,"
he said. "Hi, Nipper."
He received no answer. Somehow even Eddie
felt compelled to silence. So his uncle shifted to what was
a rarity with him—a kind of historical or philosophical summary.
"Progress,"
he said with a forced laugh. "The world government
answering the threat of atomic war, years ago. Then the greatest boon of
the human race: eternal youth, and death's defeat except by violence, producing
the problem of overpopulation, to be relieved by the colonization of the solar system. Then peace and boredom and the sensipsych dreams
leading to decadence, loss of pride in self and even rebellious violence; then
the solution of vigorous, realistic action, more and more people to enjoy life,
more and more colonies. Then, as we reach out for the stars,
this. Life. The great
adventure that can't be stopped. The rise from
barbarism. Is it even well begun?"
His words, half appropriate and half in supremely bad taste now, as Mitchell Prell well knew—though he had to
say them because of the need to say something—still fell into a void of silence
and echoed through the house like a cheap speech.
Sighing
raggedly, he tried again: "Yes, I'm alive, Eileen. The ship from the Moon
was in space before the blowup happened. We rode ahead of the main shock wave
at high speed. So we won through. From the final warning message from the Moon,
I gather that trouble started in the warp chambers. The heat and pressure were
restrained by the tight space warp for a while, until inter-dimensional
barriers ripped wide open. The whole mass of the Moon was in the way. By old
standards it couldn't happen; but a lot of lunar atoms went all to pieces in a
flare of high energy. The tough part is that we achieved a workable motor principle
for stellar ships weeks ago. The blowup came from side line test-ing."
Once
more no words answered Mitchell Prell when he stopped talking. He waited, but
his sister's eyes remained cold.
"All
right, Eileen," he went on at last. "You're thinking that I am one of
the specialists who is responsible for this. Surely
I'm the only survivor among those research men who were on the Moon. But
remember this: we weren't working on our own. We were hired, under a democratic
system, and told what to hunt for. It was the best that could be done, except
that the lab should have been put farther away, on some lonely asteroid.
Logically, then, we are not solely to blame for what has happened. But it
doesn't work that way, Eileen. Under grief and hysteria logic still collapses,
even in our time. In a real crisis there continue to be many people who need
scapegoats. A collective mishap, the result of a mass desire for more
knowledge, then becomes a personal guilt. So I'm a fugitive, Eileen."
It
was a strange, bitter thing for Eddie Dukas to watch —his mother and uncle
facing each other, not friends, his mother's face a hard mask of coldness.
Then,
all at once, her icy poise crumbled. "Jack isn't alive any more," she
said. "My husband. That's the fact that I know
best. You with your glib talk, my brother, are one person direcdy in the chain
of events that caused Jack's death. I don't accuse you, Mitch. I just say that
I can't look on you now with any pleasure. That's all."
Then,
sitting there on the sensipsych couch, she began to cry. It was painful for
Eddie to watch. He had never seen her do that before.
But
Mitchell Prell chuckled. He sat beside his sister and put his arm around her.
"Are things so bad?" he chided. "Look, Eileen. People used to
consider biological life the deepest secret of nature. Because he was at the
top of his local life scale, man would not have been flattered to know that the
vital force in him wasn't the greatest, the most indecipherable of enigmas.
But it's true, Eileen. Year after year we've learned more about cell function,
genes, chromosomes, the natural molding of living things, and the final process
in protoplasm,- which is the spark itself. Men like Schaeffer have been making
simple fife for years, while they traced out more complex riddles. For a long
time they've been replacing diseased or damaged organs from scattered cells
drawn from the bodies of many donors. Now they've gone further and have grown
such organs in a culture fluid, from a microscopic bit of tissue. It is already
theoretically possible to re-create an entire man, provided there is a pattern.
It was for repair purposes, after possible accidents, that everyone was urged
to have his body structure recorded—especially that of his brain. All you have
to do, Eileen, is have Jack's record turned over to
the same laboratories that do rejuvenation. In two or three
years hell come back to you just as he was. Soon there might even be a
simpler, better way."
Eileen
Dukas's laugh was britde and bitter. "A roll of fine, sensitized wire,"
she said. "Kept in a box no bigger than the first joint
of a finger. Supposed to be safe in a vault. The pattern of a human being. Well, Mitch, there just isn't
any such box for Jack. Or for Eddie or me either, for that
matter. We just didn't get around to it. Jack was somehow half against
it."
Again
there was a silence. For Eddie it seemed to have the quiet of forever in it. No
whistling of Dad's tunes. No sly winks, or play at being tough. Just memory.
"All
bodies that are being picked up are being sent through the recorder,"
Uncle Mitch offered at last. "Refined radar does the trick. The finest
variations of even brain structure —the mold of mind, personality, and
memory—are found and recorded. Wasn't that done for Jack?"
Eddie's mother nodded. "Only" she
stammered, "the whole top of his head was charred. There wasn't enough of
him left. Oh, you and your damned science, Mitch."
She
was weeping again. Mitchel Prell became either cruel or perhaps he spoke in
self-defense.
"The
people that used to neglect things like insurance," he remarked, "are
still plentiful, aren't they? Oh, well, maybe there's still a sort of way. A makeshift. People are bound to think of it. Let it go for
now. I've got lots to worry about, sister of mine."
"Your
own skin, for instance?" she challenged him. "Why did you come here
at all, Mitch? The scapegoat-seekers will certainly look for you here
first."
"My
own skin," Mitchel Prell agreed. "Maybe yours, since you are a
relative of mine, responsible for my sins. That is an ancient defect of logic among certain types of people still in
existence, I'm afraid—if the provocation becomes great enough. The skins of
the three of us, my most prized treasures."
He
smiled slightly then, and his blue eyes were gentle. "Don't worry too
much, though," he went on. "I'll be gone sooner than most people will
even think of looking for me. I'll keep out of sight, not even leaving the
house, except after dark. I have some things to deliver to Schaef-fer. Then
I've got to get away. Because life goes on, in spite of
everything. I'm still curious about nature, the stars and some other
things. I remain eager for some vast freedom, Eileen—for you and your son, and
the rest of the cussed race, whose errant qualities and usually good intentions
I share. I see no good in becoming the offering of expiation for an accident
that came out of a general human urge to learn that can't and won't be
downed."
Something
like a truce came then. Eddie Dukas could feel it. Family loyalty was in it and
a little of understanding and contrition.
"All
right, Mitch" was all that Eddie's mother said. She kissed his uncle's
cheek. Eddie knew that it was a woman's gesture of armistice.
Fires
had died down. Dawn was beginning to show in the patio. The rain had stopped
long ago. For no reason Eddie's eyes sought out a pool of muddy water in a
crack in the flagging. The water was clay colored, as it might have been after
any shower. A robin, which had somehow escaped death, was scolding angrily.
Breakfast
was eaten listlessly. There were radio reports and orders. "Able persons
must report to their municipal centers. . . ."
"That's
for you, Eddie," Mitchell Prell said ruefully. "And
your mother. While I play hiding rat."
Eddie
didn't know whether to hate his uncle or not. There was an inner bigness about
that slightly built man that matched some obscure drive that was Eddie's own-in
spite of his grief.
"Watch yourself, sir," he growled stiffly.
The
day was a day of searching for corpses, of cleanup, of tentative restoration.
At least there would be no smells of death. Pruning machines were already busy
on charred treetops. The world was being put back into order, like a disturbed
anthill. Grass and leaves would sprout again. The scared faces of younger
children—many from the Youth Center were given small tasks to help in the
cleanup, since it was not the custom now to hide reality from the young-would
smile again. On that day of sweeping the streets with a broom, Eddie Dukas made
and lost many a brief friendship. Hello . . . Goodbye . . .
Fortunately
the poison of radioactivity had not been transmitted to any great extent from
across space by radiation alone. Gases and fragments of the Moon that were
still falling as meteors bore a taint to the atmosphere; but it was now below
the danger level.
Overhead,
arching the sky like the Rings of Saturn turned ragged, was what was left of
Luna: rock and dust. For an hour its texture veiled the sun, until, near noon,
there was almost twilight, like that of an eclipse. That arch was a permanent
monument to a night that would be remembered.
There
still were hysterical people around. Eddie saw Mrs. Payten, his friend's
mother. She passed in the street, muttering, "Oh, Ronald, you were a beast
of a man, but I loved you. Why were you a fool, too? . . . No
record . . . None . . ."
It
had been a subject of neighborhood gossip that Ronald Payten, a large, passive
lug, had been a very much henpecked husband. His neglect of having a record
made of himself might have seemed strange for so noted
a biologist. Maybe it was absent-mindedness, professional difference of
opinion, or even some backhanded defiance of bis wife.
There
were moments when the wild taint in young blood and the magnificence of
disaster gave Eddie and others almost an outing mood. But toil, sweat and
horror soon turned things grim as he worked with the men. His hands were
blackened and scratched. But maybe tiredness was balm for delayed shock. Maybe
it was thus that he stood at the brief funeral services—for his father,
too—with less hurt. The great trench was closed over the corpses, and the thing
was done.
Later,
back in the house, he struggled with himself somewhat, and said, "I know
it wasn't your fault, Uncle Mitch."
Eddie
had seen stern faces that day, topping trim gTay uniforms: regional police. In him was the
thought: Harboring a fugitive. One who shouldn't be called that.
But who is —now. Because people have taken a beating like never before. Even
laws can be changed. Ideas of justice won't stay quite the same.
"Have
you outgrown my calling you Nipper?" Mitchell Prell asked him seriously.
"Perhaps . . . But I still want to show you something."
Young
Ed Dukas was no sucker for easy come-ons. But his polite wariness soon
dissolved, when, in the room where Mitchell Prell was holed up, he saw that the
man who turned to face him was not his uncle. The nose and lips were much
heavier. Only the eyes and grin remained much the same, though their general
effect was made different by the difference of surrounding features. This man
looked like a good-natured mechanic.
Eddie's
spine chilled. But he gave a sullen snort as the man peeled his face away.
Underneath it was Uncle Mitch.
"A mask, Eddie. A trick for kids, you'd say." His uncle laughed. "I spent the
day making it up, to help me get around more easily. That's nothing. The
important fact is that it is made of vitaplasm. Remember the bar of it that I
once had? Crude stuff then. Better now. Alive in a way
of its own. A synthetic and far tougher cousin to
natural protoplasm. Far less susceptible to damage by
heat and cold. Self-healing, like flesh. Sustained by
food and oxygen. But capable of drawing its energy
from sunlight or radioactivity, too. And in some of
its forms less dependent on a fluid base such as water. No, it's not
consistently the same substance, or combination. Like the flesh we know,
vita-plasm is in constant change. Here and now it's just an amorphous mass,
crudely molded. An unshaped building material. But,
like star ships, it belongs to the future. Here it's undeveloped principle,
another phase of our advancing science everywhere. You could call it the clay
of the superman, Eddie. I want you to remember all this. Because
I may be back from where I'm going to try to go. Or I might get in touch
sometime. We might need each other's help."
Young
Ed Dukas listened with intense interest. Perhaps his deepest drive was toward
the shadowy splendor of times yet to come. They seemed a part of his growing
self. They must become reall And he must take part in
their fulfillment. Grief or hardship could not stop him. Therein he and Mitchell
Prell traveled the same road.
"You
didn't invent vitaplasm, Uncle Mitch," he stated. "No one could
have—alone."
His
sullenly serious gaze lingered on the mask. It was warm to his touch. It even
recoiled a little.
Mitchell
Prell shook his head and chortled. "No, Nipper. You know that research is
now far too complex for that. I helped a little. Lots of men did. Maybe I've
added something to what is known. I've got to give my data to specialists
here before I leave."
Eddie thought of a man he'd sometimes seen on
television. No bigger than Uncle Mitch. And plain looking.
But great. Dr. Schaeffer in his
underground laboratory in the City.
"You aren't going to try to reach a
star, are you?" young Ed asked.
Uncle Mitch shook his head. "No. I won't
wander so far off." He laughed. "But in a way I'll be going farther,
I suppose. Though don't imagine that I mean time or hyper-dimensional travel.
It's something simpler. But it's to a place where no one can journey exactly as
a human being. I can't tell you much more. Because I don't
want other people to try to dig too much out of you. But I want to look
at things from a new angle. And from very close up, you might say. Maybe I'm
trying to hide from danger, Eddie. Some. But the
bigger reason is that I want to go on learning and exploring. Maybe my being a
small man means something, too."
Mitchell
Prell ended with another light laugh. He put the mask in his pocket and snapped
a large suitcase shut. When he spoke again it was on a slightly different tack:
"You probably won't see me for a while, Eddie. About your father, words
just aren't any good at all. Maybe I'll ache over his end even harder than you.
If anybody asks you questions about me, tell all you know. Don't try to hide
anything for my sake. They'll pry it out of you anyway. And they'll only know
what I want them to know.
"Your
mother may get a letter in a few days asking you both to report to the City. If
that letter comes, see that she conforms to its request. It will also mean that
I've delivered the results of my experiments with vitaplasm, as far as they've
gone, into the proper hands and have probably succeeded in getting away into
space. I hope that you and I and everybody make it to the Big Future, Eddie.
That's all I have to say. Unless you care to remember a word
that may crop up again—android."
Mitchell
Prell grinned reassuringly at his nephew and moved to put on his mask.
"You
don't want to say goodbye to Mom," Eddie stated, half angrily.
Prell's look of concern deepend. His thin face was touched by a fleeting
tenderness and worry. Part of it was surely for his sister. Then, mostly to
himself, he muttered, "There's greater magnificence to come—if we can grow
past the infancy of man; if new knowledge and old wild impulses don't do us
all to death first." He chuckled sheepishly. "You say goodbye for me,
Eddie," he urged. "I hate things like that."
Mitchell
Prell was gone then, out into the weird new night. Grimly, already half a man,
young Ed Dukas watched him go, bitterness and grief, hatred and love, mixed up
inside him. But the common denominator between himself and his uncle was the
need for that future of stars and wonder and legendary betterment.
"It
will happen," he promised within himself. For
a second his body was taut with dread. He had already experienced the fury
that knowledge made possible, and he could sense the potential of long silence
beyond such things—no one left, anywherel He wondered if, because life could go
on and on now, it was more precious and death more terrible.
Fifteen
minutes after his uncle's departure a spy beam was put into operation from a
mile distance. It covered the rooms of the Dukas house and the grounds around
it. The principle of the device was almost ancient. The
reflection of electromagnetic waves. On a small screen in a distant
room the plan of a house and its furnishings was outlined in a pale green glow.
Shadowy blobs shifted with the movements of its occupants, robot and human.
Only two people were there now.
Eddie
Dukas guessed that the spy beam was there, though its irregularly changing wave
length would have made it almost impossible to identify, among the waves from
many sources used for communication.
Early
on the third morning after the lunar blowup the police came to the house. They
were very gentle. There was even a policewoman to ask the questions.
Eddie's mother was cool and
wary.
"Have
you information as to the whereabouts of Dr. Mitchell Prell, Mrs. Dukas?"
she was asked. "We know that the last Moon rocket landed with him
aboard."
Before
she could lie Eddie blurted, "He was here all that day. He's gone now. He
didn't make his destination very clear."
Eileen
Dukas's eyes widened with panic and surprise. She had expected Eddie to be more
discreet.
"you
have no right to question my son!" she stated coldly.
"Mrs.
Dukas," she was informed, "when there is an investigation of the
deaths of two hundred million people, we have more than the right to question
anybody."
Young
Ed was scared. But he felt some of the hero-impulse. Or the
desire to follow faithfully the instructions of his idol, Uncle Mitch.
"If
you psych my memory, what little I know will come clearer than if I just told
it," he challenged.
This
was done forthwith, out in the police car parked in the street. When the helmet
of the apparatus was removed from Eddie's head, the police had certain comments
of Mitchell Prell's to study. Possibly they could puzzle out some of their
hidden meaning. But this couldn't have satisfied them very much.
The
next day the letter Prell had mentioned arrived. At least it could be assumed
that it was the one. Uncle Mitch had managed to make one step of his purpose
anyway! Under the heading of "Vital Section, Schaefier
Laboratories," it said:
Mhs. Dukas:
Will
you kindly report at your earliest convenience to the above section. This is of greatest importance. Please bring your
son.
Sincerely,
Dr. M. Bart
Ed was both cold with tension and hot with
eagerness. The following day he and his mother were in the battered City. Fire
had scarred it. A boiling tidal wave had washed over portions of it. But the
great building over the many subterranean levels of the Schaeffer Labs had
stood firm. Quakes had not broken it down.
An elevator took them below, to that steel-
and lead- and concrete-shielded place which might have resisted for a while
even a noval outburst of the sun. They were requested to lie down on something
like sensipsych couches. A voice-maybe Dr. Bart's—spoke to them from a
swift-gathering dream: "Think about Jack Dukas. Your
husband. Your father. Things he said. His manner of speech. His expressions,
gestures, temperament, likes and dislikes, hobbies, jokes, skills. The people that he knew. Their faces and
mannerisms. As many of them as possible will be contacted and psyched
like this, too. Think of his memories told to you. Think of everything . . .
everything . . . everything. . . ."
For
Eileen Dukas it must have been much the same as for her son. Pearly haze seemed
to float inside Eddie's mind. Like a million bits of ancient news clippings
always in motion, his recollections of his father seemed to burst in a
thousand ever-shifting fragments within his brain. He felt an awful compulsion
to recall. It sapped his strength until all consciousness faded away. Yet
before this happened he knew that the probing would go on and on.
The
next thing he knew he was sitting groggily in a pneumatic tube train, with his
mother, all but exhausted, too, leaning against him. Almost as an afterthought,
their own minds and bodies had been "recorded" there at the
laboratory. They seldom exchanged questions or speculations afterward about
what had happened to them. It had been a dream. Let it be a dream.
II
Life had become hard enough for Eileen Dukas and
her son. While most people treated them all right—from some they even received
exaggerated kindness—there was, very often, a certain disturbing expression in
eyes that looked at them.
Les
Payten, Eddie's friend said once, "I promise, Ed. No more talk about your
uncle from me. Finished, see? You've had enough."
Eddie
suppressed the anger which sprang from loyalty to Mitchell Prell, for he
understood Les Payten's good intentions.
At
regular intervals there were police visits at the house, and questioning.
"It's partly for your protection, Mrs. Dukas" was one honest comment
from the detectives. But Eddie sensed that there was more to it than that.
Subtly, the interpretation of law had changed since the lunar blowup. It went
backward, as grief sought people to blame. Catastrophe had been too big for
reason or fairness. And the scapegoat himself was not around to be mobbed.
A
freckle-faced brat from the Youth Center—her name, Barbara Day, had been drawn
out of a hat, for of course she had no known parents—offered advice: "You
ought to go far away, Eddie, where folks don't know you. It would be
better."
Ed
knew that this was good advice. Many people were saying and shouting and
whispering that too much knowledge was a dangerous possession. And Ed's uncle
still represented such a thing. More than once Ed had to run fast, with some
big lug chasing him. Black eyes he collected with great frequency, and
delivered some, too. Still, he ached inside. It was as if Uncle Mitch were part
of him.
The
world began to look normal and green again. But the undercurrents of memory
were still there. And Ed Dukas began to answer hate with hate, though he didn't
like to.
There
was a crowd of young toughs with rocks to throw, in front of the house one
night. "This is the place," Eddie heard one of them say. "Both
my parents are gone. And the bums that live here were in on the reason."
Ed
had seen the boy around before: Ash Parker. Now the rocks flew for a while, and
Ed and his mother crouched behind locked doors. There might have been a
lynching, except that Les Payten found a neighbor with a tear-gas vial and
some other neighbors with sharp tongues and courage.
It
was the final straw, however. "Will we have to leave, Eddie?" his
mother asked.
"It's best," he
growled. "But I'll be back!"
Next
day the house was being boarded up. Packing began even before the colonial
travel permits were prepared.
It
was goodbye to Les Payten and Barbara Day, and the newly ringed planet, Earth,
with its billions of inhabitants and its great shops that still worked to give
the whole solar system to mankind and maybe a segment of the larger universe
as well. The pattern of the future seemed set, and specialists still didn't
think that there was any real reason to make a change. In fact, they denied
that any change was possible. Nobody would give up the threshold of immortality,
once it was gained. Nor would they relinquish other triumphs that could bring
idleness and decay if they were not used to accomplish bigger and bigger tasks.
So, even the fearful ones were caught in the rushing current
of the times.
Ed
Dukas was soon on a crowded liner. Because she might need him, he kept close to
his mother. Around them were other colonists—young graduates from technical
schools, newlyweds and people who were physically young, too, though they were
fresh from the rejuvenation vats. They were the aged, awed by another lifetime
before them.
The
liner blasted off. A week later it landed on an asteroid of middling size. The
Dukases were assigned to one of a group of trim cottages that were not even all alike. Under the great
glass roof, which kept in the synthetic air, the new gardens and fruit trees
were already growing. And in coiled tubes of clear plastic filled with water,
circulated green algae from which almost any kind of basic food could be made.
To
Eddie it was a satisfying dip into space that he had so much anticipated. Amid
great heaps of steel and plastic and house parts and atomic machines to
maintain a normal temperature so far from the sun, life
went on. Eddie's mother worked in the office of a shop for robot machines. He
worked too—when and where he could—when he was not at school.
There
was a little more of peace, for a while anyway. There was the usual
psychological treatment to subdue possible devils of the lunar catastrophe
which might remain in his mind. There were sports and an artificial lake to
swim in with his companions. However, Ed Dukas was wary of making deep
friendships.
He
was then a sullen, overly matured youth of thirteen, earnest about everything
he did—for he knew that the years ahead were grimly earnest. Carefully he kept
up with the reports in scientific journals: about the laying of the keel of
the first star ship on a minute asteroid with only a number and no name.
Harwell was in charge. The propellant would be pure radiant energy—the best of
them all; energy so concentrated that it would be truly massive and hurled at
the speed of light, which was not remarkable, since it would be light, far more intense per unit area than the noval explosion of a
star I
This
was by no means the only major advance that had been accomplished and was
reported. Technological progress was steady in all fields, across the board,
making a solid front. Others of its facets also had a special appeal to Ed
Dukas. Biological science, in its newest interpretations, he knew to be the
most important of these. Now it was no longer just simple
rejuvenation—restoring rusty organs. It was a thing that could start from a
single cell, in warm, sticky fluids, giving rebirth to something that had
already been. And it had a further development—bringing the same results but
more swiftly and easily, and with different, far more rugged flesh. It was
frightening and fascinating. Knowing was like feeling the shadow of a demon or
an angel.
Ed
Dukas and his mother spent four years on their asteroid. Then one day a letter
fluttered in her hand. And she seemed not to know whether to look happy or
terrified. She did not show her son the letter.
"We've
had enough of being here," she stated. "We're going home."
So
they went back across the millions of miles. They cleaned up the house, on
which obscene insults had been scribbled in chalk. On two successive days Eddie
was jumped by gangs. He fought free and escaped. But on the third evening he
was cornered. This time Ash Parker was the ringleader. Ed battled like a
bobcat, but eight opponents were too many. He was flat on his back, and they
were kicking him. His own blood was in his mouth. What might happen when he
blacked out was anybody's guess. Once, before medical knowledge had advanced to
where it was, it would have been murder for sure.
Somebody
intervened—a big guy in a gray business suit who had come striding along the
block with an eager attention.
He
didn't say anything at first. He just collared the toughs, two at a time in
swift succession, and thrust them away.
Eddie
staggered up and faced his benefactor, intent on giving him sincere thanks.
"Mister . . . I . .
"Hello,
Eddie!" the man said, chuckling. "I see you turned out hardy.
Seventeen you'd be now."
Young
Ed Dukas heard the voice and looked at the face. He stiffened. Then he made a
statement in a flat tone that sounded very formal and unemotional, which it was
not: "Sir, you're my father."
The
man nodded. "Just off the assembly line, pal. The
same guy—because you and your mother, and some other people, remembered what I
was like. There was no record of me or of my mind. So, okay, they made one,
fella. From the memories of me left in other minds. Thanks, Eddie."
"Thanks?" Ed
Dukas said in a choked voice.
Bloody
and dirty, he stepped forward. Father and son clung to each other. It was a
moment of great triumph.
Ed's mind pictured filaments, as fragile at
first as pink spiderweb but already outlining a human shape, held suspended in
a kind of jelly—growing there, forming according to a record. Now even the
record could be synthesized. It seemed like real freedom from death at last.
Ash
Parker had not fled. Now he spoke, sounding awed, "Jeez, Mr. Dukas. I
didn't believe it. Maybe my folks can come back, too."
"Your
parents will
come back," Jack Dukas
affirmed. "I am the first 'memory man' to be resurrected. Among those
killed who had had their bodies and minds recorded as was recommended, about a
hundred thousand are alive again, as I think you know. Millions more are in
process. One way or another, by record or by the memories of others, in flesh
of the old kind or the new, almost everyone will return."
Ed
felt his father's hand. As far as he could tell, it was of flesh. Yet it could be something else; Ed nearly trembled with
excitement as his eager wonder and primitive dread of the strange battled
inside him. He thought again of Mitchell Prell's first samples of vitaplasm.
"Of which flesh are
you, Dad?" Ed asked anxiously.
His
father studied him there in the twilight of the day, while the silvery ring of
lunar wreckage brightened in the sky.
"The old kind,
Eddie," he answered.
"I'm
glad," Ed said, feeling greatly relieved, a reaction which he knew was odd
for one who loved the thought of coming miracles.
Jack
Dukas sighed as if he had escaped a terrible fate. "So am I glad,
pal," he said. "I guess I was favored by family connections."
Here he paused, but his wink meant Uncle Mitch. "However," he
continued, "the old flesh takes so much longer. That's why in many cases
it won't be used. There must be thousands of androids already among us, living
like everybody else. Since personal concerns are involved, statistics are kept
rather confidential. These synthetic people have organs the same as we have.
And you can't recognize them just by looking. Only they're thirty per cent
heavier, stronger, and they don't tire. There was a thought, once, that robots
would make human beings obsolete and replace them. Sorry, Eddie. Why be
gruesome at a time like this? Let's patch you up and then find your
mother."
Young
Ed Dukas was happier than he had ever been before. For quite a while he found
peace. Maybe that was true of most of humanity now—for the past three or four
years at least. There was no sharp delineation of an interval before the smokes
of doubt began to come back.
Les
Payten was still around. And Barbara Day continued to five at the Youth Center
on the hill. Often the three would meet. Their childhood was behind them.
Barbara Day's freckles had faded. Her dark hair had a coppery glint. A promise
of beauty had begun to blossom. And her talk expressed many whimsical
thoughts.
"We
all know each other, Eddie," she once said. "So don't be offended. I
sometimes think that you wonder whether your father is really the same person
that he was —whether he ever could be more than a careful duplicate."
Les
Payten frowned. "You're speaking to me, too, Babs," he pointed out.
"I also have a 'memory father.' He's good to me, and mostly I like him.
But sometimes I get scared, though I don't always know why."
Ed's skin tingled. "Could I be myself now and still be myself in another body, years
later? Could there ever be two of me—truly—constructed exactly the same? I
don't deny such a thing. I simply don't know."
But
Ed Dukas continued to wonder about his father. There were several occasions
when his dad was supposed to recognize certain people, casually encountered in
the street. For they knew him.
Ed was present on one of these occasions.
"Sorry, friend,"
Jack
Dukas apologized to a burly, jovial man. "I guess they forgot to put a
picture of you inside my head."
Les
Payten's father was also subtly different from his original—though in a
somewhat different way. The change was even very dimly apparent in his face. He
had once been a big, easy-going, timid soul, nagged by his wife. Now his
features bore a hint of brutality. He walked with a slight swagger. He did not
roar, but the aura of power was there.
Ed's
mother explained the change to his father: "Memory seems not always to
match facts, Jack. Mrs. Payten fooled herself into believing that Ronald Payten
used to be a bully. So she even fooled Schaeffer's mind-machines. And lo! Ronald
Payten is a bully now, as far as she is concerned. No,
don't worry about her too much, Jack. She may even like being pushed
around."
In the months that passed, from out on an
asteroid came the step-by-step reports of the building of the first huge star
ship. At home, one by one, old acquaintances—or was it just their reasonable
facsimiles?—reappeared. Gradually most of the dead of the lunar blowup were
restored to life—except for certain scientists who remained unforgiven.
But a
new type of population was creeping into the fabric of human society. Its
humanness, in an old sense, could be debated. Its first quiet intrusion was
marked by an awe that faded into a shrug; it began to be accepted casually and
somewhat dully, as most past novelties had been accepted before. Foresight
could extend into tomorrow, but its pictures remained not quite real. The
skills of cool, clear thinking, which education tried to impart in an era that
needed it so much, fell short again. No doubt it should have been remembered
that the shift from inattention to unreasonable panic can often be swift.
Even
young Ed Dukas, though dedicated in his heart to New and Coming Things,
sometimes lost sight of these deeper concerns because of his lighter
interests. Without much help from art, Barbara Day turned out to be beautiful.
She had a pair of suitors automatically. Ed could have had his stocky frame
lengthened. Les Payten could have had his big ears trimmed. But young men often
frown on the vanity of tampering with one's appearance. Sometimes there is even
a certain pride in minor ugliness.
They
all had their dates, their dancing, their canoe
rides-traditional pleasures, inherited from generations past. And they had the
age-old problems of youth approaching adulthood. But now, for them and for
their increasingly complex civilization, there was a new problem—vitaplasm,
which could be grown like flesh, though faster, impressed with a shape,
personality and memories. It was said that 30 per cent of those who died in the
explosion of the Moon lab were brought back in this firmer, cheaper medium. But
its use did not stop here. For one thing, there were certain adventurous
persons, alive and healthy, who changed the character of their bodies
willfully.
One
fact some might forget: there were other dead from years before, but remembered
and still loved—parents, grandparents. Besides, there were historical
characters—Washington, Lincoln, Edison, Cleopatra.
Possibly
Joe Doakes could awaken from extinction, puzzled, wondering, frightened, but
finding himself at least superficially the same, eating much the same food,
enjoying much the same things. Then something super in his body would dawn on
him, scaring him more or making him exultant. But it all seemed good at first
glance, so a joyful world forgot its times of suspicion, even against the
warnings of specialists, and released the new processes to almost any operator
who could construct the needed equipment.
The
solar system was big; the universe, optimistically promised, seemed endless.
There was plenty of room. And the task of bringing back just those who had
perished with the Moon was enormous and slow. So in cellars and out-of-the-way
places countless biological technicians tried their skill. They could not have
made the grade at all if they were stupid, and their results, generally, were
good.
The
various Julius Caesars and Michelangelos really came into being as novelties,
side-show pieces. All were reasonable likenesses, physically. From existing
minds such traits and skills as each was supposed to possess could be copied
more or less accurately. But none of the pseudo-great amounted to very much.
They enjoyed a brief popularity; then, assuming the costumes and customs of a
changed world, they sank into nonentity among the populace. Like most of those
of the new flesh, they kept this secret as if by intuitive prudence. The many
people restored in normal protoplasm were less reticent.
That
there were androids around him, known, suspected and unrecognized as such, was
a thrilling idea to Ed Dukas. It was part of the onward march to greater
wonders—or so it seemed to him most of the time. Eager to understand how they
thought and felt, he sought them out cautiously, not
wishing to offend. Usually his efforts were met with coolness and evasion—which
perhaps gave them away.
But
then Ed met a very special memory man. He wasn't the copy
of somebody famous. He was just a humorous legend. Yet now perhaps he was the
right kind of personality striking against the right sort of circumstances to
produce the type of action and fire that could affect the existing era.
Ed and his two friends, Les Payten and
Barbara Day, found him in a little park feeding pigeons. Or, rather, he found them. For in conformity with an ancient
village belief that no one should be a stranger to anyone else, he grinned at
them and said, "Hello, there! Nice young fellers. Nice girl! Sit and gab a
while? I keep gettin' lonesome. Mixed up. Got to get straightened out. Or try, anyway. Put yourselves
down? That's fine!"
Abashed
and curious after that, Ed and Barbara and Les sat and mostly just listened.
"Been around these times three months. Scared stiff at first.
Thought I was addled. Know somethin'? I can remember all the way back to 1870.
It's a fake, sure. No, they didn't make me look young, or even give me all my
teeth. Afraid of spoiling 'verisimilitude,' my gTeat-great-great-something-grandson-supposed-to-be
said. I'm a family brag. Look what I keep carrying around with me. One of the first editions of Huck Finn. They
found this tintype of a feller inside it. Illinois farmer.
And look at this here writing in the front of the book. 'Property
of Abel Freeman.' So I'm supposed to be him, slouch hat and all—funny, I
can't get used to anything else. So I write just like that. This tintype and
the writing are the only solid clues about what the original Abel Freeman was
really like. Up to there, I'm him. The rest is mostly storybook stuff, and the
idea the family has that their ancestor was a kind of pixilated hellion—the
sort some folks like to tell about. Some way for a man to be
born, huh? Shucks, I can even remember the night I was supposed to have
died. Drunk, and kicked in the belly by my own mule, because he' didn't like my
smell. Hell, I bet in real life that mule would of
plum enjoyed whisky!"
Abel
Freeman stopped talking. He turned pale gray eyes set in a face that looked
like brown leather toward his audience with expectant amusement, as if he
understood the eerie impression he'd made on them and was curious about their
reactions.
Barbara
took the lead. "We're surely glad to know you, Mr. Freeman," she
said, shaking his big brown paw and unconsciously aping his manner of speech.
"I'm sure you could tell us plum more. What's the world ever coming
to?"
His
grip, for an instant, was almost literally like that of a vise. But when
Barbara winced with pain, his hand relaxed, and his look became honestly gentle
and apologetic, though it retained a certain slyness of tricks being played or
unprecedented power being demonstrated.
"Oh, excuse me, lady!" he drawled.
"This first Abel Freeman—he was supposed to be a very strong and vigorous
man. Me—naturally I'm even a lot stronger. Sometimes I just forget. But I try
to be right courtly. There, I'll rub your fingers. Hope I didn't break no bones."
Barbara
laughed a bit nervously. "No, Mr. Freeman—I'm fine," she assured him,
nodding her dark head. "Now, if you'll tell us—"
"Oh,
yes—about what the world and everything is coming to," Abel Freeman went
on, his tone more languid than his eyes. "Well, matters could get mighty
rough. I've been studying up—thinking. When I first got to these times, I
didn't like them. Everything seemed addled. Guess I was homesick. I land of
resented being made the cheap way, too. But even way back in the years I
remember, they used to say that maybe there'd be flying machines or even
balloons to the Moon. So I perked up and got acclimated, and said to myself,
'Abel, my boy, take what's given to you and don't whine, even though you
weren't asked if you wanted to come here. And with all that can be done now,
why not bring your old woman and her chewing tobacco? And
your four ornery sons? Nat was the worst. And Nancy,
your daughter, who was an unholy terror? Of course this family that you
recollect so good probably don't match historical fact
so much, being just romanticized, mostly made-up memories put into your head.
But they're plum real to you. Guess when they synthesized you,
they should have left those recollections out. Because you love that family of
yours, omery or not, and would be happy to see its members again.' And I said
to myself besides, 'Abel, bein' made the cheap way has got plenty of
advantages. You're strong as a dozen regular men, and you won't need
rejuvenation, because you'll never get any older. You'll heal even if you're
hurt something terrible. Trouble is, your kind'll be
some mighty stiff competition for the present holders of the land. Of course
people want to get along peaceably—even your sort, Abel. But plenty of folks
will wind up trusting your sort no more than they'd trust a billygoat under a
line of wash. Yep, I'm afraid there's gonna be some mighty interesting days
coming!'"
Abel
Freeman ended his conversation almost dreamily. He'd hung his slouch hat on the
corner of the bench back. In his iron-gray hair, the sun picked out reddish
glints. His gaze, which might have been designed
especially for precision squirrel-shooting, wandered down a path that curved
along the park lake.
Ed
Dukas found him a fascinating mixture of old romance and comedy, artfully
concealing the most recent of wonders, the dark channels of which held the
potentials of great centuries to come, or mindless silence after destruction.
The treachery was not in Abel Freeman himself but in the fact of his being.
Ed's
mouth was dry. "You're honest, Mr. Freeman," he said.
Abel
Freeman answered this with a nod and a shrug. "Funny," he drawled.
"Thought I saw a young feller I was sort of expecting. A
congenial enemy, name of Tom Granger. Look, suppose you three sidekicks
of mine get on your feet nice and easy, and walk the other way on that path. It
would be safer. Not too far. Just a piece."
This
might have been an armed robber's command, but Ed sensed that it was nothing
like that. Without a word, he led Les and Barbara away.
There
was a blinding, blue-white flash. The bench on which they had been sitting was
gone—vaporized by fearful heat. Incandescent vapors rose from a big hole in the
turf. When condensed and solidified, they would show little flecks of gold
transmuted from soil. These were the effects of the familiar Midas Touch pistol. It used lighter atoms to form heavier ones,
while it converted a little of the total mass into energy.
Freeman must have leaped away at just the
right instant to avoid destruction. With astonishing agility, he was pursuing
his intended murderer. As Freeman sprang to the youth's shoulders, they both
fell in a heap on the walk and slid to a stop. Freeman's hand flicked, and the weapon flew into the bushes.
By then Ed and Barbara and Les were standing
over the prone forms. Freeman was unruffled.
"Friends,"
he said, laughing, "meet up with a young one with a sharp viewpoint and
lots of guts in his own way. Yep, Tom Granger.
Granger
was panting heavily. His mass of black hair streamed down over his thin face.
He looked scarcely older than Ed or Les, but these days that meant little. In
repose, his large, dark eyes might have been limpid and idealistic; now they
flashed fury. His shabbiness was affected. Certainly, in this era, there were
no reasons for poverty.
Now
he began to struggle again, in Freeman's grasp. Furilely, of
course. "Yes, I have guts!" he declared. "I wanted to
kill you, Freeman—with whatever means that are left that can still accomplish
that with things like you! I wanted the incident to get into the newscast—yes,
to give me public attention. And not for any stupid vanity, but for the best
purpose there ever was. I wanted a chance to be listened to, while I tell what
everyone must have begun to sense by now. Damn you, Freeman! Let me up!"
Abel Freeman smirked
indulgently and obliged.
Granger rose lamely but gamely. "You
seem to be impromptu acquaintances of this Abel Freeman," he said to Ed
and his companions. "He has feelings, he thinks; he's even a good person.
In some ways he's just an interesting rogue of the nineteenth century. But he's
a device. And unless something is done, we'll be as obsolete as the dinosaur!
Our science serves us no longer. It serves other masters, nearer to its
meaning. Others than I have realized it. In every two houses this side of the
world there is already an average of one of these creatures of vitaplasm. Is
Earth to be kept for us, and for the joy of being human; or are we to
become—basically, and no matter how humanized—mere synthetic mechanisms,
trading our birthright for a few mechanical advantages?"
The shot from the Midas Touch
pistol was drawing a crowd. An approaching police siren wailed.
Suddenly
Granger fixed his eyes on Ed in surprise and recognition. "Dukas,"
he said. "Let me see—Edward Dukas. At a time when the world was more
reasonably watchful, your house was under surveillance. As a possible means of
contacting one Mitchell Prell—who had his hand in what once happened to us,
and perhaps in what is happening now. How does it feel, Dukas, to be so close
to such a celebrity? Ah, maybe you're shyl"
Flattening
out Granger again would have been no useful answer to Ed's memories of bitter
wrongs. He smiled briefly at him.
"Come see me some evening when you don't
feel so much like making a monkey of someone, because someone has just made a
monkey out of you," he said.
Then he hustled his companions away. "There's
no good in getting involved in public confusion," he told them. "Anyhow
not till we talk things out and get them straight."
Ten minutes later they were
in a quiet restaurant.
"Abel
Freeman," Les Payten said. "He was quite a surprise at that."
"Rather,
more of a pointing out of facts we already knew," Barbara remarked.
"The
old robot-peril come true," Less said pensively. "Humanity threatened
to be replaced, not by clanking giants of metal, simple and melodramatic, but
by beings much more refined—though they are perhaps much the same thing. My own
father is one of them."
"There's truth in what Granger
said," Ed pointed out. "There's that dread of being shouldered out of
the way by something strange and tougher. I can feel it too. Granger can certainly
make use of it, preaching. He's clever. But he's the worst kind of fool."
"Yeah,
hammering on the detonator cap of the entire Earth," Less said, breathing
softly.
The
three friends, sitting around a table under soft lights and in pleasant
surroundings, looked at one another. The food before them was good, the music was quiet and soothing. But at eye level,
in the air where their glances passed, seemed to hang all the elements of the
complex civilization to which they belonged: its luxury and beauty, its
climbing technology that could conquer death and reach for other solar systems,
but the by the same or related forces could dissolve worlds, especially if
mankind, at the top, lost control of itself.
"I
thought things would go along smoothly and reasonably," Barbara offered.
"There's certainly plenty of room for both people and androids. I took all
of that more or less on faith. But I'm afraid I'm wrong. After all, how can
human beings live beside beings that blend indistinguishably with the mass and
yet are stronger, quicker?"
Ed
remembered signs of friction that he'd heard about. A minor
riot here or there. He remembered public statements by specialists like
Schaeffer admitting that some confusion was on the way but declaring that in
the end everything should be better for everyone. Those specialists had the
calculators, the great electronic thought-machines, digesting trends, making
profound predictions. But then there was another thought—had many of those
scientists already converted their own bodies to a stronger medium?
Ed
saw that Les Payten had a faint sweat of strain on his forehead, though he knew
that Les was no nervous coward. His sullen poise just after the lunar explosion
long ago had proved that.
"Maybe
the worst of all," Les was saying, "is the sense of being carried
along, swiftly and helplessly, by things that are too big and complicated. You
wish you could find a ledge somewhere in the time-stream and stop for a while
to get your bearings. Sometimes you feel that you are in a
oneway tunnel where you have to keep moving. Is there light at the end of the
tunnel? Maybe it's just a matter of personal adjustment—a taking of whatever
comes."
"I
feel as though we're at the threshold of some terrible danger, Ed,"
Barbara said. "What can we do about it?"
He
saw how strong and earnest she looked, and it reassured him. He touched her
hand briefly. "I don't know exactly," he said. "But I'm for
holding course toward the bigger future that stirred me up with big dreams of
the planets, of the stars. And I'm in favor of being reasonable. I've seen too much hate and fear and unreason
in people. The way things are, it doesn't have to be a lot of people any
more-just a few gone a little crazy. The Moon blew up by accident. A world was
gone. But what happened by accident can certainly happen by design or with the
aid of fury. So, everywhere we go we can talk against fury and panic, and for reason. To our friends, and in the streets. Everywhere that we can, and to everyone. Small as that
effort is, it might help."
Solemnly
the three friends shook hands and agreed to work out the details of a plan.
Ill
That same night, at his home in the suburbs, Ed
Dukas read an article that had especially attracted his attention. Could
vitaplasm be grown into forms unknown before? Could it be shaped from a plan—a
blueprint—like the metal and plastic forming a machine? Heart here, lungs
there, nervous system arranged so? Scaly armor, long, creeping
body? Or wings that fluttered through the air? The author saw no reason why
this could not happen. Monstrous things. Ed Dukas
chuckled at the melodramatic idea. But he suspected that it was far from
impossible.
Young Dukas also had a
caller that night.
"You said I should
come to see you," Tom Granger told him when they were alone in Ed's room.
Ed was on guard at once.
His
visitor's mood seemed to have changed since the afternoon.
"Sorry
if I seemed out of line today," Granger said. "My motives are good.
And I didn't want to insult you."
"Thanks,"
Ed responded shortly. "But you didn't come here just to tell me that. How
does it happen that you're not in jail?"
"Abel
Freeman discreetly pressed no charges. I wish he had. But, like you, he just
disappeared. There was only that hole in the ground—made by the Midas Touch
pistol—a feeble
thing to admit for a publicity showdown. So I kept still, and the police
couldn't hold me. Fact is, most of them seem
sympathetic to what I stand for—the venerable human privilege of walking on
one's own green planet as a natural animal, loving one's wife and children in
the ancient, simple manner."
Granger
was a good orator. Mysteriously, Ed was faintly moved. Perhaps the gentle
argument was too plain and clear. But Ed remained wary of the traps of language
and feeling, and of perhaps impractical dreams.
His
anger sharpened. Then, knowing the possibly deadly quality of anger in these
times and wishing to counteract that everywhere, he yearned desperately to be a
master psychologist, always calm and smiling and supremely persuasive. But he
could not be like that. He was too human and limited. Maybe
too primitive.
"You
still haven't told me why you came here, Granger," he said coldly.
"Why have you passed up a chance for pub-he shouting to come and talk to
me?"
Granger
smiled. "You're clever enough, Dukas, to know that to win the nephew of
Mitchell Prell over to my way of thinking could be to my advantage before that
public. Or that, if I can't make friends with him, at least knowing him better
might help. Even the latter circumstance could be like having a finger on a
whole set of advantages when the showdown between human beings and androids
finally comes. Oh, I admire Prelll A great man—if he was a man when last seenl But his kind of greatness
is poison, Dukas— though millions with short memories have foolishly forgiven
him. But if he ever turns up again, you'll know it, and so, perhaps, will
I—before he can do any further damage. You surely must realize that he bears a
double guilt: for the blowup and for the development of vitaplasml"
Granger's smile was savage
and hopeful.
Ed
laughed in his face. "You think that secretly I might hate Mitchell Prell,
eh, Granger? But he was the idol of my childhood, a whimsical, friendly little
man. So I'm stuck with loyalty. But even if I hated him blackly, I wouldn't
come over to your side. I don't like the way you think. Until the blowup
happened, it was bravo for science and empire. Afterward, your hysterical soul
was free from blame and white as snow, and he was guilty. Maybe I judge you
wrongly. I hope I do. But the way I add it up, it's not the androids or any
other new and inevitable development that is the big danger; it's
people like you, though maybe you don't realize it. Loudmouths
who stir up confusion, animosity, hatred. Maybe I ought to kill you.
Then there'd be one less spark in the powder barrell"
"Why
don't you?" Granger mocked. "There'd still be others. And I'd be
brought back."
Ed
nodded. "The benefits of our civilization," he said. "How would
you like to be an android? Does the idea scare you? You know, Granger, some
people say that, regardless of how you're returned to the living, you're not
the same person you were but only a superficially exact duplicate."
"You
know I'd always choose to be human, Dukas," Granger muttered, looking
almost terrified.
"Sure,
Granger," Ed taunted. "You're not afraid of death— the knowledge that
science can restore you gives you courage. You can take the benefits of
scientific advancement, can't you? But assuming its responsibilities is another
thing."
"I'm
not dodging responsibility! I'm grabbing it, Dukasl I'm striking out for sane
control. I've done things already! While I worked in the vaults, where personal
recordings are kept, certain of those little cylinders disappeared. They won't
be found againl Some men don't deserve that much
protection against mishap—among them your uncle! I'm proud of this, and I boast
of it! No, don't accuse me! Even an official complaint would be challenged by
many people and then buried in a heap of red tape. I can be a dirty fighter,
Dukas; and I'll bite and kill and kick and holler my lungs out to keep this
planet from going to the machines!"
The
wild look in Granger's face was the thing that prompted Ed to action. The
admission of the theft only emphasized the ghoulish determination that was
there. The only hope seemed in smashing that ego out of existence—for a while
at least.
Ed
chuckled. "So you'd take even the essence of people's selves," he
said.
Granger's
gaze didn't waver. "If every last thing I hold dear—and which I believe
most real human beings hold dear in like manner—were in danger, I'd do
anything."
"So would I," Ed
said grimly.
Then
he struck and struck and struck again. Blood spurted from Granger's smashed hps
and nose, as he crashed to the floor, struggled to his feet and fell again.
There
was movement at the door of the room. From behind, Ed was gripped by a strength greater than his own. "Stop it, Ed," he
was commanded quietly. It was his father.
Through
bloodied hps, Granger was explaining hurriedly, "Your son and I disagree.
He lost his temper. All I ask is that the good parts of science—medical and so
forth—be kept and the rest banned. And that fife become
simple. A thing of fields and flowers, and wholesome physical
work. And not a mechanized bedlam, full of constant
danger and tension."
Granger sounded very earnest, Ed thought.
Maybe he was earnest. Maybe he was a good actor.
"Ban
this, ban thatl" Ed shouted. "No one ever lived happily under the
kind of artificial bans you mean, Granger! And what will you do with the
billions of people who disagree with your pretty vision? Some of them will hate
what you advocate as much as you hate existing circumstances! And if modern
weapons are once used . . ."
"Quiet,
Ed," his father said softly. "You've assaulted your guest—one who, as
far as I can see, has the most reasonable of views. A
beautiful picture. I agree with it myself—entirely."
"Look,
Dad," Ed began. "This Granger here is trying to solve today's and
tomorrow's problems with yesterday's poor answers."
Ed
stopped. He had an odd thought: his synthetic father had been created largely
from his and his mother's memories, at a terrible time of grief, when his
mother's reactions had turned against the groping toward the stars. Before
that, Dad had been somewhat averse to mechanization. But now he was distinctly
more so, as if that grief and aversion had marked him.
Jack
Dukas was now medicating Granger's face with antiseptics while Granger
preached, as if from some deep font of a new wisdom: "You see, Mr. Dukas,
again, as in the past, danger is creeping up on us without receiving serious
attention. Beings that are really robots are already controlling part of their
own production. Their creation, everywhere, should be banned or stamped out.
Existing androids should be converted to flesh or destroyed. ... Ill go now.
Thank you for your help. But I think I'll get in touch with your son occasionally.
He needs guidance."
Ed
nodded grimly. "Perhaps I do," he said. "Maybe everyone does.
You watch me and I'll watch you, eh?"
During the succeeding months Ed did his best
to spread his doctrine of calm and reason, working against the agitation which
he knew was already well under way. Les Payten and Barbara Day were with him in
this. All over the world there were others, mostly unknown to them, but with
the same ideas: "Use your head. . . . Don't put fear before knowledge. . .
. Do you know
an android? What is his
name? Maybe Miller or Johnson? You must know a few.
And do they think so differently from yourself? Yes,
there are problems and no doubt prejudice. It may even be justified. But the
answers to our difficulties must be cool-minded. Everyone knows why."
Ed
and his companions talked in this manner to their acquaintances, spoke on
street corners, sent letters to newscast agencies. And they won many people
over. The trouble was that they, and others like them, could not reach
everybody.
Their
Earth remained beautiful. There were hazy hills covered with trees; there were
soaring spires. The unrest was an undercurrent.
This
was a time of choosing of sides, and of buildup, while there was a sense of
helpless slipping onward toward what few could truly want. Voices with another,
harsher message were raised. Tom Granger was hardly alone there, either. Tracts
were passed out as part of their method: What Is Our Heritage?; The Right to Be Human;
Technology Versus Wisdom. Perhaps directly out of such a mixture of truth and crude thinking the
assassinations began. There were thousands in scattered places.
One
day Ed Dukas pushed into a knot of curious onlookers and saw the body of one of
the first of these. There, in the same park where Ed had first met Abel
Freeman, it had been found in the early morning. A Midas Touch
blast had torn it in half.
"It's
Howard Besser, a machinist who lives in the same building with me," a man
in the crowd offered. "He died once in the lunar explosion. Now it
happened again. That's no joke, even though he can be brought back."
Ed saw the victim's torn flesh. It looked like flesh. But broken bones had litde metallic glints in them. Could
you avoid remembering that, mated to like, these beings of vita-plasm could
even reproduce their kind, to help increase their number? Had persons like Tom
Granger planned even this dramatization of a difference? Bits of this flesh
still squirmed, hours after violence.
Granger
had made progress. Growing public attention had won him the privilege of
orating on the newscast. It was he who had first talked about vampires and
androids—together, and to a world-wide audience. He also accomplished an important
part in winning the legal suppression of labs creating human forms in
vitaplasm.
"It
was desecration," he declared in his speech. "It is a tragedy that we
could not clamp down the lid sooner. There are an estimated seventy million of
these 'improvements on nature' now in existence. And there are many hidden establishments
still producing more. Can we ever destroy them all? It is criminal to lock a
human soul in such substance. If, of course, the soul truly remains human, as
it was meant to be . . ."
Granger's
voice was always gentle. Yet to his listeners it suggested dark, lonesome
places where there is danger. Which was true. For now
other killings had started. Familiar human blood was spilled.
On a
pavement Ed saw a grim legend smeared in red beside a corpse: "who
will inherit the universe? retribution. one good turn
desehves another."
Scattered
throughout the Americas, Europe and the Westernized Orient were millions more
of such murders. The result was a trading of grim goods, with the far hardier
android winning in the tally. And that winning was a threat. It could seem a
promise to man of the end of his era. So here was another spur to hysteria,
always mounting higher.
Ed
Dukas and his friends stayed on at the University. They studied with the
efficient help of the sensipsych machine and its vividly real visions, which
could demonstrate as real experiences almost any skill, from the playing of an
antique Viennese zither to the probing of the inner structure of a star. They also put in scattered hours of
work in the factories, whose products still aimed at empire in the spatial distance.
But above all they kept on with their appeals for reason. Their success was
great. In the main, people were reasonable and clearheaded. But a total
winning-over was far from possible.
Noted
men such as Schaeffer were shouting on the newscast. Shouting for
calm—increasing the tinny babble of the choosing of sides.
More
and more, Ed Dukas began to lose faith in the Big Future.
"Maybe
we should have kept still," he said to Les Payten and Barbara Day.
"We only added our small faggot to the fire."
His
friends laughed with him—ruefully—as they walked together across the campus.
Some
minutes later Les Payten nodded to them, and, with a half smile, said, "So
long for now. Don't lose any sleep-not over worries, anyhow."
He sauntered off. In
matters of love, Les was a good loser.
Barbara
Day had taken a little apartment on a tree-lined street. It was nice to walk
there in the twilight. Not far from the apartment a half-acre of ground had
been allowed to grow wild with trees and bushes, for contrast to the surrounding
sleek neatness.
There, in the thick shadows, Ed Dukas saw
sinuous movement. He had a fleeting glimpse of something long and winding,
and perhaps half as thick as his body. Then he saw it again—saw its weird glow,
saw the interlocking hexagonal plates that covered it everywhere. But it did
not suggest a gigantic snake at all. For one thing, its mode of locomotion was
different—a rippling movement of thousands of little prongs on its undersides
seemed to be involved in its principle. It hurried quiedy now for cover.
Rhododendron bushes parted. It disappeared behind a great oak.
Barbara
and Ed rushed forward. The grass bore no marks. Prudently, they did not venture
into the dark undergrowth.
Ed's
skin prickled all over and felt too small for him. "This is it," he
said in a flat tone.
"What, Ed?"
"Life
plotted on the engineer's drawing board. Vitaplasm.
The days when nature designed all animals are over, I'm afraid."
"What would it be for,
Ed?"
"How would I really
know? Want to guess?"
"To create more terror maybe?" Barbara said. "What else? To go around at night—to stir people up with a horror that they've
never known before. They'll realize it's
vita-plasm, the stuff of the androids too. They'll link hatreds. Maybe it's
another trick—a propaganda stunt to force the fight to the finish. A stunt
invented by somebody like Granger."
"It
seems to fit the pattern," Ed said hoarsely. "You're probably right.
But this thing could have been made by the other side, too. The
android side. As a means of reprisal. I've
admired them. But I don't especially trust their judgment, either."
Ed
Dukas felt sick. He wondered now how much longer anything on Earth could last.
Barbara
touched his arm gently. "Ed, we should notify the police. For the safety of the neighborhood."
"Of course. And you won't stay out here alone tonight. You'll put up at a hotel, or
I'll bunk on your floor."
Barbara
managed to laughed. "The building is stout. My
window is high, There are plenty of tenants. I'm not
dangerously stupid and I don't swoon. But I rather like the idea of having you
close by."
Ed Dukas had no trouble convincing the police
that he bad seen something extraordinary—which was proof enough that there had
been other calls, previously. Ed slept a few hours on a divan, listening,
while, outside, armed men patrolled the streets and watched the backs of
buildings, which were kept brilliantly illuminated. Floodlights lighted up that
shaggy wood lot like day. Low, flat robot vehicles plowed through it.
Nothing was found.
But
miles away, nearer the city, there were a dozen dead-all of them of the old
order of life. They were crushed. Not a bone in their bodies was intact. They
had been dragged from their beds while they slept.
Horror
swept through the city. The monster or monsters had been seen. They were of the
same substance as the androids. Therefore, this was an android attack, clear
and simple—to minds blurred by fear and fury.
Scared,
angry faces surrounded Ed Dukas in the streets the next morning. The coldness
in him was like a stone behind his heart. He seemed to be hurled along by
time, helpless to change its course. Even Barbara looked sullen and confused,
though, walking beside him, she tried to sound cheerfully rational.
"You
know, we could all be changed over into androids. I wonder if you or I would
ever want that? I think that even you are not
especially sympathetic to them, except as something new and potentially great.
Damn! I wish my wits were clearer. An android is a refined machine, you might
say. But to be a human being is to be a thing of soul—is that it? A creature of tradition and pride, of sentiment."
Ed Dukas shrugged. He felt
bone and brain weary.
That
same day there were bloody riots in scattered localities—much worse trouble
than before. It seemed like the start of an avalanche.
That
afternoon another incident happened. Les Payten came to meet his friends again
in their favorite restaurant. They sat chatting glumly and listening to the
newscast.
The
androids—"The Phonies," they were already being called —were slipping
away to the hills, for safety and also no doubt to gather their own not
inconsiderable numbers, and to entrench themselves.
Les
Payten was called to the phone. He came back after a minute, saying with a
puzzled expression, and almost a cynical smile, "My father committed
suicide. He left a note: 'Eternity is a joke. And I'm sick of being a robot.
But what's the good of being a man, either—now?' Bumed himself wide open with a
Midas Touch pistol. I guess the ultimate cruelty would
be to bring him back."
That
night there were three times as many crushed bodies as the night before. But there were far more deaths caused by other violent means.
Two weeks passed, each day worse than the preceding. Neighbors started hurling
imprecations at neighbors: "Test-tube monkey! . . . Obsolete imbecile!
Once there was a news report: "Equipment
found—a power generator of a type and output similar to that for a star ship,
but obviously for another purpose: meant, it seems, to power high-energy
weapons of the beam type. Is this an android or a human assembly? The equipment
was ordered dismantled. It was found in a large basement in the City."
And
Tom Granger began his broadcasts again: "Androids —your numbers are
relatively few. You could not win against us. And we would take you
back—kindly—to . become
people again. Most of you once were human beings. You were meant to be that. .
. ." Granger's tone was softer; it was condescending.
Ed Dukas phoned Granger at the newscast
studio. After a long wait, he managed to contact him. That Granger agreed to
speak to him at all was no doubt due to Ed's relationship to Mitchell Prell.
"Granger,"
he said, "I'm pleading. Please, forget that you know how to say anything.
No, I don't want to offend you— but it's just no good. I'm not guessing—I've
seen. To some you may be a great leader. To others—well—you're a lot less. So
do us a favor—again, please! Go away, disappear. Take a long, silent rest in a
place unknown."
Ed
Dukas was desperate, grasping at straws. For a fleeting moment his hope almost
convinced him that his mixture of begging and ridicule might work.
"Do
I know you? Oh, yes, Dukas!" Granger mocked. "We should converse
again when we both have the time. You still need instruction, I see. You are an
incorrigible lover of fantastic novelty, Edward Dukas! Now you're
frightened."
"Yes,
I am frightened!" Ed replied, calmly now. "If you weren't a fool and
a fanatic, you could guess that millions of androids—supermen, some call
them—could not be weak."
"Goodbye
for the present, Dukas." Granger broke the connection.
Ed
rubbed his face with his hands. He thought of the sinuous thing he had once
seen, and of the killing that it— and other things not necessarily of the same
shape but of the same substance—had done. Could Granger be one of those who
sought to stir up more dread and fury with lab-created monsters of vitaplasm?
Should he try first to find out who was using and directing them?
It
would be slow work. So, that same afternoon, he chose another path which might
lead to quicker results. He went looking for old Abel Freeman, who he guessed
was of the sort to be a leader among his land. By asking around, he located the
house where Freeman was said to live. But the picturesque android had long
since vacated his lodgings.
Ed gathered Les Payten and
Barbara.
"Freeman
will be in the hills somewhere," Barbara pointed out. "With
others like him. What if, for a lark, we rent a helicopter, and see if
we can find him? What can we lose?"
"We're
near the end of our rope," Les said. "I'm willing to try
anything."
It was a crazy stunt, but
they agreed on it. Ed had picked up some information about where Freeman might
be found, plus a few facts of his recent history. Naturally, Freeman had a bad
reputation.
Arriving
over the wooded mountain country where Freeman had often been seen in the
past, Ed let his craft setde into various forest glades, one after another. At
first they saw no one, although certainly many androids had now retreated into
this wilderness.
However,
after they had made a dozen tries in as many places, Freeman himself suddenly
appeared, dirty, covered with burrs, but dressed now in coveralls of modern
vintage. A Midas Touch pistol was in his belt.
"Hello!"
he greeted. "Yes, I know you three young onesl Are you lost?"
"We're here for
neighborly conversation," Ed began.
"That's
mighty nice," Freeman mocked with a twinkle in his hard blue eyes.
"Could be you're here just to snoop. Could be me and the boys should do
you in."
"Could
be we are here to snoop—to learn a little better what's
going on, that is," Ed replied. "And we're also here in the hope of
finding somebody with good sense and wits and influence enough to keep this
planet from becoming another Asteroid Belt."
Abel
Freeman's glance held a certain sparkle of admiration when he glanced at Ed;
then it turned grim.
"You
couldn't mean me," he said. "Figured on going
around, minding my own business, without being crowded. Got crowded plenty, though, closer to' the City. Gettin' crowded here, too. Had to smash up
quite a few people. Don't figure on taking it for good. Lucky we were
made cheap. Couldn't stand it, otherwise. Hiding in the brush. Eating sticks.
Hardly ever sleeping. Lucky we can't catch pneumonia.
We could stand conditions far worse than this—but it gets awful tiresome. Seen
Granger lately?"
"You
can smell him most everywhere," Ed answered bitterly.
There
was a loud explosion a hundred yards to the left. A Midas Touch
blast. Ed felt the shock-pressure of it and held his breath until the
radiation-tainted vapors cooled and blew away.
"That's
Nat, the hellcat of my boys," Abel Freeman remarked casually. Then he
shouted, "Nat—you damnfool— don't you know there's company?"
Then
Ed and his companions saw them—a beetle-browed foursome peering from the brush.
The Freeman boys. They looked like a quartet of
Neanderthals. But in a way they were less human than Neanderthal men. For they
were the crystallization, via science and vitaplasm, of someone's romanticized
and comic conception of the vigor of his ancestors.
Behind
them now appeared a girl with pale golden skin and eyes whose slant suggested
the beauty of a leopard. This would be Freeman's daughter, the inestimable
Nancy. There was also a leathery crone, mother of the pack, and wife of Abel.
Nat
Freeman fired the Midas Touch again. Obviously he
wasn't trying for accuracy. In fact, he must have miscalculated some. For the
wind blew the radioactive vapors against Les Payten, standing a little to one
side. He screamed once, writhing in their hot clutch, and collapsed.
Abel
Freeman, the android renegade, rushed unharmed through those vapors. Only his
clothes charred. "Nat, you stop playin'!" he ordered. "And as
for you three young ones —you haven't got the sense you talk aboutl Coming
here? You're enemies. And you're weak as daisies! No, I don't figure I'd ever
want to be your kind, even without the raw deal I got! Lots better to be a
devil in the woods until we can come out—if there's anything left to come out
of, or tol Now get out of here fast—before my family
gets annoyed."
Abel
Freeman lifted Les Payten's hideously burned body into the helicopter and then
held the door open for Ed and
Barbara.
"You better take care of this fellow right away," Freeman said.
"Now get on your way!"
Ed
guided the craft toward the City, where Les would certainly spend several weeks
in a lab tank before his injured flesh was back to normal. Les kept muttering
in semi-delirium, "Damned robots. Freeman, too. And damned, ornery people. Got to pick between them, don't
we? So maybe zero will cancel zero. Can't stay on the fence
all the time. Sorry, when the going gets rough, I'm for the people. Peaceful common sense? There just isn't any."
Les's voice sounded like a
dirge for two races.
Barbara
said, "Maybe he's right. There isn't any sense left. Only
a picking of sides for battle. Our efforts went to waste."
She
sounded remote, almost unfriendly. Ed suddenly felt that he was losing her,
too.
IV
That was a bad evening for Ed Dukas. He left
Barbara at her house, which was now guarded. But he did not get home easily.
For that was the evening trouble became general. John Jones of old-time flesh
and blood, and George Smith of vitaplasm forgot all
their politeness and let their smoldering thoughts come to the surface:
"So
now you brew up monsters like yourselves, to attack us. I wouldn't be like you
if it was the last way to be alive."
"Oh, no, brother? Those creatures must be yours. What makes you so good? Born with your
own hide, eh? The elite. With jelly
for insides, and a mean nature."
Talk
swiftly led to flying fists. But who could hurt an android with a human fist?
Before their hardened knuckles a human jaw could become mush. Still, there were
heavier primitive weapons. Then, by progression, weapons that
were not so primitive.
Ed didn't try any more to quell the trouble.
He watched it,
walked around it and away from it. The wise and careful thinking that he had
been taught to believe in seemed to have deserted his kind. The stars were only
a remote fancy, lost in the chaos of local emotion. Feeling beaten, Ed finally
got home.
This
was the evening when he told himself that anything could happen at any
moment—that morning might not even come. On the newscast, he heard the report
that the first star ship—to be aimed perhaps at Proxima Centauri or Sirius—was
within weeks of completion out there on its asteroid. There were infinite
heights to this era of his. And terrifying depths.
This
was the evening when, fearing that the spoken word could no longer be heard
through the din of clashing hatreds, Ed Dukas decided to write letters.
He
meant to begin with a letter to Les and then write to his father, whose eyes
had turned backward toward archaic simplicities. He wanted to write to Granger,
asking again for calm. But he had only completed a few paragraphs to Les when
that kid nickname of his appeared on a blank sheet of his paper. From nowhere:
"Nipper."
Only
Mitchell Prell, unheard from for ten years, had ever called him that. His uncle. A likable little man, tainted
by accusations, but part of the once thrilling thoughts of the future.
Mitchell Prell had belonged to the onward surging and reaching of science—and
its stumbling. The lunar blowup had come as a forerunner of the first leap to
the stars. And the human-and-android animosity had resulted from the mastery of
the forces of life. Wonder becoming horror. White turning
black. Till you hardly knew what to believe in, except that, being
alive, you had to go on trying to make things right.
For
an hour Ed Dukas sat in his room. Nothing more appeared on the paper which he
had clamped under his microscope. "Nipper." That was all. Silly name of his childhood.
Often
he looked around him, as though expecting someone to appear. Several times he
said sofdy, "Uncle Mitch, you must be here, someplace. . . ." There
was no answer.
The
muttering tumult in the streets—the shouts, the occasional rush of feet, the
curses and yells—masked the arrival of Tom Granger. Ed was startled from his
preoccupation to find Granger almost at his elbow. With him was a man who
looked like a plain-clothes police official. In the background, grim and
frightened, was Ed's mother.
"Eddie,"
she said. "If you know anything, tell. Mitch just isn't worth any more
trouble to us."
"Tell what?" Ed
demanded, rising.
"About
where Mitchell Prell is," Granger told him. "You said things which
hinted that he might be around."
Ed's
throat tightened. It was still a minor shock to remember that the probe beam
had probably been used on this house sporadically for years. The refined radar
of the probe beam could, if minutely focused, make fair pictures of distant
things inside walls. But Ed didn't think that it could make the small print on
a sheet of letter paper readable. But there were instruments that could pick up
faint sounds from miles away—a voice, for instance—and amplify them to
audibility. Ed was still sure that, over distance, his mind itself remained
inviolable.
Ed
felt cornered by the brute forces that always take over whenever reason is
broken down by fear. Once his uncle had been a scapegoat to
blame for disaster. Then, poor memories and triumphant years had half
forgiven him. But now, during trouble, he was guilty again. And according to
savage concepts of justice so were his relatives.
The
confusion of half blaming his uncle left Ed and was replaced by stubborn
loyalty. He summoned all his self-control and grinned carefully. He wondered if
the fright in Granger's large eyes reflected realization at last of the angry
hands, gone completely untrustworthy, that now touched the controls of modern
science. Was he getting intelligent so late? Or was he afraid of something
simpler?
Ed
forced a laugh. "You picked up my muttering, Granger," he accused.
"I wonder what you mutter about, these days?
Grant me the same privilege of nervousness under strain which you could do a
lot to relieve, everywhere, as I have been begging you to see. No, I don't know
where Mitchell Prell is, though I wish I did."
The plain-clothes man had moved over to the
table. Now he peered into the microscope. Soon he motioned to Granger to do
likewise. Ed felt the roots of his hair puckering.
"What
does 'Nipper' signify to you, Dukas?" Granger asked at last, levelly.
"Suppose
it's my pet name for you, Granger?" Ed answered. "Your friend can
take the paper along. The police laboratories might make something else of it.
Maybe I doodle with a bum pen and absent-mindedly stick the doodle under a
microscope—and right away somebody wants to make a story of it. You want to
psyche me? I've humored that kind of whim from the police before. This time,
for cussedness, I'll stand on my rights and demand that they get a court order
before they meddle with -my most private possession, my memory. Especially
since hotheads and hysterics seem to have taken over. But wait, Granger. I'm
sure that sensible people are still in the majority. They haven't reacted very
much, yet. But they will—with matters as bad as they are now. Maybe they
haven't any answers to our problems, except calm and the hope of working
something out. But that's a lot. We were schooled to cautious thinking,
Granger, and that means something, even though you and plenty of others can
lose their wits. Maybe the sensible people will finally shut you up!"
"Well
take the paper along all right," the plain-clothes man said. "And
you, too. We already have the court order you mention."
"Dukas," Granger said with a show
of great patience, "will you ever realize? We're facing a soulless horror.
We must be harsh if need be. But you should be glad to give your absolute
co-operation. It's your duty. We have always felt that Prell is alive,
somewhere. Twice he has been part of disaster, even if unintentionally. We must
stop him before he can bring us greater, unknown dangers."
Ed
eyed this thin, wily man who had managed to assume a certain unofficial power
in the world. And again Ed had trouble judging him. Perhaps he was entirely
insincere. Yet he had, too, the marks of the rabid crusader following obsolete
themes that needed revision; following them blindly, with both a kind of
courage and the crassest stupidity.
"Tell
me something, Granger," Ed said. "I'm curious. And I know I have a
duty, however different from what you mean. Did you have a hand in the creation
of the monsters of vitaplasm? I mean the real monsters, not just the androids,
the Phonies. The use of terror is old in war and politics. Stirring up fury,
with the blame carefully implied elsewhere."
Granger's
features stiffened, as if he had been insulted, or perhaps he was just acting.
"I would not dirty my hands with things from hell, Dukasl" he
snapped. "Unwise as you are, you must know thatl Now
I think the police want to take you away." N
Ed's
mother stood in the doorway of his room without saying a word. She looked
strong, yet bitter and scared. He knew that her loyalty was with him, though
her views differed somewhat from his.
His
father must have been out of the house when Granger and the other man arrived,
Ed thought. Did his going out on this chaotic evening mean anything special?
Wanting to be loyal, and at least half sure that the wish was returned,' Ed
didn't care to complete the thought.
He
was concerned about his mother, yet he said, "Try not to worry, Mom. Go to
bed. They'll have to guaid the house.-
I
can still insist on it. And I don't think I can be held very long, even
now."
"Your
father will come to you as soon as he knows, Eddie," she said.
So
Edward Dukas was carted off to the local bastille. A helmet was put on his
head. But what was learned from him about the whereabouts of Mitchell Prell
must have been both confusing and disappointing. Certainly, though, it must
have intrigued the police, as did that single name on the paper, which told
them nothing under the most -careful scrutiny.
Bronson,
the portly local police chief, introduced Ed to a man named Carter Loman, a
bullishly handsome character with a mouth like a trap, a smile to match, and a
gimlet scrutiny. A big wheel of some sort, Ed assumed. Was there something
familiar about him?
"You'll have to spend the night here,
Dukas," Loman rumbled.
Ed
put out the light in his cell, but as he crept into his cot, he held a bit of
paper from his coat pocket in one hand. He left his fountain pen open, on top
of his clothes. For maybe an hour he lay quietly in the dark, listening to the
scattered noises of the troubled night. Then he slept.
He
awoke as dawn grayed the east and glanced at once at the paper in his hand,
which he had kept outside the blanket. Ed's heart leaped. A message had been
written. Perhaps it had taken all night to toil it out at a creeping pace: "Nipper—argue police—you go Port
Smitty—Mars—at once."
The
final e of once was
already written, except that a fine of it was still being extended. A little
dot of wet ink was still laboring across the paper.
Ed
had no microscope or pocket lens, but he risked turning on the light. He peered
hard. He was not at all sure that he saw anything special. But imbedded in the
dark liquid he thought for an instant that he beheld a suggestion of
form—impossible or entirely 'fantastic. Then the tiny minuscule of ink
quivered, and the hint was gone.
Ed whispered, so low that he himself could not hear, "Uncle Mitch. I know that you're around—in some .iorrn. I
wish I understood what you're up to."
Ed
tore the message from the sheet of paper, chewed it to a pulp, and spat it on
the floor. At least he was destroying concrete evidence that might provoke greater
attention than his psyched memories. Of course they would psych him again—that
was why they had held him, hoping that he would learn more. But he had learned
very little.
The psychying was done. Chief Bronson and
Carter Lo-man knew all that he knew. Now Ed offered his proposition:
"Suppose I got to Mars, as Mitchell Prell suggests? I seem to be the only
man to contact him. You are aware that I myself haven't more than a wild
glimmer of where the trail leads. But you know that I'm badly worried about what
a human-and-android conflict can mean, and that I want to break the danger
somehow. If you want to find Prell, track me by the best means that you
know."
Chief Bronson nodded,
musingly.
"Hmm-m—very good!" Carter Loman grunted. "Of course you
would prefer to act alone, Dukas, because you are fond of Prell. You offer to
combine forces with us only because it is the only way that you can do what you
want to do at all. All right, we agree."
"Tickets
and passport will be arranged for immediately," Bronson said. "And
now there is someone here to see you."
It
was Ed's father, angry with him but more angry with
the restraint under which his son had been put.
"Damn
it, Eddie, I tried to get to you last night, and they sent me away!" he
stormed. "And what have you been up to? What's this nonsense about a
message from Prell? Damn, has everything gone completely crazy? I was for this
man Granger and his return to rustic simplicities; but he's gone wild, too!
Isn't there any way to handle what's happening? Phonies, and things from a
witch's caldron, but grown to elephant size. And more of them all the time!
Where does it stop? . . . Well, it helps a little that lots of people went out
last night breaking up fights. Even some Phonies did that, they say; but should
we believe it? Scientists were on the run everywhere, as maybe they should be
for inventing so much new trouble. The Schaeffer lab is barricaded. I'm glad
for your sensible people, Ed, but can they hold the peace for more than a
little while? And would it do any final good if they could?"
Jack
Dukas, the "memory man" of old-time flesh, was more like a dad to Ed
again, and Ed was almost as glad for that as he was for the awakening of the
forces of calm and order.
"Thanks,
Dad," Ed said with a cryptic meaning of his own. "It's a small
lessening of danger, anyway. It's a fact, though, that the situation, at the
moment, is an explosive magazine which one well-placed idiot could set off. And
it's hard to see how there could ever be less than many. Say that our population
is split three ways. Android, human and that mixed group'
which is trying to keep them from each other's throats. It's hard to see
how the latter can succeed for very long."
For a moment Ed and Jack Diikas were almost
close, in spite of differences. Ed was a little reassured.
"I'm
going out to Mars, Dad," he said. "With police cooperation.
Maybe to find my uncle. And—who knows?—maybe even to
find some useful answers."
Jack
Dukas shrugged. "More science, no doubt," he said. "Well,
anyway, good luck."
The brief spell of
companionship was broken.
For
a moment Ed was tense with the thought of precious time possibly wasted,
chasing off to the Red Planet, when perhaps he should be trying to hunt down
the perpetrators of offenses to a new biology—in vitaplasm. He knew that time
remained still desperately short, with nuclear hell building up. But a choice
had been made, and he sensed that it was the best one.
Ed
and Barbara went to see Les Payten that morning. He lay in a bed, his body
encased in an armor of plastic, under which fluids circulated. He had mended
enough to listen and speak. Ed partly explained his intentions. About them, Les
showed a mixture of a sick man's insight and weariness: "I hope well see
each other again, Ed. And that the world will still be around. And that you
won't be changed too much-strong, weak, big or little. Because I've got things
figured out for
me at last, Ed. Granger
is right, as far as I am concerned. I was a romantic kid, but now I've had
enough! The stars are still farther out of reach than we realize. Got to fight the murdering Phonies and all of the vitaplasm menace,
no matter what. Because there never was a menace like
it— not to me." Les grinned wanly. "So long, pals."
In a
park, some hours later, Barbara and Ed walked in the beautiful dusk, while the
arch of silvery murk that had been Luna masked a few of the first stars.
Something with long webbed wings was visible in silhouette against it for an
instant—another creature that never existed before. It added a chill to their
low mood. Ed was thinking that he must say goodbye to Barbara, too, very soon,
and to all the chaotic wonder and charm that was Earth. Earth
maybe in its last days.
Barbara said, "I wish
I were going along, Eddie."
"So do I. Babs, go out to the asteroids. Like my mother. It's safer there."
"I
meant my wish, Ed," Barbara protested
earnestly. Of course, a girl is still sometimes rated as a nuisance that a man
has to take extra pains to look after—no companion for one to concentrate on
the dangers ahead. Maybe it's true."
He
looked at her sharply and gulped hard. But gay little bells seemed to tinkle in
his head. "Maybe a lot of things," he commented. "But I think
you, as much as anybody, know what we're up against. Possible
death, of course, which could be permanent. Or some
fantastic loss or change of identity. How can we guess just what? If you
can take all that mystery and hardship, too—well, I won't say no. Maybe if you
were Mrs. Ed Dukas we could have Bronson provide your tickets to Mars."
Her
smile came out, like the sun. "You're heartlessly matter-of-fact and
unromantic, Ed," she told him.
He
drew her into the shadow of a tree. A couple of minutes
later, when he released her, they both looked dazed—as though, crazy as life
was, it still could be heaven. She was beautiful. He'd never seen anyone
so beautiful.
Fifteen hours later they were aboard the Moon Dust.
V
As the
ship rose on its column of
fire some of the old love of distance and enigma came back to Ed. There was
also a sense of adventurous escape, like that of city workers of centuries ago,
when, chucking business and office routines, they had rushed to the country on
weekends to regain a little of primitive nature while they scorched a steak
over a smoky fire in the woods.
On
the Moon Dust there
were more women and children than men: refugees from danger. But would old Mars
be much safer? Didn't it now belong to the same human civilization, with its
dark undercurrents?
The
Dukases were smoothly hurled across the vast trajectory to Mars. They landed
at a high south-temperate latitude, not far below the
farthest extent limit of the polar cap; though now, in summer, it had dwindled
to a mere cake of deep hoarfrost a few hundred miles across and on high ground.
Around this remnant stretched a yellow plain made up of crusting mud, swiftly
drying lakes scummed with the Martian equivalent of green algae, and' white
patches of ancient-sea salt and alkali.
But Port Smitty itself was in a wide, shallow
valley, or "canal," a bit farther north. Its many airdomes, necessary
to maintain an atmosphere dense enough and sufficiently oxygenated to sustain
human life, loomed among vast greenhouses and thickets of tattered, dry-leaved
plants. The central dome was topped by a statue of old Porter Smith, this region's
first human inhabitant; he was still alive but long gone from the Mars he had
loved. For he had associated himself with the building of
star ships.
Port
Smitty already boasted a population of half a million. And there were other
cities of almost equal size. On Mars, many of the first rejuvenated had
settled. And many colonists of every sort had come there since.
On
the rusty bluff overlooking the city were the remains
of a far older metropolis—towers, domes and strange nameless structures for
which anything manlike could have no use. Fifty million years ago the Martians,
like the people of the Asteroid Planet, had been wiped out in war.
Ed
Dukas and his bride rode by tube train from the flame-blasted spaceport to the
city. Their hotel room overlooked a courtyard lush with earthly palms and
flowers. Birds twittered and flitted from branch to poppy bloom. From somewhere
in the hotel came dance music.
Their
room was supposed to be energy-shielded, but Ed remained cautious. He merely
left his penpoint bared in his coat pocket, with the envelope of an old letter.
He had already told Barbara all he knew about Uncle Mitch's message and had
added some wild guesses. So now she gave her husband a smile of understanding
as he hung his coat carefully on a chair. Then she came into his arms.
Later
that evening, dancing, they covered their wariness carefully. They might be
under observation in any of a hundred different ways: by probe beams, hidden
cameras, or by individuals, android or human, whom they did not know. In spite
of old loyalty, Ed Dukas was not entirely at ease with the thought of
contacting Mitchell Prell. Yet, he wished to avoid being trailed so that he
could act alone and separate from the dictatorial and often panic-stricken
opinions of others.
On
Mars there had been considerable violence, too, though there had been no
gliding, sinuous things that brought nocturnal terror. But here, too, there
was a mingling of android and human being, with no visible marks to distinguish
the one from the other, though to many the difference was as great as that
between man and werewolf.
Barbara
seemed to grow sleepy in Ed's arms as they danced. Ed yawned slightly. So they
drifted from the room and back to their own quarters.
Ed
pulled the old envelope from the pocket of the coat on the chair. As he had
hoped, a message was traced waveringly on it: "Go Port Karnak—then E.S.E. into desert."
Both
Ed and his wife knew that Martian deserts surpassed all earthly conceptions of
desolation. They looked at each other. The challenge was still in Barbara's
eyes. The fact that she could carry a pack was a matter that had been settled
long ago.
Now
Ed risked speaking—in the lowest of audible whispers: "So, instead of
going to bed, as people in our position should, we start traveling—fast."
He
felt the safety pouch under his belt. Personal recordings were in it: tiny
cylinders, a pair for each of them. A precaution. In
the vaults on Earth there should still be others. But one could not always be
sure of those. Some had disappeared.
As
memory of what he thought he had seen in a tiny ink drop still clutched rather
frighteningly at Ed Dukas's brain. It was a hint of how Mitchell Prell wrote
his messages—in an utterly simple and heroic way, but with fantastic, dream-shot
implications. Could it be part of android flexibility? Well, probably his fancy
had tricked him, because things couldn't be that odd. Still ...
Often
Ed had felt bitter over the confusions created by the advance of science. But
now enigmas led him on as thrillingly as ever. There had to be wonders ahead,
for thinking of Mitchell Prell without thinking of new science was impossible.
"Let's go, Babs,"
he whispered.
Casually,
like ordinary guests checking out, they put two light valises into the conveyer
and dropped to the main floor by elevator. The rest of their stuff they left
behind. They paid their bill ,and took an auto cab to
the central tube station. In the washrooms they changed from leisure clothes to
the rough gear used in the Martian wilderness: light-weight vacuum armor and
oxygen helmets equipped with air purifiers and small radios—all fitted over
light trousers and shirts. The remaining contents of their discarded valises
they transferred to ruck-sacks.
In
the station they mingled with farmers, miners and homesteaders. Couples such as
themselves were common on Mars; they were going out to make their fortunes.
They
bought their tickets to Port Karnak. Ed and Barbara looked around them. A half-dozen men among the waiting passengers wore no
oxygen helmets. True, this underground depot was pressurized, but the outer
thinness and oxygen-poverty of the Martian air had to be prepared for. The
absence of helmets, then, almost had to be the mark of the android. To keep its
vital processes going, the versatile vigor of vitaplasm merely disintegrated a
tiny bit of its atomic substance, to make up for the shortage of chemical
energy.
Ed
and Barbara boarded the train with the crowd. Much of this underground system
of transportation had merely been converted to human beings' use from that
which had remained from the ancient culture of Mars. Behind the projectilelike
coaches, close fitting in the tubes, air-pressure built up. Acceleration was
swift. Covering the thousand-mile distance to Port Karnak took twenty minutes.
Once
arrived, Ed bought the additional equipment they needed; then in a small
restaurant they ate a last civilized meal. They took an ato bus out along a
glassed-in, pressurized causeway and descended at the final stop, beside a few
scattered greenhouses, the outermost of which provided the city with fresh,
earthly vegetables.
Here
the desert was at hand, utterly frigid at night, under the splinters of stars.
Deimos, the farther moon, hung almost stationary in the north. Irregular in
shape, it looked like a speck of broken chinaware, just big enough to make its
form discernible. Probably it was a small asteroid which the gravity of Mars
had captured.
The
Dukases began to plod. The desert came under their boots, and the solidity of
the ground gave way, gradually, to a difficult fluffiness, like that of dry
flour. It was millions of square miles of dust the color of rusted iron, which,
in part, it was. Dust, ground to ultimate fineness by eons of
thin, swift wind. Under the dim light of the sky, colors dropped in tone
to a monotonous grayness that only faintly revealed the nearest dunes, and
showed plumes of soil moving on the wind like ghosts. The dust made a constant,
sleepy soughing against their helmets, like an invitation to death.
Barbara
pressed Ed's gloved hand, as if in reassurance, and he pressed hers in return.
Maybe they had eluded all pursuit or probe-beam tracking. Certainly the blowing
dust itself would be an effective screen against the most refined radar device.
Yet to vanish from the view of men could mean another kind of danger. It came
to Ed that even when Mars had teemed with millions of its own inhabitants,
perhaps no one had trod within a mile of where he and his wife were now
walking.
The
Dukases marched on for an hour without saying anything. But during a momentary
rest Barbara gripped Ed's arm, thus establishing a firm sonic channel, so that
they could talk without using their helmet radios, which might betray them.
"I hope we're not too crazy, Ed,"
she said. "Going out
into a wilderness like' this, on the basis of a
couple of strange ■ notes, and with blind faith that somehow we'll be
guided. I 1 hope; I hope!"
Her
tone was light and courageous, and he was more than ' ever glad.
"Think
of our muddled home world, and make that a prayer," Ed said. "We
might be doing something to help."
So
they kept up their march through the night and into the weirdly beautiful dawn.
The desert was rusty dun. The sky was deep, hard blue. The dunes were
dust-plumed waves, in which a footprint was quickly lost. The rocks were
wind-carven spires. Earth was the bluish morning star. It looked very peaceful,
denying the need for haste. Its ring was a nebulous blur.
Barbara
and Ed sucked water into their mouths through the tubes which led back from
their helmets to the large canteens in their rucksacks. They swallowed
anti-fatigue and food tablets. For a moment they even removed their oxygen
helmets. There was no great harm in that; only the distention of blood vessels
under swiftly lowered air pressure and an ache and ringing of eardrums, and of
course the stinging dryness of the Martian cold against their cheeks.
Forty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, below zero, it was just then.
"No
more clowning," Ed said as they replaced their helmets. "We might
get dazed by oxygen starvation and forget what we're doing."
They
kept up their march, through the morning, past the almost warm Martian noon,
and on into the frosty chill that came long before sunset. They were still
plodding on when it was dawn once more. In spite of anti-fatigue capsules, they
were getting pretty groggy.
In
his breast pouch Ed had his pen and the envelope on which the latest message
from Mitchell Prell had been inked. Now, surely, there had been time enough. So
he ventured to disturb the writing materials. There were more words on the
envelope: "True
on course—keep moving."
So they continued to follow the pointer of
their small gyrocompass, set to stab precisely toward east-southeast. Ed no
longer questioned an odd miracle. It was simply there, and he was grateful.
An
hour later Barbara glimpsed fluttering movement near by: a fleck of bright
yellow. Then it was gone behind a large chip of stone. Then it appeared again.
Ed saw it, too, for an instant. It fluttered, it chirped-plaintively. It was an impossibility in the wastelands of Mars, or anywhere
else on the Red Planet, outside of an air-conditioned cage. It was a small,
earthly bird. A canary.
Barbara
stared at it. Her blue eyes were bloodshot and scared. The tired droop of her
cheeks deepened.
"Darling,"
she said rather lamely. "I think that fatigue is about to get the better
of us."
"Think again," Ed
said.
"I
guess you're right," she answered. "Even without vita-plasm, it's not
much of a stunt to give a guided missile or a spy-robot the form of a little
bird, with television eyes. And a Midas Touch weapon,
or something equally unpleasant, built into it. At the hotel in Port Smitty, it
was unrecognizable among the other caged canaries. Here, though, it's unmistakably
identified. Which means that whoever is guiding it—the police
looking for your Uncle Mitch or friends of Granger's, or whoever else—don't care
any more that we know what it is. We're helpless now—they think."
A
dull fury came to Ed Dukas. He might have guessed that all chances of their
eluding surveillance would have been countered carefully. This birdlike
mechanism must have followed them all the way from Port Smitty, keeping just
out of sight.
Then
a more hopeful idea hit him. But reason conquered it. "No," he said
aloud, gripping Barbara's shoulder so that she could hear. "If the
pseudo-canary was Uncle Mitch's guide for us, it would have revealed itself
sooner, and the messages on paper would not have been necessary."
In a flash Ed drew his own Midas Touch and fired it at the place among the broken rocks where
the canary had just vanished. At a little distance there was the usual spurt of
incandescence, fringed now with red dust. But from the projecting boulders near
its base, a small yellow form spurted with a faint and musical twitter of
mockery. Then a heavy voice spoke—one which neither Ed nor Barbara recognized
just then:
"Better luck next
time, robot lovers. Lead on!"
Thereafter,
the false canary was careful not to show itself. And Ed was left with his
frustrated anger, and with other uncertain thoughts. What if the written
messages had not come from Mitchell Prell at all, but from someone else with an
unknown purpose? Or, what if they were from Uncle Mitch, but had been prepared
long ago and left to be presented to him, Ed Dukas, by means of some
mechanical agent? What if—well—many things.
Using
his tiny portable radar unit to locate the bird drew only a blank. Perhaps the
little mechanism with a radio speaker for a voice was effectively shielded
against such detection, even at short range.
To
attempt evasive action would be a waste of time and waning energy. There was
nothing to do but go on, see what developed, and trust to luck. There was the
certainty that real pursuit would come, but .what shape it would take remained
unknown.
As
Ed and Barbara plodded on through the day, their minds became fuzzy with
weariness. Once, in a kind of retreat from present harsh facts, Ed's thoughts
touched a vivid daydream that he'd had before, of a planet of some star. He
looked down at imaginary dry ground under imaginary feet and saw that each
pebble under the strange, brilliant sunshine had a little hole in it. And
something shaped like a cross, with four rough, brownish-gray arms that could
bend in any direction, scrabbled away, flat against the soil, its equipment
glinting. The thickets all around were stranger than those of Mars.
Yes,
it was just a daydream, originating from within himself,
like an old, half-buried hope of some distant exploration. He wondered if it
could ever still have any fulfillment, or if that even mattered any more? Perhaps, for all he knew, his wife and he were now headed
for an even stranger region.
Ed
shook his head to clear it. He did not want to disturb the envelope in his
pouch too often. To expose the ink to the dried-out Martian air, while the
writing was in progress at hour-hand speed, might spoil a vital message. But at
last he chanced it. It seemed that the writer was not much troubled by the
presence of the bird-thing or what it might mean.
Barbara
and Ed read avidly: "Base
of capped granite rock before you. Lab."
Barbara
nodded toward a formation which loomed a half mile ahead in the freezing cold
of late afternoon. The slab, balanced crosswise on a slender pinnacle,
identified it beyond doubt, though there were other similar spires around it.
It cast its shadow on the sunlit dunes. Or was all of that dark, irregular
patch shadow?
Ed
Dukas and his bride had not enjoyed the luxury of natural sleep for a long
time. But summoning their flagging strength, they hurried forward. Ed felt that
at last he was approaching the solution of ten-year-old enigmas.
The
darker area at one side of the capped rock was not all shadow. But the Dukases
had scant attention for the bluish masses of plushy stuff that grew in this
aridity. At another time it might have been fascinating, for it was vegetation
related to the android as moss is related to a man. It was a growth of
vitaplasm—another of Mitchell Prell's experiments. But Ed and Barbara had no
chance to ponder this.
They
located an eighteen-inch cleft at the rock's base. Edging into it, they found
an irregular stone pivoted on steel hinges. To their touch, it closed behind
them, and bolts clicked. From the outside now the outline of the door would
seem merely a pattern of natural cracks in the granite pinnacle.
Atomic
battery lamps lighted the passage, and there were more heavy doors, some of
them of steel, for Ed and Barbara to bolt behind them. The place was like a
small, secret fortress. At the bottom of a spiral stair, beyond a small airlock,
was Mitchell Prell's latest and perhaps last workshop.
He
must have blasted it from the crust of Mars without help. It was a series of a
half-dozen rooms and was no larger than a fair-sized apartment. Smallest of all
was the combined sleeping room and kitchen; and there the evidence of months or
perhaps years of absence was plainest. The bunk was thick with dust, and food
remnants were blackened on unwashed plates. The air, of earthy density, smelled
of decay and a strange pungence. The floors and walls were crusted with patches
of the tough, bluish growths seen outside. It was suggestive at once of both
fungus and moss but was really like neither. It had a pretty color under the
lamps, which had certainly been burning for a long time.
Ed
and Barbara removed their oxygen helmets and began a swift exploration of the
premises. The rooms had all the marks of lone bachelor occupancy by a man too
fearfully busy with his own deep pursuits to waste
time on more than the barest attempts at housekeeping. Apparatus was everywhere.
There were even recognizable parts of a helicopter— the one, no doubt, which
had brought Prell and his equipment to this refuge.
At
first they thought that he might since have fallen victim to some violence or
accident. And then they found his body in a rectangular, plastic-covered tank,
submerged in a cloudy, viscous fluid. It was a standard sort of vat, much used
in laboratories in repairing extensive injury and restoring a destroyed body
from a personal recording—either in protoplasm or vitaplasm. Near by, there
were three similar vats, which, when opened, proved to contain only fluid.
Barbara and Ed looked for a long moment at
Mitchcell
Prell's forever young face. It was peaceful in death that was not quite
death; for of the latter you could never be sure any longer, unless it was the
death \ of the species.
If
there were guile behind that gentle face, it did not show. If there were
darkness of purpose, or stubborn unwillingness to recognize errors that he had
committed in a civilization that tottered as it reached for greatness, it could
not be seen. But in this refuge, one fact was plain: Mitchell Prell had gone on
with his work in a super-biology.
Ed
wandered over to a beautiful microscope of a standard make. Its attachments
also started out from a familiar design. It was fitted with dozens of special
screws and levers. When Ed, and then Barbara, peered into its eye-piece, they
found that each of these screws and levers could manipulate a tiny tool, almost
too small to see with the naked eye. There were minute cutters, calipers and
burnishing wheels. Set up under the microscope there was even what seemed to be
a tiny Jathe. In fact, there was an entire machine shop on an ultra-miriiature
scale. And there were tiny, tonglike grasping members, intended to serve—on
such a reduced scheme of things—as hands, where the human hand, working
directly, would have been hopelessly mountainous.
In
addition to this equipment, there were exact duplicates of the vats across the
room and their attendant apparatus, except that each entire assembly was less
than a half-inch long. In one vat there was a human figure much smaller than a
doll, yet perfect.
Barbara
laughed nervously. Even in this century of wonders, the human mind had its
limitations for making swift adjustments. The laugh was a denial of what her
eyes beheld.
Ed
Dukas's wide face looked at once avid and haggard. Beside the tiny vats there
was also another microscope, complete in every detail, yet of the same
relative dimensions as the little figure in the vat. But this lesser microscope
was of the electron variety. It had to be. For at this reduced' size light
waves themselves were too coarse in texture to be effective for close-range
work.
Ed
turned slowly toward his young wife, whose eyes were alert and wonder-filled in
spite of her weariness. He noticed the pleasant wave
in her hair. He noted the charming curve of her brow, the tiny and pleasing
irregularity of her nose. And what was all this attention but a clinging to an
object of love when facing a strangeness so great
that it scared him as he had never been scared before. Ed Dukas knew that his
face must have gone gray.
Now
his words came slowly and precisely: "Babs, I've told you that I watched
part of Mitchell Prell's first message being written. That in the moving speck
of wet ink, for an instant something looked like a man the size of a motel I
thought I'd imagined it. But is that what Uncle Mitch is now? An android so
small that the. only way for him to write a note to a
person of usual dimensions is to surround his own body with a droplet of ink
and to drag himself across the paper, making the fines and loops of
script?"
Barbara looked at him
obliquely, doubting his seriousness.
"Aw,
now, Eddie-boy, take it a little bit easy," she said. "Please
do."
He
didn't answer her. He let his unchanging expression and many seconds of silence
do the answering for him. His pulses drummed in his ears.
At
last he said, "No, darling, I mean it. There's no reason why an android no
bigger than the smallest insects can't exist. And the signs of what Mitchell
Prell did in this laboratory are plain enough.
"Working
at first with the larger microscope and the miniature tools and machinery
under it, he duplicated a now common kind of biological apparatus in half-inch
size. In its tank he caused to grow the simulacrum of himself that you can see.
Aside from the difference in dimensions, that much has been both possible and
fairly common practice for years. Its brain having been stamped with all phases
of his memory and personality, it became him when it awoke. His own body he
left inert and preserved in the large "vat. But he was not finished. He
had made just one step toward the degree of smallness that he wanted to reach.
So he started over from scratch, constructing first another microscope and then
relatively minute machinery and tools, fine beyond our sight. Under that tiny
electron microscope I'll bet there's another, smaller
machine shop, and a smaller tank from which a mote-sized Mitchell Prell
emerged. It must all have been quite a job. It's not hard to see where those
ten years went."
Barbara
was silent for a long time. Finally, she said, "It sounds reasonable—superficially.
But still, is it possible? Consider a brain. It can come in many sizes, from
an ant's to a human being's. But all are made of molecules of the same
dimensions. And it has been pretty well determined that a brain must be always
about as big as a human being's to be truly intelligent. Trying to cram such
intelligence into a smaller lump of gray matter—composed of the familiar molecules—would
be like trying to weave fine cloth out of rope. How can you get around that,
Ed?"
"Maybe
I can guess," he said. "With smaller units.
How about the electron, Babs? Far smaller than the molecule,
certainly. And it's been the soul of the best calculators—thought
machines—for a couple of centuries. There isn't any doubt that a brain of
microscopic size could function by far finer electronic patterning. No, it
probably wouldn't work in natural protoplasm. But we already know the
flexibility of vita-plasm: easy to redesign, capable of drawing its energy even
from a nuclear source. Well, you figure it out. What have we here but other
android advantages? I think my uncle once told me that he meant to go where no
one could go exactly as a human being."
"All
right, Eddie," she conceded. "I guess I'm persuaded. Proud girl, me. I've got a smart boyfriend. And your uncle
—he skips blithely from the bigness of the interstellar regions in his
thoughts to the smallness of dustl And he seems,' actually, to have done the latter—in person! Is that
what we're supposed to accept as truth? If so, he must have been with you all
the time, or at least for quite a while. On Earth,
even. And he must have come out to Mars with us. He was right in your pocket,
riding with the paper and pen. To write, he must have gunked himself up good
with the ink inside the pen point. Ugh—what a thoughtl And
maybe he's still in your pocket right now. He—or a
tremendously shrunken equivalent of him. Does all this stack up right
in your eyes, Ed?" A pallor had crept through
Barbara's tan.
"Pretty much so,"
Ed replied heavily.
"So
what do we do now, Ed? Try to follow your uncle's path—down?"
Ed's
flesh tingled. To follow Mitchell Prell down—a course
more weirdly remote than traveling to the stars. He did not answer Barbara. He
unzipped his pocket. He could not tell whether a minute android emerged or not.
There were no further messages on the envelope.
But
from a sound cone in a shadowy comer of this workshop, there suddenly came
tones that a decade had not rubbed from his memory:
"Nipper—hello! Or is it always Ed now? So we've come to Mars together. And you with
Barbara! Well, maybe that is an agreeable complication! Now we can talk. Here I
have the right amplifying apparatus. I need help, and you always seemed the
best—and enough like me. I know your doubts about science, and I don't blame
you. But I'm still the same-wanting to learn everything that I can, feeling
that everything should work out right."
The
stillness closed in again. Ed and Barbara looked at each other. Technology was
full of tricks—the possibility of a thousand illusions. Could he even trust a
voice, made so like Mitchell Prell's used to be? And could he trust the mind
behind it? Even if it truly was his uncle's?
"Work out right!" Ed growled
mockingly. "That sounds almost pious! If you are what you say you are, you
were on Earth and have seen everything. You know then how right things have
beenl I was around when the Moon blew—remember? And no scared hotheads caused
that. But there are plenty of them now. And from here on Mars, I've expected
to see Earth momentarily puff up into a little nova."
There
was a sigh from the sound cone. "So I'm to blame— at least partly—for
helping to give those fools something to be furiously right or mistaken
about," Mitchell Prell's voice replied. "Well, I was what I was, and
I am what I am, Ed. I'm sorry about many things that happened. But I can't
erase them. I've urged you to come here to help me try to counteract them. I
don't think you'll stay angry with me, Ed. Come where I am—you and Barbara. It
can be done quite quickly now. I have two forms prepared. They will take the
lines and personalities of anyone. Just set the dials above two of the
unoccupied vats at one hundred—full energy. Lower yourselves into the fluid.
Clothes, or lack of them, won't matter. Your own bodies will sink into suspended
animation."
Again
the voice from the sound cone faded out. Ed's and Barbara's eyes met in a tense
congress of thought. They were being asked to leave their natural, physical
selves behind and to become beings of vitaplasm. To many, that was horror in itself,
even without a radical change in size. Then there was the fear of loss of
identity. To be an exact duplicate in mind and memory might not necessarily
mean to be the same person. Here was a metaphysical problem elusive and hard to
answer. What others of experience might have told you could never quite satisfy
you. You had to learn for yourself.
Beyond
all that, there was that drop, down and down into tininess, to where physical
laws themselves must seem warped by the relativity of size levels, and to where
nothing remained quite the same. Could one's mind even endure the difference?
For a moment Ed felt cornered and panicky.
But something eager and questioning came into him. For the first time he
wished that Barbara had not come with him.
Finally
he said, "I've got to go down, Babs. There just isn't any other way."
"What's
sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose, Ed," she said. "With us,
that was settled a while ago."
He
didn't protest. She was resourceful. She'd be a help, not a trouble. And he knew
that love of adventure was as strong in her as in himself.
So the decision was made.
Suddenly
they heard a distant clink and hammering. Metal against
stone. The canary had followed them to Mitchell Prell's underground
fortress. And of course the little mechanism had been merely a scout for some
larger party farther to the rear.
Again
the words came from the sound cone, but in a whisper, "I was pretty sure
you'd be followed, Ed. But we should still have considerable time. It'll be
hard for them to break into here—without destroying everything. And I think
they'll want to see what I've got."
Ed
Dukas had never before considered his brilliant tireless uncle in any way
impractical. But now he was sensing a certain inadequacy and felt that Mitchell
Prell truly needed him. If it was Mitchell Prell, of
course—if the voice itself wasn't a trick. But now Ed was at least more
confident that he was not being fooled. What doubt remained had to be part of
many calculated risks.
"All right, Uncle
Mitch," he said.
Barbara
smiled at him rather wanly, but her eyes held a glint. He kissed her.
"So here goes, eh,
Eddie?" she said.
"Be
seein' yuh, sweetheart," he said, taking her in his arms.
Stripped of their boots and vacuum armor, they set the
controls and lowered themselves into the gelatinous contents of the tanks. A
warm, tingling numbness flowed into them at contact with the viscous, energized
fluid. Weariness stabbed into their muscles. Their knees buckled, and they sank
deeper into the gelatin.
"All okay, Babs?"
he asked.
"Okay, Ed."
Then
their faces went under that surface. Their minds numbed and were blotted out.
They no longer needed to breathe.
The
journey downward into a smaller, or, in a sense, a vaster region, was made
without their awareness, in a single step. There was no need to pause at
middle size, represented by the tiny but easily visible doll-like figure in
the minute tank. Mitchell Prell's labors in two size levels need not be done
again, for that work was finished. The direct path was prepared. There was a
flow of impulses, like that of the old-time transmission of photographs over
wires. Gelatins already roughly of human form responded, swirled and moved
tediously, and took sharper shape, in a still-smaller vat. And it was the same
with the brains meant to harbor mind, memory and personality. They also were
repeated in a finer medium, and by a different
principle than their originals— but nonetheless repeated. So, in slightly more
than an hour, the essences of two human beings were re-created in the dimensions
of motes of dust.
Awareness
returned gradually to Ed. At first it was like a blur of dreams, out of which
came realization of a successful transformation, and of where heNmust
be. Panic followed, but briefly. He was struggling violently in a thick, gluey substance. His entire body,
even his face, was imbedded in it. He was certain that he would smother-yet the
impulse to breathe was subdued.
Fighting
the sticky stuff, he knew that he possessed great strength—relatively. Some of
this was the android power in him. Perhaps more of it was the increased
relative .toughness of everything, in lesser size. An ant was relatively
stronger than a man—a phenomenon of smaller dimensions. And here, even a
gelatinous fluid seemed like heavy glue, its molecular chains long and tough.
Water itself, not lying flat, but beading into dewdrops,
would have seemed almost as sticky.
Ed
Dukas, or his tiny likeness, got clear of the vat and its contents, though much
of the latter still clung to him. On all fours he dragged it with him, leaving
a trail of it in his wake on a rough, glassy surface. He kept spiraling around
and around until he rid himself of most of the gelatin.
With
avidness and wonder and dread, his mind scrambled through a moment of time to
grasp the truths of his present state and to test them. Even the act of existing in the body he now inhabited was
indescribably different. His mouth was almost dry inside. He still could draw
air ipto his nostrils, but breathing became unnecessary before some source of
energy that was probably nuclear. His hands and his nude body still looked
slender and brown to him. And he retained memories—of people he knew, sights he
had seen, and of things he had learned. Here he seemed to remain himself. Those
memories were clear enough; but were they already losing a little importance,
were they too gigantic to be concerned about in this place?
That
thought, again, was panic at work—a sense of separation from all that he held familiar. For the ato lamp towering over
him seemed as remote as the sun. The form of the less-than-miniature electron
microscope seemed a metal-sheened tower. And in his mind there was even the
certainty that his present form must be of a wholly different design inside to
meet different conditions. He knew that he could feel the thump of a heavier
heart, circulating relatively more viscous fluids.
And something about his vision had changed.
Close by, everything was slightly blurred, as if he were far-sighted. Farther
off, objects became hazed, as by countless drifting, speeding dots that weren't
opaque but that seemed—each of them—to be surrounded by refractive rings that
distorted the view of what lay beyond them. And because there were so many tiny
centers of distortion constantly in motion, vision at this middle-distance
never quite cleared but remained ashimmer. Were those translucent specks
perhaps the auras of air molecules themselves?
At a
greater distance, clarity came again. For there the haze which was not haze at
all but which consisted merely of seeing too much detail—in too coarse a grain,
as under too much magnification—was lost. Light and dark, and
familiar rich colors. And he saw the whole room around him almost as
he used to see it, except for its limitless vastness.
For
a little while Ed wondered further about his new eyes. They were responsive to
familiar wave lengths of light. Those wave lengths were not too coarse—at least
when reflected from farther objects. For nearer things, he was not at all sure
that he could see even as well as he could by ordinary light. Was his vision,
in this segment, perhaps electronic, then? Did he see, close at hand, fringed hints of strange, beautiful hues? Were these
electronic colors? Or were there infinitely finer natural wave lengths, far
above the known spectrum, which too-massive instruments had been unable to
detect?
This
question was dropped quickly, because there was too much more. Now he looked
again, very briefly, out into the depths of air, full of drifting debris—jagged
stones that glinted, showing a crystalline structure, twisted masses like the
roots of trees, though they had the sheen of floss. All of it was dust of one
kind or another. Ed could even hear the clink and ratde as bits of it collided.
Everywhere there were murmurings of sound, which made a constant, elfin ringing
never heard in the world he knew.
Gingerly
now he crept across the rough glass surface, back tdward the vat from which he
had emerged and its companion. Barbara was his first concern. There she was, in
the second vat, imbedded in a bead of gelatin. Already she was trying to fight
free. He reached both arms into the stuff and tugged at her shoulders to help
her. He lifted her out easily and helped scrape away the adhering gelatin,
while he worried about how she might react to a tremendous change. To
counteract the shock of it, he kept up a running flow of talk, in a voice that
even seemed a little as it used to be:
".
. . We made it, Babs. Down to rock bottom, you might say. I don't think that
any conscious human shape could be made much smaller. Or any machine, for that
matter. Remember some old stories? Little men lost in weed jungles, fighting
spiders and things? Strange, unheard-of adventure, in those days! Maybe we can
even try it sometime. Except that a spider, or even an aphid, wouldn't notice
us. We're too small."
A little pink nymph with a rather determined jaw, she
seemed only half to listen as she stared around with large
eyes. ,
Later,
like two savages, they were clothing themselves crudely in scraps of lint torn
from what looked like a sleeping pallet. A fiber was knotted across it in a
way that reminded Ed of the safety straps by which passengers of planes and
space ships attached themselves to their seats during take-offs and landings.
Here, Prell, the tiny android, must take his rare moments of rest. Some of the
lint was far finer than spiderweb, but it was still coarse to Ed and his wife
in their present state, as they wound its strands around them.
"You
look beautiful, darling," he said. "You're just as you were."
Barbara
smiled slightly. "Even here I'm vain enough to respond to compliments,
Eddie," she answered. "Where's Prell?"
Her
voice was a thin thread in the keening murmur of sounds. And it was worried. Ed
and Barbara both craved the reassuring presence of someone of experience here,
where everything was changed—where minute gusts of air seemed bent on hurling
you upward, so that you would float helplessly, like a mote. You stood up
gingerly, meaning to try walking a step. But that mode of locomotion seemed not
only unsafe here but impractical. You could be swept away, and in the vastness
all around, how could one mote find another again? Too much of what you were
used to was lost already. Even the habit of walking no longer functioned
properly. The air was a buoyant, resisting substance, a prickling presence of
individually palpable molecular impacts, and there was litle traction for one's
feet. Perhaps, then, here you swam in the air.
Ed
spoke at last: "My uncle can't be far away. Hell come
to us. It's been only a moment."
Barbara
clung to him, afraid. "Eddie, am I me anymore? Can I even find old ways of
talking, and old subjects to talk about? Here? Everything seems too different.
Damn— I never could accept the idea of there being two of anyonel Us up in those other tanks—giants asleep. And yet us here!
Maybe we're different already—shaped by other surroundings! And remember how
little we are and how helpless. Moving a couple of inches would be like walking
a mile. And we came here to see if we could find a way to straighten out the
giant affairs at home. We're androids now,
aren't we? A special kind. But we still have the
capacity for the old emotions. Damn it again, Eddie, everything around us in
this place is so strange. But it's beautiful, too."
He
patted her shoulder and said nothing. But her thoughts paralleled his own.
Suddenly there was a
rumble, like distant thunder. In a more familiar size level, it would have been a clink and a thud, coming
through many yards of granite. They both recognized it. Ed even chuckled.
"Whoever
or whatever was following the canary machine,"/ he said.
"Remember?"
Just
then Mitchell Prell's simulacrum appeared, a comic, bearded figure wrapped in a
few strands of lint that suggested woven twigs. He swam out of the depths of
atmosphere—the fall-guy of an era that had stumbled over its own achievements.
And in several of those very achievements, he had taken refuge.
He
alighted near Ed and Barbara and wrung their hands cordially. Then words
spilled out of him excitedly: "Ed. Barbara. We've got to hurry. But first
we should put our minds straight about one another. I know that back home you
were on the side of responsibility and good sense. Well, so am I. There haven't
been many new quirks added to my viewpoint since you first knew me, Eddie. I
want knowledge to blossom into all that it can give us. I think ypu do, too.
Now tell me how you feel."
Mitchell
Prell could still inspire Ed Dukas. Even here, at this opposite, smaller end of
the cosmos, he imagined again his splendid towers of the future.
"There
were moments when I felt pretty bitter," he said, in not too friendly a
fashion. "But in the main I'm with what you just said—all the way. I put
my life on it as a pledge."
Barbara nodded solemnly.
"Thanks," Prell answered, the
breath that he'd drawn for speech sighing out of him. "I'm more grateful
than I can tell. You two may think that we're too tiny—that our size makes us
powerless. I don't believe that's true. I was on Earth as I am, you know. I
went there and back—undetected—on space liners. But while on Earth I missed
many opportunities to act against danger. Maybe I'd been here too long, down
close to the basic components of matter', studying them. And
I
went to Earth poorly equipped in both materials and experience. Well, I think
you can see how it was. Let it go for now. Visitors are at our door. I suppose
we've got to try to meet them in the manner that they deserve."
"Call the shots!"
Ed said impatiently.
Mitchell
Prell smiled rather wistfully. "The main part is done," he replied.
"I set the small remote controls of the large vats for revival of the
bodies in them—our larger selves. That was why I was delayed in getting to you
here. They are colossi. They cannot hide. And they must be defended. I'm sorry, they are better able to defend themselves than we are
to defend them. At least they will a better chance alive than inert. Revival
takes a little time, but in a moment you will see."
Ed
did not quite know what to think about this action on his uncle's part—whether
to agree to it or to suspect that it was somehow a mistake. Circumstances were
too strange here, and he was too inexperienced. And the whole situation itself
was fraught with confusion for him. Two selves, both named Edward Dukas? It was
not a new circumstance in the ideas of the times. You knew that it could be.
Yet it remained a muddle of identities hard to straighten out. Barbara clung to him again, her feelings doubtless similar to his
own.
"It's happening,"
she whispered.
And
it was. From their perch on the scored, glassy surface under a miniature
electron microscope, they looked out past the minute tanks and the attendant
cables, crystals and apparatus that had given them special being, and across
the shimmering void of air, they saw those other vats, glassy, too, and tall
as mountains.
It
seemed then that the mountains opened, unfolded, grew
taller, disgorged Atlases that stepped dripping over a cliff wall. There was no
connection of mind now—these three giants were other people, for the link had
been broken in the past. There was no blending of consciousness.
Now there were vibrations almost too heavy in
this miniahire region to be called sounds. They were more like earthquake
shocks. But Ed realized that they were just the noises of normal human
movement—the giants Ed, Barbara and Mitch putting on their boots, the grind of
their footsteps. Meanwhile they conversed, it seemed; but their voices were
only a quiver, a rattle, with a hint of worried inquiry. The giant Mitchell
Prell seemed to make suggestions.
The
lesser Prell must still have understood what was being said. For now he gripped
a roughly made microphone and talked into it. His words were amplified to a
seismic temblor as they emerged from the sound cone on the far wall; but to Ed
and Barbara they were still directly audible from the speaker's own lips.
"You've come down to me successfully. Now we must see what will happen.
Ed, if it is only the police at our gates, perhaps it would be best simply to
present yourselves as citizens. You and Barbara have rights. And you've
fulfilled your pledge to them. They can't harm you. Beyond this, I must
apologize to you both. You have made a difficult journey to what must seem to
you a frustrating blank wall—without experiencing anything very new. That is a
defect of being duplicated. And there is no time now to blend into your minds
the memories of the descent into smallness. I'm sorry. Mitchell Sandhurst
Prell—yes, you, my overgrown former identity—show them what to do. But for
heaven's sake, move this workshop of mine to a slightly less exposed
placel"
Because
he was like his old self, the smaller Ed Dukas still thought as his original
did. So, after all, there was that much contact. He understood the frustration
that had just been mentioned, plus the confusion of not having seen the reality
of another size level. This failure could even involve suspicion of his uncle's
purposes. But there was loyalty and belief, too. From the basis of parallel
minds, the lesser Ed felt all these emotions personally.
So
he moved quickly, closer to the tiny microphone, bent on giving reassurance. He
shouted into it; and of course his words came out sounding somewhat mad:
"Ed, it's me! Ed! Honestly! And that was a real Mitchell Prell speaking.
Take care of yourself—and Babs—because you're me—or still part of me. And we
both love Barbara—in any form. Hello, Barbara,
darling."
There
was no time to say any more, for now there began a steady, heavy vibration,
growing gradually stronger. In a moment he guessed what it was. A huge,
high-speed drill had been brought into play against granite. Very soon now
these caverns would be invaded.
And
mere was happening. There were more seismic temblors. A colossus moved nearer,
bringing its shadow; its wet clothing seemed to be woven of cables instead of
thread. The face, briefly glimpsed, was a huge, pitted mask, bearded with a
forest of dark and tangled trunks. A wind came with him, caused by his
rtiotion. He was that other Prell.
"Hang on!" his
tiny android likeness yelled.
Ed
of the dust-grain region drew his Barbara down. They flattened together and
clutched part of the intricate but roughly made apparatus attached to the vats
from which they had emerged, just as the glassy floor under them tilted, and
they were almost swept away by gusts of air. Wires had been disconnected, and
now the whole assembly—large microscope with the miniature machine shop,"
middle-sized tank and middle-sized doll figure under it, and the lesser electron
microscope with its similar though reduced equipment—was being carried and
hoisted.
It was set on a high shelf. And what must
have been a translucent jar was placed in front of it to hide it casually.
Maybe there was no time for anything else, for that rough vibration of the
drill was becoming rapidly more pronounced.
"They
ought to put on oxygen helmets!" Barbara shouted in the. quaking tumult. "These vaults will be unsealed! And
they aren't built to live in Martian air!"
Maybe
the three giants even heard her, through the mike and sound cone. But they
would know, anyway.
From the twilight of the jar's shadow, Ed
could still see into the immensity of the room. The colossi were donning their
heavy gear.
The
vibration had become a gigantic rattle with creaking, crackling overtones,
audible only to micro-ears. Ed felt almost shaken apart and dazed by it. Any
instant now the drill would break through into the room. But he didn't anticipate
much real trouble. It wasn't reasonable. He felt fairly sure that it was the
police who had followed his larger self here. They had their duty to give
protection, not harm. Their power might be warped by the fears and prejudices
of the times, but not beyond reason.
He
knew that there would be a jolt when the drill came through. So he scrambled
over to the pallet and pulled from it a long bit of floss, thicker to him than
a rope. Quickly he bent one end around his waist and knotted it, and fastened
the middle of it around Barbara. The far end he passed to his uncle.
"Tie
on!" he shouted. "So we don't get separated. And hold tight to
anything solid!"
The break-through came, and it was not too
bad. It felt like a monster ram hitting the world one sharp, stinging blow;
then the spinning mountain of the super-hardened drill bit—all of a yard
across, it must have been—braked quickly to stationary. There was no tumultuous
outrush of air of earthly composition and pressure. The drill hole had
evidently been capped.
Ed
saw the colossi there in the room—the originals of himself, his wife and his
uncle—grimly clad for Mars. They had taken up positions a little behind this
obstacle or that, not ready to trust entirely but more or less sure. He knew
how it was—particularly with his other identity. There had to be this tense
moment before someone, known or unknown, spoke. They were armed. At the hip
that was still his own in a way hung the Midas Touch
pistol that he remembered, though it was expanded seemingly a million fold.
The outcome was different from what he could
have hoped or expected. There was no voice of challenge or greeting from behind
the drill. You could not see beyond the dark space around its jagged rim. There
was only perhaps a small, intuitive warning before the neutrons of another
Midas Touch struck, and a few of the atoms of metal and flesh and stone
exploded in a narrow, sweeping curve, making a flash in which all visible
details became lost and a volume of sound and quaking in a confined space that,
of itself, could have killed.
The
little Ed Dukas could be proud of his forerunner, for he was quick enough to
have half drawn his own Midas Touch, just as the blaze
of light came.
It
didn't do any good. The lesser Ed's android consciousness was rugged enough
not to be lost, even as he and his companions, tethered like beads on a string,
were sucked upward into the swirling dust of the atmosphere. So he saw how the
Midas Touch, discharged from behind the drill, cut slantingly, like a sword
blade, across the room, its narrow beam slicing through the three giants almost
simultaneously. Then, for a moment, coherence of impression was lost in swirl
and glare and tumbling motion. But when the tumult quieted slightly and he
floated on choppy air currents, he saw the crumpled, mountainous forms.
Mitchell Prell—colossal version—had been chopped in two at the waist. The heads
and shoulders of the other two giants had ceased to be.
To
Ed Dukas's microcosmic nostrils, the smell of burned flesh remained unchanged.
Nor was his capacity for horror any different. It came after that small, numb
pause of doubt of what he had just seen. He heard the lesser Prell and the
lesser Barbara shout from beside him. They had not been torn loose from the
joining strand—luckily.
At
first he thought that the attack had come from someone other than those who
had trailed him. But then the drill point moved forward. From behind it stepped
several men, wearing the trim vacuum armor of Interworld Security— usually honorable in the past but now sometimes made shaky and corrupt by the doubts within
its own ranks and among the people about what, within the realm of human effort, was good or bad.
The group had a leader. Ed and his companions drifted idly in the air, near the man's shoulders, but his helmeted head
still loomed in die sky of
their present world. Old personality hints were hard to translate from such
magnitudes; but the cocky briskness and triumph showed. There were rumblings
and quakings of speech. Ed began to recognize repeated patterns in the rattle
of it. Centuries ago, the deaf had had a way to "hear"—by sense of
touch. And by feeling the heavy vibration, Ed knew that he was
"hearing" syllables too heavy for his present auditory organs to
detect as such: ". . . Prell's lab . . . Dukas led us . . ."
Ed
could still understand only scattered scraps; but the skill was coming—now,
with his body, he felt the stinging discord which must have been a harsh laugh.
Now
a gust of wind from a vast swinging arm lifted the Strand of floss and the three who were tied to it upward. Beyond the view window of the helmet, Ed saw the tremendous
face—rolling plains and hills, pitted with pores and hair follicles, and
scaled with skin, beneath which the individual living cells were easily
visible, the latter mysteriously haloed around the edges with a faint
luminosity. The mouth was a long, rilled valley, crescented into a hard grin.
The nose was a crag. The eyes were concave lakes set in rough country and islanded with iris and pupil.
"You know him, don't you, Eddie?"
Barbara said.
Size
did not hide the bullish quality or the gimlet stare. Rather, it emphasized an
ugliness of character.
"Of
course," Ed answered. "Carter Loman, who was with Chief Bronson and
who spoke to us before we left. An
unidentified official with whom we made the deal to come here. Nice
guy. Feels that he can be the whole of the law out here
in the remote Martian desert."
Again Loman addressed his henchmen. Ed was
getting better at understanding the vibrating words: "We'll clear everything
out for shipment back home. I've got to study this equipment! But before we
even open a door we'll sterilize everything with a four per cent neutron
stream. That'll kill even that damned vitaplasm! Fascinating, devilish stuff!
Too bad, in a way, to erase it here—because I think I know what's still around,
and I'd like to see. But we can't take the risk. A snake I might give a chance,
but not a robot or robot-lover!"
Loman
paused, then spoke again, turning his head this way
and that, directing his words toward the invisible: "Prell, you're dead,
but are you still somehow here? What can't happen in the crazy age you helped create? On
Earth we psyched your nephew. Don't think I didn't guess what you were doing.
Now we've taken your carcass into the other room to psych your dead brain. In a
few minutes we'll know. There'll be ways to stop your kind of folly!"
As
the great head continued to turn here and there ques-tioningly, the
still-living Mitchell Prell shouted in derision: "Here I am, crusader!"
But
there were no microphone and sound-cone in action now, and Loman did not hear
him.
Maybe
Barbara's present eyes were too minute to shed tears, but her face looked as
though she were weeping. "Loman is the worst kind of fanatic," she
said. "Sure that he's right, and blind about it. Sadistic, energetic and,
I suppose, clever."
"I'll
tell you more about him," Mitchell Prell offered softly. "His face
gives a faint glow—a fine radiation that only our eyes can see. Radioactivity. It wouldn't be visible on Earth, where oxygen
gives even an android bodily energy. But on Mars—or wherever else that oxygen
is in short supply—vita-plasm adapts readily to other energy sources. It would
be silly for him to carry air purifiers in that helmet he's wearing."
Ed Dukas looked down at his own arms. Yes,
they glowed,
too, though he'd hardly noticed it before in the light of the great ato lamps.
"Then
Loman is an android who hates androids!" Barbara breathed. "Well, I
guess that hating one's own kind has happened often enough before. But an android in the Inter-world Police? Under physical
examination, he could never hide what he is."
"Legally,
they still have equal rights," Ed answered. "That much I'm glad for.
They couldn't be kept out of the Force. But there could be other twists, not so
unprejudiced. A thief sent to catch a thief, would you say? Something strong,
and full of self-hatred, sent out to match strength? Tom Granger, and thousands
of others, might think like that."
Ed
Dukas's anger broke through at last, slow and terrible. Maybe he had been too
startled before for exact meanings to register. The other Barbara, whom he
loved, had been murdered, her body mangled. It was the same with his own other self, and his uncle's. Those bodies had been
the one available route back to all familiar things and out of this weird place
of expanded forms, warped physical laws, keening sounds and distances
multiplied a millionfold. But now those bodies were gone. And even if beings
invisible in small-ness could escape death in neutron streams from Midas Touch pistols turned low, there would be little left that
they, in their tininess, could work with. They would be stranded here in a
microcosmos for as long as they could survive, helpless to move even a pebble.
These
thoughts were fringed with a homesickness that Ed had never before known. He
wondered if a little dust-grain android could go mad. It was Carter Loman's
fault. No, the responsibility extended further than that! To Tom Granger, the
rabble-rouser, and those like him, and those who listened. And
to a renegade android leader of mythical origin. Yes, it was Mitchell
Prell's fault, too, and his own for coming here and bringing Barbara.
With his two companions, Ed Dukas floated
high in the
air, supported by molecular impacts, near the helmeted head of an Atlas called
Carter Loman, and felt his fury and the helpless contrast of dimensions. This
giant, aided by his henchmen, had all of the advantage, while Ed and his wife
and uncle could be blown away merely by the wind of that monster hand in
motion.
Loman
was throwing words at Mitchell Prell again, his voice coming easily through the
thin face plate of his helmet. It was not a true sound to micro-ears. Rather,
it was a heavy quiver in the air, felt with one's entire body. "Prell, I'm
sure you haven't stopped existing. Don't think that I can't understand how.
And you did things to me. There was your Moon-blast, but that wasn't the worst.
Everything you stand for must be stamped out. Even if we all
go with it."
Maybe
it was then that Ed's thoughts became crystalized. His anger was turned cold
and clear, as if by need. Although Ed was of vitaplasm himself, he felt no
loyalty to kind. In fact, he was still far from reconciled to the condition.
But an enemy of reason was an enemy to all men of whatever sort.
His
wits were sharpened. Suddenly a realization of the power in smallness came to
him—combined with the hardiness and flexibility of flesh that made even such
dimensions and powers possible. Android powers.
"I
guess everybody must have a breaking point of fear and exasperation," he
said softly. "We were born to it. To be crowded from the Earth can seem a
terrible idea. But maybe even that is as it should be, and good. I can't agree
that pushing everything into extinction in an open fight can be any better.
We've gained too much. There is too much wonder ahead. And maybe, small as we
are, we can quiet the leaders. Under the right conditions, I think we could
handle these giants—even kill them if necessary. Quieting Loman and Granger
might help a little."
"I
know," Mitchell Prell answered. "I thought of it myself. Perhaps I
didn't have the nerve to carry the idea through. Maybe that was why I wanted you to come to me on Mars—where I
had the apparatus to change you. Microbes are smaller than we are, yet they
used to kill men."
Ed
Dukas saw his wife wince. But this couldn't make any difference now.
"Ed
and Barbara, I'm sorry for all I've gotten you into," Prell added.
"Don't
be," Ed told him. "Who can regret a chance to try to do some good in
what seemed a hopeless conflict? Now, first, let's get out of here, if we still
can or ever could."
Ed
felt some of the command switching to himself— strange, because his uncle knew
far more about these regions than he did. But Mitchell Prell was made more for
study than for physical action. And he was somewhat fuddled by the effects of
the miracles he had helped produce.
VII
The
colossi were
piling Mitchell Prell's movable equipment into a corner, where Midas Touch pistols, turned low, could play neutron streams
against it. Then they would no doubt scour walls, floors and ceilings with the
same corpuscular beams. The air itself would heat up considerably. Combustible
floating dust, would burn to finer dust. Drafts would seem blasting hurricanes.
"There's
a way out—if we hurry," Mitchell Prell said. "Imitate my
movements."
And so they swam in the atmosphere. But
without other aid it would have been slow going indeed. But the motien of dust
particles revealed the direction of air currents that could be gotten into and
used to cover distance.
Still,
progress back to the shelf and the microscopes, and the tiny workshop from
which they had been blown but a few minutes before, was agonizingly slow. By
luck and scanty concealment offered by the jar, this paraphernalia had not yet been discovered or moved by
Loman and his men.
Ed
and his companions came to rest at last on the rough glass surface where little
machines were arranged around the vats and their appartus.
"Tools
that we can use," Ed said. "And materials that we can work. We've got
to try to take some things along. To make weapons. Could we contrive Midas
Touch pistols that we could hold?"
"Maybe,"
Prell answered. "I hope so. Take this, and that— and that over there. Hurry."
Creatures
of vitaplasm, with its complex combinations of silicon compounds paralleling
the hydrocarbons, and its internal metabolism that could even involve
transmutation and subatomic energy release, still could die under sufficiently
violent conditions.
The
three tiny androids scrambled to gather supplies and to equip themselves. Ed
was awkward in the new conditions, where even the atmosphere tried to tear him
away from any firm foothold. But he loaded himself down.
Before
they were finished gathering all that they could use, the rattle and flare of
Midas Touch weapons, turned low so as not to damage Mitchell Prell's various
apparatus, but strong enough to destroy any clinging speck of synthetic life
that Carter Loman might suspect the presence of, began behind them. Prell's
experimental plant life withered slowly.
"Lead on!" Ed
Dukas shouted.
And
so, though hurricanes had begun for them, they crept across the glazed surface
beneath the barrel of the little electron microscope and dropped into the air
at its edge. It was like leaping from a cliff. But it was different, too. For
if they had not been so heavily burdened, they might not even have fallen.
Being such small objects, they had a greater exposed surface than large
objects, in proportion to then-bulk. This greater surface, like a sail
presented to the wind,
offered a larger area for speeding molecules to hit; hence, without the
equipment, they would have been as buoyant as dust particles.
Still lashed together by their joining strand
of floss, the three fugitives drifted slowly down to the rear of the shelf.
"An
inch more to go," Prell shouted, in grim humor. "A rather long one,
I'm afraid."
Again
they crept. Rough stone of the cupboardlike compartment rose around them,
seemingly taller than buildings they had known. And it glowed reddish-violet.
Fluorescence, it must be, from the scattered radiations of the Midas Touch weapons. Tediously the three crawled toward escape, as
if through a night of fire and violence. Finally they reached a minute steel
door in the corner of the cupboard, half hidden in the roughness of the stone.
They
closed the door behind them and refastened its crude bolt. The space around
them now was narrower—more in proportion to their own size. And there was a
glow here—at least to their final eyesight. Perhaps there was a trace of radioactive
ore in the rock causing the glow. The walls were as rough as a cave's.
"Just a chink in the
stone," Barbara commented.
"Yes,"
Prell replied. "A crevice leading out to the face of the
rock formation. Feel the draft of Martian night air? It would smother
and freeze you if you were as you were born. But our flesh not only resists
cold, it can create plenty of warmth within itself. We will be perfectly
comfortable here, and safe—I think. Do you want to rest?"
"No,"
Barbara told him. "We don't really need that, either, do we? So let's begin
what must be done. What are our plans, Ed?"
"We'll
make a few things, if we can," Ed replied. "Then get to a spaceport
somehow. I suppose that if we pick the right wind at the right time, it will
blow us there—eh, Uncle Mitch? Then we'll do as you did—drift into a space
liner and get a free ride back, home to Earth. There—well, we'll see.
If
we're very, very lucky, we might even get our old selves back."
Just
then that recovery seemed to be his greatest, most desperate yearning, with
many, many obstacles in its way. Even their personal recordings were in enemy
hands now. Small though those cylinders were, they
were far too huge for them to move or to think of recapturing.
"Where can we start to
work?" Ed said to his uncle.
"Farther
along the cleft," Prell told him. "I've already cached some supplies
there. And there's a level space in a side cleft protected from these constant
air currents."
Now
they leaped upward and let the draft carry them. The muted quivers of
destruction in the chambers from which they had just escaped, they left behind
them. They arrived in the work area and got busy at once.
Near dawn they felt the quiverings of unusual
sounds. So they followed air currents, betrayed by drifting particles of
fluorescent dust, to a crack that showed starshot sky and the undulating
desert. Thus they saw Carter Loman's caravan start back toward Port Karnak,
with its booty of all that Mitchell Prell had made here: the fruit of a man's
mind. But to Loman it was also the worst of the world's inventions. Lo-man was
an android and also, obviously, a central figure, a personage of some
importance, or he would not have been sent on this mission. But his mind
remained that of a bigot.
Just
then Ed Dukas found a savage pleasure in shaking one of the smallest fists ever
to exist at the three retreating tractor vehicles. "Loman, Granger and the
rest of you,'' he said, "there'll come a time.
You've been fools. You were born too late."
The
work went on for days—more tediously than Ed could have imagined, even with
only hand tools to use The same old metals seemed unbelievably hard at this
size level—and coarse in texture—as if the atoms themselves had expanded
Barbara could scrub and scrub with a bit of abrasive mineral, achieving only what seemed a poor excuse for
a polish. Hammering did little good in shaping such metals, though Ed Dukas
and Mitchell Prell were relatively so much stronger than they had been. Only
cutting and pressure tools were effective, when aided by the softening heat of
a forge—a tiny speck of nuclear incandescence maintained by a neutron stream
and carefully screened, though vitaplasm, being actively or latently
radioactive itself, was far less endangered by radiation than protoplasm
But
at last they produced three rough, cylindrical devices and their fittings
Ed
Dukas began to adjust to littleness. But to see boulders with their stratified
layers of mica floating lazily through the thin air never lost its .wonder
Crazy beauty was all around: strange, rich colors; keening musical notes—fine
overtones of normal sounds Sometimes, in the daylight, near cracks open to the
outdoors, you saw living things seldom bigger than yourself: Martian life;
little pincushions of deep, translucent purple veined with red and pronged with
cilia of an indescribably warm hue These were Martian microorganisms blown in
by the breeze
And
once there was something else that Ed and Barbara both saw: something like the
smallest of Earthly insects, but not that, either A thing of steel-blue
flilaments and great eyes, and vibrating vanes as glossy as transparent plastic
Ed knew that he could shatter it with his hands It rested in the sunshine for a
moment; then it was gone.
"I
suppose that there are star worlds as odd as this," Barbara commented.
She
was strange herself—an elfin being that floated in the air, her form dimly
aglow whenever there was shadow or darkness. To Ed, she was part of his vast
separation from Earth. In accustoming himself to an environment where even the
simple act of walking was a memory, it seemed that Earth dimmed away, easily
yet frighteningly, like a dream, until Ed knew that, degree by degree, his mind
was becoming different than it had been, and he not quite the same person. And
it seemed more so with Babs.
"Bacon
and eggs for breakfast, Eddie," she teased once, lightly. "Walks under old trees beside a river. The Youth Center. Teachers I used to know. Yes, I remember.
But the memory tries to get dim. And I want to hold on. Got
to, because there are things to be done. But sometimes I wonder if I
shouldn't regret the duty. I think of swimming in raindrops or floating high
over trees—being as whimsical as children and poets can imagine. We could do
itl It's part of being super, isn't it? And I used to
be scared of becoming an android!"
It
was fun, and relief from grimness, to hear her talk like that. And now, too, he
half agreed that being of synthetic substance was not so bad. Yet part of him
still ached savagely for his old dimensions. And here in smallness he sometimes
felt that she was changing so much that he was losing her—that she would let
herself be blown away into the vastness, never to be seen again.
They
ate a food-jelly, which Prell had prepared long ago for his sojourn here, and
radioactive silicates. In it you could see the thready molecular chains and the
beads of moisture between. Viscosity complicated etiquette. Everything tried to
stick to you. You laughed and shook it off as best you could.
But
even in fantastic moments grim facts didn't truly fade. Hard work helped
sustain them. Murder and loss were too new. The danger on Earth was still too
plain—perhaps poised on hours or weeks of time. Speed was the keynote.
Only
once the three micro-beings peeped back into the lab that had belonged to
Mitchell Prell, colossus. It was empty now, glowing with the taint of radiation
left by the Midas Touch pistols. No one had troubled
to neutralize it, as had surely been done with the removed equipment.
Mitchell
Prell had built a radio, like one he had owned before. A flake of quartz dust,
a few rough strands of metal, an insignificant power supply. Simple,
compact. Certain crystals were sensitive to radio waves. And at these
tremendously reduced dimensions, they could convert tiny induced electric
currents almost directly into fine sound waves that infinitely refined ears
could hear.
So
Ed Dukas heard the interplanetary newscast again: ". . . Android groups
are still massing in large numbers to seek safety among their own kind and
perhaps to carry out their own plans. There is a superficial calm. Fear of
consequences so far seems to have kept both sides in check. We hope that it
can hold."
Later
there was a broadcast from Port Smitty: ". . . This information was
withheld but has now been released. The mystery of Mitchell Prell's
disappearance is believed solved after ten years. What is claimed to be his
body-much damaged, since he and his confederates, one of whom is supposed to be
a close relative, resisted capture and had to be shot down—was brought in to
Port Smitty and is now en route to Earth, along with some mysterious equipment.
The man who tracked Prell down is Carter Loman, a scientist in his own right,
who has had a brief but brilliant career in Interworld Security. Detailed information
is under seal, but Prell, a known advocate of 'improved mankind,' has been
wanted for questioning and possible indictment for a long time. It has been
suggested that his researches had gone further than most would dare to
imagine."
Mitchell
Prell, micro-being, chuckled. "The funny part," he remarked, "is
that I never became a full-size android myself. My old carcass seemed good
enough. Or I didn't get around to a change."
But
Ed didn't smile at this. And he looked savage when one of Tom Granger's speeches
was rebroadcast: "Prell ended? Can we believe it? There is an evil that
could restore him in known ways. Now are there unknowns, too? Haven't we had
enough? Some things from drunken visions are destroyed, but others come, to
make our nights hideous. A creature with a fifty-foot wingspread swoops down on
a house, and people die. Are androids any different from what they create? But
we are fortified, armed. If we must, we'll fight to the last."
No
doubt there was truth behind the melodramatic oratory—at least as far as the
horror was concerned. Barbara smiled sadly.
"He's
earnest, I think," she offered. "So there's that much glory and
courage in him, if there isn't any control. And you keep wondering, Is he half right?"
"I
know," Ed answered with some contrition. "But I'd rather have what he
considers a scientific hell than nothing. Well, we'll soon be en route back to
Earth—unseen. Then maybe we'll find out and accomplish something. Lack of
sense, like Granger's, or the muddled way in which laws are often interpreted
now, will never work. That's one fact I'm sure of, even in a booby-trapped
situation."
Ed
was trying to be optimistic. In three weeks they had made equipment that they
thought they could use. The three cylinders were Midas Touch
pistols—neutron blast guns that could explode a few of the atoms of any solid
or liquid that their beams touched. They also had a dozen grenades of the same
principle and tubes to carry scant rations. There was a radio for each of the
three—for reception, but also limitedly useful as transmitters. And there were
knapsacks and clothing made from linten fiber pounded and divided as Prell had
never bothered to do.
"We'll
catch the first Earth-bound ship that we can," Prell said. "Queer,
isn't it? If we could truly walk, going a mile would seem impossible. But the
prevailing winds and a little jockeying will get us to Port Karnak. The tube
train will take us to the space ships."
Prell
had spoken too soon. Within that same hour, listening to the newscast, they
learned: "For security reasons, interplanetary traffic has been
indefinitely suspended."
Ed Dukas winced as if in pain. He and Barbara
and Prell looked at one another. In Ed's strange, small body, frustration and
bitter anger fairly hummed.
"Security reasons." That could be a blanket excuse—minus
explanations—for almost anything. Loman, knowing of something inimical and
microscopic, and guessing at an intended journey from Mars, could well have had
a hand in the suspension order. He was wary, and not sure that he had destroyed
his hidden enemies.
The
three stared down at the equipment that they had toiled so hard to produce. But
Ed, like many another man before him who had been
cornered, couldn't have quit even if he had willed it. Stubborn spunk, fear,
need to regain losses, self-preservation and the awareness of the danger of
millions of well-intentioned individuals, both android and human, all took part
in the reason. And you could add the ancient and primal lust for revenge.
Ed
crouched with the others on the rough floor of their chink in the rock.
"Wait," he said at last. "Haven't small objects crossed space
naturally—at least in hypothesis? Yes! Spores—living dust, their vital
functions suspended. The old Arrhenius Theory of the propagation of life from
world to world and solar system to solar system—throughout the universe. A
spore, drifting high in an atmosphere, achieves escape velocity through
molecular impacts and perhaps the pressure of solar light. It's driven into
space, and onward. Uncle Mitch, couldn't the same thing happen to us far more
readily, since we're not inert and we have minds to help direct our movements?
Since we have beams of massive neutrons from the Midas Touch
weapons? And aren't we more rugged than the first androids? Wouldn't we have a
middling chance to endure raw space itself?"
Mitchell
Prell eyed him quietly. Perhaps even his android cheeks blanched a trifle.
"Something like that occurred to me once—a long time ago, Ed," he
remarked at last, his voice very calm. "I didn't think it through. I guess
it seemed just too out of the ordinary even for me. And there wasn't any need
to try it. Perhaps I was scared." "There's need now," Ed said.
Barbara's
expression was a study of eagerness and half fear. "Eddie, have you maybe
discovered something?" she exclaimed. "Uncle Mitch, if there is any
chance that it would work, I'm game to try it!"
After
a moment the scientist nodded. "I believe that there's a good chance it
will work," he said.
Before the next sunup they were ready.
Clothed in garments of linten fiber, they looked like savages from fifty
thousand years before. Yet their present condition could have belonged to no
primitive era. They were united by a tough line of twisted strands, and their
equipment was lashed to their backs. To human eyes they would have been as
invisible as spirits. Were they to demonstrate, even unintentionally, android
superiority in yet another field? Maybe, maybe not.
From
the outlet of the crevice in the rock, they flung themselves into the
atmosphere above the gray desert. Their great advantage at this stage was that,
at the Martian dawn fringe, there were many updrafts, for the air, chilled
fearfully at night, was already warming. At once they were sucked upward, as
if by a vertical wind. Still, the first phase of their climb took many hours.
They kept watching for upward-moving motes to guide them. Short, rocketlike
bursts of heavy neutrons from their Midas Touch
cylinders provided the reaction or kick to get them into the swiftest vertical
currents.
Mars dropped far below, a dun plain marked here and there by the
straight, artificial valleys or "canals." The relative vastness of a world to beings
of pinpoint dimensions was nullified by the distance of altitude, until it
looked no more extensive than it would have to the eyes that used to be theirs.
Mars developed a visible curvature and a rim of haze,
fired to redness by the rising sun. The sky above darkened from hard, deep blue
toward the blackness of space, and the stars sharpened. The sun blazed whitely, and the frosty wings of its
corona began to show. The thinning atmosphere seemed to develop a definite
surface far beneath the three voyagers.
They
had spoken little in their ascent; but now the free movement of sound was
smothered by the increasing vacuum, and there were only gestures and lip
movements to convey meanings.
But
there was not much that really needed to be said. The plan remained simple: get
into trains of upward-jetting molecules, marked by small blurs or warpings of
light. Absorb some of that upward surge into yourselves. How often had this
same thing happened, without conscious design? Molecules move fast in a high
vacuum. Molecular velocity was heat, wasn't it? But here it could not burn. For
heat is chained to matter, and here there was just not enough matter to be hot.
Ed
thought that they must be getting close to the Martian velocity of escape now. Only three-potnt-two miles per second. They might have
attained it more simply by making greater use of their Midas Touch
cylinders. There was scarcely any reactive thrust more efficient than that of
neutrons hurled at almost the speed of light. But there was a pride in
accomplishing it in a more difficult way. Besides, the energy supply for the
weapons must be conserved.
But
now Prell signaled with his hand, and they began to use the cylinders in
earnest, shifting their course little by little from the vertical and in the
direction of the sun. For it was time to curve inward—earthward. Swiftly now,
there was no molecular distortion around them at all. Sense of motion faded
out. Their high velocity was demonstrated only by the rapid shrinking of Mars
behind them; unless, from sunward there came a minute, resisting thrust. Light
pressure? But it would take a longer time in space than they meant to be to
slow them down at all.
"We've
done this much!" Ed said with his lips, but without a voice.
Barbara nodded and tried to smile, and he reached out and pressed her hand. Prell looked
awed and bemused.
Ed
tried then to read part of their fortunes in the reactions of his strange,
minute body to the rigors of space. It was an atomic mechanism more than it was
a chemical one. Therefore, it needed no breath. And the strong, radiant energy
of the sun warmed it a little, so he did not feel cold. Hard ultraviolet light
seemed not to harm it. There was only a sensation as of the shrinking of its
hide—perhaps an adaptive reaction of its demoniac vitality—to protect the trace
of moisture within it against the dryness of space. The fluid within vitaplasm
could be alcohol or liquid air—it was that adaptable. Prell had said this
recently. Such fluids did not freeze easily. But they evaporated. So water
remained the best body fluid in dry space. For in the full light of the sun,
and with a nuclear metabolism, freezing was not a great danger.
Several days out from Mars the three
contacted a small meteor swarm—maybe a fragment of a comet moving sunward and
earthward. They moved with the swarm and landed on a chunk of whitish rock
perhaps eight inches through at its largest diameter. But to them it was an
airless world into which they could burrow, blocking the entrance to their
shelter with chalky dust—a fortunate thing, for in the open the sun's glare and
aridity of space were drying out even their android tissues and blurring their
minds.
The
meteor proved not quite lifeless, for on it clear crystalline needles crumbled
and rose again. Call it silicon biology, proving that one could never know
where something might thrive. In a fall into any atmosphere, such growth would
surely be burned away without a trace.
Ed
and Barbara and Prell learned to understand silent speech by watching lip
movements. The need for hurry still beat in their minds, but drowsiness crept
over them—perhaps another androidal adaptability was functioning here, related
to the hibernation of animals in winter. It lessened loss of vitality when
conditions were not too favorable. But you could resist its compulsions if you
applied your will.
The
meteor moved on swiftly in the general direction of Earth. The journey would
take weeks, and though Ed felt that never had there been a crossing of distance
as eerily strange as this one, still the passage of time, and the events it
held, was always with him and his companions.
There
was a way for them still to experience real sounds, even here. The quartz-flake
radio sets, pressed tight to their ears, transmitted vibrations through their own
substance, when there was no air. They heard fragments of broadcasts coming
from Earth. Pictures of what was happening there came to mind:
A score of monsters destroyed by hunting parties. A side issue, really. For in guard post and
sketchily fortified line, man faced the hardier likeness that his knowledge had
produced. When there were no clearly defined geographical boundaries to
separate the poised forces, you never knew just where those lines would be.
But
the scared, the pleading, the exhorting voices, faint in the distance, gave the
mood, if not the clear view. Tom Granger was there,
and others like him. The latest claim was that vitaplasm gave off poisonous
radioactive radiations—not very true on Earth, where its vital energy remained
mainly chemical.
Those
with sense also tried to be heard. And there were other voices calling for the
retreat to simplicity and the doing of work by hand. Such a pastoral of white
clouds, green hills and sunshine could have its appeal. But how could its
philosophy and inefficiency feed billions? Even if it were not just a bright
vision seen before the last battle?
And
in the midst of all this babble, there was another voice that was faint
thunder: ". . . Got things of our own now, here in the woodsl Even our own
newscast station. Damn, we've taken enough! We Phonies won't go back no
further! Time to be stubborn—even if we all die for it and never come backl
They say folks would like to hang me— which shows how much wits they've gotl
Even if they got the chance, it wouldn't work!"
With
a faint smile, Barbara's hps formed the name for her companions to read:
"Abel Freeman . . ."
Ed
nodded, watching his uncle's quizzical interest over an individual and a legend
that he had only heard them tell about. And Ed had his own reactions,
compounded of admiration, humor and icy mistrust that came close to hatred.
Whatever else he was, Abel Freeman was also a figure of power.
Barbara's
pixyish mouth—she was more than ever a pixy-shaped other words as they crouched
at the entrance of a tiny cave that they had excavated into their meteor.
Outside, the sunshine blazed.
"I've
almost said it before, Ed," she remarked. "All these things happening
on Earth are still important to me—never fear. But I'm a little too different
now to quite belong to it. It gets like a dream—kind of remote."
Ed
had been feeling this himself—almost with panic, because he was enough the
person he had been to ache inside with the importance and tension of what
happened at home. Yet somehow part of him was drifting away on its own special
course.
"Hold on, Babs, a
little longer," he urged.
They
fell into torpid sleep after they had devised a mechanism to arouse them with
an electric shock at an appointed time. It conserved their strength and allowed
them to pass the long interval quickly.
Ed
Dukas's slumber was not altogether dreamless. Like shadows, people moved in his
mind. His parents. His old friend
Les Payten, who perhaps had shown the white feather and had been lost to a
small viewpoint. Schaeffer, one of the greatest scientists, barricaded
in his underground lab in the City. And Harwell, the
efficient but daring adventurer— another legend of his boyhood, who sometime
was supposed to command the first star ship. And perhaps most of all, there was that
fantastic android bigot, Carter Loman, who aroused his black fury.
Perhaps
Ed slept lighter than the others and awoke more quickly to the tingling prickle
of electricity, because he had to run the show. The major burden of
responsibility was his.
He
shook his wife and his uncle awake and pointed to the blue-green bead that was
the Earth, still several million miles away. Lashing their equipment to their
shoulders and tying onto one another's waists like Alpine climbers, they leapt
back into space one more, pushed by the neutron thrust of dieir Midas Touch cylinders. They had to make the rest of their trip
apart from their meteor, which would not pass any nearer to Earth.
When
the home planet was expanded by nearness to a great, mottled, fuzzy bubble, Ed
tugged at the line for attention and spoke without sound in the stinging
silence: "We've talked everything over before," he said. "So we
know generally what to do—though only generally. We'd like to stick together.
But there is just no way to do that and work fast—which may be a vital point.
So we'll soon have to scatter. But we'll listen on our receivers. At least one
of us should be able to find a way to communicate back. Failing that, we still
know where to meet. Remember—the oak by my old house. The valley made by the
trunk and the lowest branch."
Prell's brows knitted, his mind probably
steeped in the swift, strange action to come. Barbara gave a soundless laugh.
"The
crotch of an oak!" her lips commented. "What a trysting place! But it
seems natural enough. Are we mad, or were we once just dull?"
Was
her gaiety just bravado, or was she as cool as she seemed? Ed hoped that she
was cool. Tugging at the linten fine that joined them, Ed drew himself close to
her.
"You don't have to speak, Eddie,"
she told him. "I know what you're thinking. But why shouldn't I—and all of
us—be all right?"
Her
face had sobered. She looked strong. And so he was somewhat relieved. He kissed
her. Perhaps it was odd that dust-mote beings still could do that.
VIII
Ed and Barbara and Prell came to the parting of the ways
sooner than they had intended. Without instruments, it was hard to judge
velocity. They did not use their Midas Touch cylinders
quite long enough to check speed sufficiently as they approached the great
blue-green planet with its blurred ring. They hit the atmosphere, not really
fast, but fast enough. Briefly, sound was reborn around them in a shrieking
whistle, like a vast, thin wind. They tumbled over and over, and the strand
that kept them together was broken. Tumultuous currents of the high ionosphere
separated and scattered them as they plummeted lower.
Ed
was unhurt. And did he hear—more in his imagination than his ears, here in the
muffling semi-vacuum—a distant laugh and shout: "It's all right, Eddie . .
."? The impression faded away, like the voice of some gay sprite
vanishing. He'd thought before of losing Barbara. Now they were two specks,
separated from each other in the infinity of the terrestrial atmosphere. Even
with the logic of plan and method, there was still some unbelief about how they
would ever find each other again.
Using
his radio, he tried to call. But there was no answer. The microscopic
instrument could pick up messages from powerful stations millions of miles
away. But for transmission, its range and that of those like it had to be
ridiculously short: perhaps a score of yards—a fair distance in proportionate
units.
Ed was drifting now, alone and high, as his
wife and uncle must be, too. Well, they'd meant this to happen soon anyway. So
there was no real difference, was there? Get down to work
quickly, down to the surface, where the high clouds seemed to lie flat on the
gray Atlantic and on the near-by greenery of the continent. Ed's cylinder
flamed, forcing him lower toward the City. His first chosen task was to find
Carter Loman, a key enemy. Prell's objective was Tom Granger; then he would try
to contact the androids, perhaps through Abel Freeman. And Barbara was to try
to spike the trigger of violence by whatever means she could. That, in fact,
was the greatest purpose of them all.
Downdrafts
aided Ed's descent, while he listened to his quartz-chip radio. Was one who
figured as prominently as Loman in the strained news of the day ever difficult
to find? Ed did not anticipate too much trouble in locating him. Many people
would know where Loman was and mention of the place would be frequent. Crowds
would follow him everywhere.
As
Ed watched a wolfish patrol of armed spacecraft, flying low on their
atmospheric foils, the information came easily enough: ". . . Carter
Loman's quarters at the Three Worlds Hotel are constantly under guard."
Ed
was far more proficient now in getting around swiftly in the region of
smallness. Erratically but effectively, using currents of air and the thrust of
his Midas Touch blast, he descended toward a
sky-piercing tower. He drifted into the doorway of the hotel's sumptuous lobby,
marred now by the grim additions of radiation shields. For a few minutes Ed
perched on the reception desk; he was less noticeable there than a fleck of
cigarette ash.
There
were constant inquiries for Loman, by telephone and in person, made mostly by
newscast men. The clerks fended them off briskly. But soon there came whispered
thunder, so low that it was almost audible to Ed as sound and not merely
sensible as a heavy vibration: "More mail for Mr. Loman . . ."
The
spark of Ed's propelling cylinder was almost too small to see as he jetted to
the heavy bundle of letters and rode up with the attendant, past the guards,
and slid with a skittering envelope through a mail slot, and into Carter
Loman's presence.
He
was sprawled on a bed and was clad in full vacuum armor of a type heavier than
would have been necessary even on a dead world. It was pronged with special
details as well: filaments, like parts of the insides of a Midas Touch weapon. Hovering over the vast shape, Ed felt the hard,
stinging punch of a few scattered neutrons hitting his body before he ventured
too close. Even though his own life was subatomic in principle, enough of those
infinitesimal pellets could kill him. Loman had evidently grown wary and nervous,
guessing with shrewd imagination what dangers he might now face. In addition to
his massive costume, this android who hated his kind was wearing an aura of
low-speed neutrons, constantly being projected from the filaments on his armor.
Just then, the savagery inside Ed felt its bitter frustration. Loman even
mistrusted the ban on space travel.
The
enormous face beneath him, framed beyond the glaze of a helmet window, did not
look at ease. Loman was muttering. He must have been at it, off and on, for a
long time: "I wouldn't be surprised if you were around, Prell. Or even
you, Dukas. I was right! I know all about your little self, Prell. It was all
in your dead brain. You think you'll play a reverse David against Goliath, eh?
If blasting out your lab didn't kill you . . ."
No,
Ed Dukas was not so easily defeated. The aura of neutrons thrown out only by
scattered fiilaments was probably not of continuous intensity. At certain
points there might well be chinks in it, at which time he could slip to close
quarters without having his own nuclear metabolism speeded up to the point of
his destruction. But before he did anything final, he had to find out where
Prell's stolen equipment was.
Ed felt the whir of the air-filtering
apparatus in the room and smiled. And there was a television globe nearby. Ed
could have found ways, now, to make his own tiny voice audible to his enemy and
to challenge him. But Ed decided against this for the present. He mustn't waste
precious time, yet he suspected that he could depend on the restlessness of a
nervous foe not to wait here quietly very long.
Again
he was right. Perched on a ledge made by an irregularity of the wall, Ed
waited less than five minutes before Carter Loman jumped up from the bed,
cursed, and dashed from the room. Ed's Midas Touch
cylinder reddened in his hand as he jetted after him. Of firmer flesh than
other men, Loman hurried untiring, even in his massive armor and plastic
helmet, down a back stairs, passing a hundred levels.
Then
he was in a small, powerful car racing along a civic speedway that Ed
remembered well. Clinging to plush that was like a dense forest under him, Ed
remained undislodged by the tornadoes of air that came from speed.
Around
him passed beauty that he used to know, expanded so enormously that much of
the familiar mood of it was lost; and he himself seemed cut off from it, like a
ghost coming back. But there was other, perhaps greater beauty, too-closer to
the heart of what he was now. There'd been a controlled shower induced by the
weather towers. Now the sun shone again, and the air sparkled, not with dust,
but with countless tiny droplets of moisture—crystal globes, clear as lenses,
but breaking the sunshine into brilliant prismatic hues.
Ed's
brief rambling of mind ended when Loman did an odd thing. He stopped in Ed's
old neighborhood, after having passed a half-dozen road blocks where uniformed
men had entrenched themselves, covering their ugly vehicles with cut branches.
Loman had only flashed his Interworld Security badge at each post, to receive
respectful permission to go on.
Loman
stopped his car abruptly before a house adjacent to Ed's own—one Ed knew well.
But Ed had an odd feeling that this was not as strange as it seemed. This
suburb, close to the City, harbored many of the noted and notorious. Besides,
many recent turbulent events had been centered within these few hundred square
miles. And Loman had been in the neighborhood before, in the company of Police
Chief Bron-son. Also, had there always been something disturbingly familiar
about Loman's manner?
Ed
tingled at the unraveling of an enigma, as Loman hurried up the walk to the
house. Loman found the door locked, but if this annoyed him, it stopped him not
at all. An armored shoulder, backed up by the muscles of his kind —dieir power rarely
demonstrated publicly—battered the door to splinters and Loman stepped through.
Ed
followed him—as unobtrusive as part of the atmosphere —up a stairway and into a
pleasant student room seen in colossal scale.
It
was Les Payten's room which had thus been invaded without ceremony. Nor was the
intruding colossus the least abashed that the giant Les, somewhat thinned down
and pallid after his long convalescence from a visit to Abel Freeman, was
present.
Ed
saw his old friend's startled expression, then felt
the vibration of his words: "Chummy, aren't you, bursting in like this? The police, eh? What have I done? My God, I've seen your picture! You're Loman!"
The
other giant's smirk was half gentle, half bullishly humorous. "That's my
name—if you prefer," he said. "I've had you watched, Lester Payten,
for various reasons. You've been ill. Then why do you stay so close to what may
become the battle lines? You're an odd guy, Lester. Too much fear, courage and
conscience. Wanting to be a hero, but half a martyr.
Recently one of the 'reasonable' kind. Soon there
won't be any of those left. Not when a few more see those they love torn open,
crisped or perhaps crushed by created things more hideous than Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Such facts destroy the folly of thoughtfulness. And, good! For in that way the
showdown comes against another kind of slime that desecrates the form of manl You're a mixed-up kid, Lester— maybe even thinking of some
old companions. But in your heart you know that you're all human. Me, I'm still
sentimental, so I had to come to you at last. You ought to be safe among the
asteroids, like your timid mother."
Being
an audience to these comments, Ed's first puzzlement changed slowly toward
comprehension of a weird truth. Drifting with the air molecules near the center
of the room, he watched Les Payten sitting quietly at his desk, his look also
showing that he was at the fringe of understanding. But maybe his mind half
refused to plunge into the stark-ness of fact beyond. Too much had become
possible. Sometimes it might be a land too strange for human wits.
Maybe
primitive terror prompted Les to sudden violence. Or it was the sickening
cynicism in Loman's words. In a flash of movement Les tried to get a weapon
from his desk. Confronted by a human being, he might have succeeded. But Loman
even dared, first, to shut off the neutronic aura around his armor, so as not
to burn or kill the one he had come to see. Then quick fingers latched onto
Les's wrists. Les fought with all his might but was pushed down on the floor.
Dazed, he looked up at his conqueror.
"Yes,
your memory-man father killed himself," Loman said. "But he could
always return by recording, couldn't he? Before that, it was all arranged—with
many who sympathized with the human cause. The mind probe showed that my expressed
views were truthful. Interworld Security could use someone who was clever,
unknown, and supremely active. Umhm-m—maybe I'm even harder than they hopedl
Yes, I'm still an android, Les, because I have to be strong for battle. I
hardly care who learns of it now, because the fight is sure to come. But I'll
be a man again, when and if I can. And, like a man, I love my son. Things will
become very difficult soon, Lester. So I want you with me."
Loman's
heavy growl- might have sounded paternal to common ears. But he capped it with
a light tap to Les's jaw.
Les
crumpled. For a moment this fantastic echo of his original sire, changed in
face and form, stood over him, an armored demon by any standard.
The
sun had set. From the twilight beyond the window came blue flashes, light heat
lightning, off toward the wooded hills. They glinted on Loman's plastic face
window, which had muffled his words scarcely at all. Loman seemed to match
those flickers: science misused; wisdom, once reached for so carefully, fading;
the collected armaments, improvised quickly by a master technology hidden in
tunnel and on mountain-top, by both sides. And the guts of a star ship engine
perverted. Once, on a lost Moon, a thing like that had explo-ed, just by error
or chance. There had been no wild speeches to bring it about. Nor any panic.
And there had been no Lomans to help in a more savage way.
Unless
driving impulses were checked, the end could come this very night. Ed even
wondered if he might waste valuable time sticking close to Loman any longer.
Would it lead to more answers, as he had felt it must? Well, he still was sure
of that, and Loman also seemed driven by haste. So Ed alighted on Les's
shoulder and burrowed into the cloth. It was the safest thing to do. For
whatever weapon might be used, it probably would not be directed at Les.
Loman
picked up the unconscious form and dashed out to his car. There followed a wild
ride along winding roads ; through the woods.
Distantly, on a hilltop, Ed saw a metal framework slanting skyward. It held a
cylinder whose neutron beam could level anything. But its power supply could
mean complete 'destruction in a last resort to madness, for revenge—if someone
lost control of himself, smashed the safety stops on controls, pushed levers a
little beyond them.
There
were wrecks on the road. Horror had been exchanged already, as refugees fled
the City. Beside one broken car, half fused to a puddle of fire lay the body of
a child, briefly glimpsed. And Ed detected a man's cries and protests, flung
wildly at the sky from among the shadowy trees.
Or could it have come just as well from an
android throat?
If it was Jones of common human clay or Smith, -an android, could it
make any difference? Yet it was an old thing— a reasonable man's anguish against wrong.
Still,
was it hard to see a sequel, when something snapped in the brain? A kind of explosion. Then, before horror and rage,
immortality or death could become equally meaningless. Good sense and kindness,
once clung to desperately, could then become zero, and Earth, sky and humanity
empty phantoms. Then could you picture the wronged one awaiting someone of the
other kind? Could you picture him aiming his own weapon at another car and
holding its trigger down until his own curses were lost in the roar of
incandescence?
Ed Dukas rode on through the dusk in Loman's car, still clinging to the
fabric at the shoulder of his inert friend, Les Payten. The sky still flickered—warning barrages,
not yet aimed to kill. An aircraft swooped, its weapons shredding a high-flying
horror that Was not of metal. Some had been destroyed, but
others always came—though they never had been truly numerous. A few other cars
sped along the road —persons fleeing the dangerous congestion of the City.
Ed
wondered if the steady ping
ping ping in
his quartz-chip radio was the ultra-sonic evidence of a spy beam in action,
perhaps meant to trace Loman's course? At last the
forces of law might do that to their own, if some of them disagreed with
Loman's zeal or suspected that it had become too extreme. Chief Bronson, for
one, had seemed a likable man. Besides, even after a mind probe, many would
mistrust an android.
Ed reasoned that this must be a flight to a
hide-out, which he had to see.
The
car careened for a mile along a narrow side road, where, behind high banks, the
pinging stopped. Had Lo-man counted on their shielding effect? Deeper in the
woods, a block of undergrowth folded upward on a hinge, and the car rolled
inside. Then the great trap door closed behind it.
Ed
was not surprised even by so elaborate a retreat/as
this. Now, with his neutronic aura cut off, Loman bore Les through a low
doorway, into a great, low chamber fused out of bedrock. Could Loman and
Mitchell Prell be as alike as this in their choice of secret places? Queer—and yet not so queer. Both were scientists. Prell had
invaded the field of biology and Loman, in his original incarnation as Ronald
Payten, had been a biologist from the start.
Ed
might have attacked, now that Loman's aura was inactive. But it could be
restored in an instant. Better to wait. A clearer chance might well come. His
enemy might even be trying to lure any small, unseen intruder close to the
coils of the aura.
Besides,
in the soft artificial light, answers lay—answers that Ed had only dimly
suspected, in spite of Loman's background. Since he had learned who Loman was,
there hadn't been time enough for him to understand. But now the solution to a
dreadful mystery came easily, because Ed could intrude here unseen.
There
were vats here, too, vaster than any Ed had ever seen from any viewpoint and
webbed with their attendant apparatus. Beneath the glossy surface of the fluid,
like smooth oceans in the floor, various shapes were visible—all devilish but
half transparent in their undeveloped state, their smooth plates of vitaplasm muscle
and scale showing, but already alive and in slight, undulating motion. And no
doubt these things were only in the embryonic state. They could grow much huger
after being set free to hide and kill. Here, then, was the devil's brewpot of
creation. Here the first slithering synthetic monsters must have been
blueprinted and created. It was Ronald Payten's work—the product of his skill
and his secret quirks. Madness in vitaplasm, to help build
hate between android and man and bring the conflict to a climax.
And
ther^ was more. Against one wall was the plunder of Mitchell Prell's laboratory
on Mars—or most of it. The tanks were empty. But on a table stood the larger microscope, as if what
could be seen through its eyepiece had been under examination. Perhaps the
doll-like shape, the other vats, the machine shop and that tiny electron
microscope were still there. And what lay at a still lower size level. Across
such a void of distance, Ed Dukas could not see such detail. But he felt the
mingling of hope and frustration. No path back to normal circumstances was
here, yet. And the time was certainly not ripe—if it would ever come. Besides,
did all of him really want to return, even if part of him fairly ached for it?
Carter
Loman, or Ronald Payten, bent close to Les, his pronged helmet and wide face,
beyond the curve of plastic and radiation shielding, like an ugly world in the
sky. But if you had the mind to notice, perhaps Loman's expression was almost
gentle just then. His voice came to Ed's senses as a subdued and modulated
quake: "Lester! Wake up! I didn't hit you that hard."
Les
seemed to have been lowered onto a couch of some kind. Perhaps he had already
regained consciousness moments ago and had since been bent on quiet scrutiny
of his surroundings, seeking out comprehension and the core of his own
feelings. Ed could guess at some of this: an enigma revealed; Ronald
Payten—creator of monsters; Les Payten's pseudo-father. Then,
for Les, horror, shame, fury.
For
Ed, the world seemed to rock as Les leaped. Les was not strong now and was
still in his convalescence. And maybe he had been wavering and unsure, or even
wrong in his past choices. But at this moment he was not at all in doubt,
though the attack he made could have been pure, wild fright.
"Father, indeed! I'll kill you—Phony!" he screamed. Then he was grappling with Loman
with all the strength that muscle and emotion could muster.
For
that moment at least, he was Ed Dukas's ally, willing or otherwise. For he held
Loman's attention diverted. And because of Les's attack Loman's neutronic aura
remained turned off.
Ed
leaped and jetted, his tiny Midas Touch a scarcely
visible spark as it flamed. He landed on the fabric near the back of Loman's
neck and at the base of his helmet. Holding tight, Ed let his weapon flare
again, this time using it to blast a tiny hole. He braved the violent spurt of
energy from the dissolving rubberized fabric and then the moment of exposure
to radiation and heat as he crept through. Now he floated in Loman's private
atmosphere, within the great oxygen helmet, as Loman's struggle with Les went
on.
Now
was the time to test a plan: the speck-sized man against a being of human
dimensions—comparatively as huge as a mountain. And it was android against
android, advantage against advantage.
Loman's
lungs, active now to give breath to a chuckle of triumph, breathed Ed in
deeply. With his full equipment still lashed to his shoulders, he tumbled down
through moist and faintly ruddy gloom. When the air currents quieted, he clung,
a sharp splinter of obsidian rising and falling in his hand, as he cut through
soft tissue.
Thus
he reached a small artery and was borne along by the flow within it. It was a
world of warm, buried rivers. Dim, rosy light sometimes found its way through
the walls of flesh. Or was it, still the radioactive glow that Loman's body,
adapting to the shortage of oxygen, had shown on Mars? But its physical
structure, apart from its substance, remained human: the disklike red blood
corpuscles pumped along in the gloom.
Only
wait now to be circulated to the right position. Ed knew when he passed the
great thumping valves and chambers of Loman's heart. But, no, this was not the
place for action. He could feel himself rising now. Good! Was die darkness
within the skull denser than elsewhere? Ed forced his way into constantly
narrowing channels. Around him he still saw very dimly the living cells
themselves. Here they
had long, interlocking filaments. They were the
brain cells, i beyond question.
He
dared not use his Midas Touch here. The fluid at its
very muzzle would have exploded. But he had grenades of much the same function.
Set the fuse of one and leave it lodged here.
Before
Ed was pumped back to the huge lungs, he felt the heavy concussion. Then came the wild gyrations of the colossus. A spark of atomic
incandescence had exploded within its head, opening arteries to hemorrhage and
destroying surrounding tissue with heat and radiation. A demoniac vitality of
body might linger on, but a mind was dead. Had total death come quickly, all
movement ceasing, Ed might have had to tunnel his way tediously from the
gigantic corpse.
But
his luck held out. He reached the lungs, and a great burst of air flung him
forth into the oxygen helmet again.
Loman's
form still twitched on the floor. One enemy was erased from the immediate
future at least. Loman—or the pseudo Ronald Payten—had been removed as an
active force of history, but the fury he had helped stir up was by now
self-sustaining. Ed gave him a brief, almost rancorless thought. A woman had
lost her husband in the Moonblast. And he was her memory re-created. She had
had reason to hate science. And he had been warped and marked by her view. He
was a bitter product of his times—impossible in the centuries that came before.
Ed knew that he himself—as he was now, certainly—was also the child of his era.
His uncle must always have been that. Babs—wherever she was now— was also of
these years. And his dad, and countless others. Maybe,
therein you had to find a tiny spark of tolerance for Loman, though not much.
And would anyone ever want to bring him back to fife, even if the world went on
existing?
Ed's score stood at two points gained—Loman out of
the way and the source of the monsters revealed. But these were small victories
compared with what must be gained if there was to be any hope. Masses of human
beings and androids faced each other, their emotions inflamed to the point of
final folly. And the end of one troublemaker and the revelation of his tools
were small items beside all that.
Ed
got out of Loman's oxygen helmet the way he had entered. Les Payten, a dazed
Atlas, was stumbling around. Ed felt cut off from his old friend by a strange,
great distance. But he could talk to him at least.
Ed
floated to the radio in a corner of the workshop, found his way through a vent
in its back, and touched a wire with the minute contact points of a crude
microphone as large as his hand. The infinitesimal electric currents it bore
were amplified and converted into sound. Ed's voice came forth loud and clear:
"Les! It's me—Ed Dukas. I'm here, just as Prell came to me once. I'm an
android just a few thousandths of an inch tall. I'm inside the radio, Les.
First, I want to know how you feel about all this. Yes, I killed Loman."
There
were world tremors of footsteps approaching with slow caution. A panel of the
set was opened. The giant stared inside. Ed was now sufficiently accustomed to
the vibrations of human speech to interpret the mood behind them.
There
was a brief, hard chuckle, controlled and distant and unfriendly.
"Yes,
Dukas, I'm quite sure it's as you say. It's odd, maybe, but I'm not surprised.
at all. In our time, you have to accept too much.
Thanks for finishing Loman—not my father. Dad died on the lunar blowup, as you
know, a victim of technology or history, as we all will probably soon be. I've
told you before how I feel about everything. And what has hap-
pened to
me tonight can scarcely have made my view of the androids any kinder. Once upon
a time, in my callow youth, I thought I belonged to this crazy period. How
wrong can you get? You take your strength and durability. I wonder what finer
flavors of life you've lost. So there's my standard, and I'll live and die by
it, Dukas. It's sad to lose a pal, but as you are, I guess you'll have to be an
enemy. It's like an instinct, Dukas."
Les
had spoken calmly and firmly. But Ed sensed the bitterness and uncertainty
that lurked beneath the words.
"I
won't argue, Les," he answered. "But when I'm thinking straight, the
truth to me is still as it was. In championing man above android, or vice
versa, you can only come to zero. Only in fair play between them is there a
chance. So, if the urge ever comes over you, you might still do me a favor.
Across this room is a microscope and attached equipment that are vital to me
and to Barbara, who is like me, somewhere. Guard it, Les. No place that you
could reach is perhaps truly safe for it. But I was thinking that if you could
gamble again —as we all must—you might take it to Abel Freeman. I know that you
were almost killed in his camp, Les. But I believe that the old reprobate is
fundamentally sound and not as bitterly against such a device as some human
beings might be. Thanks if you consider it, Les."'
Still
unseen by his one-time friend, Ed jetted to the vaulted ceiling and escaped
through a ventilator pipe that emerged among concealing bushes. He rose above
the trees, and a night wind pushed him on, while he listened to the quartz chip
he carried. His first impulse now was to locate Tom Granger as his next
candidate for silence.
It
was not necessary. The news was on the air: "Granger was stricken in his
quarters just before eight o'clock. The cause is not yet clear. He had just
begun to write his new speech: T am frightened. We are
all frightened. But this can change nothing of our purpose. In vitaplasm we are
confronted by a vampirish fact: an identity of face masking a difference of
spirit. A treachery. A slow,
dreadful encroachment. . . ."'
Prell had gotten to Granger, then. If this
was murder, maybe it was justified—if Earth was one per cent less in danger
with one exhorter quieted, for a while if not forever. But what had been
accomplished so far was,small beside the threat that
had been stirred up in many minds and machines across the countryside.
The
sky was heavy with thickening clouds. Weather Control, working through its
ionic towers had already been smashed. The night was alternately a Stygian hole
or a glare-lit holocaust full of battering vibrations which might mean that
real battle had already begun. So far, only neutron streams were being used.
Where a mountain peak was hit there would be a blaze of light that even an
android had better not look at. Then another mountain, looming over a
different fortified line, would flare up and glow with moving lava. And the
power that energized the weapons was the same as that which could reach the
stars.
Rising
high and jetting forward with his Midas Touch, Ed went
to work. He thought of Abel Freeman's camp, which lay somewhere beyond the
carpet of flaming woods which flanked one slope. But that waS1
not his immediate destination now. He had dived for a power station
house in a great trailer—and did it matter whether it belonged to the older
race or the newer? He took great risks getting into its busy vitals. The
constricting pressure of space warps, creating a gravity pressure of billions
of tons to the square inch, eased gradually. A marble-sized bit of super-dense
matter, crushed and compressed by the force and hidden by its opaqueness, began
to expand to meter-wide size and to lose its blinding heat and fury as the
processes within it stopped. Soon the power plant, turning out a flood of electricity
out of" all proportion to its small size, ceased to function. Scattered
atoms of hydrogen and lithium became inert.
There was no easily visible cause for the
breakdown, until puzzled eyes found minute holes burned in vacuum tubes,
allowing air to enter, oxidizing grids and fiilaments and stopping their
action.
Two
great weapons died, their energy cut off. But the power stations themselves
were the far greater threat, for they harbored that sun-stuff within them. Now
the controls of one, which some enraged person might contrive to push too far
in spite of the watchfulness of others, were temporarily useless.
Working
both sides of the line, Ed sabotaged another energy source, and another. Then
he lost count, not because of a high score, but because heat and radiation had
fogged his mind somewhat. Yet he kept at his labors because there was no other
way. Within every square mile there was enough potential power to end his
planet.
Around
him, curses came vibrating from giants: "Men, eh? Jelly for insides!. . . ." "Stinking Phonies—Hell-born or
Prell-bornl . . . Jim, I was wondering, this fizz-out looks fishy. Do you
suppose the bastards have
something?"
The
front had quieted. It could be that, as far as he had gone, Ed had actually
held the Earth together by spiking a few danger points. But he could take no
pride for himself out of this. The job could go on and on, like a few buckets
of water poured on a forest fire. It helped briefly, yet if there had been a
thousand like him, but truly indestructible, the situation might still be
without promise. The mass of the populace was too enormous and scattered; the
natural suspicion and the forces which had stirred it up were too deep. The
ghosts of Loman and Granger still walked in memory and maybe now in martyrdom. And the. technology was still
there. So Ed knew that, unless there was another way, he could-only go on
attempting to lessen a threat, until heat and radiation or its fulfillment
zeroed him out.
It
took him over an hour to stop one power station because his demoniac vitality
was ebbing and because it had begun to rain heavily. The great drops could not
kill him, but like falling lakes, they could hammer him into the mud, from
which it might take days for him to extricate himself. He waited in the shelter
of a loose bit of bark on the trunk of a tree. There he felt the helpless side
of his smallness.
As
he waited, his mind rambled. Had several groups of weapons quit without his
noticing, or was this only something that he wished were so? Where was Barbara
now? Would he ever see her again? . . . Now he lost himself in a fantasy. He
saw them leaving Earth's atmosphere the way they had come—she and he together;
maybe finding beauty and peace out there. Perhaps there were even tiny
worlds—meteors—inhabited by crystalline things such as they had once seen but
advanced to a state where they could think and build, and be friendly.
And,
almost wistfully, he thought of another idyl—his father's, and even Granger's,
among millions of others. He could almost see the crude charm of the houses,
the gardens and the flocks. But how did one erect a wall against science —with
science? It seemed harder to do than diking the water out of the deepest ocean
and trying to live in the hole thus made.
_ The rain ended. Ed was air-borne again. He caused one more
power station to break down. But there were others. And some that he had spiked
might already be repaired. And from his quartz chip he heard other exhorting
voices— not Granger's, but like Granger's. The old and human traits that
Granger had represented could go on without him, fighting maturer thoughts as
if in a drive toward suicide. Who could be everywhere, to quiet such clamoring?
In
the darkness before dawn, Ed felt desperate and hopeless. His mind was on Abel
Freeman again—the memory man, somebody's cockeyed family legend. It was an
instinctive thing to seek out the strong for advice, for discussion and
perhaps for a joining of forces.
Ed
had only part of an energy cartridge left for his Midas Touch.
But this was more than enough to jet him across the mountains to the camp of
the quaint android chieftain with whom he must now admit a kindship of flesh.
Freeman was certainly a local leader now among those of the same mark who had
fled from the City, where the population was predominantly of the old kind.
Technicians, craftsmen, specialists of every sort, would be among Freeman's
following.
Just
as first daylight began, Ed drifted over the vast, hodgepodge encampment
hidden in the woods and the marshes. Part of the ground it covered had been
fused to hot, glassy consistency, perhaps by a small aerial bomb. Maybe a hundred
Phonies had died there—which fact added nothing to the cause of peace.
Abel
Freeman himself was not too hard to find, for he occupied a central,
commanding position among various equipment housed in
great trailers carefully concealed from any observer in an aircraft. But Abel
Freeman, true to his legend,. was
sitting inside a rude shelter of boughs, which effectively concealed the fight
of his ato lamp. Before him was a sensi-psych training device and a vast pile
of books on many subjects, ranging from military tactics to atomics, on which
he was obviously endeavoring to get caught up. He was savagely intent upon
book learning, for which he had little aptitude. But Ed, seeing him in
mountainous proportions, was perhaps better able than others to understand why
androids in need of leadership flocked to his stamping grounds Abel Freeman
looked like the essence of rough and ready ability. Among android leaders, he
was certainly the greatest.
Freeman
had a small radio receiver beside him. Ed Dukas did not try to read the meaning
of its blaring vibrations, for he was aware of their general tone. To him the
instrument was chiefly a possible bridge of communication between himself and
Freeman.
,
But Ed was not now given the chance to make such contact. For something else
happened. From the pages of an opened book in Abel Frerrtan's hands coiled a
thread of smoke, as charred words were written rapidly across the paper. Ed was
close enough in the air to read'them, too: "I am Mitchell Prell, who helped make your kind
'possible. I am one of you now—though
undersize. Help keep the peace. Make no moves to start trouble."
Ed
himself was startled. His uncle was here, then! They had arrived at almost the
same time. And Prell had chosen a more dramatic means of communication—not ink,
not an amplified voice, but the spiderweb-thin beam of his Midas Touch used as a long stylus, while he clung, perhaps, to a hair on the back of Freeman's hand!
For
an instant, Abel Freeman was gripped by surprise. But then, with
rattlesnake-swift movement, his own Midas Touch was in
his hand. His whole self seemed to take on the smooth flow of perfect alertness
which nothing but an utterly refined machine could have equaled.
"Prell or a liar?" he challenged. "Or Prell with a conscience —for his own first people and
against his brain children? Yes, I've heard how little you might be now."
Ed
had only glimpsed his uncle far off among the scattered motes of the
air—another mote among them—a foot away he must be, at least. But Ed hadn't
waited for contact. Instead he darted quickly inside Freeman's radio, touched
the contacts of his microphone to the proper surface, and spoke: "Maybe
you'll remember me, too, Freeman. I'm Dukas, Prell's nephew. You and I have
talked before, man to man. Prell is no liar. And the conscience is there—for
everybody, android or otherwise. Yes, I'm with him, the same size. And there's
a problem, everybody's problem, the toughest one that I've ever heard of. So
where do we get any answer that makes sense? Some of it has got to come
quickly, I'm afraid, Freeman."
Amplified,
Ed's voice had boomed out till it was like an earthquake to him. Once again a
plastic box was opened above him and a gigantic face was overhead. In the
tinkling overtones of smallness, there was almost a silence for a moment. Then
came the rattle of Freeman's hard, amused laugh, as he
said, "111 be damned! Smaller than
snuS and made the cheap way. People. Something better. Yep, it must be so, even if I can't even
see you. That puts us way ahead, I guess. And it ain't a whisky vision. Well, I
guess it still don't make any difference. The old-time kind
of folks hate us, and they'll never stop while both of us and them are
alive. And us Phonies have been crowded all we can
take. They've fired on us here, just barely trying to miss. Could be we've done
the same to them. It's a mighty ticklish proposition. In winktime they could
finish us all here, nice and clean and no grease left. So could we burn them
quicker than gunpowder. So who gets trigger crazy and
does it first? We've fixed them: an answer, under the ground. Maybe they can
spoil our other weapons, like it seems they can, but not this one. It's buried
deep enough. Let 'em try to hit us hard, and it'll set
everything off. Your old Moonblast will be beat a thousand times. Us Phonies are bullheaded. We were made on Earth, same as
them. It's ours as much as theirs. We came alive, and we can fade out again,
young fella!"
The vibrations of Freeman's tones rose and
fell, with humor, fatalism and stubbornness. Two races, one born of the
knowledge originated by the other, seemed to have driven each other into
corners of no return. At some indefinite instant, the Big Zero would come.
Ed
saw this garish picture more clearly than ever before. His strange little body
fairly quivered with it. He looked at Mitchell Prell, who had come beside him
now, where the pieces of apparatus that made up the interior of a small receiving
set loomed, and he saw in his face the puzzled, tired fear of a scientist whose
researches had always aimed at doing good. Just then Ed Dukas, micro-android,
was far from separated from the Big Earth as he used to know it. So now, in
desperation, he clutched at a vision which had once seemed almost a fact.
"Freeman,"
he said, "maybe men can't back down or cooperate with supermen. Doing that can seem like embracing extinction. But hasn't-there
always been an obvious thing for us to
do?"
"Umhm-m—you
mean we should back down," Freeman replied
softly. "Set out for the wide-open spaces that we were meant for. Leave
the poor clodhoppers behind. Young fella, could be
that you and me see things bigger. For others like us, it ought to be like
that, only it ain't—yet. Most of the new people are butcher, baker and
candlestick maker, Earth-born, and Earth-tied in their minds, like anybody.
There's a ship, sure. But the stars are still awful far off, and never touched,
and you can go addled just thinkin' about them. Lots of our sort would leave in
their own sweet time, same as regular folks, sure. It's in their blood. You
might say they got wings. But who really knows how to use 'em yet? And crowd
our kinfolks off their home world? When they're spunky and sore like any human
being? Nope. Sorryl"
Ed's
faint hope faded before the old android's realism. For years the movement of
migration had been farther and farther outward into space. It was at once a
fact, a dream and a philosophy, like getting nearer to the Eternal Unknown.
But most of the worth-while solar system was already owned by the original
dominant species. Beyond was only the distance, not a beaten path at all, an
untried and fearsome novelty. One star ship was about completed, yes. Fast it
would be, but its speed would still fall far short of the velocity of light. So
the nearer stars were decades, centuries, millenniums
away.
An
idea so familiar that it seems almost an accomplished fact can lose some of its
charm in the hard glare of real obstacles. Ed felt something like a chill
inside him. Though he knew the strangeness of a micro-cosmic viewpoint, others
did not have this training and boldness for the unknown. He saw the majority of
them balking fatally. But he still had to try something, to change as much of this as he could—if he
could change any of it at all.
"I don't know whether or not to blame
you and the others for the.revenge you say is rigged here and elsewhere, Freeman,"
he said. "I can see why both sides felt driven to do it. But I'm going to
borrow your newscast facilities, Freeman. Or someone else's.
Because rumor can be a powerful force. And I think. I
can give it a little push."
Mitchell
Prell was still beside him. His grin was encouraging and sly. "Best of
luck in what you intend, Eddie," he remarked. "Need a charge for your
Midas Touch? . . . Meanwhile, I might try drawing the teeth of some dragons, as
you seem to have been doing. Got to be careful, though, that
both sides don't blame each other and get nervous. Granger, poor
knothead, was easy. I hope that somehow circumstances will be right so that he
can come back and leam. About Loman and the things he made, I can feel
differently." , "You heard?" Ed asked.
"It
was on the air," Prell replied. "Somebody phoned the news in from
near that lab. At least the overwise ones will know that they guessed wrong
about which faction contrived a biological horror: a rabid old-race
sympathizer, but an android, tool Can that make either side proud?"
A minute later Ed landed on the roof of the
trailer which housed Freeman's wireless equipment. He crept past an immense
drop of rain water that loomed like a rounded mesa beside him and entered a
vent. Soon he touched the terminals of his microphone to the proper contacts.
The transmitter was active. During the first pause between the temblors of
other words and signals and coded information, Ed spoke quickly, half like a
mischievous sprite. "This is no ghost voice. We hear that many androids
want to take all of their kind beyond the solar system."
The
station did not stop sending at once. Blame that on the starded monitor, who
must have been listening. Ed took advantage of his opportunity. He was granted
another moment to speak: "It is only natural that they should want to do
that. Their kind of vigor matches the stars^ They
don't need, or really want, the Earth. Their departure in peace could be a
perfect answer to everything." „
That
much Ed got out before the transmitter clicked to silence. He knew he hadn't
said anything original and that he had pushed an argument intensely, like a
high-pressure salesman without full belief. What he had said was the way things
should be, perhaps, but were not. Yet, again, like a romantic kid, had he felt
the glamorous impact bf his own words?
He
was aware that androids would hear and millions of the old race—intent on
communications from an enemy station—as well. A mysterious, informal voice was
always a thing to draw attention, and his remarks had been rather startling.
That they would be repeated and discussed a thousand times from other stations
was probable. For they were like a chink of hope in one of two
granite walls of obstinate righteousness and strength.
But
Ed decided that he'd build no bright pictures of what his speech would
accomplish but would wait for hard facts. He wished desperately that he'd had a
moment more to speak on the transmitter, to call out Barbara's name.
Now
he drifted again in a morning sunshine. Luck had held
out this far at least. But over woods and crude shelters and hidden equipment
and grimy grim-faced hordes that looked as human as refugees could, there were
interruptions that denied optimism. A patrolling rocket ship sailed high; an
intensified neutron beam turned a finger of air white hot behind it—very close.
And mountaintops, already truncated and smoking, still would flare up
dazzlingly. Android muscles and backs strained and bent to build
fortifications as nothing merely human could. The toilers were both men and
women. Could android children cry? Yes, some did.
Another
thing happened. Ed, floating unseen low in the air, felt the buzz of shouts and
cries. A man who seemed to be near collapse was being helped forward by a youth
whose sidearms dangled near the knees of his torn dungarees.
At a
little distance, where size seemed more as it used to be, Ed saw that the
exhausted man was Les Payten. He was mud from head to foot; his face and arms
were bloodied by brambles, his suit was a rag.
He
was brought straight to Abel Freeman's shelter. There, supported by the armed
youth, he spoke his piece: "I'm here again, Freeman, because a friend of
mine asked me to bring you something for him. Does that make me a fool? I know
it does. Because he's only my remembrance of a friend now.
Damn you all!"
Les
Payten fainted. A package wrapped in a plastic sheath fell from his hands, but
Abel Freeman caught it. A couple of Abel's ornery sons looked on, exchanging
puzzled scowls. Freeman warned them away with a clenched fist, knotty as an
oaken club, and then shouted, "Nancyl Oh, Nancy-y-y!" But there was
no time for Ed to observe Freeman's hellion daughter functioning as a nurse. He
went inside Freeman's radio again, and spoke, "Freeman, this is Dukas. I
came to you to give and receive help. That means that I've tried to guess right
about you. I believe I have. When your neo-biologists examine what Payten has
brought, they will be able' to guess its value to me and mine. And I think that
they will be able to combine its uses with those of their own equipment for
something I'd like to see done. But there are other matters. Some of your power
plants broke down, but so did others across the line. I did most of that. Prell
must be doing more of it right now. What I said over your wireless was meant to
gain a little time."
Ed
paused. Freeman did not open the radio case again. Ed couldn't see him. He
could only feel small thuds and clinkings—the- android leader
opening the package that Les Payten had brought. Ed wondered if he could ever
imagine what was going on in Freeman's head, the thousand problems and feelings
that must be seething there.
Freeman
might be no good at book learning. And his roots were in a century when even a
flying machine was a wild thought. But he had to be shrewd to match the legend
behind him. And he had to take tough situations with a light shrug for the
same reason.
Finally
Ed felt the rumble of his chuckle. "You mean I'm one of your 'reasonable' variety," he said. "Meantime you smash my stuff,
eh, little bug in the air! I ought to get damn unreasonable! You might even finish me off! I'm kind of curious about
that! But I don't think you have to bother. I know that the old-time folks are
moving lots more hell machines up. And they're awful mad, because we got quite
a few of them in one place last night—sort of by miscalculation. What's this
talk about us androids matching the stars? Well, young fella, go 'head and talk
some more. Yep, on our wireless rig. What's left to
lose? And I'm still curious."
On
the way to the radio frailer, Ed looked back to the ugly, humping shapes of
weapons creeping up a high, blackened slope a few miles away. This was fresh
action by men of the old kind who had lost friends or family and who saw no
future in a demoniac succession. They were exposed, an easy target. But if they
were destroyed, others would come. So they dared and defied, and the vicious
spiral toward Big Zero continued to mount.
Ed
tried to forget this for a moment. His first words by wireless were a call for
his wife: "Babs, this is Ed, at Freeman's camp! Barbara, come to us if
you can.' At least, try to communicate with us. You know how. Barbara! . .
."
She
had her own quartz chip, active all the time, so she must hear! And if she did,
she could send a message just as he did, from some other station. But though Ed
now had help, at Freeman's orders, no reply from his wife was sifted from the
countless communications that were received.
But
his previous attempt to spread a rumor had brought some expected results. The
morning air was full of conflicting comments: "... A cruel joke . . . Psychological warfare . . .
Perhaps, but what if the Phonies mean to leave?
Some
already deny it. . . . Who spoke? Let him speak again."
Ed
was glad to oblige, even revealing his name, his present dimensions and how a
being of such size, equipped with a Midas Touch, might wreck a power station.
He explained this last item because he did not want a misplaced blame to stir
up more tension on both sides. Otherwise, he addressed himself mostly to the
androids, aware that the old race would listen, too.
".
. . We were made on Earth, but not for Earth.
We were meant to go much farther. Since we have so much, to be other than
generous would be stupid. We have peace and the future, and most of what man
ever hoped for, in our hands. That, or oblivion for
everyone."
Though
the ominous movement on the burned-out slope continued, the actual flash of
weapons seemed suspended. The - quiet was either promising or it was ominous.
He
was lulled into enough confidence so that at noon he took a break. He went back
to Freeman's shelter and into the tiniest workshop that Mitchell Prell had made
and that Les Payten had rescued. He dropped from the air beside minute machines
and die vats that had given Barbara and him their micro-android forms on Mars.
The
whole piece—the greater microscope together with all the much lesser
equipment—Abel Freeman had unwrapped hastily, so that entry into the twilight
within the plastic cover had been easy. Freeman himself was not around.
For
a moment Ed felt alone and wistful, clinging to the rough glass floor of the
shop. But then he saw a faintly luminous elfin figure.
"Barbara!" he
exclaimed.
Her
laughter tinkled. "Think I wasn't come back,
Eddie?" she teased. "That I couldn't share any
interest in what happens to a big world?" Her blitheness almost
angered him. Her expression sobered at once, and he saw that she looked worn.
"I know," she said. "It's not funny. We might have burned up
with the Earth—far apart. But I kept busy. I tried to call you yesterday from a
station in the City. But I wasn't sure I touched the proper contacts. And last
night I had to be a good saboteur. ■ I got three weapon-feeding power
houses—though I guess that the fine equipment could be shielded against us
easily enough. Later, I was lost—high up in the wind. With you along, it could
have been wonderful. Of course, I heard news broadcasts. About
Loman's lab. And from Freeman's station, a report of
how Les arrived with a strange device. This morning I heard your call,
but there was no way to answer. Eddie, Freeman's experts could copy us in
normal size quite easily and quicky, couldn't they? And in
better vitaplasm. The methods have been improved. Our personal
recordings, perhaps lost, wouldn't be needed. Should we try to have it done?
Then there'd be two of each of us, in different sizes. Two . . ."
Ed
chuckled. "Not a word about returning to the old flesh, eh?" he said.
"So have we learned? Android freedom to go anywhere, to
be almost anything. Yep, magic almost. I think you'd rather perch on
thistledown or a sunset cloud, or be pushed by light pressure, like sleeping
spores, to a thousand light-years awayl Well, it could still happen. Part of us has been changed enough by things like that to
belong there. But the older part seems much like it was and belongs to the size
plane that we first knew about."
They
hugged each other and laughed. And they were reassured by the comparative calm
around them. But the forces were still there, only awaiting someone's ultimate
madness. And what can a world's end be like, coming
in a split instant, to one's dissolving senses? Certainly it must be a quick,
almost trivial experience.
Ed
became aware of a bluish flicker. Then there was something like an awful thud;
he could scarcely tell whether a crash of sound took part in it or not. Around
him everything was dazzling whiteness, without shadow or form. Then there was
nothing.
X
Consciousness came back to him, bringing a cloudy surprise.
Rough rocky walls were around him. This was an artificial cavern crowded with
neo-biological equipment, most of which he could recognize. He lay firmly on a
hard couch contrived of planks and a folded blanket, part of the latter
covering him. A pair of dungarees and a mended shirt had been tossed casually
across his bare torso.
Someone
who looked like a young medico laughed near him.
"One
week's time, Dukas—that's all we need now for a major transformation," he
said. "You must have thought that we were all goners; it would have seemed
like that to you. But it was just a freak attempt at sniping from the hills,
with a Midas Touch focused to a thin beam. Whoever
tried it must have been aiming at our chief's shelter. Only he wasn't there!
Still down in miniature, you were caught in the backlash of the blast. But it
only knocked you out and singed you a little. You kept holding onto some solid
object. Your wife and the equipment were scarcely hurt at all. Then Prell
showed up again. They talked with our chief the way you did before. They
engineered the transformation. I thought you'd want to know all this
quickly."
The youthful android looked good-humoredly
awed. "They just stepped out," he added. "They'll be back in a
minute."
Ed
began to slide into his dungarees. He was grateful for his return to something
like what he had been. His memories of an interlude when people were mountain
tall were clear, yet they didn't seem quite to belong to himself.
He
thought briefly of how he must have been brought back to normal size—hisB
micro-form in one of the vats of similar proportions acting as a pattern,
electronic brain and all. In another vat, which Freeman's specialists had connected,
the gelatins must have filmed and solidified slowly, taking shape, while in
brain cells and filaments—different from electronic swirls but capable of
assuming the same connecting arrangements—a personality was reproduced without
destroying the pattern. With Barbara and Prell it had been the same.
"The world goes on, I
see," Ed remarked.
The
android biologist smiled wryly. "Some of that is your fault, Dukas,"
he said. "A matter of advertising. You made
enough old-timers half believe that the Earth will go on being theirs. That
cooled them off some. As for our kind, what you said started lots of them
thinking again along what ought to be a natural track. Certainly the prompt departure
of almost all of us is the only answer that can really solve anything. Yes, if that isn't far too large an orderl Though I rather wish it were possible. . . . Here come Prell and your lady. Ill disappear."
They
looked almost as they used to look—before anything about them was changed.
Blame the loss of some trifling birthmark or scar here and there on the
simplification of details that had occurred during a step down to smallness.
Yet Mitchell Prell's china-blue eyes were as good-humored as ever and Barbara's
smile as bright and warm.
"So
here we are, Eddie," she said*gaily. "And what we recently were are
still around somewhere—alive and aware, and the same as we were, though not
quite us any more. Separate, but still helping, I'm sure. And if we all get
through all right, well, their universe is as wonderful and
even vaster than ours."
Prell
scowled for a moment, as if he envied his lesser likeness the continued chance
to study the structure of matter, down where molecules themselves seemed bigger
and nearer. But then his shoulders jerked almost angrily, as if to shake off
the scientist's woolgathering. "Come on, Ed," he snapped.
"Abel Freeman has been pushing thé idea
you expressed, talking it around the world to all the androids. He says that,
crazy though it is, hell encourage it."
They
emerged from the cavern into the afternoon sunshine of the camp. A sudden quiet
had come over it. Eyes were staring up toward the east, while bodies tensed for
a dive for whatever shelter was at hand. Something moved there with seeming
slowness, though its gray hue, like a distant mountain peak, told that it was
seen through all the murky heights of the atmosphere and was in free space
beyond. Its motors were inactive. High sunshine brought metallic glints from
its prow. It was certainly miles in length. Its presence could mean doomsday.
But it was magnificent! If it could set human blood to
coursing more swiftly, how must it affect an android?
"The
star ship!" someone shouted. Others took up the cry: "The star ship .
. . The star ship . . ."
Now
Abel Freeman's voice boomed from a sound system: "Yep, you're right. I
sent a call for it to come in from the asteroids. Figured it would be good for all our tough-gutted breed to look at! Uh-huh, tough gutted,
I said, but might be I'll have to take that back. Anyhow, a man made for a mule
loves a mule on sight. So how about men and a ship made for
the stars? But might be you ain't that kind of folks— you only seem that
way. Might be. you can only
see the mud on the ground and not the sky. I dunno. Moving all of us fast would
take an awful lot of insides. But ain't she a beauty? I figure that the folks
that brought her here didn't like to disobey orders, but they figured that
letting us see was necessary. Maybe they're Phonies, too. I figure that Harwell,
who bossed her construction, would be that now. Her kind of purpose demands it.
But maybe you ain't up to what she's for. And you folks of the old kind, what
do you say? What if we did leave you alone on Earth? What if you gave us this
first star ship and let us build more, out on a moon of Saturn where you don't
go much? Let's hear some answersl"
Obviously,
Abel Freeman's words were also being broadcast. Meanwhile the star ship glided
into the sunset. Someone spoke briefly from her by radio. Harwell?
"I
hope you convince everybody, Freeman. I believe it does make sense. Not a
cinch, though, everi for us."
That,
too, came out of the address system, as the ship headed back toward its base.
" In his
newer self, here on Earth, Ed breathed again, and his breathing was rapid. Once
more the unseen future was a thrill. Yet he must not let glamour gild harsh
uncertainties too much.
He
looked at the faces around him. Some were stem, some
grinned in bravado under Abel Freeman's challenging sarcasm, but in most of
them there was a special, eager light, almost avid. It looked as if Freeman's
talk and the great craft that had come with it were turning the trick. But
these were trivial dramatics, too. The real source of success—if it was
that—was in a basic kinship of android vigor with the stars. Awakened, it could
relinquish the Earth without regret. These people could feel a little like
lesser gods now. Their strength and endurance matched the next step of
progress. Now the fantastic gulf of distance didn't seem as wide as Freeman had
once thought.
From
scattered android camps, messages came in, pointing generally toward deeper
space. Yes, doubts were expressed.
"Shall
we leave our homes without even an argument? Are we complete fools?"
"Yes,
fools if we don't leave. We can make
a mass departure. And remember that this is the only solution. Are they still too primitive for us to live with? The same
fault might be ours. I wonder what they will say to our proposition?"
Communications
also flashed back and forth among the old race:
".
. . They look like us but aren't. Their disguise and their powers hold a
warning. No wonder so many of us think of them as something like medieval
demons. Can we trust what they say? Or is it a trick to disarm us? How can we
know? Yet they intrigue us. Man has always sought to borrow strength and
permanence from the rocks and hills. Are they that achievement? And we
ourselves have wanted the stars."
Crouched
over the small receiver in Freeman's restored shelter during that still-ominous
afternoon, Ed and Barbara" listened and waited. Around them they found
both humor and pathos. In another shelter, dug into the rocks and soil, they
located Les Payten, whose misfortunes with the Phonies had been many. His bitter
frankness had won him dislike here. He had been put under restraint. There was
the bearish tenderness and nursing of the gorgeous and powerful Nancy,
Freeman's daughter, who stood beside him now, her big blue eyes expressing a
mixture of soulful devotion and hunger about as rapacious as that of a starved
hound-dog six inches from a fat rabbit. Les didn't seem to appreciate it at
all. But he still tried to be a friend to his companions of a lost youth.
"Babs! Ed!" he exclaimed at sight of them. "So you got back—to
size, anyhow! But you could go back to where you began, as natural creatures!
Damn, once we were young idiots, dazzled by a sense of wonder into too much
tolerance. I don't want to be something synthetic! Can't you two realize the
fundamental truth of that—for yourselves? Good Glory! Wake up!"
Ed's
grin was one-sided. "For one thing, I suspect that going back all the way
wouldn't quite work, Les," he said mildly. "We are what we are now,
that's all. There's a cloudy sort of limit on switching bodies. There can never
truly be two of anyone. Besides, we like being what we are. And should I remind
you that, in common with all animals, man is a natural machine? As for being
synthetic, I assure you that both love and poetry are there as well. So what do
you imagine that we lack that the old timers always had? A
taste for turkey or cake? Just lead us to it! We're human, Les— our
forms and ideals and feelings are as they always were.
We're not devils. We're not truly separated
from the old race in any part of sympathy. We're just people gone on—I hope!—a
little further."
Ed
spoke gently, as he must to a tired, confused friend. Or was it to a whole,
vast section of humanity, dumfounded by hurtling technology, proud and stubborn
about what had seemed its eternal self, and dreading any change which could
seem so darkly drastic?
Barbara
tried, too. "Why don't you join
us, Les?" she urged. "If you became
like us, you would know! Besides, even if all the androids leave the Earth, the
knowledge of how to mold vitaplasm won't be taken away with us. People here
will continue to be destroyed in accidents, as has always happened. So that
knowledge will be needed and used. Besides, some persons will change
willingly. Some people may want to shut thmselves away from such realities. But
I don't think that they can. They'll have to learn to accept facts."
Les
Payten looked at his old companions oddly, as if tempted by an old soaring of
the fancy. Then the light died in his eyes. "Nice logic," he said
coldly. "I could almost trust it if I didn't remind myself. A mechanical treachery. My Ed Dukas and Barbara Day are
dead."
His
tone was calm, yet there was a quiver in it—perhaps of revulsion for these
imponderable liknesses before him, whose hearts he thought he could not—or did
not—want to see.
Ed
was exasperated before a stubbornness of thought habit which was partly fear, though Les Payten was no coward. Some human minds were
quick to adjust, taking even the radical newness of the last half century in
their stride. But there had always been many others who were slow. Perhaps it
was a childish taint, a resisting of maturity. And how could they keep pace
now? But right there, Ed had to remind himself not to be too sure of himself. The next day or minute might trip him up.
There seemed no further way to argue with
Les. Ed could only express his sincere thanks for a favor, offer good wishes,
and shrug lightly and in some mockery, for one who refused what seemed a simple
truth. If that shrug was superficially unkind, perhaps it was also a goad in
the right direction. A favor to a pal.
An
hour later, when Ed told Freeman of Les Payten's reactions, the colorful
android leader had a similar comment: "There's maybe billions like
that—one reason why we got to leave. They'll change. But right now, who cares
to take the ornery kid brothers fishing? Give 'em time to grow up a litde more,
first. It won't be so long. Just now we got our own problems and jobs. They
ain't small, and nothing's certain. There's no hole to jump into that's as deep
as deep spacel I thought once that it couldn't happen. But now it looks as if
we're gonna get the chance to tryl"
Abel
Freeman was right. That evening a message came from the World Capital:
"Let us meet and confer with android representatives and earnestly apply
ourselves to a binding solution."
That
was the beginning. It seemed that reason had won out after all. Freeman and
Prell were flown to the Capital. Ed did not go, for he foresaw a bleak
conference with the single purpose of getting an arrangement made as soon as
possible. This proved to be true. To the androids went the first star ship, its
asteroid base, provisions to be delivered regularly over a ten-year period,
supplies and equipment of all kinds, and the use of Titan, largest' of distant
Saturn's moons.
To
the vast majority of the androids this was enough. To the few grumblers there
would be scant choice. Let them view themselves as exiles, borne along by the
eager mass of their kind.
When Freeman and Prell returned to camp after
the signing of the- treaty, Les Payten had already left for the City. For a
while Nancy Freeman would look wistful. She was strong and beautiful, and
perhaps not as wild as her personal legend. Briefly, Mitchell Prell's eyes
rested on her. Then "he chuckled.
"Sirius,"
he said. "Nine light-years away. Not the nearest
star, and not perfect. But the best bet of the nearest. Alpha Centauri is a binary, too. Bad for stable planetary orbits.
But in the Sirian System, at least we know now that there are many planets. Come on, Freeman. There are more plans to straighten
out."
Preparations
began, and the weeks passed. Once Ed even went shopping with his wife—for the
pretty things, symbols of the luxury and sophistication of Earth,
that she wanted to take with her into the unknown. Was that the crassest
kind of optimism before the harshness that could be imagined?
Ed,
Barbara and Prell would be among the many thousands to be packed into the
first star ship for the first long jump. They had earned the privilege of
choice. Abel Freeman had elected to stay behind, to help direct operations on
Titan.
Interplanetary
craft were moving out in a steady stream, transporting migrants and the
prefabricated parts needed to set up a vast glassed-in camp that few of the old
blood could ever have tried to build. The androids might even have endured the
cold poison of Titan's methane atmosphere without protection. But they had
inherited, and could not easily throw off, earthly conceptions of comfort. And
they had their rights. The countless things needed to build other star ships
would soon begin to follow them.
The
first group of interstellar migrants didn't have to go anywhere near Titan. The
star ship came to Earth again, to orbit around it. Small rocket tenders were
there to bring the passengers up to the boarding locks.
At
the take-off platforms, Ed Dukas saw his parents for the last time. Jack Dukas,
who had chosen to remain on Earth with his wife, shook Ed's hand warmly. Let
them try their simple life of thatched stone houses on hillsides, Ed thought, let them defy what seemed a too involved
civilization. Perhaps after the android exodus, some few would even make it
work—on Venus, if not at home.
Ed
hugged his mother. They had memories. Now Ed stretched optimism considerably.
"At last there can be a lot of time, Mom," he said. "Enough so
that we might even see each other again, someplace. . . ."
Soon
he and Barbara were up there in the great ship. To his touch, her arm was as
smooth and soft as ever. Her hair was dark and thick,
her eyes were bright with adventure, her skin a golden tan. And was it a loss
that she could have bent crowbar with her bare hands, or have braved a vacuum
at near absolute-zero temperature without harm?
"You're
insulting me in your mind, Ed," she joshed gaily. "Not that I'm much
bothered. So the robot stoops to conquer, eh? Of course we have no souls,
Eddie."
"Certainly
not!" he responded in the same manner. "All our hopes spring from
human sources. Even our firmer flesh was a human dream. Yet you can practically
hear our mechanical joints creak. The old race was created perfect. Who could
ever dare to make it any better?"
Ed's sarcasm was honest. Yet he knew that
before the unprobed distance, even the ruggedest of his kind were disposed to
do a little whistling in the dark.
Around
them in the ship's huge assembly room, there were shouts, greetings, jokes and
laughter. A young couple chatted brightly. A child studied a toy with serious
petulance. A man consulted a notebook. Perhaps few here yet realized their
range, power and freedom or just what they faced. Their environment had been
narrow, like all earthly history. No doubt many were afraid of the strangeness
and time and distance ahead. They had reason to be. Out there in the black pit
of the galaxy, even giant stars could perish.
Mitchell
Prell had not yet come aboard. Abel Freeman had already left for Titan—without
his willful daughter. Schaeffer, the scientist, had gone with him.
Under Harwell's commands, the colossal craft
kept taking on migrants at "top speed for thirty hours. They boarded in
numbers out of all proportion to the available living space. . Meanwhile there
were needles to submit to. Vitaplasm could be more rugged and adaptable now
than when it was first used. The fluids from hollow needles were the means of
imparting the improvements.
At
last the ship quivered slightly. In contact with the heat of fusion of hydrogen
and lithium to form the gaseous stellar ash called helium, any material rocket
chamber would have been scattered instantly as incandescent vapor. But space
warps stood firm in their place, squeezing with an atom-crushing pressure of
their own, natural only at the centers of stars. And now there was no secondary
arrangement for the conversion of such power as was released into electricity.
Even the helium" became pure radiation that emerged in a stream. It was a continuous, directed
explosion of light, far stronger within its narrow limits than the outburst of
a supernova. It had been known for centuries that light had both mass and
pressure, and here it was concentrated matter—the ultimate in propulsive
thrust—changed completely to energy. On the sullen Earth, neither man nor
android dared watch that thin thread of fury, while slowly the ship began to accelerate
toward a five-figure number of miles per second.
It
was the start of the departure of fear from an ancient race. Or so it was meant
to be. From Earth, curses no doubt followed the ship—and sighs of relief, and
regrets, and good wishes. This setting forth should have been a human triumph.
Many would insist that it was not that. Others knew that it was.
Braced
in a cubicle two meters long, one wide and half a meter high, Ed Dukas held his
wife's hand. Tiered rows of other cubicles were around them. Mitchell Prell had
been with them minutes ago, and he had simply said,
"Good night," half jokingly. Or was it more whistling in the dark?
"Just good night. That's how it'll be,
sweet," Ed whisp'ered now. "The years won't mean anything. In the
old mythology, the demigods could sleep for a millennium."
So
the small spark of dread flickered out in them, as they invoked a power which
they had used before, in smaller android bodies, and for a much shorter
interval. No drug was needed. Their sleep became suspended animation.
Fine
dust began to settle on them. But after forty years, measured by the ship's
chronometers—on the basis of a retarded time imparted to objects moving at
high velocity, a somewhat longer interval must have passed on Earth—Ed was
awakened to help patrol the vessel.
With
a few other silent men, he moved through its ghostly, dimly lighted corridors
and compartments inhabited by the living dead. The stillness was all around,
and outside only the stars bumed in the void. The decades had been like the
passing of a night of sleep; yet now awake, Ed was aware that the time had
gone, building up an unimaginable distance. Here was the abyss. It was a cold
awareness which made him neither confident nor happy. Sometimes he looked down
at Barbara's quiet face, but he did not wish her to awaken now.
Ahead
was Sirius, brighter than before. Beside it, visible at least to the unaided
eye, was the dim speck of its companion star, a white dwarf, shrunken and old,
little larger than the Earth, but incredibly massive, the very atoms at its
core compressed by its fearsome gravity and the weight of material above them.
This dwarf's internal substance, largely pure nuclear matter, would have
weighed tons per cubic inch.
Instruments, brought nearer to a destination,
now showed more clearly, by the irregularities in the movements of this binary
system, the existence of planets pursuing changing paths in the complicated
cross drags of two stellar bodies revolving around a common center. Those
worlds, known of on Earth for a quarter century, were still out of telescopic
view. Their seasons must be crazy—hot, cold, uncertain. Yet other, nearer star
systems had the same, and worse, drawbacks. And Sirius was relatively near,
too. Besides, need an android worry about the fluctuations of mad climates so
much?
After a month, Ed Dukas relinquished his
duties to others who were aroused briefly. He slept again, for more decades,
and on through the first contact with a Sirian world. His mind still slightly
blurred, he came down in a tender from the orbiting star ship, after others had
landed. Barbara was with him. Somewhere far ahead, among hills rapidly shedding
their glacial coat under hot sunshine, was Mitchell Prell.
The
sunshine came from Sirius itself, father away than the distance from Earth to
Uranus; hence its size and brilliance were counteracted. Yet this world did
not attend Sirius directly. It belonged to the white-hot speck at zenith —the
dwarf with an almost equal attraction—tiny, but much closer. The planet hurried
like a moon around this miniature sun.
Ed
looked up at thin fish-scale clouds that were rose-tinted. Before him was a
prairie covered with waving stalks bearing white plumes. Might you call them
flowers blown by the wind?
High
up among the melting ice he saw a tower and maybe a roadway. Later he beheld
two shapes, brown and rough, with four tapered, flexible limbs radiating from a
central lump. Man, with his arms and legs, also has vaguely the form of a
cross. But these were different, though sometimes they almost walked, and metal
devices glinted in the equipment they wore. Had he dreamed all this somewhere
years ago? . . . Sometimes they rolled quickly like wheels, or they crept
along, their limbs coiling. Once they flew, with bright flashes and without
wings. But that was artificial. They moved off at last beside a shallow,
salt-rimmed sea.
"We
can't stay here, Eddie," Barbara stated. "It could be fascinating,
but it would be worse than on Earth."
"As everyone will
realize," Ed Dukas answered.
So
the explorers came back to the tender. Nearer to the dwarf sun they found a
world with a more stable orbit and less extremes of cold and heat. If it was
nearer the dwarf with its almost negligible radiance, it also did not approach
as close to Sirius, nor swing so far away. It was a chilly little planet that
had once been inhabited, too; but now there were only shattered stone and glass
and rusted steel. Much of it was desert. But there were forests here and there,
and high glaciers..
High
on a clifftop in the thin, cold atmosphere, the refugees built their first
city. It began with houses of rough logs and stone. But as time passed and the
population increased, its metal-sheathed towers began to soar. In its
glassed-in gardens, terrestrial flowers and trees thrived, while out of doors
beautiful plants of a neo-biology easily surpassed in vigor the hardy local
growths. There were theaters, stores and libraries. There was feminine fashion.
Thus, nostalgically, an old earthly way was copied, though Earth was lost.
There was no method to speak across the fight-years. Earth might even belong to
a somewhat different branch of time. But all this did not include the major
point of separation. That was expressed in the way these people climbed the
highest mountains without tiring and let the hoarfrost of fearsome cold gather
on their bare faces without discomfort.
Sometimes,
on blizzard nights, while they took the sleep that they did not need for more
than the pleasure of it, Barbara and Ed would leave the windows open to the
storm.
"Roofs, buildings—why do we even bother with them?" Ed would say jokingly.
His wife would look at him somewhat
worriedly, as if he meant it. As if here there were a
bitter strangeness that lowered all earthly art and charm and comfort and sense
of home to a futility. But then she'd manage to laugh lightly, though often she
didn't quite feel that way. "You know why we bother, Ed," she'd
answer. "Because we want to stay somewhat as we once were. Didn't you
always agree to that? Because it's hard to change old habits and limitations,
and grasp the freedom you're thinking about, Eddie. Sometimes I even suspect
that we try to hide from that freedom."
Ed
would scowl, feeling all of these thoughts, too. They had all the freedom that
men had envisioned long ago: practical freedom from death, except from extreme
violence; freedom from aging, freedom of mind, of action, of shape and size;
the freedom of peace and plenty, and boundless energy. But beyond all this,
like a goad, there often was, already, much more than a ghost of that ancient
human restlessness that always had thrived on strength.
"Are
you happy here, Babs?" Ed asked once when there had been time to doubt.
By
then they already had two young sons, born of new flesh in an old way.
"Of
course—reasonably," she chuckled. "Though I have my
moods. Then I don't quite know . . . But, Eddie, this is the great,
marvelous future, isn't it—the one we looked forward to with longing and
wonder? We ought to appreciate it completely."
"It
is that future. But now, sweetheart, it's also just the present."
There were incidents to match such restless
talk and thinking. There was Mitchell Prell, always groping for new things,
shouting down from a cragtop, or from his laboratory, "Hey, Ed! Barbaral
Come here!"
Maybe
he'd discovered a vein of ore that might be mined, or a strange specimen of
hitherto unnoticed local fauna or flora. He remained a scientist, while Ed had
become a mere builden of buildings.
More than likely, the woman Prell had married
would be with hjm—she had been Nancy Freeman of a fantastic origin. That he
had separated himself enough from his studies to take a wife was a minor
miracle. That these so-different two should be together was certainly another.
That she had learned to be both tasteful and poised, though no less vigorous
than ever, had perhaps been hoped for by the first romancing thought that had
given her real being on Earth.
To
five in peace, comfort and beauty, Ed now realized, was not a final goal. The
wild nomad, like Prell, shouting down from mountaintops, always seeking the
unknown and straining to be bigger than his powers—however great they might
have become—still had to be served. Otherwise pride was insulted, the urge to
learn and progress was defeated; boredom set in, and centuries of life were not
worth living.
Besides,
belatedly, after years, there were voices, speaking out of wireless equipment
in a way that Ed and Barbara Dukas and Mitchell Prell had reason to remember.
That this world was now haunted by beings that floated with the dust in the air
was a fact which in itself had an eerie, nomadic charm. Three
tiny beings. No, now there were four.
"Hello!
Did you guess that we came with you on the star ship? . . . But we stayed on
that first planet. Then we visited others. Once we slept under a glacier—we
don't know how long. Now we have built another biological workshop. So we will
not be lonely. There will be many of us. I see you have done well. What comes
next?"
Ed
had the odd and startling impression of having been spoken to by himself. But
he and a tiny speck of the clay of the half-gods were entirely distinct, even
if their names were the same. The vast difference in size, enforcing separate
thought patterns to meet the problems of different environment, had widened
the gap further.
"It's us!"
Barbara said.
Mitchell
Prell and Nancy were also present just then, in the Dukas house. Perhaps the visitors
had waited for them to be there.
"I
know who you mean," Nancy remarked. "Your little folk, Mitch; Tell
them something. Or do they embarrass you by being so strange? Have you
forgotten?"
Prell laughed somewhat unsteadily. Other
interests had long ago taken his attention away from the small regions that
were within the reach of android powers.
"They're
special friends," he said. "We won't have any trouble talking to
them. Hello yourselves!"
So it was, for an hour. There was a mood of
elfin charm, of expanded dimensions, of soft, rich colors; of physical laws
wonderfully different in effect. The memory was haunting. But the larger Ed
and Barbara had no present wish to return to that fantastic land. It was not
their destiny.
"So
long for now. . . ." The voices faded away playfully. But as Sirian time
built Terran years, they were occasionally heard again, bearing a note of
challenge.
The
new city had grown huge. The surrounding country was becoming populous. And the
inevitable happened, like part of a plan implanted in the nature of man from
the beginning—to grow, to reach out, to be bigger in all things than he was
before, though perhaps even to imagine the final goal itself was still beyond
his intelligence and his experience. Now a more rugged body only made the
drives stronger and the outcome more sure.
Still orbiting around this first colonial
world, outside the old solar system and linked to the history of Earth, was the
star ship, kept always in careful order. But on a small, jagged moon, a larger,
better craft was under construction. It would have thrilled ancient blood; it
could stir an android more.
Something
sultry began to ache in Ed Dukas's mind at the thought of restraint.
"Some
of us will have to go on, Babs," he said one dwarf-lit half-night.
"Blame it on fundamental biological law—in me, and the boys, too. Call it
building an empire too big for any government. Maybe it's an intended
step—toward some other condition still out of sight. No doubt we're far from
the end of what we can become. I don't know. I don't really care. I'm just a
man and glad of it. I only know how I feel, and I suspect that, deep down, you
feel the same!"
For a moment Barbara was angry and sad. She
still had a
160 PEOPLE MINUS X
woman's
wish for permanence. She knew that Ed was thinking of other stars and their
systems—red giants, flickering variables, bursting novae—a whole universe of
mystery beckoning to a new kind of human. Even the ugly coal-sack clouds of
cosmic dust could have their appeal. She herself was not beyond being intrigued
by such things.
She
walked across her pleasant room, which had begun to bore her a little, as Ed
knew. "I'm game," she said mildly.
Inconceivably
far off were other galaxies. Maybe Ed read her mind a little, as she thought of
the vast, tilted swirl of the one in Andromeda, almost as big as their native
Milky Way. It was the nearest, but so distant that all the light-years they had
crossed could seem a mile by comparison. As a child she used to look at a
picture of it and think that everything she could imagine, and much more, was
there: books, musical instruments, summer nights, dark
horror.
Ed and she were like the pagan divinities
dreamed up wistfully long ago. Yet now she felt very
humble.
"Ed-"
"Yes?"
"I was just wondering where God
lives," she said.
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