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People Minus X

<h2>III</h2> 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 public 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 Prell! A great man—if he was a man when last seen! 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 vitaplasm!" 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 barrel!" "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, Dukas! 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 again! 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 lips 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 lips, 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 life 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 that!" 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.... I'll 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?" <hr class="tb" /> 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 little metallic glints in them. Could you avoid remembering that, mated to like, these beings of vitaplasm 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 DESERVES 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 quietly 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 vitaplasm, 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 laugh. "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." <hr class="tb" /> Ed Dukas had no trouble convincing the police that he had 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?' Burned himself wide open with a Midas Touch pistol. I guess the ultimate cruelty would be to bring him back." <hr class="tb" /> 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 kind. 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 settle 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 ones! 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 about! 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 to! 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. <hr class="chap" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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