Back Aa

People Minus X

<h2>IV</h2> 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 softly, "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!" "We'll 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, Dukas!" he snapped. "Unwise as you are, you must know that! Now I think the police want to take you away." 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 guard 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 line 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 form. 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. <hr class="tb" /> The psyching was done. Chief Bronson and Carter Loman 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 Dukas were almost close, in spite of differences. Ed was a little reassured. "I'm going out to Mars, Dad," he said. "With police co-operation. 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 we'll 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. <hr class="chap" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.