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People Minus X

<h2>VIII</h2> 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 nearby 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 filaments 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 Bronson. 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—their 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 man! 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 starkness 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 hoped! 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 exploded, 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 Loman 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 there 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 eye-piece 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 the 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, 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 life, even if the world went on existing? <hr class="chap" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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