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,hefound 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 great-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 ofHuck 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 kind 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, ornery 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. Futilely, 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 shy!"
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," Les 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 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 one-way 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 beingreasonable. 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, andforreason. 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.
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 hewasa 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?"
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 youknowan 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. Itlookedlike 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 trusttheirjudgment, 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."
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."
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 wearehere 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.
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 whatyoumutter 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 finaleofoncewas 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.
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 outfor meat 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."
"Imeantmy 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 theMoon Dust.
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 theMoon Dustthere 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 rucksacks.
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 auto 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 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 vitaplasm, 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."