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People Minus X

<h2>II</h2> Life had become hard enough for Eileen Dukas and her son. While most people treated them all right—from some they even received exaggerated kindness—there was, very often, a certain disturbing expression in eyes that looked at them. Les Payten, Eddie's friend said once, "I promise, Ed. No more talk about your uncle from me. Finished, see? You've had enough." Eddie suppressed the anger which sprang from loyalty to Mitchell Prell, for he understood Les Payten's good intentions. At regular intervals there were police visits at the house, and questioning. "It's partly for your protection, Mrs. Dukas," was one honest comment from the detectives. But Eddie sensed that there was more to it than that. Subtly, the interpretation of law had changed since the lunar blowup. It went backward, as grief sought people to blame. Catastrophe had been too big for reason or fairness. And the scapegoat himself was not around to be mobbed. A freckle-faced brat from the Youth Center—her name, Barbara Day, had been drawn out of a hat, for of course she had no known parents—offered advice: "You ought to go far away, Eddie, where folks don't know you. It would be better." Ed knew that this was good advice. Many people were saying and shouting and whispering that too much knowledge was a dangerous possession. And Ed's uncle still represented such a thing. More than once Ed had to run fast, with some big lug chasing him. Black eyes he collected with great frequency, and delivered some, too. Still, he ached inside. It was as if Uncle Mitch were part of him. The world began to look normal and green again. But the undercurrents of memory were still there. And Ed Dukas began to answer hate with hate, though he didn't like to. There was a crowd of young toughs with rocks to throw, in front of the house one night. "This is the place," Eddie heard one of them say. "Both my parents are gone. And the bums that live here were in on the reason." Ed had seen the boy around before: Ash Parker. Now the rocks flew for a while, and Ed and his mother crouched behind locked doors. There might have been a lynching, except that Les Payten found a neighbor with a tear-gas vial and some other neighbors with sharp tongues and courage. It was the final straw, however. "Will we have to leave, Eddie?" his mother asked. "It's best," he growled. "But I'll be back!" Next day the house was being boarded up. Packing began even before the colonial travel permits were prepared. It was goodbye to Les Payten and Barbara Day, and the newly ringed planet, Earth, with its billions of inhabitants and its great shops that still worked to give the whole solar system to mankind and maybe a segment of the larger universe as well. The pattern of the future seemed set, and specialists still didn't think that there was any real reason to make a change. In fact, they denied that any change was possible. Nobody would give up the threshold of immortality, once it was gained. Nor would they relinquish other triumphs that could bring idleness and decay if they were not used to accomplish bigger and bigger tasks. So, even the fearful ones were caught in the rushing current of the times. Ed Dukas was soon on a crowded liner. Because she might need him, he kept close to his mother. Around them were other colonists—young graduates from technical schools, newlyweds and people who were physically young, too, though they were fresh from the rejuvenation vats. They were the aged, awed by another lifetime before them. The liner blasted off. A week later it landed on an asteroid of middling size. The Dukases were assigned to one of a group of trim cottages that were not even all alike. Under the great glass roof, which kept in the synthetic air, the new gardens and fruit trees were already growing. And in coiled tubes of clear plastic filled with water, circulated green algae from which almost any kind of basic food could be made. To Eddie it was a satisfying dip into space that he had so much anticipated. Amid great heaps of steel and plastic and house parts and atomic machines to maintain a normal temperature so far from the sun, life went on. Eddie's mother worked in the office of a shop for robot machines. He worked too—when and where he could—when he was not at school. There was a little more of peace, for a while anyway. There was the usual psychological treatment to subdue possible devils of the lunar catastrophe which might remain in his mind. There were sports and an artificial lake to swim in with his companions. However, Ed Dukas was wary of making deep friendships. He was then a sullen, overly matured youth of thirteen, earnest about everything he did—for he knew that the years ahead were grimly earnest. Carefully he kept up with the reports in scientific journals: about the laying of the keel of the first star ship on a minute asteroid with only a number and no name. Harwell was in charge. The propellant would be pure radiant energy—the best of them all; energy so concentrated that it would be truly massive and hurled at the speed of light, which was not remarkable, since it would be light, far more intense per unit area than the noval explosion of a star! This was by no means the only major advance that had been accomplished and was reported. Technological progress was steady in all fields, across the board, making a solid front. Others of its facets also had a special appeal to Ed Dukas. Biological science, in its newest interpretations, he knew to be the most important of these. Now it was no longer just simple rejuvenation—restoring rusty organs. It was a thing that could start from a single cell, in warm, sticky fluids, giving rebirth to something that had already been. And it had a further development—bringing the same results but more swiftly and easily, and with different, far more rugged flesh. It was frightening and fascinating. Knowing was like feeling the shadow of a demon or an angel. <hr class="tb" /> Ed Dukas and his mother spent four years on their asteroid. Then one day a letter fluttered in her hand. And she seemed not to know whether to look happy or terrified. She did not show her son the letter. "We've had enough of being here," she stated. "We're going home." So they went back across the millions of miles. They cleaned up the house, on which obscene insults had been scribbled in chalk. On two successive days Eddie was jumped by gangs. He fought free and escaped. But on the third evening he was cornered. This time Ash Parker was the ringleader. Ed battled like a bobcat, but eight opponents were too many. He was flat on his back, and they were kicking him. His own blood was in his mouth. What might happen when he blacked out was anybody's guess. Once, before medical knowledge had advanced to where it was, it would have been murder for sure. Somebody intervened—a big guy in a gray business suit who had come striding along the block with an eager attention. He didn't say anything at first. He just collared the toughs, two at a time in swift succession, and thrust them away. Eddie staggered up and faced his benefactor, intent on giving him sincere thanks. "Mister ... I ..." "Hello, Eddie!" the man said, chuckling. "I see you turned out hardy. Seventeen you'd be now." Young Ed Dukas heard the voice and looked at the face. He stiffened. Then he made a statement in a flat tone that sounded very formal and unemotional, which it was not: "Sir, you're my father." The man nodded. "Just off the assembly line, pal. The same guy—because you and your mother, and some other people, remembered what I was like. There was no record of me or of my mind. So, okay, they made one, fella. From the memories of me left in other minds. Thanks, Eddie." "Thanks?" Ed Dukas said in a choked voice. Bloody and dirty, he stepped forward. Father and son clung to each other. It was a moment of great triumph. Ed's mind pictured filaments, as fragile at first as pink spiderweb but already outlining a human shape, held suspended in a kind of jelly—growing there, forming according to a record. Now even the record could be synthesized. It seemed like real freedom from death at last. Ash Parker had not fled. Now he spoke, sounding awed, "Jeez, Mr. Dukas. I didn't believe it. Maybe my folks can come back, too." "Your parents will come back," Jack Dukas affirmed. "I am the first 'memory man' to be resurrected. Among those killed who had had their bodies and minds recorded as was recommended, about a hundred thousand are alive again, as I think you know. Millions more are in process. One way or another, by record or by the memories of others, in flesh of the old kind or the new, almost everyone will return." Ed felt his father's hand. As far as he could tell, it was of flesh. Yet it could be something else; Ed nearly trembled with excitement as his eager wonder and primitive dread of the strange battled inside him. He thought again of Mitchell Prell's first samples of vitaplasm. "Of which flesh are you, Dad?" Ed asked anxiously. His father studied him there in the twilight of the day, while the silvery ring of lunar wreckage brightened in the sky. "The old kind, Eddie," he answered. "I'm glad," Ed said, feeling greatly relieved, a reaction which he knew was odd for one who loved the thought of coming miracles. Jack Dukas sighed as if he had escaped a terrible fate. "So am I glad, pal," he said. "I guess I was favored by family connections." Here he paused, but his wink meant Uncle Mitch. "However," he continued, "the old flesh takes so much longer. That's why in many cases it won't be used. There must be thousands of androids already among us, living like everybody else. Since personal concerns are involved, statistics are kept rather confidential. These synthetic people have organs the same as we have. And you can't recognize them just by looking. Only they're thirty per cent heavier, stronger, and they don't tire. There was a thought, once, that robots would make human beings obsolete and replace them. Sorry, Eddie. Why be gruesome at a time like this? Let's patch you up and then find your mother." <hr class="tb" /> Young Ed Dukas was happier than he had ever been before. For quite a while he found peace. Maybe that was true of most of humanity now—for the past three or four years at least. There was no sharp delineation of an interval before the smokes of doubt began to come back. Les Payten was still around. And Barbara Day continued to live at the Youth Center on the hill. Often the three would meet. Their childhood was behind them. Barbara Day's freckles had faded. Her dark hair had a coppery glint. A promise of beauty had begun to blossom. And her talk expressed many whimsical thoughts. "We all know each other, Eddie," she once said. "So don't be offended. I sometimes think that you wonder whether your father is really the same person that he was—whether he ever could be more than a careful duplicate." Les Payten frowned. "You're speaking to me, too, Babs," he pointed out. "I also have a 'memory father.' He's good to me, and mostly I like him. But sometimes I get scared, though I don't always know why." Ed's skin tingled. "Could I be myself now and still be myself in another body, years later? Could there ever be two of me—truly—constructed exactly the same? I don't deny such a thing. I simply don't know." But Ed Dukas continued to wonder about his father. There were several occasions when his dad was supposed to recognize certain people, casually encountered in the street. For they knew him. Ed was present on one of these occasions. "Sorry, friend," Jack Dukas apologized to a burly, jovial man. "I guess they forgot to put a picture of you inside my head." Les Payten's father was also subtly different from his original—though in a somewhat different way. The change was even very dimly apparent in his face. He had once been a big, easy-going, timid soul, nagged by his wife. Now his features bore a hint of brutality. He walked with a slight swagger. He did not roar, but the aura of power was there. Ed's mother explained the change to his father: "Memory seems not always to match facts, Jack. Mrs. Payten fooled herself into believing that Ronald Payten used to be a bully. So she even fooled Schaeffer's mind-machines. And lo! Ronald Payten is a bully now, as far as she is concerned. No, don't worry about her too much, Jack. She may even like being pushed around." <hr class="tb" /> In the months that passed, from out on an asteroid came the step-by-step reports of the building of the first huge star ship. At home, one by one, old acquaintances—or was it just their reasonable facsimiles?—reappeared. Gradually most of the dead of the lunar blowup were restored to life—except for certain scientists who remained unforgiven. But a new type of population was creeping into the fabric of human society. Its humanness, in an old sense, could be debated. Its first quiet intrusion was marked by an awe that faded into a shrug; it began to be accepted casually and somewhat dully, as most past novelties had been accepted before. Foresight could extend into tomorrow, but its pictures remained not quite real. The skills of cool, clear thinking, which education tried to impart in an era that needed it so much, fell short again. No doubt it should have been remembered that the shift from inattention to unreasonable panic can often be swift. Even young Ed Dukas, though dedicated in his heart to New and Coming Things, sometimes lost sight of these deeper concerns because of his lighter interests. Without much help from art, Barbara Day turned out to be beautiful. She had a pair of suitors automatically. Ed could have had his stocky frame lengthened. Les Payten could have had his big ears trimmed. But young men often frown on the vanity of tampering with one's appearance. Sometimes there is even a certain pride in minor ugliness. They all had their dates, their dancing, their canoe rides—traditional pleasures, inherited from generations past. And they had the age-old problems of youth approaching adulthood. But now, for them and for their increasingly complex civilization, there was a new problem—vitaplasm, which could be grown like flesh, though faster, impressed with a shape, personality and memories. It was said that 30 per cent of those who died in the explosion of the Moon lab were brought back in this firmer, cheaper medium. But its use did not stop here. For one thing, there were certain adventurous persons, alive and healthy, who changed the character of their bodies willfully. One fact some might forget: there were other dead from years before, but remembered and still loved—parents, grandparents. Besides, there were historical characters—Washington, Lincoln, Edison, Cleopatra. Possibly Joe Doakes could awaken from extinction, puzzled, wondering, frightened, but finding himself at least superficially the same, eating much the same food, enjoying much the same things. Then something super in his body would dawn on him, scaring him more or making him exultant. But it all seemed good at first glance, so a joyful world forgot its times of suspicion, even against the warnings of specialists, and released the new processes to almost any operator who could construct the needed equipment. The solar system was big; the universe, optimistically promised, seemed endless. There was plenty of room. And the task of bringing back just those who had perished with the Moon was enormous and slow. So in cellars and out-of-the-way places countless biological technicians tried their skill. They could not have made the grade at all if they were stupid, and their results, generally, were good. The various Julius Caesars and Michelangelos really came into being as novelties, side-show pieces. All were reasonable likenesses, physically. From existing minds such traits and skills as each was supposed to possess could be copied more or less accurately. But none of the pseudo-great amounted to very much. They enjoyed a brief popularity; then, assuming the costumes and customs of a changed world, they sank into nonentity among the populace. Like most of those of the new flesh, they kept this secret as if by intuitive prudence. The many people restored in normal protoplasm were less reticent. That there were androids around him, known, suspected and unrecognized as such, was a thrilling idea to Ed Dukas. It was part of the onward march to greater wonders—or so it seemed to him most of the time. Eager to understand how they thought and felt, he sought them out cautiously, not wishing to offend. Usually his efforts were met with coolness and evasion—which perhaps gave them away. But then Ed met a very special memory man. He wasn't the copy of somebody famous. He was just a humorous legend. Yet now perhaps he was the right kind of personality striking against the right sort of circumstances to produce the type of action and fire that could affect the existing era. Ed and his two friends, Les Payten and Barbara Day, found him in a little park feeding pigeons. Or, rather, he found them. For in conformity with an ancient village belief that no one should be a stranger to anyone else, he grinned at them and said, "Hello, there! Nice young fellers. Nice girl! Sit and gab a while? I keep gettin' lonesome. Mixed up. Got to get straightened out. Or try, anyway. Put yourselves down? That's fine!" Abashed and curious after that, Ed and Barbara and Les sat and mostly just listened. "Been around these times three months. Scared stiff at first. Thought I was addled. Know somethin'? I can remember all the way back to 1870. It's a fake, sure. No, they didn't make me look young, or even give me all my teeth. Afraid of spoiling 'verisimilitude,' my 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 of Huck Finn. They found this tintype of a feller inside it. Illinois farmer. And look at this here writing in the front of the book. 'Property of Abel Freeman.' So I'm supposed to be him, slouch hat and all—funny, I can't get used to anything else. So I write just like that. This tintype and the writing are the only solid clues about what the original Abel Freeman was really like. Up to there, I'm him. The rest is mostly storybook stuff, and the idea the family has that their ancestor was a kind of pixilated hellion—the sort some folks like to tell about. Some way for a man to be born, huh? Shucks, I can even remember the night I was supposed to have died. Drunk, and kicked in the belly by my own mule, because he didn't like my smell. Hell, I bet in real life that mule would of plum enjoyed whisky!" Abel Freeman stopped talking. He turned pale gray eyes set in a face that looked like brown leather toward his audience with expectant amusement, as if he understood the eerie impression he'd made on them and was curious about their reactions. Barbara took the lead. "We're surely glad to know you, Mr. Freeman," she said, shaking his big brown paw and unconsciously aping his manner of speech. "I'm sure you could tell us plum more. What's the world ever coming to?" His grip, for an instant, was almost literally like that of a vise. But when Barbara winced with pain, his hand relaxed, and his look became honestly gentle and apologetic, though it retained a certain slyness of tricks being played or unprecedented power being demonstrated. "Oh, excuse me, lady!" he drawled. "This first Abel Freeman—he was supposed to be a very strong and vigorous man. Me—naturally I'm even a lot stronger. Sometimes I just forget. But I try to be right courtly. There, I'll rub your fingers. Hope I didn't break no bones." Barbara laughed a bit nervously. "No, Mr. Freeman—I'm fine," she assured him, nodding her dark head. "Now, if you'll tell us—" "Oh, yes—about what the world and everything is coming to," Abel Freeman went on, his tone more languid than his eyes. "Well, matters could get mighty rough. I've been studying up—thinking. When I first got to these times, I didn't like them. Everything seemed addled. Guess I was homesick. I 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 being reasonable. I've seen too much hate and fear and unreason in people. The way things are, it doesn't have to be a lot of people any more—just a few gone a little crazy. The Moon blew up by accident. A world was gone. But what happened by accident can certainly happen by design or with the aid of fury. So, everywhere we go we can talk against fury and panic, and for reason. To our friends, and in the streets. Everywhere that we can, and to everyone. Small as that effort is, it might help." Solemnly the three friends shook hands and agreed to work out the details of a plan. <hr class="chap" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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