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People Minus X

<h2>IX</h2> Ed's score stood at two points gained—Loman out of the way and the source of the monsters revealed. But these were small victories compared with what must be gained if there was to be any hope. Masses of human beings and androids faced each other, their emotions inflamed to the point of final folly. And the end of one troublemaker and the revelation of his tools were small items beside all that. Ed got out of Loman's oxygen helmet the way he had entered. Les Payten, a dazed Atlas, was stumbling around. Ed felt cut off from his old friend by a strange, great distance. But he could talk to him at least. Ed floated to the radio in a corner of the workshop, found his way through a vent in its back, and touched a wire with the minute contact points of a crude microphone as large as his hand. The infinitesimal electric currents it bore were amplified and converted into sound. Ed's voice came forth loud and clear: "Les! It's me—Ed Dukas. I'm here, just as Prell came to me once. I'm an android just a few thousandths of an inch tall. I'm inside the radio, Les. First, I want to know how you feel about all this. Yes, I killed Loman." There were world tremors of footsteps approaching with slow caution. A panel of the set was opened. The giant stared inside. Ed was now sufficiently accustomed to the vibrations of human speech to interpret the mood behind them. There was a brief, hard chuckle, controlled and distant and unfriendly. "Yes, Dukas, I'm quite sure it's as you say. It's odd, maybe, but I'm not surprised at all. In our time, you have to accept too much. Thanks for finishing Loman—not my father. Dad died on the lunar blowup, as you know, a victim of technology or history, as we all will probably soon be. I've told you before how I feel about everything. And what has happened to me tonight can scarcely have made my view of the androids any kinder. Once upon a time, in my callow youth, I thought I belonged to this crazy period. How wrong can you get? You take your strength and durability. I wonder what finer flavors of life you've lost. So there's my standard, and I'll live and die by it, Dukas. It's sad to lose a pal, but as you are, I guess you'll have to be an enemy. It's like an instinct, Dukas." Les had spoken calmly and firmly. But Ed sensed the bitterness and uncertainty that lurked beneath the words. "I won't argue, Les," he answered. "But when I'm thinking straight, the truth to me is still as it was. In championing man above android, or vice versa, you can only come to zero. Only in fair play between them is there a chance. So, if the urge ever comes over you, you might still do me a favor. Across this room is a microscope and attached equipment that are vital to me and to Barbara, who is like me, somewhere. Guard it, Les. No place that you could reach is perhaps truly safe for it. But I was thinking that if you could gamble again—as we all must—you might take it to Abel Freeman. I know that you were almost killed in his camp, Les. But I believe that the old reprobate is fundamentally sound and not as bitterly against such a device as some human beings might be. Thanks if you consider it, Les." Still unseen by his one-time friend, Ed jetted to the vaulted ceiling and escaped through a ventilator pipe that emerged among concealing bushes. He rose above the trees, and a night wind pushed him on, while he listened to the quartz chip he carried. His first impulse now was to locate Tom Granger as his next candidate for silence. It was not necessary. The news was on the air: "Granger was stricken in his quarters just before eight o'clock. The cause is not yet clear. He had just begun to write his new speech: 'I am frightened. We are all frightened. But this can change nothing of our purpose. In vitaplasm we are confronted by a vampirish fact: an identity of face masking a difference of spirit. A treachery. A slow, dreadful encroachment....'" Prell had gotten to Granger, then. If this was murder, maybe it was justified—if Earth was one per cent less in danger with one exhorter quieted, for a while if not forever. But what had been accomplished so far was small beside the threat that had been stirred up in many minds and machines across the countryside. The sky was heavy with thickening clouds. Weather Control, working through its ionic towers had already been smashed. The night was alternately a Stygian hole or a glare-lit holocaust full of battering vibrations which might mean that real battle had already begun. So far, only neutron streams were being used. Where a mountain peak was hit there would be a blaze of light that even an android had better not look at. Then another mountain, looming over a different fortified line, would flare up and glow with moving lava. And the power that energized the weapons was the same as that which could reach the stars. Rising high and jetting forward with his Midas Touch, Ed went to work. He thought of Abel Freeman's camp, which lay somewhere beyond the carpet of flaming woods which flanked one slope. But that was not his immediate destination now. He had dived for a power station house in a great trailer—and did it matter whether it belonged to the older race or the newer? He took great risks getting into its busy vitals. The constricting pressure of space warps, creating a gravity pressure of billions of tons to the square inch, eased gradually. A marble-sized bit of super-dense matter, crushed and compressed by the force and hidden by its opaqueness, began to expand to meter-wide size and to lose its blinding heat and fury as the processes within it stopped. Soon the power plant, turning out a flood of electricity out of all proportion to its small size, ceased to function. Scattered atoms of hydrogen and lithium became inert. There was no easily visible cause for the breakdown, until puzzled eyes found minute holes burned in vacuum tubes, allowing air to enter, oxidizing grids and filaments and stopping their action. Two great weapons died, their energy cut off. But the power stations themselves were the far greater threat, for they harbored that sun-stuff within them. Now the controls of one, which some enraged person might contrive to push too far in spite of the watchfulness of others, were temporarily useless. Working both sides of the line, Ed sabotaged another energy source, and another. Then he lost count, not because of a high score, but because heat and radiation had fogged his mind somewhat. Yet he kept at his labors because there was no other way. Within every square mile there was enough potential power to end his planet. Around him, curses came vibrating from giants: "Men, eh? Jelly for insides!..." "Stinking Phonies—Hell-born or Prell-born!... Jim, I was wondering, this fizz-out looks fishy. Do you suppose the bastards have something?" The front had quieted. It could be that, as far as he had gone, Ed had actually held the Earth together by spiking a few danger points. But he could take no pride for himself out of this. The job could go on and on, like a few buckets of water poured on a forest fire. It helped briefly, yet if there had been a thousand like him, but truly indestructible, the situation might still be without promise. The mass of the populace was too enormous and scattered; the natural suspicion and the forces which had stirred it up were too deep. The ghosts of Loman and Granger still walked in memory and maybe now in martyrdom. And the technology was still there. So Ed knew that, unless there was another way, he could only go on attempting to lessen a threat, until heat and radiation or its fulfillment zeroed him out. It took him over an hour to stop one power station because his demoniac vitality was ebbing and because it had begun to rain heavily. The great drops could not kill him, but like falling lakes, they could hammer him into the mud, from which it might take days for him to extricate himself. He waited in the shelter of a loose bit of bark on the trunk of a tree. There he felt the helpless side of his smallness. As he waited, his mind rambled. Had several groups of weapons quit without his noticing, or was this only something that he wished were so? Where was Barbara now? Would he ever see her again?... Now he lost himself in a fantasy. He saw them leaving Earth's atmosphere the way they had come—she and he together; maybe finding beauty and peace out there. Perhaps there were even tiny worlds—meteors—inhabited by crystalline things such as they had once seen but advanced to a state where they could think and build, and be friendly. And, almost wistfully, he thought of another idyl—his father's, and even Granger's, among millions of others. He could almost see the crude charm of the houses, the gardens and the flocks. But how did one erect a wall against science—with science? It seemed harder to do than diking the water out of the deepest ocean and trying to live in the hole thus made. The rain ended. Ed was air-borne again. He caused one more power station to break down. But there were others. And some that he had spiked might already be repaired. And from his quartz chip he heard other exhorting voices—not Granger's, but like Granger's. The old and human traits that Granger had represented could go on without him, fighting maturer thoughts as if in a drive toward suicide. Who could be everywhere, to quiet such clamoring? In the darkness before dawn, Ed felt desperate and hopeless. His mind was on Abel Freeman again—the memory man, somebody's cockeyed family legend. It was an instinctive thing to seek out the strong for advice, for discussion and perhaps for a joining of forces. Ed had only part of an energy cartridge left for his Midas Touch. But this was more than enough to jet him across the mountains to the camp of the quaint android chieftain with whom he must now admit a kinship of flesh. Freeman was certainly a local leader now among those of the same mark who had fled from the City, where the population was predominantly of the old kind. Technicians, craftsmen, specialists of every sort, would be among Freeman's following. Just as first daylight began, Ed drifted over the vast, hodge-podge encampment hidden in the woods and the marshes. Part of the ground it covered had been fused to hot, glassy consistency, perhaps by a small aerial bomb. Maybe a hundred Phonies had died there—which fact added nothing to the cause of peace. Abel Freeman himself was not too hard to find, for he occupied a central, commanding position among various equipment housed in great trailers carefully concealed from any observer in an aircraft. But Abel Freeman, true to his legend, was sitting inside a rude shelter of boughs, which effectively concealed the light of his ato lamp. Before him was a sensipsych training device and a vast pile of books on many subjects, ranging from military tactics to atomics, on which he was obviously endeavoring to get caught up. He was savagely intent upon book learning, for which he had little aptitude. But Ed, seeing him in mountainous proportions, was perhaps better able than others to understand why androids in need of leadership flocked to his stamping grounds. Abel Freeman looked like the essence of rough and ready ability. Among android leaders, he was certainly the greatest. Freeman had a small radio receiver beside him. Ed Dukas did not try to read the meaning of its blaring vibrations, for he was aware of their general tone. To him the instrument was chiefly a possible bridge of communication between himself and Freeman. But Ed was not now given the chance to make such contact. For something else happened. From the pages of an opened book in Abel Freeman's hands coiled a thread of smoke, as charred words were written rapidly across the paper. Ed was close enough in the air to read them, too: "I am Mitchell Prell, who helped make your kind possible. I am one of you now—though undersize. Help keep the peace. Make no moves to start trouble." Ed himself was startled. His uncle was here, then! They had arrived at almost the same time. And Prell had chosen a more dramatic means of communication—not ink, not an amplified voice, but the spiderweb-thin beam of his Midas Touch used as a long stylus, while he clung, perhaps, to a hair on the back of Freeman's hand! For an instant, Abel Freeman was gripped by surprise. But then, with rattlesnake-swift movement, his own Midas Touch was in his hand. His whole self seemed to take on the smooth flow of perfect alertness which nothing but an utterly refined machine could have equaled. "Prell or a liar?" he challenged. "Or Prell with a conscience—for his own first people and against his brain children? Yes, I've heard how little you might be now." Ed had only glimpsed his uncle far off among the scattered motes of the air—another mote among them—a foot away he must be, at least. But Ed hadn't waited for contact. Instead he darted quickly inside Freeman's radio, touched the contacts of his microphone to the proper surface, and spoke: "Maybe you'll remember me, too, Freeman. I'm Dukas, Prell's nephew. You and I have talked before, man to man. Prell is no liar. And the conscience is there—for everybody, android or otherwise. Yes, I'm with him, the same size. And there's a problem, everybody's problem, the toughest one that I've ever heard of. So where do we get any answer that makes sense? Some of it has got to come quickly, I'm afraid, Freeman." Amplified, Ed's voice had boomed out till it was like an earthquake to him. Once again a plastic box was opened above him and a gigantic face was overhead. In the tinkling overtones of smallness, there was almost a silence for a moment. Then came the rattle of Freeman's hard, amused laugh, as he said, "I'll be damned! Smaller than snuff and made the cheap way. People. Something better. Yep, it must be so, even if I can't even see you. That puts us way ahead, I guess. And it ain't a whisky vision. Well, I guess it still don't make any difference. The old-time kind of folks hate us, and they'll never stop while both of us and them are alive. And us Phonies have been crowded all we can take. They've fired on us here, just barely trying to miss. Could be we've done the same to them. It's a mighty ticklish proposition. In winktime they could finish us all here, nice and clean and no grease left. So could we burn them quicker than gunpowder. So who gets trigger crazy and does it first? We've fixed them: an answer, under the ground. Maybe they can spoil our other weapons, like it seems they can, but not this one. It's buried deep enough. Let 'em try to hit us hard, and it'll set everything off. Your old Moonblast will be beat a thousand times. Us Phonies are bullheaded. We were made on Earth, same as them. It's ours as much as theirs. We came alive, and we can fade out again, young fella!" The vibrations of Freeman's tones rose and fell, with humor, fatalism and stubbornness. Two races, one born of the knowledge originated by the other, seemed to have driven each other into corners of no return. At some indefinite instant, the Big Zero would come. Ed saw this garish picture more clearly than ever before. His strange little body fairly quivered with it. He looked at Mitchell Prell, who had come beside him now, where the pieces of apparatus that made up the interior of a small receiving set loomed, and he saw in his face the puzzled, tired fear of a scientist whose researches had always aimed at doing good. Just then Ed Dukas, micro-android, was far from separated from the Big Earth as he used to know it. So now, in desperation, he clutched at a vision which had once seemed almost a fact. "Freeman," he said, "maybe men can't back down or co-operate with supermen. Doing that can seem like embracing extinction. But hasn't there always been an obvious thing for us to do?" "Umhm-m—you mean we should back down," Freeman replied softly. "Set out for the wide-open spaces that we were meant for. Leave the poor clodhoppers behind. Young fella, could be that you and me see things bigger. For others like us, it ought to be like that, only it ain't—yet. Most of the new people are butcher, baker and candlestick maker, Earth-born, and Earth-tied in their minds, like anybody. There's a ship, sure. But the stars are still awful far off, and never touched, and you can go addled just thinkin' about them. Lots of our sort would leave in their own sweet time, same as regular folks, sure. It's in their blood. You might say they got wings. But who really knows how to use 'em yet? And crowd our kinfolks off their home world? When they're spunky and sore like any human being? Nope. Sorry!" Ed's faint hope faded before the old android's realism. For years the movement of migration had been farther and farther outward into space. It was at once a fact, a dream and a philosophy, like getting nearer to the Eternal Unknown. But most of the worth-while solar system was already owned by the original dominant species. Beyond was only the distance, not a beaten path at all, an untried and fearsome novelty. One star ship was about completed, yes. Fast it would be, but its speed would still fall far short of the velocity of light. So the nearer stars were decades, centuries, millenniums away. An idea so familiar that it seems almost an accomplished fact can lose some of its charm in the hard glare of real obstacles. Ed felt something like a chill inside him. Though he knew the strangeness of a micro-cosmic viewpoint, others did not have this training and boldness for the unknown. He saw the majority of them balking fatally. But he still had to try something, to change as much of this as he could—if he could change any of it at all. "I don't know whether or not to blame you and the others for the revenge you say is rigged here and elsewhere, Freeman," he said. "I can see why both sides felt driven to do it. But I'm going to borrow your newscast facilities, Freeman. Or someone else's. Because rumor can be a powerful force. And I think I can give it a little push." Mitchell Prell was still beside him. His grin was encouraging and sly. "Best of luck in what you intend, Eddie," he remarked. "Need a charge for your Midas Touch?... Meanwhile, I might try drawing the teeth of some dragons, as you seem to have been doing. Got to be careful, though, that both sides don't blame each other and get nervous. Granger, poor knothead, was easy. I hope that somehow circumstances will be right so that he can come back and learn. About Loman and the things he made, I can feel differently." "You heard?" Ed asked. "It was on the air," Prell replied. "Somebody phoned the news in from near that lab. At least the overwise ones will know that they guessed wrong about which faction contrived a biological horror: a rabid old-race sympathizer, but an android, too! Can that make either side proud?" <hr class="tb" /> A minute later Ed landed on the roof of the trailer which housed Freeman's wireless equipment. He crept past an immense drop of rain water that loomed like a rounded mesa beside him and entered a vent. Soon he touched the terminals of his microphone to the proper contacts. The transmitter was active. During the first pause between the temblors of other words and signals and coded information, Ed spoke quickly, half like a mischievous sprite. "This is no ghost voice. We hear that many androids want to take all of their kind beyond the solar system." The station did not stop sending at once. Blame that on the startled monitor, who must have been listening. Ed took advantage of his opportunity. He was granted another moment to speak: "It is only natural that they should want to do that. Their kind of vigor matches the stars. They don't need, or really want, the Earth. Their departure in peace could be a perfect answer to everything." That much Ed got out before the transmitter clicked to silence. He knew he hadn't said anything original and that he had pushed an argument intensely, like a high-pressure salesman without full belief. What he had said was the way things should be, perhaps, but were not. Yet, again, like a romantic kid, had he felt the glamorous impact of his own words? He was aware that androids would hear and millions of the old race—intent on communications from an enemy station—as well. A mysterious, informal voice was always a thing to draw attention, and his remarks had been rather startling. That they would be repeated and discussed a thousand times from other stations was probable. For they were like a chink of hope in one of two granite walls of obstinate righteousness and strength. But Ed decided that he'd build no bright pictures of what his speech would accomplish but would wait for hard facts. He wished desperately that he'd had a moment more to speak on the transmitter, to call out Barbara's name. Now he drifted again in a morning sunshine. Luck had held out this far at least. But over woods and crude shelters and hidden equipment and grimy grim-faced hordes that looked as human as refugees could, there were interruptions that denied optimism. A patrolling rocket ship sailed high; an intensified neutron beam turned a finger of air white hot behind it—very close. And mountaintops, already truncated and smoking, still would flare up dazzlingly. Android muscles and backs strained and bent to build fortifications as nothing merely human could. The toilers were both men and women. Could android children cry? Yes, some did. Another thing happened. Ed, floating unseen low in the air, felt the buzz of shouts and cries. A man who seemed to be near collapse was being helped forward by a youth whose sidearms dangled near the knees of his torn dungarees. At a little distance, where size seemed more as it used to be, Ed saw that the exhausted man was Les Payten. He was mud from head to foot; his face and arms were bloodied by brambles, his suit was a rag. He was brought straight to Abel Freeman's shelter. There, supported by the armed youth, he spoke his piece: "I'm here again, Freeman, because a friend of mine asked me to bring you something for him. Does that make me a fool? I know it does. Because he's only my remembrance of a friend now. Damn you all!" Les Payten fainted. A package wrapped in a plastic sheath fell from his hands, but Abel Freeman caught it. A couple of Abel's ornery sons looked on, exchanging puzzled scowls. Freeman warned them away with a clenched fist, knotty as an oaken club, and then shouted, "Nancy! Oh, Nancy-y-y!" But there was no time for Ed to observe Freeman's hellion daughter functioning as a nurse. He went inside Freeman's radio again, and spoke, "Freeman, this is Dukas. I came to you to give and receive help. That means that I've tried to guess right about you. I believe I have. When your neo-biologists examine what Payten has brought, they will be able to guess its value to me and mine. And I think that they will be able to combine its uses with those of their own equipment for something I'd like to see done. But there are other matters. Some of your power plants broke down, but so did others across the line. I did most of that. Prell must be doing more of it right now. What I said over your wireless was meant to gain a little time." Ed paused. Freeman did not open the radio case again. Ed couldn't see him. He could only feel small thuds and clinkings—the android leader opening the package that Les Payten had brought. Ed wondered if he could ever imagine what was going on in Freeman's head, the thousand problems and feelings that must be seething there. Freeman might be no good at book learning. And his roots were in a century when even a flying machine was a wild thought. But he had to be shrewd to match the legend behind him. And he had to take tough situations with a light shrug for the same reason. Finally Ed felt the rumble of his chuckle. "You mean I'm one of your 'reasonable' variety," he said. "Meantime you smash my stuff, eh, little bug in the air! I ought to get damn unreasonable! You might even finish me off! I'm kind of curious about that! But I don't think you have to bother. I know that the old-time folks are moving lots more hell machines up. And they're awful mad, because we got quite a few of them in one place last night—sort of by miscalculation. What's this talk about us androids matching the stars? Well, young fella, go 'head and talk some more. Yep, on our wireless rig. What's left to lose? And I'm still curious." On the way to the radio trailer, Ed looked back to the ugly, humping shapes of weapons creeping up a high, blackened slope a few miles away. This was fresh action by men of the old kind who had lost friends or family and who saw no future in a demoniac succession. They were exposed, an easy target. But if they were destroyed, others would come. So they dared and defied, and the vicious spiral toward Big Zero continued to mount. Ed tried to forget this for a moment. His first words by wireless were a call for his wife: "Babs, this is Ed, at Freeman's camp! Barbara, come to us if you can. At least, try to communicate with us. You know how. Barbara!..." She had her own quartz chip, active all the time, so she must hear! And if she did, she could send a message just as he did, from some other station. But though Ed now had help, at Freeman's orders, no reply from his wife was sifted from the countless communications that were received. But his previous attempt to spread a rumor had brought some expected results. The morning air was full of conflicting comments: "... A cruel joke ... Psychological warfare ... Perhaps, but what if the Phonies mean to leave? Some already deny it.... Who spoke? Let him speak again." Ed was glad to oblige, even revealing his name, his present dimensions and how a being of such size, equipped with a Midas Touch, might wreck a power station. He explained this last item because he did not want a misplaced blame to stir up more tension on both sides. Otherwise, he addressed himself mostly to the androids, aware that the old race would listen, too. "... We were made on Earth, but not for Earth. We were meant to go much farther. Since we have so much, to be other than generous would be stupid. We have peace and the future, and most of what man ever hoped for, in our hands. That, or oblivion for everyone." Though the ominous movement on the burned-out slope continued, the actual flash of weapons seemed suspended. The quiet was either promising or it was ominous. He was lulled into enough confidence so that at noon he took a break. He went back to Freeman's shelter and into the tiniest workshop that Mitchell Prell had made and that Les Payten had rescued. He dropped from the air beside minute machines and the vats that had given Barbara and him their micro-android forms on Mars. The whole piece—the greater microscope together with all the much lesser equipment—Abel Freeman had unwrapped hastily, so that entry into the twilight within the plastic cover had been easy. Freeman himself was not around. For a moment Ed felt alone and wistful, clinging to the rough glass floor of the shop. But then he saw a faintly luminous elfin figure. "Barbara!" he exclaimed. Her laughter tinkled. "Think I wasn't come back, Eddie?" she teased. "That I couldn't share any interest in what happens to a big world?" Her blitheness almost angered him. Her expression sobered at once, and he saw that she looked worn. "I know," she said. "It's not funny. We might have burned up with the Earth—far apart. But I kept busy. I tried to call you yesterday from a station in the City. But I wasn't sure I touched the proper contacts. And last night I had to be a good saboteur. I got three weapon-feeding power houses—though I guess that the fine equipment could be shielded against us easily enough. Later, I was lost—high up in the wind. With you along, it could have been wonderful. Of course, I heard news broadcasts. About Loman's lab. And from Freeman's station, a report of how Les arrived with a strange device. This morning I heard your call, but there was no way to answer. Eddie, Freeman's experts could copy us in normal size quite easily and quickly, couldn't they? And in better vitaplasm. The methods have been improved. Our personal recordings, perhaps lost, wouldn't be needed. Should we try to have it done? Then there'd be two of each of us, in different sizes. Two...." Ed chuckled. "Not a word about returning to the old flesh, eh?" he said. "So have we learned? Android freedom to go anywhere, to be almost anything. Yep, magic almost. I think you'd rather perch on thistledown or a sunset cloud, or be pushed by light pressure, like sleeping spores, to a thousand light-years away! Well, it could still happen. Part of us has been changed enough by things like that to belong there. But the older part seems much like it was and belongs to the size plane that we first knew about." They hugged each other and laughed. And they were reassured by the comparative calm around them. But the forces were still there, only awaiting someone's ultimate madness. And what can a world's end be like, coming in a split instant, to one's dissolving senses? Certainly it must be a quick, almost trivial experience. Ed became aware of a bluish flicker. Then there was something like an awful thud; he could scarcely tell whether a crash of sound took part in it or not. Around him everything was dazzling whiteness, without shadow or form. Then there was nothing. <hr class="chap" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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