Part 2

Eddie's mom kept saying things, and it was all something like a formula that had been learned, a rote, a parroted incantation: "You're right, Eddie. We've got to think before we do anything. They always tell us that life is an adventure. We've got to meet a bigger future or be destroyed, Eddie. Everything takes nerve."

At last the earthquake shocks lessened both in intensity and frequency. Maybe the worst was over.

Eddie risked an eye, and then nudged his mother.

Beyond the undamaged flexoglass of the windows night had returned, red-lit from both sky and ground. The firmament was smeared with a ruddy glow extending in a great curve, beaded with more intense blobs at several points. Dust of the Moon, it had to be. Of its rock and pumice shell. And of its core of meteoric iron. But that sullen effulgence was fading now, as matter cooled and began simply to reflect solar light back to this dark side of Earth.

Yet everywhere outside there was fire. The towering glow in the east--that would be the City, fifty miles away. Destruction and confusion there would be unimaginable. Nearer at hand, trees were aflame--leaves and branches that minutes ago had been cool with greenness now blazed wildly. Mixed with the tumult of voices was the clang of robot fire units.

Eddie rushed to the radio and turned it on, as he had been taught to do in emergencies. You listened; you obeyed directions. "... lunar blowup," someone was saying. "Follow the usual precautions and measures for radioactive contamination and flesh burns. Rescue and relief units are already in action. Fortunately most of our buildings are not made of combustible materials...."

For minutes Eddie was furiously busy, rubbing special salves and lotions into the skin of his entire body. Then, dressed in fresh clothes, he and his mother just stared out of the windows for a while. Outside, metal shapes were at work. Science and civilization were working efficiently to recapture their balance after an upset that might have been the end.

Eddie and his mother explored the house and found it mostly intact. Then incident piled on incident in quick succession. The first of these began with a whimper at the door. Masked with respirators against possible radioactive taints in the outside air, they opened it. A blackened thing without eyes dragged itself inside, quivered once, and lay still. It was death among supposed immortals. The passing of a dachshund called Schnitz.

Eddie was dazed. Child-grief or man-grief had no chance to come to him then. Events moved too fast. There was too much to be done.

A half-dozen people in radiation armor came into the house. At once it was converted into a first-aid station. Hard law and hard drills, blueprinted long before for disaster, came into play. Eddie's mother joined the crew. Nor was he left out of it. There was coffee for him to prepare in the kitchen, and rugs and furniture to be cleared away, and equipment to be set up.

He saw blood and death, and hysteria-twisted faces. He saw glinting, complex instruments and apparatus, as the therapeutic methods of the age were applied. There were blood pumps that could serve as hearts and machines to duplicate the functions of kidneys and lungs. There were devices to teleport scattered body cells from a dozen healthy individuals, converting them briefly into mobile energy, and then back into living tissue in the body of an injured person.

Mostly the maimed and burned remained stolid and calm. Luxury had not weakened them. They, too, had known their era and had had some preparation.

Eddie recognized a child of his own age among those who came into his own house: a neighbor boy named Les Payten, the son of a noted biologist. He had big ears and a freckled nose. He wasn't hurt badly. His eyes were inflamed. He hadn't shut them quite quickly enough. He had turned sullen, and his lip trembled a bit. Otherwise he was still full of pepper.

"Braggin' about your Uncle Mitch _now_, Eddie?" he taunted. "Great stuff, that guy! He and his pal scientists nearly got us all. Better luck next time, huh?"

Young Ed Dukas might have growled back but he did not. As if he too carried a burden of responsibility, his jaw hardened and his cheeks hollowed. His back stiffened, as if to bear the load. He returned to the kitchen. He had not yet noticed any other signs of blame. It was too soon. The shock of cosmic catastrophe had deadened minds. Sometimes prejudice and hatred need a certain leisurely brooding to build them up.

But another raw realization had come to Eddie. As soon as there was a moment to speak to his mother he said, "Uncle Mitch was supposed to land in the City spaceport tonight. It's a six-hour run from the Moon. But now he'll never get here."

She shook her head. And in her expression there was fury mixed with her sadness.

He didn't think about that very long as he helped carry a stretcher. His mind was on Mitchell Prell--grinning, setting up a lab in the room upstairs, even modeling wax with his swift fingers. He had once molded little heads of Mom and Dad. A lump gathered in Eddie's throat for someone who would never be back. Mitchell Prell. Even the name sounded nice.

Then slowly another question came into his mind. _Where was Dad?_ He'd gone out to that quartz lode and hadn't come back! Funny, thought Eddie, I hadn't even thought about that. Well, it came from taking Dad for granted. Someone never to worry about. Someone always around, like the hills. Eddie clenched his fists to steady himself. No use worrying yet.

Now the torrential rains began. Steam had been boiled out of the ground by heat. Now it was condensing. Helping, maybe, as the radio said, to wash away the poison of the radioactive meteorites and dust that were falling to Earth--wreckage that hours before had been part of the Moon.

Somewhere out in the moaning storm a bell chimed out ten o'clock very calmly. It must have been about then that what was left of Jack Dukas was brought home in a truck. Eddie didn't see this happen. He was helping again with the injured. And later, when Les Payten told him, Mom wouldn't let him go into the locked room where his dad had been taken. He almost told her that he had a right. But he did not want to disturb her further.

Eddie was up till 4:00 A.M. By then the rescue crew had left the house and a tentative calm had been restored in the world. The injured were in hospitals, rigged in tents and public buildings. But there were far more dead. Anyone caught more than a step from shelter when the catastrophe had occurred was apt to belong to that endless list. Half a planet had been scorched by heat and radiation.

While the guard-robots rumbled through the rain on their caterpillar treads, Eddie simply passed out from weariness on the floor of the living room. His mother managed to arouse him a little but not enough to send him to bed. Rather, she folded down the twin couches from the sensipsych set. She made her husky young son climb up onto one of them and took the other for herself.

He slept, and his body was refreshed. And he had dreams--not dreams in which he was an imaginary cartoon character; nor was he toiling to make dead asteroids habitable; nor was he enjoying an adventure on some imaginary planet among the stars. No, for the present he had had enough of strain. Instead he lay in grass by a little lake. The sun was bright. There were boats with colored sails, and blue flamingos flying, and odd, elfin music. The sensipsych was not an opiate to fill the emptiness of soft lives now. It was rest; it was honest, relieving therapy.

Young Ed Dukas didn't see the mud-spattered truck arrive, to be parked some distance from the house. He did not see the figure moving in the dense shadows. It knocked cautiously at the front door, waited for a reasonable time, and then went around to the porch in the rear. There skillful fingers worked carefully to release the lock. Massive luggage was lifted without sound inside the door.

Eddie awoke with a small, hard hand shaking his shoulder. His mother was already awake. The light was on. At first only with simple unbelief, they beheld a slight, disheveled figure.

Uncle Mitch's cheek was scraped. His hands were filthy. His recently neat business suit was torn. An old jauntiness about his eyes fought with worry, regret and wariness.

"Hello, Eileen," he said. "Hi, Nipper."

He received no answer. Somehow even Eddie felt compelled to silence. So his uncle shifted to what was a rarity with him--a kind of historical or philosophical summary.

"Progress," he said with a forced laugh. "The world government answering the threat of atomic war, years ago. Then the greatest boon of the human race: eternal youth, and death's defeat except by violence, producing the problem of overpopulation, to be relieved by the colonization of the solar system. Then peace and boredom and the sensipsych dreams leading to decadence, loss of pride in self and even rebellious violence; then the solution of vigorous, realistic action, more and more people to enjoy life, more and more colonies. Then, as we reach out for the stars, this. Life. The great adventure that can't be stopped. The rise from barbarism. Is it even well begun?"

His words, half appropriate and half in supremely bad taste now, as Mitchell Prell well knew--though he had to say them because of the need to say something--still fell into a void of silence and echoed through the house like a cheap speech.

Sighing raggedly, he tried again: "Yes, I'm alive, Eileen. The ship from the Moon was in space before the blowup happened. We rode ahead of the main shock wave at high speed. So we won through. From the final warning message from the Moon, I gather that trouble started in the warp chambers. The heat and pressure were restrained by the tight space warp for a while, until inter-dimensional barriers ripped wide open. The whole mass of the Moon was in the way. By old standards it couldn't happen; but a lot of lunar atoms went all to pieces in a flare of high energy. The tough part is that we achieved a workable motor principle for stellar ships weeks ago. The blowup came from side line testing."

Once more no words answered Mitchell Prell when he stopped talking. He waited, but his sister's eyes remained cold.

"All right, Eileen," he went on at last. "You're thinking that I am one of the specialists who is responsible for this. Surely I'm the only survivor among those research men who were on the Moon. But remember this: we weren't working on our own. We were hired, under a democratic system, and told what to hunt for. It was the best that could be done, except that the lab should have been put farther away, on some lonely asteroid. Logically, then, we are not solely to blame for what has happened. But it doesn't work that way, Eileen. Under grief and hysteria logic still collapses, even in our time. In a real crisis there continue to be many people who need scapegoats. A collective mishap, the result of a mass desire for more knowledge, then becomes a personal guilt. So I'm a fugitive, Eileen."

It was a strange, bitter thing for Eddie Dukas to watch--his mother and uncle facing each other, not friends, his mother's face a hard mask of coldness.

Then, all at once, her icy poise crumbled. "Jack isn't alive any more," she said. "My husband. That's the fact that I know best. You with your glib talk, my brother, are one person directly in the chain of events that caused Jack's death. I don't accuse you, Mitch. I just say that I can't look on you now with any pleasure. That's all."

Then, sitting there on the sensipsych couch, she began to cry. It was painful for Eddie to watch. He had never seen her do that before.

But Mitchell Prell chuckled. He sat beside his sister and put his arm around her. "Are things so bad?" he chided. "Look, Eileen. People used to consider biological life the deepest secret of nature. Because he was at the top of his local life scale, man would not have been flattered to know that the vital force in him wasn't the greatest, the most indecipherable of enigmas. But it's true, Eileen. Year after year we've learned more about cell function, genes, chromosomes, the natural molding of living things, and the final process in protoplasm, which is the spark itself. Men like Schaeffer have been making simple life for years, while they traced out more complex riddles. For a long time they've been replacing diseased or damaged organs from scattered cells drawn from the bodies of many donors. Now they've gone further and have grown such organs in a culture fluid, from a microscopic bit of tissue. It is already theoretically possible to re-create an entire man, provided there is a pattern. It was for repair purposes, after possible accidents, that everyone was urged to have his body structure recorded--especially that of his brain. All you have to do, Eileen, is have Jack's record turned over to the same laboratories that do rejuvenation. In two or three years he'll come back to you just as he was. Soon there might even be a simpler, better way."

Eileen Dukas's laugh was brittle and bitter. "A roll of fine, sensitized wire," she said. "Kept in a box no bigger than the first joint of a finger. Supposed to be safe in a vault. The pattern of a human being. Well, Mitch, there just isn't any such box for Jack. Or for Eddie or me either, for that matter. We just didn't get around to it. Jack was somehow half against it."

Again there was a silence. For Eddie it seemed to have the quiet of forever in it. No whistling of Dad's tunes. No sly winks, or play at being tough. Just memory.

"All bodies that are being picked up are being sent through the recorder," Uncle Mitch offered at last. "Refined radar does the trick. The finest variations of even brain structure--the mold of mind, personality, and memory--are found and recorded. Wasn't that done for Jack?"

Eddie's mother nodded. "Only," she stammered, "the whole top of his head was charred. There wasn't enough of him left. Oh, you and your damned science, Mitch."

She was weeping again. Mitchell Prell became either cruel or perhaps he spoke in self-defense.

"The people that used to neglect things like insurance," he remarked, "are still plentiful, aren't they? Oh, well, maybe there's still a sort of way. A makeshift. People are bound to think of it. Let it go for now. I've got lots to worry about, sister of mine."

"Your own skin, for instance?" she challenged him. "Why did you come here at all, Mitch? The scapegoat-seekers will certainly look for you here first."

"My own skin," Mitchell Prell agreed. "Maybe yours, since you are a relative of mine, responsible for my sins. That is an ancient defect of logic among certain types of people still in existence, I'm afraid--if the provocation becomes great enough. The skins of the three of us, my most prized treasures."

He smiled slightly then, and his blue eyes were gentle. "Don't worry too much, though," he went on. "I'll be gone sooner than most people will even think of looking for me. I'll keep out of sight, not even leaving the house, except after dark. I have some things to deliver to Schaeffer. Then I've got to get away. Because life goes on, in spite of everything. I'm still curious about nature, the stars and some other things. I remain eager for some vast freedom, Eileen--for you and your son, and the rest of the cussed race, whose errant qualities and usually good intentions I share. I see no good in becoming the offering of expiation for an accident that came out of a general human urge to learn that can't and won't be downed."

Something like a truce came then. Eddie Dukas could feel it. Family loyalty was in it and a little of understanding and contrition.

"All right, Mitch," was all that Eddie's mother said. She kissed his uncle's cheek. Eddie knew that it was a woman's gesture of armistice.

Fires had died down. Dawn was beginning to show in the patio. The rain had stopped long ago. For no reason Eddie's eyes sought out a pool of muddy water in a crack in the flagging. The water was clay colored, as it might have been after any shower. A robin, which had somehow escaped death, was scolding angrily.

Breakfast was eaten listlessly. There were radio reports and orders. "Able persons must report to their municipal centers...."

"That's for you, Eddie," Mitchell Prell said ruefully. "And your mother. While I play hiding rat."

Eddie didn't know whether to hate his uncle or not. There was an inner bigness about that slightly built man that matched some obscure drive that was Eddie's own--in spite of his grief.

"Watch yourself, sir," he growled stiffly.

The day was a day of searching for corpses, of cleanup, of tentative restoration. At least there would be no smells of death. Pruning machines were already busy on charred treetops. The world was being put back into order, like a disturbed anthill. Grass and leaves would sprout again. The scared faces of younger children--many from the Youth Center were given small tasks to help in the cleanup, since it was not the custom now to hide reality from the young--would smile again. On that day of sweeping the streets with a broom, Eddie Dukas made and lost many a brief friendship. Hello.... Goodbye....

Fortunately the poison of radioactivity had not been transmitted to any great extent from across space by radiation alone. Gases and fragments of the Moon that were still falling as meteors bore a taint to the atmosphere; but it was now below the danger level.

Overhead, arching the sky like the Rings of Saturn turned ragged, was what was left of Luna: rock and dust. For an hour its texture veiled the sun, until, near noon, there was almost twilight, like that of an eclipse. That arch was a permanent monument to a night that would be remembered.

There still were hysterical people around. Eddie saw Mrs. Payten, his friend's mother. She passed in the street, muttering, "Oh, Ronald, you were a beast of a man, but I loved you. Why were you a fool, too?... No record.... None...."

It had been a subject of neighborhood gossip that Ronald Payten, a large, passive lug, had been a very much hen-pecked husband. His neglect of having a record made of himself might have seemed strange for so noted a biologist. Maybe it was absent-mindedness, professional difference of opinion, or even some backhanded defiance of his wife.

There were moments when the wild taint in young blood and the magnificence of disaster gave Eddie and others almost an outing mood. But toil, sweat and horror soon turned things grim as he worked with the men. His hands were blackened and scratched. But maybe tiredness was balm for delayed shock. Maybe it was thus that he stood at the brief funeral services--for his father, too--with less hurt. The great trench was closed over the corpses, and the thing was done.

Later, back in the house, he struggled with himself somewhat, and said, "I know it wasn't your fault, Uncle Mitch."

Eddie had seen stern faces that day, topping trim gray uniforms: regional police. In him was the thought: Harboring a fugitive. One who shouldn't be called that. But who is--now. Because people have taken a beating like never before. Even laws can be changed. Ideas of justice won't stay quite the same.

"Have you outgrown my calling you Nipper?" Mitchell Prell asked him seriously. "Perhaps.... But I still want to show you something."

Young Ed Dukas was no sucker for easy come-ons. But his polite wariness soon dissolved, when, in the room where Mitchell Prell was holed up, he saw that the man who turned to face him was not his uncle. The nose and lips were much heavier. Only the eyes and grin remained much the same, though their general effect was made different by the difference of surrounding features. This man looked like a good-natured mechanic.

Eddie's spine chilled. But he gave a sullen snort as the man peeled his face away. Underneath it was Uncle Mitch.

"A mask, Eddie. A trick for kids, you'd say." His uncle laughed. "I spent the day making it up, to help me get around more easily. That's nothing. The important fact is that it is made of vitaplasm. Remember the bar of it that I once had? Crude stuff then. Better now. Alive in a way of its own. A synthetic and far tougher cousin to natural protoplasm. Far less susceptible to damage by heat and cold. Self-healing, like flesh. Sustained by food and oxygen. But capable of drawing its energy from sunlight or radioactivity, too. And in some of its forms less dependent on a fluid base such as water. No, it's not consistently the same substance, or combination. Like the flesh we know, vitaplasm is in constant change. Here and now it's just an amorphous mass, crudely molded. An unshaped building material. But, like star ships, it belongs to the future. Here it's undeveloped principle, another phase of our advancing science everywhere. You could call it the clay of the superman, Eddie. I want you to remember all this. Because I may be back from where I'm going to try to go. Or I might get in touch sometime. We might need each other's help."

Young Ed Dukas listened with intense interest. Perhaps his deepest drive was toward the shadowy splendor of times yet to come. They seemed a part of his growing self. They must become real! And he must take part in their fulfillment. Grief or hardship could not stop him. Therein he and Mitchell Prell traveled the same road.

"You didn't invent vitaplasm, Uncle Mitch," he stated. "No one could have--alone."

His sullenly serious gaze lingered on the mask. It was warm to his touch. It even recoiled a little.

Mitchell Prell shook his head and chortled. "No, Nipper. You know that research is now far too complex for that. I helped a little. Lots of men did. Maybe I've added something to what is known. I've got to give my data to specialists here before I leave."

Eddie thought of a man he'd sometimes seen on television. No bigger than Uncle Mitch. And plain looking. But great. Dr. Schaeffer in his underground laboratory in the City.

"You aren't going to try to reach a star, are you?" young Ed asked.

Uncle Mitch shook his head. "No. I won't wander so far off." He laughed. "But in a way I'll be going farther, I suppose. Though don't imagine that I mean time or hyper-dimensional travel. It's something simpler. But it's to a place where no one can journey exactly as a human being. I can't tell you much more. Because I don't want other people to try to dig too much out of you. But I want to look at things from a new angle. And from very close up, you might say. Maybe I'm trying to hide from danger, Eddie. Some. But the bigger reason is that I want to go on learning and exploring. Maybe my being a small man means something, too."

Mitchell Prell ended with another light laugh. He put the mask in his pocket and snapped a large suitcase shut. When he spoke again it was on a slightly different tack: "You probably won't see me for a while, Eddie. About your father, words just aren't any good at all. Maybe I'll ache over his end even harder than you. If anybody asks you questions about me, tell all you know. Don't try to hide anything for my sake. They'll pry it out of you anyway. And they'll only know what I want them to know.

"Your mother may get a letter in a few days asking you both to report to the City. If that letter comes, see that she conforms to its request. It will also mean that I've delivered the results of my experiments with vitaplasm, as far as they've gone, into the proper hands and have probably succeeded in getting away into space. I hope that you and I and everybody make it to the Big Future, Eddie. That's all I have to say. Unless you care to remember a word that may crop up again--_android_."

Mitchell Prell grinned reassuringly at his nephew and moved to put on his mask.

"You don't want to say goodbye to Mom," Eddie stated, half angrily.