Part 5

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 trust _their_ judgment, 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 we _are_ here 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.

IV

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 what _you_ mutter 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.