Da Vincelleo, hovering far above Dafess in a spaceship, watched the
final scene upon the TV screen before him. Then, sighing because it
hurt him to destroy his greatest work of art, he pressed a red button.
And he saw the city of Dafess disappear in the old and familiar, but
still terrible, mushroom.
"That fool Revanche!" he said. "Did he really think I'd massacre an
entire city and take a million to one chance of escaping retribution
from the Solar Police?"
He did not think of his being punished for such a deed as being
justice. Anything he did was right; retaliation from others would have
been vengeance, not justice.
He sighed again. The Project: Dafess, had been enormous. But the worst
problem had been Dafess's citizens themselves. Even while an exact
replica of the city was being constructed in a Canadian wilderness,
far from the real Dafess, his staff was tackling the necessary
research, of which the hardest part had been both historical and
technological. One, finding out exactly what each citizen looked and
acted and talked like. Two, building Bioids that looked, acted, and
talked like the original.
Of course, the whole illusion had been designed to fool only one man
and had had to be kept in existence less than ten hours.
A minor, though fascinating problem had been that of getting blood
to spout from the severed heads and concealing the springs and wires
inside the wrecked bodies.
At that moment Revanche, very much alive in his star yacht poised just
above the stratosphere, pressed a button. The screen on his desk showed
him a blur that was the missile he'd just launched and the target, Da
Vincelleo's ship. Then there was incandescence, followed by the old
familiar mushroom.
Revanche growled, "That fool!" and he turned away from the screen. His
face was smug as a porcupine's that has loaded up on tender and vitamin
rich birch-bark. He felt exceedingly satisfied. Why not? Watching the
destruction of the synthetic citizens of the synthetic city of Dafess
had been almost as rewarding as seeing the real city delivered to
judgment. The process had been a type of psycho-drama that any good
psychiatrist would have recommended for emotional catharsis.
For the financier trusted no man, and though Da Vincelleo had thought
his double-crossing project was a secret, he could not hide it from the
richest and most inquisitive human in the system. Nor had he guessed
that Revanche would then employ Bioid's competitor to fashion an
electronic proxy of himself.
Revanche had suffered--long distance--as his plastiskin counterpart had
seemed to suffer. Its terror-stricken face was his, and when it had
yelled with frustration and screamed for mercy, he had done so also.
But when he saw the terrible parody of himself lop off his proxy's head
with a saber, he had felt as if he'd been killed and then come to life
again.
He'd been seized with a laughter that forced him to grip his chair to
keep from falling to the floor. And now, very much calmed and smoking a
new cigar, he felt wonderful about his mockup's death.
He no longer had a barely suppressed fear of being hurled by his deity
into the molten ocean of Rejectus. It was as if he had paid for his own
sins through the mechanical scapegoat and now could live on with an
untroubled conscience.
He took the cigar from his mouth and chortled.
And a third mushroom suddenly sprouted.
Revanche and his star yacht went back to the elements in its white
heart, far hotter than the flames of Rejectus.
Da Vincelleo had been a thorough man, as suspicious as Revanche
himself. Shortly after he had made his deal with the financier, he
had had a machine built which keyed in to the personal pattern of his
_kappa_ brain-waves. If that pattern disappeared, quit radiating, a
circuit was activated which sent a "bloodhound" missile soaring up
into the air from a buried pit in the city of Messina, a missile
whose electromagnetic nose sniffed for the scent of Revanche's _kappa_
brain-waves and would not stop until it homed in on its target.
Thus, if the financier had paused long enough to light up his cigar
_before_ pressing the button that disposed of his enemy, he would have
finished smoking it and many more after it.
For Da Vincelleo had been convinced that Revanche had perished with
the false city of Dafess, and he was just reaching out to flick the
bloodhound's de-activation stud when Revanche's missile interrupted him
forever.