Printed in U.S.A.
[Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any
evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was
renewed.]
I
Ed Dukas was writing letters. Someone or something was also
writing--unseen but at his elbow. It was perhaps fifteen minutes before
he noticed. Conspicuous at the center of the next blank sheet of paper
he reached for, part of a word was already inscribed:
"_Nippe ..._"
The writing was faint and wavering but in the same shade of blue ink as
that in his own pen.
Ed Dukas said "Hey?" to himself, mildly.
The frown creases between his hazel eyes deepened. They were evidence
of strain that was not new. The stubby forefinger and thumb of his
right hand rubbed their calloused whorls together. Surprise on his
square face gave way to a cool watchfulness that, in the last ten years
of guarded living, had been grimed into his nature. Ed Dukas was now
twenty-two. This era was hurtling and troubled. Since his childhood,
Ed had become acquainted with wonder, beauty, hate, opportunity and
disaster on a cosmic level, luxury, adventure, love. Sometimes he had
even found peace of mind.
He put down his pen, leaving the letter he had been writing suspended
in mid-sentence:
... _Pardon the preaching, Les. Human nature and everything else seems
booby-trapped. They drummed the idea of courage and careful thinking
into us at school. Because so much that is new and changing is a big
thing to handle. Still, we'll have to stick to a course of action._
* * * * *
Now Ed sat with his elbows on his table, that other, no longer quite
blank, sheet of paper held lightly in his hands. He sat there, a stocky
young man, his hair cut short like a hedge, the clues of his existence
around him: student banners on the walls; a stereoptic picture of his
track team--in color of course; ditto for his astrophysics class; his
bookcase; his tiny sensipsych set; and the delicate instruments that
any guy who hoped to reach the next human goal, the nearer stars, had
to learn about.
His girl's picture, part of any youth's pattern of life for the last
three centuries, smiled from beside him on the table. Dark. Strong as
girls were apt to be, these days. Beautiful in a rough-hewn way. But
even with all that strength to rely on, he was worried about her more
than ever now. Times were strange. He glanced at her likeness once.
Then his gaze bounced back to the paper in his hands.
His nerves tingled at the eerie thing that was happening there. He
didn't know whether to feel afraid of it or hopeful. Man was stumbling
toward ultimate mastery of his own flesh and the forces of the
universe. But the distance remained enormous, though technical science
was moving forward, perhaps too swiftly, on all fronts. Part of Ed's
fear before the unknown was like the stage fright of an inexperienced
actor. You never quite knew what was ahead or how to judge anything
strange that you saw.
"_Nippe...._"
At the end of the line which made the "e" there was a tiny speck of
blue ink. Almost imperceptibly, like the minute hand of a clock, it
crept on, curving and looping to form another letter.
"_Nipper_" the word was now.
This could be somebody's funny gag, Ed thought. Somebody with a gadget.
The world is full of gadgets these days. Maybe too full.
It occurred to him that a pal might be playing a joke with some simple
device bought in a novelty store. But probability leaned toward
something deeper and more costly. Who knew? Someone might have invented
a way to make a man invisible. You didn't deny that anything could be,
any more.
"Speak up!" he ordered softly.
But no answer came, and his wondering gaze found nothing unusual in the
room around him. He froze. "_Nipper._" It could be part of a message,
an honest attempt to convey vitally important information. Or it could
be the forerunner of violence aimed in his direction. Through no fault
of his own, he had had enemies for ten years. Tonight they might
really act. To die was still possible. In spite of vitaplasm. Or the
more tedious method that employed natural flesh. Or the tiny cylinders
hidden away in vaults. Lives were now in danger again. Human, and
almost human....
For a moment Ed wanted to give a warning and to call others into
consultation. He wanted to shout, "Dad! Mom! Come here!"
He didn't do so. Between him and the precise, benign personality that
he called Dad there was a gradually growing barrier. And for his
mother, beautiful and young by art and science, he had that feeling of
male protectiveness that takes the form of keeping possible dangers
hidden.
Ed decided to work on his own. Being essentially careful and slow
moving when it came to delicate processes, he had not touched that
creeping droplet of ink. Its secret might thus be destroyed. No, he'd
never do a thing so foolish.
Swiftly he folded the paper and fastened the writing under his
microscope. The ink speck was almost dry now, and nothing was hidden in
it. The line of the writing itself was odd under magnification. Here
and there it showed tiny, irregular dots at spaced intervals, connected
by fine, dragging marks. That was all.
Of course he realized that _Nipper_ might be only the first cryptic
word of a message and that he had only to wait and see what would
follow.
Until he began to wait, however, the significance of the word itself
eluded him. A child's nickname was all that it suggested.
But now his mind bore down on it. And he had the answer almost at
once. A small boy climbing the wall of a pretty garden. And his casual
christening by a pleasant stranger who met him thus for the first time.
Among more vivid and significant details, the memory of the name itself
had been mislaid. But Ed Dukas knew that in his boyhood one person had
always called him Nipper: Uncle Mitch Prell, and nobody else. Now it
seemed like a secret sign.
Ed gulped, his reaction suspended somewhere between shocked pleasure
and a frosty sense of eeriness. To have a friend, whom he had loved
as a child, vanish into space and into apparent nonexistence after
becoming a fugitive, and then to have what _seemed_ to be this
friend try to communicate again after ten years, and in this weird
manner--well--how would you say it? Ghosts, of course, were pure
superstition. But in this age one could still react as if to the
supernatural--with tingling hide and quickened heartbeats. In fact,
with the vast growth of technology, more than ever was such a feeling
possible.
"Uncle Mitch!" Ed Dukas called quietly.
Again there was no reply. The name on the paper still could be somebody
else's trick. Granger's, maybe. There were ways for him to have learned
a nickname. Many people might admire Granger as much as others despised
him. And it was hard to say what he might do, or when. Or how, for that
matter. He was clever. And wrong.
There was still another thing to remember. Ed did not altogether love
the memory of his uncle, Dr. Mitchell Prell. For this famous scientist
was marked with the stigma of responsibility for a terrific mishap. No,
Prell did not bear the burden alone. There were other scientists, it
was said, who had poked too roughly, and with too sharp a stick, into
Nature's deepest lair. Nature had snarled back. Ed had grown up with
the public hate that had resulted. He had fought against it, yet he had
felt it, until sometimes he did not know where he himself stood.
Now he waited for more writing to be traced on the paper under the
microscope. A minute passed, but there was nothing more. He did notice,
however, that the letters of that one word matched roughly the austere
handwriting of his uncle.
Once he glanced toward the window with some nervousness. Outside, the
night was glorious. Never again would nights be hideous as they once
had been. He saw lush gardens under silver light. If any devilish
thing not known until recent months slithered through the shadows, it
kept hidden. Ed saw other neighboring houses. New trees had grown to
fair size in ten years. Older and larger trees remained lopsided and
gnarled. But their burn scars had healed.
Otherwise there was nothing left to monument the past--except, perhaps,
the sullen mutter of voices in nearby streets.
But Ed Dukas's mind, triggered by the name _Nipper_ and by awareness
of Mitchell Prell, slipped briefly away from the present. He had
often explored memory to find understanding. At school, after the
catastrophe, psychiatrists had made every kid do that. So that neuroses
might be broken or lessened or avoided. So that animal terror would not
draw a curtain over a mental record of an interlude. So that memory
might not be lodged, like a red coal of hysteria, in the subconscious.
* * * * *
Like a trained dog leaping through a flaming hoop, Ed Dukas's thoughts
plunged back to that zone where his earliest memories faded into the
mists of infancy:
A birthday cake with two candles. A fountain splashing in the patio of
this same house. A dachshund, Schnitz, which a little boy put in almost
the same category as the flat, rubber-tired robots that cleaned the
rooms. Where was the distinction between machines and animals?
Flowers, hummingbirds, and butterflies in the garden. The echoes of
footsteps on stone floors. Toy space ships and star ships at Christmas.
The star ships were things yet to become real.... There was endless
interest in life then. But even in those days there were signs of
cautious and puzzled guidance.
There was the sensipsych, of course. It was a wonderful box of dark
wood in the living room. A soft couch folded down from it. There you
lay, and for a moment strange golden light flickered into your eyes.
You went to sleep, but you did not really go to sleep. For you became
someone else. Maybe a cartoon character in a world where everything
looked different. Funny things happened to you that frightened you at
first; but then you laughed when you found that there was no harm in
them.
Or, instead of being in such a crazy fairyland, you might be a real
boy in space armor jumping across the surface of a huge chunk of rock
called an asteroid, while stars and a blazing white sun stared at you
from blackness. You were very busy helping others to roof the asteroid
with crystal, and to put air underneath, and to build houses and
factories where people might live and work. Always more and more people
spreading out and out to populate the empty worlds of space.
But you were never on that sensipsych couch for very long, or too
often. You would wake up, and there was Mom saying, "Enough, fella.
A little of that sort of thing goes a great way, even when the
experiences are rugged and educational and not just whimsical nonsense."
Ed Dukas would be angry and puzzled. For it had seemed that those
visions, going on without end, could bring joy forever.
"You'll understand sometime, Eddie," his mother would say, consoling
him. "What happens to you by sensipsych is just make-believe. What we
call recorded sensory experience. Some of it really happened to other
people. Some of it is just made up. It can teach you things. But too
much is very bad. Not so long ago folks found out."
There was something tender and hard and even scared in his mother's
words.
Ed's dad also had his comments. Dad was something called a minerals
expert.
"Come on, Eddie, let's rassle," he'd say. "Stick your chin out, boy.
Let's see how tough you can look. No, not mean-tough.... That's better.
We've got to lick the times we live in. And something in ourselves.
With machines doing so much for us, life can be soft. And sensipsych
dreams are soft. Everything in moderation. Dreams can make you feel as
helpless as an oyster. Until you despise yourself and the whole race.
Yes, people found out. They were always meant to feel strong and proud,
and they must have tasks equal to their increasing powers. Otherwise
there's spiritual rot. We've got to be ready for anything, feel our
way, try to be ready to keep our balance for whatever comes. Because
life could be terrible, too, if the wonderful forces we control got out
of hand. We've got to go on progressing--moving out to the planets, and
then maybe the stars. Got to go either ahead or backward. Can't stand
still. And it's easy to go backward nowadays. Got to fight that, Eddie,
or else there might be a kind of death."
"What is death, Dad?"
Ed's father would answer his son's serious expression with a gay grin.
"A kind of myth, now, boy. Just going to sleep and never waking up. We
hope it's mostly finished, for everybody. Even the disease of old age
turned out to be something like rust gathering in a pipe. Simple. It
can be fixed up. Some people even let themselves get old. But they can
be made young again. Always."
Eddie had other questions.
"You were born in the old way, Eddie," his mother said. "But _so many_
people are needed now to populate the solar system. So everybody can't
be born from his mother's body. There's another way; almost the same,
really. Babies are born--they're made, really--in a laboratory. Then
they live in a youth center, like the one on the hill."
Eddie saw its great white spire looming among the trees. Often he could
hear voices in the gardens and playgrounds on the terraced setbacks of
its many levels. The voices seemed mysterious somehow.
Even then Eddie sensed the groping and confusion that was in his
parents' minds. Sometimes his mother would speak fervently to his
father: "Jack, I'd never choose to live in another age. I love it.
Because it's rich, endlessly varied, exciting. Is that why I'm often
scared out of my wits? Even disgusted often enough with my selfish self
and all the automatic devices? I love my work, the planning of pleasant
interiors. I'm so busy there doesn't even seem to be time for another
child. Yet maybe there are centuries ahead, Jack. How does one fill
centuries without getting fed up? And are we supposed to be something
superhuman in the end? Or do we wind up like the ancient Martians and
the beings of the Asteroid Planet, before it was blown to millions of
pieces? Wiped out in super-conflict, before they could progress very
much further than we are now?"
Most of this went over Eddie's head. But it left a smoky tension to
lurk in his mind behind the peaceful presence of sun and trees. People
had made their world more beautiful for their own relaxed enjoyment.
Yet even in those days Eddie sensed the turbulent undercurrent deep
inside them.
Once his father expressed a vagrant thought: "Maybe we should go out
to Venus sometime, Eileen. Start life over more simply in an uncrowded
planet that's being conditioned to receive our ancient race. Maybe
we'll do it in just a few years." He grinned.
"Yes," Eddie's mother replied. "If being indefinitely young and alive
doesn't fool us before then. If our complicated civilization doesn't
crack open and spit fire, and vaporize everybody. Death by violence is
still definitely possible. You know, lots of our friends are getting
their bodies and minds recorded so that they can be restored in case
of serious injury. Maybe we should have done it long ago."
Jack Dukas met her concern with a light tease: "A woman's worry
matched against the stubbornness of a man--eh, Eileen? There's
something unnatural about being recorded that I rebel against. Don't
be too troubled, though. The centuries won't slip from our fingers so
immediately. I hardly ever touch a dangerous thing in my work. Besides,
safety devices are almost perfect."
Such serious, troubled thoughts did not dim the optimism and eagerness
of young Ed Dukas. His private dreams soared into the thrills of
Someday. His small hands were impatient to grasp the shadowy shapes
of the future, more legendary than the not-distant past with its
still-living heroes: Roland, who was largely responsible for the
rejuvenation process; Schaeffer, who developed the sensipsych, brought
on the dream-world period of decay, and in the end helped Harwell
defeat the trap of emasculating visions by urging mankind back toward a
vigorous grip on reality; and the hundreds of others who had taken part.
But the first visit of Mitchell Prell, when Ed Dukas was five, was,
to the boy, like acquaintance with a legend. "Hi, Nipper!" were the
first words his uncle had spoken to Eddie. Dr. Mitchell Prell was his
mother's brother. He was a much smaller man than Eddie's dad, and dark
instead of blond. He was famous. And he brought gifts.
"A piece of the Moon, Nipper," he said. "An opal imbedded naturally
in gold. For your mom. And this case of instruments dug up in Martian
ruins, for your dad. Fifty million years old but better than anything
designed by human beings for locating ores far underground. And this
for you--also from Mars. I haven't been there for a long time. But I
got an old friend to send me the stuff--to the labs on the Moon."
Maybe Eddie's gift had once been a toy for the off-spring of extinct
Martian monsters. It was triangular like a kite, metallic, with a
faint lavender sheen. When you whistled a certain way, a jet of air
made it rise high in the sky. But it always came back. Atomic power was
in it somewhere. For it never ran out of energy.
Uncle Mitch never seemed to say much. He didn't get deep into
philosophy. He set up queer apparatus in his room, and a kid could look
at it if he didn't touch. And to one of Dad's questions he answered
briefly, "Yes, we're making headway in the labs on the Moon. There'll
be a motor for star ships. If, in our experiments, hyperspace itself
doesn't burst at the seams under that level of power. No, we're not yet
trying for speeds of more than a fraction of that of light. A trip to a
star will take a long time."
It soon came out that Uncle Mitch had another interest. He kept in a
glass tube something that squirmed and wriggled, and felt like warm
flesh though its natural form, when at rest, was a slender cylinder of
pencil size.
About that he would only say, "Call it alive if you want to. But not
like us. Invented and artificial, and far more rugged than our flesh.
For the rest, wait and see if anything comes of it. Maybe it'll become
the clay of the superman. Schaeffer, here on Earth, is working on it,
too."
Uncle Mitch stayed for a week. Then he was gone, rocketing out to the
labs, isolated for safety at the center of a _mare_ on the always
hidden hemisphere of the Moon.
"Mitch knows what he wants and is direct about it," was Jack Dukas's
comment. "Simple. No conflicts. The scientist's approach. Wise or
stupid? Who knows?"
Eddie was six, and then seven. The years moved slowly, but he grew
and hardened with them. By the time he was twelve, sports and study
and awareness of realities had toughened his body and matured his
soul considerably. That was fortunate, for this was his and mankind's
fateful year. The day came when the household robots were fixing up the
guestroom specially for Uncle Mitch again. Dad was afield, a hundred
miles away, to look over a vein of quartz crystal that was to be
shipped to the lunar laboratories. At 9:00 P.M. Eddie's father
had not yet returned.
Eddie was sprawled on his bed looking lazily at the translucent blue
font of the lamp beside it. The color was rich and beautiful, the
carvings snaky and odd. Here was another gift, ordered by Uncle Mitch
from a friend in the region of the Asteroids. The font was an artifact
of a race contemporary with the Martians who had also lost their fight
to master nature and themselves through knowledge. The font had been
found floating free in space, among the wreckage of a planet blown to
pieces ages back.
Eddie was thinking of such things. He was also thinking of neighborhood
pals, to whom he had bragged about his uncle and his expected arrival.
As for what happened at that moment: there _was_ transpatial warning,
radioed out fifteen seconds ahead, telling of forces gone hopelessly
out of control in the lunar laboratories. But Eddie's set was not
functioning, and he did not hear it.
Beyond the windows of his room there was just calm, pale moonlight. The
Moon looked little different than it always looked, except for the blue
spots of the atmosphere domes of the great mining centers.
But then came the intolerable blue-white light. Perhaps, somewhere,
exposed instruments measured its intensity. On the roofs of
meteorological stations, maybe. Say conservatively that, for the space
of a few seconds, it was five hundred times as strong as full sunshine.
Night was broken off. But there was no day like this. For one fragment
of a second Eddie glanced at the window. Shadows seemed gone, utterly.
Even dark things like tree trunks reflected so much light that they
all but vanished in the shimmering glare. As yet, it was a soundless
phenomenon.
Eddie shut his eyes and buried his face in his pillow. This reflex
action, partly as natural as terror and partly the result of training
for emergencies at school, saved his vision. He might have screamed,
had he been able to find his voice. Distantly, he heard human sounds
that increased the sickness in his stomach. A gentle scene and mood,
product of science, had been utterly shattered by forces of the same
origin.
He did not see the fuzzy blob of incandescence that bloomed in the sky
and expanded slowly for many seconds. In fact, no one saw it; only
cameras, fitted with special dark filters, would have been able to do
so. For living eyes would have been charred by that splendor.
He heard his mother calling his name. Keeping his eyelids tightly
closed and an elbow bent over them, he fumbled his way to the hall, and
to her. They dropped to the floor and huddled there.
Outside, voices died away. By then the devilish glory in the sky was
fading a little, too, at the edges. Only the heart of the great blob
still blazed supernally, with its millions of degrees of heat. Around
it was a cooling fog of dust and gases that masked the hell within it.
The world grew still for a few moments, as it does at the center of
a typhoon. Then there was a great, soft roaring. The shock wave of
expanded, rarefied gases, speeding at many hundreds of miles per
second, striking the upper terrestrial atmosphere, and pressing down.
Eddie could feel the pressure of it, transmitted by the air--a light
but definite punching inward of his flesh, from all sides.
Then there was a distant sighing of wind--air, super-heated and
compressed, being forced outward. Next came the resurgence of human
sounds, if they were truly that any more.
Someone was yelling, "Oh, God ... Oh, God ... Oh, God...." There was a
crackle and smell of fire. Something blew up far off.
Then the earthquakes began. With a sharp snap, rock strata far
underground broke. Then came a jolt. Eddie Dukas and his mother,
huddled on the floor, were engulfed in a swaying sensation, smooth and
vibrationless. Then the ground quivered softly. After that, there
was a pause, as of something hanging precariously for a moment at the
jagged lip of a chasm. Suddenly the pathetic hold seemed to be broken,
and the whole world was seized by a tooth-cracking chatter. A pause....
Then it began again.
For a second Eddie's mother almost lost her control. She tried to rise.
"The house!" she stammered. "It'll fall on us."
Panic and reason fought inside Eddie. "No, Mom," he gasped. "The house
has a steel frame. It'll probably hold together. Outside, we don't know
what would happen to us."
They both braced themselves for the next seismic burst. They were
both creatures of luxury, science-made. But planning, training,
psychology--science it all was, too--had given them ruggedness and
courage, a reserve of strength against hysteria--while the earth
rattled again and again.
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.
Prell's look of concern deepened. His thin face was touched by a
fleeting tenderness and worry. Part of it was surely for his sister.
Then, mostly to himself, he muttered, "There's greater magnificence to
come--if we can grow past the infancy of man; if new knowledge and old
wild impulses don't do us all to death first." He chuckled sheepishly.
"You say goodbye for me, Eddie," he urged. "I hate things like that."
Mitchell Prell was gone then, out into the weird new night. Grimly,
already half a man, young Ed Dukas watched him go, bitterness and
grief, hatred and love, mixed up inside him. But the common denominator
between himself and his uncle was the need for that future of stars and
wonder and legendary betterment.
"It _will_ happen," he promised within himself. For a second his body
was taut with dread. He had already experienced the fury that knowledge
made possible, and he could sense the potential of long silence beyond
such things--no one left, anywhere! He wondered if, because life could
go on and on now, it was more precious and death more terrible.
Fifteen minutes after his uncle's departure a spy beam was put into
operation from a mile distance. It covered the rooms of the Dukas house
and the grounds around it. The principle of the device was almost
ancient. The reflection of electro-magnetic waves. On a small screen
in a distant room the plan of a house and its furnishings was outlined
in a pale green glow. Shadowy blobs shifted with the movements of its
occupants, robot and human. Only two people were there now.
Eddie Dukas guessed that the spy beam was there, though its irregularly
changing wave length would have made it almost impossible to identify,
among the waves from many sources used for communication.
Early on the third morning after the lunar blowup the police came to
the house. They were very gentle. There was even a policewoman to ask
the questions.
Eddie's mother was cool and wary.
"Have you information as to the whereabouts of Dr. Mitchell Prell, Mrs.
Dukas?" she was asked. "We know that the last Moon rocket landed with
him aboard."
Before she could lie Eddie blurted, "He was here all that day. He's
gone now. He didn't make his destination very clear."
Eileen Dukas's eyes widened with panic and surprise. She had expected
Eddie to be more discreet.
"You have no right to question my son!" she stated coldly.
"Mrs. Dukas," she was informed, "when there is an investigation of the
deaths of two hundred million people, we have more than the right to
question anybody."
Young Ed was scared. But he felt some of the hero-impulse. Or the
desire to follow faithfully the instructions of his idol, Uncle Mitch.
"If you psych my memory, what little I know will come clearer than if I
just told it," he challenged.
This was done forthwith, out in the police car parked in the street.
When the helmet of the apparatus was removed from Eddie's head, the
police had certain comments of Mitchell Prell's to study. Possibly they
could puzzle out some of their hidden meaning. But this couldn't have
satisfied them very much.
The next day the letter Prell had mentioned arrived. At least it
could be assumed that it was the one. Uncle Mitch had managed to make
one step of his purpose anyway! Under the heading of "Vital Section,
Schaeffer Laboratories," it said: