That same night, at his home in the suburbs, Ed Dukas read an article
that had especially attracted his attention. Could vitaplasm be
grown into forms unknown before? Could it be shaped from a plan--a
blueprint--like the metal and plastic forming a machine? Heart here,
lungs there, nervous system arranged so? Scaly armor, long, creeping
body? Or wings that fluttered through the air? The author saw no reason
why this could not happen. Monstrous things. Ed Dukas chuckled at the
melodramatic idea. But he suspected that it was far from impossible.
Young Dukas also had a caller that night.
"You said I should come to see you," Tom Granger told him when they
were alone in Ed's room. Ed was on guard at once.
His visitor's mood seemed to have changed since the afternoon.
"Sorry if I seemed out of line today," Granger said. "My motives are
good. And I didn't want to insult you."
"Thanks," Ed responded shortly. "But you didn't come here just to tell
me that. How does it happen that you're not in jail?"
"Abel Freeman discreetly pressed no charges. I wish he had. But, like
you, he just disappeared. There was only that hole in the ground--made
by the Midas Touch pistol--a feeble thing to admit for a publicity
showdown. So I kept still, and the police couldn't hold me. Fact is,
most of them seem sympathetic to what I stand for--the venerable human
privilege of walking on one's own green planet as a natural animal,
loving one's wife and children in the ancient, simple manner."
Granger was a good orator. Mysteriously, Ed was faintly moved. Perhaps
the gentle argument was too plain and clear. But Ed remained wary of
the traps of language and feeling, and of perhaps impractical dreams.
His anger sharpened. Then, knowing the possibly deadly quality of anger
in these times and wishing to counteract that everywhere, he yearned
desperately to be a master psychologist, always calm and smiling and
supremely persuasive. But he could not be like that. He was too human
and limited. Maybe too primitive.
"You still haven't told me why you came here, Granger," he said coldly.
"Why have you passed up a chance for public shouting to come and talk
to me?"
Granger smiled. "You're clever enough, Dukas, to know that to win
the nephew of Mitchell Prell over to my way of thinking could be to
my advantage before that public. Or that, if I can't make friends
with him, at least knowing him better might help. Even the latter
circumstance could be like having a finger on a whole set of
advantages when the showdown between human beings and androids finally
comes. Oh, I admire Prell! A great man--if he _was_ a man when last
seen! But his kind of greatness is poison, Dukas--though millions with
short memories have foolishly forgiven him. But if he ever turns up
again, you'll know it, and so, perhaps, will I--before he can do any
further damage. You surely must realize that he bears a double guilt:
for the blowup and for the development of vitaplasm!"
Granger's smile was savage and hopeful.
Ed laughed in his face. "You think that secretly I might hate Mitchell
Prell, eh, Granger? But he was the idol of my childhood, a whimsical,
friendly little man. So I'm stuck with loyalty. But even if I hated him
blackly, I wouldn't come over to your side. I don't like the way you
think. Until the blowup happened, it was bravo for science and empire.
Afterward, your hysterical soul was free from blame and white as snow,
and he was guilty. Maybe I judge you wrongly. I hope I do. But the way
I add it up, it's not the androids or any other new and inevitable
development that is the big danger; it's people like you, though maybe
you don't realize it. Loudmouths who stir up confusion, animosity,
hatred. Maybe I ought to kill you. Then there'd be one less spark in
the powder barrel!"
"Why don't you?" Granger mocked. "There'd still be others. And I'd be
brought back."
Ed nodded. "The benefits of our civilization," he said. "How would you
like to be an android? Does the idea scare you? You know, Granger,
some people say that, regardless of how you're returned to the living,
you're not the same person you were but only a superficially exact
duplicate."
"You know I'd always choose to be human, Dukas," Granger muttered,
looking almost terrified.
"Sure, Granger," Ed taunted. "You're not afraid of death--the knowledge
that science can restore you gives you courage. You can take the
benefits of scientific advancement, can't you? But assuming its
responsibilities is another thing."
"I'm not dodging responsibility! I'm grabbing it, Dukas! I'm striking
out for sane control. I've done things already! While I worked in the
vaults, where personal recordings are kept, certain of those little
cylinders disappeared. They won't be found again! Some men don't
deserve that much protection against mishap--among them your uncle! I'm
proud of this, and I boast of it! No, don't accuse me! Even an official
complaint would be challenged by many people and then buried in a heap
of red tape. I can be a dirty fighter, Dukas; and I'll bite and kill
and kick and holler my lungs out to keep this planet from going to the
machines!"
The wild look in Granger's face was the thing that prompted Ed to
action. The admission of the theft only emphasized the ghoulish
determination that was there. The only hope seemed in smashing that ego
out of existence--for a while at least.
Ed chuckled. "So you'd take even the essence of people's selves," he
said.
Granger's gaze didn't waver. "If every last thing I hold dear--and
which I believe most real human beings hold dear in like manner--were
in danger, I'd do anything."
"So would I," Ed said grimly.
Then he struck and struck and struck again. Blood spurted from
Granger's smashed lips and nose, as he crashed to the floor, struggled
to his feet and fell again.
There was movement at the door of the room. From behind, Ed was gripped
by a strength greater than his own. "Stop it, Ed," he was commanded
quietly. It was his father.
Through bloodied lips, Granger was explaining hurriedly, "Your son
and I disagree. He lost his temper. All I ask is that the good parts
of science--medical and so forth--be kept and the rest banned. And
that life become simple. A thing of fields and flowers, and wholesome
physical work. And not a mechanized bedlam, full of constant danger and
tension."
Granger sounded very earnest, Ed thought. Maybe he was earnest. Maybe
he was a good actor.
"Ban this, ban that!" Ed shouted. "No one ever lived happily under
the kind of artificial bans you mean, Granger! And what will you do
with the billions of people who disagree with your pretty vision?
Some of them will hate what you advocate as much as you hate existing
circumstances! And if modern weapons are once used...."
"Quiet, Ed," his father said softly. "You've assaulted your guest--one
who, as far as I can see, has the most reasonable of views. A beautiful
picture. I agree with it myself--entirely."
"Look, Dad," Ed began. "This Granger here is trying to solve today's
and tomorrow's problems with yesterday's poor answers."
Ed stopped. He had an odd thought: his synthetic father had been
created largely from his and his mother's memories, at a terrible
time of grief, when his mother's reactions had turned against the
groping toward the stars. Before that, Dad had been somewhat averse to
mechanization. But now he was distinctly more so, as if that grief and
aversion had marked him.
Jack Dukas was now medicating Granger's face with antiseptics while
Granger preached, as if from some deep font of a new wisdom: "You see,
Mr. Dukas, again, as in the past, danger is creeping up on us without
receiving serious attention. Beings that are really robots are already
controlling part of their own production. Their creation, everywhere,
should be banned or stamped out. Existing androids should be converted
to flesh or destroyed.... I'll go now. Thank you for your help. But I
think I'll get in touch with your son occasionally. He needs guidance."
Ed nodded grimly. "Perhaps I do," he said. "Maybe everyone does. You
watch me and I'll watch you, eh?"
* * * * *
During the succeeding months Ed did his best to spread his doctrine
of calm and reason, working against the agitation which he knew was
already well under way. Les Payten and Barbara Day were with him in
this. All over the world there were others, mostly unknown to them,
but with the same ideas: "Use your head.... Don't put fear before
knowledge.... Do you _know_ an android? What is his name? Maybe Miller
or Johnson? You must know a few. And do they think so differently from
yourself? Yes, there are problems and no doubt prejudice. It may even
be justified. But the answers to our difficulties must be cool-minded.
Everyone knows why."
Ed and his companions talked in this manner to their acquaintances,
spoke on street corners, sent letters to newscast agencies. And they
won many people over. The trouble was that they, and others like them,
could not reach everybody.
Their Earth remained beautiful. There were hazy hills covered with
trees; there were soaring spires. The unrest was an undercurrent.
This was a time of choosing of sides, and of buildup, while there was
a sense of helpless slipping onward toward what few could truly want.
Voices with another, harsher message were raised. Tom Granger was
hardly alone there, either. Tracts were passed out as part of their
method: _What Is Our Heritage?_; _The Right to Be Human_; _Technology
Versus Wisdom_. Perhaps directly out of such a mixture of truth and
crude thinking the assassinations began. There were thousands in
scattered places.
One day Ed Dukas pushed into a knot of curious onlookers and saw the
body of one of the first of these. There, in the same park where Ed had
first met Abel Freeman, it had been found in the early morning. A Midas
Touch blast had torn it in half.
"It's Howard Besser, a machinist who lives in the same building with
me," a man in the crowd offered. "He died once in the lunar explosion.
Now it happened again. That's no joke, even though he can be brought
back."
Ed saw the victim's torn flesh. It _looked_ like flesh. But broken
bones had little metallic glints in them. Could you avoid remembering
that, mated to like, these beings of vitaplasm could even reproduce
their kind, to help increase their number? Had persons like Tom Granger
planned even this dramatization of a difference? Bits of this flesh
still squirmed, hours after violence.
Granger had made progress. Growing public attention had won him the
privilege of orating on the newscast. It was he who had first talked
about vampires and androids--together, and to a world-wide audience. He
also accomplished an important part in winning the legal suppression of
labs creating human forms in vitaplasm.
"It was desecration," he declared in his speech. "It is a tragedy
that we could not clamp down the lid sooner. There are an estimated
seventy million of these 'improvements on nature' now in existence.
And there are many hidden establishments still producing more. Can we
ever destroy them all? It is criminal to lock a human soul in such
substance. If, of course, the soul truly remains human, as it was meant
to be...."
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.