Chapter VIII

Ed and Barbara and Prell came to the parting of the ways sooner than they had intended. Without instruments, it was hard to judge velocity. They did not use their Midas Touch cylinders quite long enough to check speed sufficiently as they approached the great blue-green planet with its blurred ring. They hit the atmosphere, not really fast, but fast enough. Briefly, sound was reborn around them in a shrieking whistle, like a vast, thin wind. They tumbled over and over, and the strand that kept them together was broken. Tumultuous currents of the high ionosphere separated and scattered them as they plummeted lower.

Ed was unhurt. And did he hear--more in his imagination than his ears, here in the muffling semi-vacuum--a distant laugh and shout: “It’s all right, Eddie...”? The impression faded away, like the voice of some gay sprite vanishing. He’d thought before of losing Barbara. Now they were two specks, separated from each other in the infinity of the terrestrial atmosphere. Even with the logic of plan and method, there was still some unbelief about how they would ever find each other again.

Using his radio, he tried to call. But there was no answer. The microscopic instrument could pick up messages from powerful stations millions of miles away. But for transmission, its range and that of those like it had to be ridiculously short: perhaps a score of yards--a fair distance in proportionate units.

Ed was drifting now, alone and high, as his wife and uncle must be, too. Well, they’d meant this to happen soon anyway. So there was no real difference, was there? Get down to work quickly, down to the surface, where the high clouds seemed to lie flat on the gray Atlantic and on the nearby greenery of the continent. Ed’s cylinder flamed, forcing him lower toward the City. His first chosen task was to find Carter Loman, a key enemy. Prell’s objective was Tom Granger; then he would try to contact the androids, perhaps through Abel Freeman. And Barbara was to try to spike the trigger of violence by whatever means she could. That, in fact, was the greatest purpose of them all.

Downdrafts aided Ed’s descent, while he listened to his quartz-chip radio. Was one who figured as prominently as Loman in the strained news of the day ever difficult to find? Ed did not anticipate too much trouble in locating him. Many people would know where Loman was and mention of the place would be frequent. Crowds would follow him everywhere.

As Ed watched a wolfish patrol of armed spacecraft, flying low on their atmospheric foils, the information came easily enough: “ ... Carter Loman’s quarters at the Three Worlds Hotel are constantly under guard.”

Ed was far more proficient now in getting around swiftly in the region of smallness. Erratically but effectively, using currents of air and the thrust of his Midas Touch blast, he descended toward a sky-piercing tower. He drifted into the doorway of the hotel’s sumptuous lobby, marred now by the grim additions of radiation shields. For a few minutes Ed perched on the reception desk; he was less noticeable there than a fleck of cigarette ash.

There were constant inquiries for Loman, by telephone and in person, made mostly by newscast men. The clerks fended them off briskly. But soon there came whispered thunder, so low that it was almost audible to Ed as sound and not merely sensible as a heavy vibration: “More mail for Mr. Loman...”

The spark of Ed’s propelling cylinder was almost too small to see as he jetted to the heavy bundle of letters and rode up with the attendant, past the guards, and slid with a skittering envelope through a mail slot, and into Carter Loman’s presence.

He was sprawled on a bed and was clad in full vacuum armor of a type heavier than would have been necessary even on a dead world. It was pronged with special details as well: filaments, like parts of the insides of a Midas Touch weapon. Hovering over the vast shape, Ed felt the hard, stinging punch of a few scattered neutrons hitting his body before he ventured too close. Even though his own life was subatomic in principle, enough of those infinitesimal pellets could kill him. Loman had evidently grown wary and nervous, guessing with shrewd imagination what dangers he might now face. In addition to his massive costume, this android who hated his kind was wearing an aura of low-speed neutrons, constantly being projected from the filaments on his armor. Just then, the savagery inside Ed felt its bitter frustration. Loman even mistrusted the ban on space travel.

The enormous face beneath him, framed beyond the glaze of a helmet window, did not look at ease. Loman was muttering. He must have been at it, off and on, for a long time: “I wouldn’t be surprised if you were around, Prell. Or even you, Dukas. I was right! I know all about your little self, Prell. It was all in your dead brain. You think you’ll play a reverse David against Goliath, eh? If blasting out your lab didn’t kill you...”

No, Ed Dukas was not so easily defeated. The aura of neutrons thrown out only by scattered filaments was probably not of continuous intensity. At certain points there might well be chinks in it, at which time he could slip to close quarters without having his own nuclear metabolism speeded up to the point of his destruction. But before he did anything final, he had to find out where Prell’s stolen equipment was.

Ed felt the whir of the air-filtering apparatus in the room and smiled. And there was a television globe nearby. Ed could have found ways, now, to make his own tiny voice audible to his enemy and to challenge him. But Ed decided against this for the present. He mustn’t waste precious time, yet he suspected that he could depend on the restlessness of a nervous foe not to wait here quietly very long.

Again he was right. Perched on a ledge made by an irregularity of the wall, Ed waited less than five minutes before Carter Loman jumped up from the bed, cursed, and dashed from the room. Ed’s Midas Touch cylinder reddened in his hand as he jetted after him. Of firmer flesh than other men, Loman hurried untiring, even in his massive armor and plastic helmet, down a back stairs, passing a hundred levels.

Then he was in a small, powerful car racing along a civic speedway that Ed remembered well. Clinging to plush that was like a dense forest under him, Ed remained undislodged by the tornadoes of air that came from speed.

Around him passed beauty that he used to know, expanded so enormously that much of the familiar mood of it was lost; and he himself seemed cut off from it, like a ghost coming back. But there was other, perhaps greater beauty, too--closer to the heart of what he was now. There’d been a controlled shower induced by the weather towers. Now the sun shone again, and the air sparkled, not with dust, but with countless tiny droplets of moisture--crystal globes, clear as lenses, but breaking the sunshine into brilliant prismatic hues.

Ed’s brief rambling of mind ended when Loman did an odd thing. He stopped in Ed’s old neighborhood, after having passed a half-dozen road blocks where uniformed men had entrenched themselves, covering their ugly vehicles with cut branches. Loman had only flashed his Interworld Security badge at each post, to receive respectful permission to go on.

Loman stopped his car abruptly before a house adjacent to Ed’s own--one Ed knew well. But Ed had an odd feeling that this was not as strange as it seemed. This suburb, close to the City, harbored many of the noted and notorious. Besides, many recent turbulent events had been centered within these few hundred square miles. And Loman had been in the neighborhood before, in the company of Police Chief Bronson. Also, had there always been something disturbingly familiar about Loman’s manner?

Ed tingled at the unraveling of an enigma, as Loman hurried up the walk to the house. Loman found the door locked, but if this annoyed him, it stopped him not at all. An armored shoulder, backed up by the muscles of his kind--their power rarely demonstrated publicly--battered the door to splinters and Loman stepped through.

Ed followed him--as unobtrusive as part of the atmosphere--up a stairway and into a pleasant student room seen in colossal scale.

It was Les Payten’s room which had thus been invaded without ceremony. Nor was the intruding colossus the least abashed that the giant Les, somewhat thinned down and pallid after his long convalescence from a visit to Abel Freeman, was present.

Ed saw his old friend’s startled expression, then felt the vibration of his words: “Chummy, aren’t you, bursting in like this? The police, eh? What have I done? My God, I’ve seen your picture! You’re Loman!”

The other giant’s smirk was half gentle, half bullishly humorous. “That’s my name--if you prefer,” he said. “I’ve had you watched, Lester Payten, for various reasons. You’ve been ill. Then why do you stay so close to what may become the battle lines? You’re an odd guy, Lester. Too much fear, courage and conscience. Wanting to be a hero, but half a martyr. Recently one of the ‘reasonable’ kind. Soon there won’t be any of those left. Not when a few more see those they love torn open, crisped or perhaps crushed by created things more hideous than Tyrannosaurus Rex. Such facts destroy the folly of thoughtfulness. And, good! For in that way the showdown comes against another kind of slime that desecrates the form of man! You’re a mixed-up kid, Lester--maybe even thinking of some old companions. But in your heart you know that you’re all human. Me, I’m still sentimental, so I had to come to you at last. You ought to be safe among the asteroids, like your timid mother.”

Being an audience to these comments, Ed’s first puzzlement changed slowly toward comprehension of a weird truth. Drifting with the air molecules near the center of the room, he watched Les Payten sitting quietly at his desk, his look also showing that he was at the fringe of understanding. But maybe his mind half refused to plunge into the starkness of fact beyond. Too much had become possible. Sometimes it might be a land too strange for human wits.

Maybe primitive terror prompted Les to sudden violence. Or it was the sickening cynicism in Loman’s words. In a flash of movement Les tried to get a weapon from his desk. Confronted by a human being, he might have succeeded. But Loman even dared, first, to shut off the neutronic aura around his armor, so as not to burn or kill the one he had come to see. Then quick fingers latched onto Les’s wrists. Les fought with all his might but was pushed down on the floor. Dazed, he looked up at his conqueror.

“Yes, your memory-man father killed himself,” Loman said. “But he could always return by recording, couldn’t he? Before that, it was all arranged--with many who sympathized with the human cause. The mind probe showed that my expressed views were truthful. Interworld Security could use someone who was clever, unknown, and supremely active. Umhm-m--maybe I’m even harder than they hoped! Yes, I’m still an android, Les, because I have to be strong for battle. I hardly care who learns of it now, because the fight is sure to come. But I’ll be a man again, when and if I can. And, like a man, I love my son. Things will become very difficult soon, Lester. So I want you with me.”

Loman’s heavy growl might have sounded paternal to common ears. But he capped it with a light tap to Les’s jaw. Les crumpled. For a moment this fantastic echo of his original sire, changed in face and form, stood over him, an armored demon by any standard.