Abel Freeman answered this with a nod and a shrug. "Funny," he drawled. "Thought I saw a young feller I was sort of expecting. A congenial enemy, name of Tom Granger. Look, suppose you three sidekicks of mine get on your feet nice and easy, and walk the other way on that path. It would be safer. Not too far. Just a piece."
This might have been an armed robber's command, but Ed sensed that it was nothing like that. Without a word, he led Les and Barbara away.
There was a blinding, blue-white flash. The bench on which they had been sitting was gone—vaporized by fearful heat. Incandescent vapors rose from a big hole in the turf. When condensed and solidified, they would show little flecks of gold transmuted from soil. These were the effects of the familiar Midas Touch pistol. It used lighter atoms to form heavier ones, while it converted a little of the total mass into energy.
Freeman must have leaped away at just the right instant to avoid destruction. With astonishing agility, he was pursuing his intended murderer. As Freeman sprang to the youth's shoulders, they both fell in a heap on the walk and slid to a stop. Freeman's hand flicked, and the weapon flew into the bushes.
By then Ed and Barbara and Les were standing over the prone forms. Freeman was unruffled.
"Friends," he said, laughing, "meet up with a young one with a sharp viewpoint and lots of guts in his own way. Yep, Tom Granger."
Granger was panting heavily. His mass of black hair streamed down over his thin face. He looked scarcely older than Ed or Les, but these days that meant little. In repose, his large, dark eyes might have been limpid and idealistic; now they flashed fury. His shabbiness was affected. Certainly, in this era, there were no reasons for poverty.
Now he began to struggle again, in Freeman's grasp. Futilely, of course. "Yes, I have guts!" he declared. "I wanted to kill you, Freeman—with whatever means that are left that can still accomplish that with things like you! I wanted the incident to get into the newscast—yes, to give me public attention. And not for any stupid vanity, but for the best purpose there ever was. I wanted a chance to be listened to, while I tell what everyone must have begun to sense by now. Damn you, Freeman! Let me up!"
Abel Freeman smirked indulgently and obliged.
Granger rose lamely but gamely. "You seem to be impromptu acquaintances of this Abel Freeman," he said to Ed and his companions. "He has feelings, he thinks; he's even a good person. In some ways he's just an interesting rogue of the nineteenth century. But he's a device. And unless something is done, we'll be as obsolete as the dinosaur! Our science serves us no longer. It serves other masters, nearer to its meaning. Others than I have realized it. In every two houses this side of the world there is already an average of one of these creatures of vitaplasm. Is Earth to be kept for us, and for the joy of being human; or are we to become—basically, and no matter how humanized—mere synthetic mechanisms, trading our birthright for a few mechanical advantages?"