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."