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!"