People Minus X

by Raymond Z. Gallun

Maybe the three giants even heard her, through the mike and sound cone. But they would know, anyway.

From the twilight of the jar's shadow, Ed could still see into the immensity of the room. The colossi were donning their heavy gear.

The vibration had become a gigantic rattle with creaking, crackling overtones, audible only to micro-ears. Ed felt almost shaken apart and dazed by it. Any instant now the drill would break through into the room. But he didn't anticipate much real trouble. It wasn't reasonable. He felt fairly sure that it was the police who had followed his larger self here. They had their duty to give protection, not harm. Their power might be warped by the fears and prejudices of the times, but not beyond reason.

He knew that there would be a jolt when the drill came through. So he scrambled over to the pallet and pulled from it a long bit of floss, thicker to him than a rope. Quickly he bent one end around his waist and knotted it, and fastened the middle of it around Barbara. The far end he passed to his uncle.

"Tie on!" he shouted. "So we don't get separated. And hold tight to anything solid!"

The break-through came, and it was not too bad. It felt like a monster ram hitting the world one sharp, stinging blow; then the spinning mountain of the super-hardened drill bit—all of a yard across, it must have been—braked quickly to stationary. There was no tumultuous outrush of air of earthly composition and pressure. The drill hole had evidently been capped.

Ed saw the colossi there in the room—the originals of himself, his wife and his uncle—grimly clad for Mars. They had taken up positions a little behind this obstacle or that, not ready to trust entirely but more or less sure. He knew how it was—particularly with his other identity. There had to be this tense moment before someone, known or unknown, spoke. They were armed. At the hip that was still his own in a way hung the Midas Touch pistol that he remembered, though it was expanded seemingly a million fold.

The outcome was different from what he could have hoped or expected. There was no voice of challenge or greeting from behind the drill. You could not see beyond the dark space around its jagged rim. There was only perhaps a small, intuitive warning before the neutrons of another Midas Touch struck, and a few of the atoms of metal and flesh and stone exploded in a narrow, sweeping curve, making a flash in which all visible details became lost and a volume of sound and quaking in a confined space that, of itself, could have killed.

The little Ed Dukas could be proud of his forerunner, for he was quick enough to have half drawn his own Midas Touch, just as the blaze of light came.

It didn't do any good. The lesser Ed's android consciousness was rugged enough not to be lost, even as he and his companions, tethered like beads on a string, were sucked upward into the swirling dust of the atmosphere. So he saw how the Midas Touch, discharged from behind the drill, cut slantingly, like a sword blade, across the room, its narrow beam slicing through the three giants almost simultaneously. Then, for a moment, coherence of impression was lost in swirl and glare and tumbling motion. But when the tumult quieted slightly and he floated on choppy air currents, he saw the crumpled, mountainous forms. Mitchell Prell—colossal version—had been chopped in two at the waist. The heads and shoulders of the other two giants had ceased to be.