People Minus X

by Raymond Z. Gallun

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.

The sun had set. From the twilight beyond the window came blue flashes, light heat lightning, off toward the wooded hills. They glinted on Loman's plastic face window, which had muffled his words scarcely at all. Loman seemed to match those flickers: science misused; wisdom, once reached for so carefully, fading; the collected armaments, improvised quickly by a master technology hidden in tunnel and on mountain-top, by both sides. And the guts of a star ship engine perverted. Once, on a lost Moon, a thing like that had exploded, just by error or chance. There had been no wild speeches to bring it about. Nor any panic. And there had been no Lomans to help in a more savage way.

Unless driving impulses were checked, the end could come this very night. Ed even wondered if he might waste valuable time sticking close to Loman any longer. Would it lead to more answers, as he had felt it must? Well, he still was sure of that, and Loman also seemed driven by haste. So Ed alighted on Les's shoulder and burrowed into the cloth. It was the safest thing to do. For whatever weapon might be used, it probably would not be directed at Les.

Loman picked up the unconscious form and dashed out to his car. There followed a wild ride along winding roads through the woods. Distantly, on a hilltop, Ed saw a metal framework slanting skyward. It held a cylinder whose neutron beam could level anything. But its power supply could mean complete destruction in a last resort to madness, for revenge—if someone lost control of himself, smashed the safety stops on controls, pushed levers a little beyond them.

There were wrecks on the road. Horror had been exchanged already, as refugees fled the City. Beside one broken car, half fused to a puddle of fire lay the body of a child, briefly glimpsed. And Ed detected a man's cries and protests, flung wildly at the sky from among the shadowy trees. Or could it have come just as well from an android throat?

If it was Jones of common human clay or Smith, an android, could it make any difference? Yet it was an old thing—a reasonable man's anguish against wrong.

Still, was it hard to see a sequel, when something snapped in the brain? A kind of explosion. Then, before horror and rage, immortality or death could become equally meaningless. Good sense and kindness, once clung to desperately, could then become zero, and Earth, sky and humanity empty phantoms. Then could you picture the wronged one awaiting someone of the other kind? Could you picture him aiming his own weapon at another car and holding its trigger down until his own curses were lost in the roar of incandescence?