People Minus X

by Raymond Z. Gallun

Ed Dukas rode on through the dusk in Loman's car, still clinging to the fabric at the shoulder of his inert friend, Les Payten. The sky still flickered—warning barrages, not yet aimed to kill. An aircraft swooped, its weapons shredding a high-flying horror that was not of metal. Some had been destroyed, but others always came—though they never had been truly numerous. A few other cars sped along the road—persons fleeing the dangerous congestion of the City.

Ed wondered if the steady ping ping ping in his quartz-chip radio was the ultra-sonic evidence of a spy beam in action, perhaps meant to trace Loman's course? At last the forces of law might do that to their own, if some of them disagreed with Loman's zeal or suspected that it had become too extreme. Chief Bronson, for one, had seemed a likable man. Besides, even after a mind probe, many would mistrust an android.

Ed reasoned that this must be a flight to a hide-out, which he had to see.

The car careened for a mile along a narrow side road, where, behind high banks, the pinging stopped. Had Loman counted on their shielding effect? Deeper in the woods, a block of undergrowth folded upward on a hinge, and the car rolled inside. Then the great trap door closed behind it. Ed was not surprised even by so elaborate a retreat as this. Now, with his neutronic aura cut off, Loman bore Les through a low doorway, into a great, low chamber fused out of bedrock. Could Loman and Mitchell Prell be as alike as this in their choice of secret places? Queer—and yet not so queer. Both were scientists. Prell had invaded the field of biology and Loman, in his original incarnation as Ronald Payten, had been a biologist from the start.

Ed might have attacked, now that Loman's aura was inactive. But it could be restored in an instant. Better to wait. A clearer chance might well come. His enemy might even be trying to lure any small, unseen intruder close to the coils of the aura.

Besides, in the soft artificial light, answers lay—answers that Ed had only dimly suspected, in spite of Loman's background. Since he had learned who Loman was, there hadn't been time enough for him to understand. But now the solution to a dreadful mystery came easily, because Ed could intrude here unseen.

There were vats here, too, vaster than any Ed had ever seen from any viewpoint and webbed with their attendant apparatus. Beneath the glossy surface of the fluid, like smooth oceans in the floor, various shapes were visible—all devilish but half transparent in their undeveloped state, their smooth plates of vitaplasm muscle and scale showing, but already alive and in slight, undulating motion. And no doubt these things were only in the embryonic state. They could grow much huger after being set free to hide and kill. Here, then, was the devil's brewpot of creation. Here the first slithering synthetic monsters must have been blueprinted and created. It was Ronald Payten's work—the product of his skill and his secret quirks. Madness in vitaplasm, to help build hate between android and man and bring the conflict to a climax.

And there was more. Against one wall was the plunder of Mitchell Prell's laboratory on Mars—or most of it. The tanks were empty. But on a table stood the larger microscope, as if what could be seen through its eye-piece had been under examination. Perhaps the doll-like shape, the other vats, the machine shop and that tiny electron microscope were still there. And what lay at a still lower size level. Across such a void of distance, Ed Dukas could not see such detail. But he felt the mingling of hope and frustration. No path back to normal circumstances was here, yet. And the time was certainly not ripe—if it would ever come. Besides, did all of him really want to return, even if part of him fairly ached for it?

Carter Loman, or Ronald Payten, bent close to Les, his pronged helmet and wide face, beyond the curve of plastic and radiation shielding, like an ugly world in the sky. But if you had the mind to notice, perhaps Loman's expression was almost gentle just then. His voice came to Ed's senses as a subdued and modulated quake: "Lester! Wake up! I didn't hit you that hard."

Les seemed to have been lowered onto a couch of some kind. Perhaps he had already regained consciousness moments ago and had since been bent on quiet scrutiny of his surroundings, seeking out comprehension and the core of his own feelings. Ed could guess at some of this: an enigma revealed; Ronald Payten—creator of monsters; Les Payten's pseudo-father. Then, for Les, horror, shame, fury.