People Minus X

by Raymond Z. Gallun

Les had spoken calmly and firmly. But Ed sensed the bitterness and uncertainty that lurked beneath the words.

"I won't argue, Les," he answered. "But when I'm thinking straight, the truth to me is still as it was. In championing man above android, or vice versa, you can only come to zero. Only in fair play between them is there a chance. So, if the urge ever comes over you, you might still do me a favor. Across this room is a microscope and attached equipment that are vital to me and to Barbara, who is like me, somewhere. Guard it, Les. No place that you could reach is perhaps truly safe for it. But I was thinking that if you could gamble again—as we all must—you might take it to Abel Freeman. I know that you were almost killed in his camp, Les. But I believe that the old reprobate is fundamentally sound and not as bitterly against such a device as some human beings might be. Thanks if you consider it, Les."

Still unseen by his one-time friend, Ed jetted to the vaulted ceiling and escaped through a ventilator pipe that emerged among concealing bushes. He rose above the trees, and a night wind pushed him on, while he listened to the quartz chip he carried. His first impulse now was to locate Tom Granger as his next candidate for silence.

It was not necessary. The news was on the air: "Granger was stricken in his quarters just before eight o'clock. The cause is not yet clear. He had just begun to write his new speech: 'I am frightened. We are all frightened. But this can change nothing of our purpose. In vitaplasm we are confronted by a vampirish fact: an identity of face masking a difference of spirit. A treachery. A slow, dreadful encroachment....'"

Prell had gotten to Granger, then. If this was murder, maybe it was justified—if Earth was one per cent less in danger with one exhorter quieted, for a while if not forever. But what had been accomplished so far was small beside the threat that had been stirred up in many minds and machines across the countryside.

The sky was heavy with thickening clouds. Weather Control, working through its ionic towers had already been smashed. The night was alternately a Stygian hole or a glare-lit holocaust full of battering vibrations which might mean that real battle had already begun. So far, only neutron streams were being used. Where a mountain peak was hit there would be a blaze of light that even an android had better not look at. Then another mountain, looming over a different fortified line, would flare up and glow with moving lava. And the power that energized the weapons was the same as that which could reach the stars.

Rising high and jetting forward with his Midas Touch, Ed went to work. He thought of Abel Freeman's camp, which lay somewhere beyond the carpet of flaming woods which flanked one slope. But that was not his immediate destination now. He had dived for a power station house in a great trailer—and did it matter whether it belonged to the older race or the newer? He took great risks getting into its busy vitals. The constricting pressure of space warps, creating a gravity pressure of billions of tons to the square inch, eased gradually. A marble-sized bit of super-dense matter, crushed and compressed by the force and hidden by its opaqueness, began to expand to meter-wide size and to lose its blinding heat and fury as the processes within it stopped. Soon the power plant, turning out a flood of electricity out of all proportion to its small size, ceased to function. Scattered atoms of hydrogen and lithium became inert.

There was no easily visible cause for the breakdown, until puzzled eyes found minute holes burned in vacuum tubes, allowing air to enter, oxidizing grids and filaments and stopping their action.

Two great weapons died, their energy cut off. But the power stations themselves were the far greater threat, for they harbored that sun-stuff within them. Now the controls of one, which some enraged person might contrive to push too far in spite of the watchfulness of others, were temporarily useless.

Working both sides of the line, Ed sabotaged another energy source, and another. Then he lost count, not because of a high score, but because heat and radiation had fogged his mind somewhat. Yet he kept at his labors because there was no other way. Within every square mile there was enough potential power to end his planet.