by Earl
Moore tuned his television screen carefully. Now he would carry on as Dennis Smith, living a new life by proxy. The scene, as viewed through the bio-man’s eyes, was that of a squad-car, with Lewis to the left and Carrol at the right.
Dennis Smith glanced at his companions. Lewis was still red-faced, uncomfortable, undoubtedly cursing himself under his breath for a complete fool. Carroll was quiet, listless, avoiding his eyes.
Smith reached for her hand. She half drew hers away, uncertainly. She looted at him questioningly.
Smith whispered in her ear, above the motor’s hum. “I’m sorry about before, on the verandah. Forgive me, Carroll?”
Her eyes were on him searchingly. She saw only sincerity, and more. She squeezed his hand, smiling in answer. Her head leaned toward his shoulder.
Moore, alias Smith, was not through playing with Carroll. Let her fall completely for an artificial man! Let her rush headlong forward, and be one day cast aside, as she had cast aside Moore.
But her head failed to reach his shoulder. She checked the impulsive movement herself. At the same time she slowly pulled her hand from Smith’s.
“Carroll!” he said with an injured air. “I’m sincere! I don’t hold it against you that you accused me of being Moore. What’s wrong?”
“I—I don’t know,” she murmured tonelessly. Her voice changed. “He looked so lonely! So much in need of—me!”
Smith started. He was about to speak, but there was interruption.
COMMISSIONER LEWIS had stiffened, listening to the squad radio’s constant drone. The announcer’s voice had suddenly become sharp, tense.
“Attention, ah cars! Go to scene of Moore’s explosion. The heavy mist hanging within the pit for the past year has begun to roll out in huge quantities. A rancher’s home was engulfed. The rancher, his wife and four sons have failed to come out. No cattle have escaped alive.
“The nature of the poisonous mist is unknown, as yet. Scientists from several cities are rushing to the scene. All police within range of this call go there immediately, to help in confining the mist. Warning—use extreme caution!”
Lewis’ voice barked to the driver. “Sounds like an interstate emergency. Head for the scene.”
The driver slewed the car around and took the next cross highway west. But first calling for a halt, Lewis motioned his two passengers out.
“I want to go along—” Smith remonstrated.
“Impossible,” Lewis snapped. “Get a lift somewhere and take a train back to California.”
The squad car sped away. Alone on the highway with the girl, Smith cursed and then watched a pair of headlights approaching from the opposite direction. He stepped in the road and flagged the car down. A man stuck his head from the window.
“How about a lift?” Smith asked. “In the other direction?”
The man stared. “Are you crazy? I’m not going to turn around and—”
“Then you’ll stay here!”
Smith barked the words. At the same time he jerked open the car door and pulled the struggling man out. Enraged, the car-owner pulled free and swung his fist. He was a large, powerful man, quick on his feet and obviously handy with fists.
The blow might have knocked any other man cold. The bio-man’s head barely snapped back slightly. Knuckles had cut themselves against a hard, adamant chin. With a short laugh, Smith tapped him back. The blow seemed effortless. But the man’s eyes went glassy and he fell forward.
Smith caught his tumbling form, picked him up in his arms, and carried him easily as a child to the grassy edge of the road. Then the magnificent body leaped back for the car.
Carroll had watched the episode in amazement. Now she leaped in the car herself, beside him.
“Get out!” he snapped. “There may be danger ahead.”
“I’m going along,” the girl snapped back. “I must—I tell you I must.” She bit her lips.
Smith stared for a moment, then slammed the car in gear and roared away.
“You acted like a maniac, taking the car,” Carroll said after a while. “Why are you so interested in that mist from Moore’s explosion?”
“Because I think it may be a worldwide menace!”
The girl gasped, looking at his grim-set lips.
Back before his controls, Moore’s lips were just as grim-set. All the past episode was wiped from his mind. All his malicious playing of a game of revenge. This was no game now. This was stark peril—for the whole world!
And he, again, was the cause of it.
Moore alone knew what the mist was. He had revisited the pit once, before Wheeler had come. He had been vaguely alarmed then. But after the arrival of Wheeler, and the task of training the proxy for its role, Moore had forgotten the pit and its strange vapors.
An hour later, they neared the scene. Smith had driven at what seemed a reckless pace, at the powerful car’s top speed. But the strong fingers, fast reflexes, and sheer strength of his superb body had handled the car with ease.
Brakes squealed as he stopped before a group of police cars. When he leaped out, a figure strode toward him from the uniformed men. It was Lewis.
“You, Smith?” The commissioner looked angry. “No civilians allowed here. This is a grave emergency.”
“Graver than you know,” Smith retorted. “What’s going on?”
Instead of reiterating the command to go, Lewis explained. He had the air of a frightened man who had to talk to someone.
“The rancher was found staggering around an hour ago. He had seen the mist coming, tried to hustle his family away. It caught them all, though. He saw them die in horrible convulsions. Saw their flesh fall from their bones! He managed to run out of the mist edges. He gasped out his story to those who found him, then died. When they tried to move him, his flesh came away like soggy dough—”
Lewis gestured. Smith saw the body in the light of cars’ headlights. Or what was left of a body—a skeleton from which most of the flesh had sloughed away.
A bearded man stood over it, muttering.
“Impossible!” he kept saying. “There is no known disease, or gas, or any agent that can cause flesh to drop from the bones as if cooked off!”
“Radioactivity!” Smith spat out at the scientist. “The mist is a radioactive gas, more potent than radium. Its rays bum all flesh instantly.”
“Radioactivity!” the little scientist gasped. “That’s it!” Horror swept over his face. “The mist is rolling out of the pit in a flood. It will engulf the next town!”
“It will engulf the whole world, in time,” Smith said.
They stared at him, and then turned to the west.
The pit was five miles away. Over it billowed a glowing, phosphorescent cloud that was slowly creeping out over the surrounding territory. Somewhere in the pit, vast new quantities of the terrible radio-vapor were streaming forth.
“We’ll stop it,” the scientist said, with a hollow confidence. “But first we’re locating the source of the gas. We sent a man in a sealed diving suit, with a tank of oxygen on his back. When he finds the source, we’ll know what to do—”
“You fool!” Smith grasped the little man’s arm, squeezing. “That gas will go through anything—anything! He’s doomed—”
A shout came from the police group. Several men held the limp end of a rope. They hauled it in now. Ten minutes later, the diving suit arrived. A gasp of horror went up. It was charred, rotting. No one dared look in, at what lay there.
“Good God!” whispered the scientist. “Good God! It’s radioactivity, all right. And if that gas sweeps the world, poisons all the atmosphere—what can we do?” He clutched at Smith’s arm, moaning. “How can we stop it?”
VI
SOMEHOW they all turned to Dennis Smith. His strong features, powerful body, and calm manner labeled him a leader, a man to follow.
“Stop it?” Smith repeated slowly. And then they shrank back a little at the diabolical gleam in his eye.
Stop it—why? Moore a
sked himself that. Why not let the gas roll out over Earth and destroy every living thing? Destroy the world that had unfeelingly trampled his soul to dust?
Only for a moment the blazing, Satanic thought ground through his mind. It was succeeded by utter remorse. And then a mental groan.
Were the jealous gods punishing him for seeking one of the greater secrets of the universe? They had destroyed the laboratory in which had spawned the first groping toward that source of illimitable power which stoked the fiery suns of space—atomic power. Were they now determined to wipe out the troublesome pebble of Earth entirely, with its inquisitive, prying little minds?
So it almost seemed. And he, Moore, had been the one to place Earth in jeopardy. On his soul it rested. This was no longer a question of society’s crime against him. This was death for all mankind!
What could be done? No man could race into that blinding, choking, lethal gas cloud and come out alive.
No man!
But what of Dennis Smith, the proxy, and its great, wonderful body? . . .
Dennis Smith straightened up. His voice barked authoritatively.
“Batteries! Get all the batteries from the cars. Rip them apart. Take out the lead plates and heap them together. Hurry!”
Lewis and the police stared uncertainly. But the scientist nodded. “Lead—I see! Hurry with those batteries! I think this man knows what he’s doing.”
Fifteen minutes later a pile of lead battery plates lay before Smith. He took off all his clothes, standing naked. Ripping the trousers down the seams, he formed a bag and tossed the plates within, slinging the load over his shoulder.
The men watched, gasping. Any of them would have broken his back trying to lift the burden. Dennis Smith carried it as though it were a bag of feathers. Muscles stood out like cords over his magnificent body.
Without a word, he stalked toward the mist.
“You can’t go in there like that!” Lewis protested. “You won’t come out alive—”
Smith flung words over his shoulder.
“If I don’t, get all the lead you can. Millions of tons of it. Make a wall of it around the pit. It will be the only hope—if it isn’t too late by then!”
And he stalked on.
Smith reached the edges of the slowly spreading cloud of glowing gas and plunged in. Would he make it? Moore didn’t know. He sent the proxy oh, toward highly probable doom. And with it he sent all his chances of breaking his exile. If the bio-man failed to return, Moore faced a lifetime of bitter loneliness. He could never fashion another bio-man. Only the dead genius of Jed Wheeler could do that.
Smith went on. His eyes and ears, more than humanly sharp, kept constant vigilance. The gas was bright, stinging, blocking vision for more than a few feet ahead. A steady, increasing hiss sounded ahead.
Suddenly his sharp ears heard a sound back of him. A human cry!
He whirled, then dropped his bag and leaped back. He caught Carroll in his arms, just as she fell with a choking gasp. She had stumbled after him into the mist. Her clothing was already smoldering as radioactive rays drilled through and through.
“Carroll, you little fool—”
“I had to follow you, Dennis!” she mumbled, as if in a feverish delirium. “I love you. I want to die with you.”
“But I may not die—”
She hardly seemed to hear, sinking fast into a coma. “Want to be with you always. Love you—Bruce!”
She went limp.
Bruce l Had she said that name last, or had he heard wrong? She had followed Smith into the mist, and yet in her last breath before fainting had said—Bruce! Did it mean—
His thoughts broke off. No time for such trifling conjecture.
Smith was running, with the unconscious girl over his shoulder. Safely out of the mist, he put her in the arms of police, with orders to revive her and then hold her from running in again.
Then the bio-man raced back into the mist, at a faster pace than any human runner had ever achieved. He picked up the bag of leaden plates and continued his rim. Even with the crushing burden, his flying legs propelled him over the rough, uncertain, veiled terrain faster than the hundred-yard dash had ever been run.
Relentlessly, Moore drove his proxy. Over the edge of the pit, down the slope, five miles to the center point of the great crater. Tirelessly, the legs pumped, the strong heart beat, the lungs sucked in air. Jed Wheeler himself had not known what a super-being he created from the test-tube.
The lungs also sucked in radioactive gases. Their slow, searing bite began to damage the tissue. And the bioman’s skin began to turn red as gimlet rays ate inward. Would even the super-strong bio-man’s body stand against this killing environment?
“We must!” Moore was half moaning, back before his controls.
“We must,” Dennis Smith roared at the mists, plunging on.
He did. Or they did. Moore felt as though he himself were there, running that incredible marathon. Smith’s body and his mind—together they had made it.
THE hissing vapors were thickest at the center of the pit. Smith could see no more than five feet. But he made out the smoldering, smoking mass, puffing jets of radioactive gas upward like a geyser.
He knew he would find that. Under his cyclotron, he had produced bits of disintegrating matter. The explosion had blown all into atoms—except perhaps a little speck of still-disintegrating matter. This had nestled into the ground, like a seed. It had smoldered for a year. Perhaps the constant cosmic rays had acted like rain, nourishing the atomic spark.
Suddenly, after a year, it had blossomed into open flame. A supernal flame that called everything its fuel. Everything made of atoms. And all Earth was made of atoms.
Water to euench it? He laughed. Water was made of atoms that would burn fiercely in this atomic furnace. And so was carbon dioxide, carbon tetrachloride, and all ordinary agents of fire-fighting.
Only one thing might stop this budding world-flame. It went back to a fundamental rule of combustion, including the combustion of life.
No fire could burn its own ashes.
Lead metal was the ashes. All radioactive elements died out eventually into cold, dead lead. Even this atomic flame burned the lighter elements into the heavier one of lead, giving off excess energy. Left alone, the super-fire would burn all Earth and only a shrunken lump of lead would circle endlessly around the sun.
Smith spent little time thinking of these things.
Rapidly he worked. He shredded the lead-oxide battery plates in his strong fingers and strewed them over the smoldering mass. It was about three feet in area. Then, with a whole plate, he dug the coals up and mixed them thoroughly with more sprinkled lead oxide.
He watched with agonized eyes.
Would it work? Was there enough lead to choke off this malignant patch of spreading fire? Or would it worm through, eat greedily into surrounding matter, and swiftly expand out over the pit, and state, and country? Then burn eagerly into the ocean and be carried as a firebrand to all the continents, with the whole world its prey, eating inward finally to the heart of the globe?
He let out a choked cry of triumph, a few minutes later.
The glow had dimmed. The atomic-fire was damping! The geyser of byproduct radioactive gas pouring upward drooped.
It had worked!
Smith stumbled away. No need to stay and watch. The embers would take hours to finally blink out. There was still a chance to save himself. A slim chance. In a sudden tide, pain overwhelmed him. His skin was on fire. His bones felt hollow, eaten. Every muscle had turned to limp rubber.
Moore felt the pain, for telepathy carried that across.
“Good work, old boy!” he found himself groaning. “We did it, all right. Now keep going. Don’t give up. It won’t be long now—”
Abruptly he stopped. And abruptly the bio-man stopped. It stood still in the still-hanging mists, with radioactive fires burning into it viciously.
“Stay there and burn,” Moore was suddenly screec
hing. “Why should I save you? Carroll loves you—your fine, great body. Stay and burn, I say!”
Moore knew he was half mad. Jealousy, again. Jealous of a proxy, a biological robot. Jealous because the eyes of a girl looked upon it with the glow of love she had denied Moore years ago, and would deny him now because of the being known as Dennis Smith.
“But God,” Moore groaned, then, “if you stay there and burn, my last hope of proxy life is gone!”
It was all tragic, mad, insane. No man in all history had been faced with this soul-stabbing choice.
What should he do? How could his spinning mind ever solve this damnable maze of fate—
MOORE gasped. The front door had opened. Previous to that, a car’s motor had roared into the yard, stopping with shrieking brakes. Footsteps came into the room. The light, short steps of a woman.
“Carroll!” he gulped.
She stood in the doorway. Her quick glance took in the tele-radio apparatus, the view as seen through Dennis Smith’s eyes.
“I thought so!” she cried. “You’re Dennis Smith. Dennis Smith is you. No matter how crazy it seems, Dennis Smith is some kind of proxy. Isn’t that true, Bruce?”
Moore nodded. No chance to fool her again. The secret was out—at least with her. “Dennis Smith is a biological robot, a laboratory man, run by telepathy. Run by my mind. We are one.”
He glared at her then.
“And you love him!” he laughed. “You love a test-tube dummy. A thing! A piece of animated clay. I’m glad you found out, Carroll. You’ll burn with shame every night for the rest of your life—”
He stopped.
She was staring at him pityingly, slowly shaking her head.
“Did it hurt so much?” she murmured.
She moved toward him.
“I made a mistake, that time years ago. I was young, headstrong. You poor, stupid man! You think I love Dennis Smith. But I saw you in him all the time. It’s you—you! Not a proxy who merely happens to express your personality. Your every gesture, mannerism, thought was in him, behind that body that meant nothing—” She had reached near him. Moore came to his feet. And the kiss that burned his lips held all the promise that the girl had expressed once before—even though to a proxy.
