Anti-Man

XV

I should have felt some tremendous elation, I suppose. I had found out that He was, after all, everything that He claimed to be, that He did want to help mankind, that He was going to be a great benefit to us. I was standing on the threshold of a revolution, the likes of which the world had never before seen, and I could not summon up enough excitement to make a dog wag its tail. Perhaps it was because, in showing me what wonders lay ahead for Man, He had also shown me that Man was, in essence, a very small portion of things, a piece of a painting by a being so far superior, so much his intellectual master, that he could never hope to understand the real basis upon which the universe turned. One day, Man would reach the end of his explorations, and there would be nowhere else to go. This alone would not be so bad, but he would also have to cope with the understanding that there was more beyond what he knew, more than he could ever hope to grasp. The quitting would not be what hurt Man. It would be the knowing that he had quit before absolutely everything had been conquered.

The only emotion I felt as we boarded the sled was fear.

Hyde, after all, was every bit as formidable as the good part of His personality. A very deadly creature

The android climbed in behind me, did not bother buckling himself in. After all, He was not prone to fatal accidents, not with a healing system that would patch up a torn artery or vein in seconds. I switched on the field, felt the sudden bouyancy as it hummed to life. The wheel trembled under my hands-or was it my hands that trembled? I put the sled in gear, tramped on the accelerator, and took it down the snowy slope, around the sharper rises, toward the edge of the woods around which I would have to navigate. In a few minutes we were moving in behind the cabin, near the spots where the pseudopods of the Hyde mother body had leaped out of the ground and had brought down the deer. I slowed, eased-off on the accelerator, and coasted to within fifty feet of the cabin, stopped the sled altogether, and shut down the magnetic field. With the motor oft, I knew for certain that it was my hands that trembled, not the wheel.

"You walk behind me," He said.

We got out of the sled.

"We have two things to worry about," He went on. "One, the mother body. It is immobile and offers us the smallest problem. It is set in its present form and cannot change to escape. Two, there is the Hyde android it has created. It may not be anywhere in the area, as far as that goes. It may still be back in New York, trying to find you. But if it is here, in this area, it may try to circle around behind us while we are at work on the mother body. Remember, as soon as the mother body knows we are here, the Hyde android will know as well, for they are one and the same organism."

I nodded. I was listening to what He said, yet I felt as if I were in a dream, as if none of this could really be happening to me.

We started for the house.

The snow here was only half a foot deep, for the wind had scoured the knoll upon which the cabin rested, carrying away the other few feet that had originally been deposited. There were even patches where the hard, bare earth was exposed. Fleetingly, I thought how much easier that would make things if we had to turn tail and run

We were no more than a dozen feet from the front steps of the little house when I felt the ground tremble beneath me. At first, I thought of an earthquake, then quickly remembered what I had seen the Hyde mother body do to that white-tailed deer. Abruptly, there were pseudopods of pink-tan jelly flesh springing up around the Jekyll android walking before me. He turned, as if looking for a way out, then raised His hands to defend Himself. At that point, my view was cut off, because a second group of the slimy tentacles leaped up on all sides of me-quivering, swaying columns of shapeless flesh. I had been carrying my rifle in ready position, the pin-gun tucked in an open pocket where it could be reached easily, if the need arose not to be lethal. I dropped to one knee, raised the rifle, and fired into the fleshiest of the pseudopods. The blast tore a chunk of the flesh loose and sent it spiraling away, presumably to land in the snow, where it would wither and die, separated from the healing influences of the Hyde mother body. The pseudopod hesitated, drew back, then started down again, apparently more anxious than before to have me. I fired again, ripped all of the head of the false arm loose with that blast. But it was too late now. The other tentacles dropped onto me, melting together and encasing me in a digestive vacuole.

I tried to pull on the rifle trigger again, but the false flesh had poured over me like cement, had engulfed me so thoroughly that I could not move my fingers. I could not lift my arms to bring the rifle into a firing position that would not blow off my own foot.

Trapped

I felt a strange, prickly wetness on my face, the sensation of dampness against my clothing. For a moment, I could not imagine what was happening, and then I understood in a flash of horrible insight. The first of the digestive enzymes were seeping out of the vacuole wall. My face would be the first to dissolve under the strong acid. My clothes would rot, fall away, and the rest of my body would be prey to the mother body's juices.

I screamed. It came out as a dead, muffled sound. Like a child crying in his blankets

I struggled against the rubbery flesh, tried to kick and squirm my way out of its death hold, but I soon found out why the deer had been unable to escape. The cloying, sticky-cold pseudo-flesh was glue-like and could not be shaken off.

I felt vomit rising in my throat, tried to force it back down. There was no time for upchucking now, no time at all. There was only time to think, think, think like crazy. Or, maybe, there was only time to die

I screamed. But when I opened my mouth, the pseudo-flesh crept into it, sour tasting. I tried to spit it out, could not manage that. I gagged and realized I was going to suffocate before I could be dissolved by the enzymes. At least, I thought, that is something to be thankful for.

Then, abruptly, the vacuole broke open, split back like a speedpod ready to spill its inner fruits. A cold draft of Alaskan air blew across my face, drying the enzymes before they could do more than set my flesh to burning with a pimpled rash. I had cursed the cold of Cantwell before. Now I blessed it. It was infinitely more preferable to the sticky, warm closeness of the digestive vacuole. The false flesh began to shrivel around me, wrinkle and draw away as if I was unpleasant to touch. Or taste. In minutes, I was lying free, the flesh curled about me like burned paper, gray, dry and powdery.

"That was close," He said, bending over me and offering me a hand.

"What-"

"The Hyde could have done the same thing to me if it had thought of it first. I simply used my fingers to reach inside its body and start minor molecular changes. Once I started the process, it continued, a chain reaction that coursed back to the mother body along the line of the pseudopod."

"You mean the Hyde mother body is already dead?"

"We'll see," He said.

I followed Him up the porch steps and into the house. The door was unlocked, and a window in it was broken out. We searched the upstairs rooms, were satisfied there was nothing there, nothing like a dead mother body, then went to the cellar door. He opened it and looked down the stairs into what must have been a cellar, almost identical to Harry's. We could not see it, for it was in pitch darkness. He reached for the light switch, flipped it on. Nothing happened.

We stood there, looking down into the dark. Deep, ugly dark

"It's dead," I said.

"We have to be certain."

"You said there was a chain reaction."

"There was."

"Then it would have died."

"I'm going down," He said. "I have to be sure, and there is no way to check it out except to go look. You stand guard here, in case the Hyde android is somewhere about. If you see it, don't try to be a hero. Shout. I may be reading your mind, and I may not, so give me vocal warning."

"But-"

He did not give me time to frame another argument. He went down the steps, leaving me alone in the living room. I was as frightened as a child in an unlighted bedroom who sees shadows moving on his walls, and can see nothing that could make them. I fumbled along the wall until I found the light-switch for the living room. I flipped it up. Then back. Then up again. Nothing, except darkness.

I took my position by the living room door, where I could watch the cellarway and the porch outside without being forced to move back and forth from one vantage point to another. The snow outside would make a perfect backdrop against which to spot any movement. I shifted my eyes back and forth from one door to the other, waiting

I heard Him step off the last riser onto the cellar floor. There was a very long moment of silence in which I could hear the cabin settling, the creak of its boards, the slight moan of the night wind, the brisk scratching sound of hard snow driven against the window glass. Then came the crashing noise that shook the floor and made me jump and almost turn to run.

"Hey!" I called.

He did not answer.

I strained my ears and could hear the sounds of combat of some sort. There was a shuffling sound of feet on ice, a slapping of flesh as if blows were being exchanged, the grunting and breathing of heavy exertion. But there were no screams or curses as you would expect, and the lack of them made the inhuman aspect of the battle all the more pronounced.

"Are you all right?"

Still no answer.

Except the grunting and shuffling and heavy breathing.

I started toward the cellar stairs, thinking I might help Him somehow, then had the prickly sensation in the back of my neck that the Hyde android had come in from outside while I had not been looking. I imagined I could feel His eyes on me, sense His straining fingers as He reached out to grasp my neck… I whirled back to the door, ready to cry out, and saw that there was no one there. Just the same, I went back to the door and waited out the battle, hoping the Hyde mother body would succumb to the Jekyll android-though I had nothing to offer, but hope.

The sounds of battle suddenly changed. The shuffling and grunting ceased and were replaced by a harsh hissing noise that reminded me of air escaping from a balloon. I recognized that sound as the same the pseudo-flesh had made outside when the Jekyll android had burned it away from me. One or the other of them was burning the moisture out of its enemy's flesh, turning it into dry, gray powder. "Are you all right?" I asked again.

Silence, but for the hissing.

"Hey!"

Hissing

I looked over the snow fields, searching for movement, almost wishing I would see some, so that I would not feel as utterly useless as I did now. But there was nothing out there-just whiteness and coldness and wind.

Then the hissing ceased, and there were footsteps on the stairs. I sighed with relief, for I knew the Hyde mother body could not walk. It had to be my Jekyll android coming back. Or… The thought came to me like a grenade exploding in front of my face. Or: the Hyde android, the one who had shot at me, and who had broken into my apartment, the one who had chased me through the tubeways of the Bubble Drop system… The Hyde android might have been down there when the mother body was destroyed through the Jekyll's chain reaction in its molecular structure. The Hyde may have been waiting for the Jekyll. And, now that the fight was over, it could be either of them coming up those stairs…