Forrester’s eyes bulged and he shouted. He snatched his hand away from the waistband of his trousers. The hand pulled free at the wrist, spun across the room and slapped viscidly against the wall, clinging for a moment, all shape lost, bleeding in a thin line on the plaster, sliding slowly down the pattern of blood.
A gout of blood came from the wrist and where it struck the focal point of the device, it turned into a pinkish fog. The blouse where the hand had been turned shiny and ran into liquid.
The beam hit into the spare body underneath, softening it to a thin liquid, exploding it into a pink mist. Forrester screamed once as he fell.
A guard leveled his automatic and Lucas managed to center the beam on it. The barrel sagged as the man tried to fire it. The unliquified portion exploded violently, and the man, his face torn open, fell and writhed on the floor. The other guard tried to make the door, but Lucas swept the beam across his legs at knee level. The man dropped and at first Lucas thought that he had dropped onto his knees. Then he saw that the man’s legs were out in front of him, toes up. The guard made a mewling sound, fell back, swiveling the gun to fire at Lucas. Lucas swept the beam across his face, saw the face become a pinkish pool in which the eyes were but widening stains.
He touched the guard whose gun had exploded on the back of the neck and the man was suddenly still.
Breathing hard, Lucas stood erect. He knew that if he looked at them any more he’d be violently ill.
He listened. The subdued workers who had heard the shot stayed close to their houses.
He heard the distant pound of running feet. There was no time to liberate the others. He cut the back wall of the house, finding that at fifteen feet, the area of liquification was about six inches in diameter. He made a sweeping cut, seeing the running plastic explode into gas with a puffing sound.
The section fell out and he went through. As he went he brushed the moist edge by accident with the back of his hand. For a moment he was in panic for fear the liquid contagion could be transmitted by contact.
But the back of his hand was uninjured. As fear faded, he noted that the process did not generate heat.
Floodlights clicked on over the area, and the massive throat of the siren on the roof of the Bureau Building began to pulsate.
Lucas felt naked, crouching in the glow, fifty feet from the rear of his house. Someone shouted behind him and he ran for the fence.
There was a soft whisper near his ear and the slug continued on to smash against the wire mesh. With a slow up and down sweep he cut the fence, seeing the dance of blue sparks as the electric current tried to bridge the gap.
He flattened, turned around and swept the beam across the legs of those who pounded toward him. The hoarse shouts turned to screams as they toppled over. Another slug whispered too close to him, and he sprayed the convulsing bodies until at last they were still. Another splash, and a section of the fence fell away.
He ran through the gap, turned and aimed the beam at the nearest floodlight. It spat and went dark.
There was a quarter mile of open ground to cross. He had covered half of it at full run when the headlights bounced toward him. Silhouetted against the distant floodlights he could see the men who clung to the outside of the car.
He dropped and rolled into a shallow place, propped himself on his elbows.
“Spread out and nail him!” somebody ordered.
Lucas yelled, “Go back! Go back or you’ll die!”
“He’s right over there. Try a few shots with the rifle, Joe.”
He couldn’t risk rifle fire. He pushed the copper strip against the terminal, sprayed the beam hack and forth across the vehicle like a man watering a lawn. One headlight popped out and a bubbling scream was cut off.
There were cries of alarm. The other headlight went out and he heard the car creak and sag oddly.
A man came frighteningly close, leaping toward him. Lucas aimed up at him, threw himself to one side. The man fell across his legs, writhed once and was still. Something warm ran across Lucas’ ankle. There was no more movement. He pulled himself clear, staggered to his feet and began to run again.
By the time he reached the wide avenue, he heard the rising bleat of sirens all over the city.
He crossed to parallel streets, crouched behind a hedge and waited there until his breathing was under control. A hundred feet away a man hurried toward his car.
Lucas ran after him. The man heard the faint sound and turned.
“Give me your keys,” Lucas demanded.
The man grunted as he swung. The snap of the beam caught the fist in midair. It hit Lucas along the jaw, a soft and boneless thing. He wiped his face on his sleeve, bent over the man and found the car keys.
He knew of an automobile only through the drawings he had seen and the descriptions he had read.
He carefully placed the device on the seat beside him, started the car and drove it jerkily down the street, cutting the first corner too closely so that the rear wheel hit the curbing and he bounced high.
Five blocks, ten, twenty.
He abandoned the car, ran down toward the fire lane, the scattered rubble that marked the border of the dead city.
There were no lights there. He could not risk falling.
Behind him the sirens moaned and he knew that all of the resources of the New City, even of the country and the world would be directed at finding him and killing him. He was the villain of the melodrama now; he was mad, evil science raising its foul head again, greedy for destruction.
Chapter Three
City of Pariahs
In the dead city ten thousands lived where once there had been four millions. They lived outside the frame of reference of the New City, lived as their remote forebears had lived, in lust and violence and sudden death.
Some of them were there because to venture outside was to die for some past crime. Others were there because their emotional quotients were dangerous to the orderliness of the New City. And many had been born there, amid the clutter of gray stone, of broken brick, of dust and decay and matted, tangled growth that obscured first-floor windows, split the battered asphalt.
At night, in an area ten blocks deep bordering on the dead city, doors were double-barred and windows were shuttered. In time that area would become part of the dead city, providing new loot, new hiding places.
Within the dead city there was a loose society, with the strongest man at the top. Most vagrants who wandered in had a short life. If they managed to survive attack, they would still have no hiding place and would be picked up by the well-armed groups of special police who made periodic patrols through the man-made wilderness.
The police had learned by listening to the whisper of a thrown knife, that it was wise to make the patrols at regular and predictable intervals during daylight, to stay together, to conduct only the most cursory searches of buildings.
Ellen Morrit crept into the dead city at night.
She knew the unforgettable extent of her humiliation, the pathetic inadequacy of her revenge against a society which had abused and disillusioned her.
It would have been simpler to wait for them to come. But to sit and wait meant to think and to remember. It was easier to run away.
She carried a hand torch and a .22 target pistol. She wore rough tweeds and stout shoes and carried food in a hiking pack.
She turned and looked back at the New City, at the blare of lights which stopped abruptly at the high mound of rubble which she had crossed.
Ellen Morrit did not know that the first rule of secret travel by night is never to silhouette oneself against distant lights.
But her body was young, her reactions quick, and she carried the automatic ready to fire.