Rock walked over to the desk. “Out with it, boy. Who’s Dandridge and how’d he kill your father?”
“My grandfather,” Jonathan Madsen corrected. “Dandridge worked with him at Stanford. Grampa Julie would let me visit now and then. I liked being around the lab. Then something happened to a grad student of his named Barry Feinman and Dandridge took over and had gramps canned.”
“Flash,” Captain Anger murmured, “check status of a Dr. Dandridge at Stanford.”
“Already working,” said a voice in his ear. “ William Arthur Dandridge, Ph.D. in electronics. Currently head of research at Drexler College of Nanotechnology.”
Cap withdrew a sheaf of papers partway from the safe. “Are these patent forms what you’re looking for?”
The young Madsen gazed impassively at the imposing figure before him. “Maybe. Let me see.” He walked over to the open safe and reached in with his right hand, feeling around for a second or two. Then he pulled out the stack of papers with both hands and carried them to the desk by the bookshelf-lined far wall. Putting the papers down, he casually slid his hands into his pockets and sat down behind the desk.
“Yeah. That’s the stuff.”
Cap smiled at the kid’s bold—but crude—effort. “And,” he said, “how about what you palmed into your pocket?”
In a leap that surprised all, Madsen jumped to the desk and took a swift step to its edge. Using it as a diving board, he kicked off and sailed fists first through the glass of the second-story window. The crash of the shattering panes startled the three into action.
“ Gospodi!” Rock cried, turning to run downstairs.
Cap raced to the window in time to see Jonathan hit the ground shoulder first. With a bone-crunching thud, the boy landed in the soft earth of the floral landscaping. The wind knocked out of him, he fought to rise and run.
With a stronger and more planned jump, Captain Anger sailed from the window to land on his feet a yard from the gasping, bloodied boy. After determining that Madsen was not seriously injured, Cap crouched beside him and waited.
When Jonathan had regained his breath, Cap said, “What’s in your pocket that’s worth dying for?” He held out a hand as the boy struggled in panic. “I won’t take it from you, even though I easily could. I want to help you.”
Rock and Leila arrived by a more mundane route in time to hear the wheezing teen say, “Gramps... and I were, real pals. I wanted, to be a scientist the way. he was. He told me. about his problems at. work.
Said corporate intrigue. and spying were. things he wasn’t used to.”
He sat up, with help from Leila. Still laboring for breath, he also fought to restrain sobs of anguish.
“He told me if. anything should happen to him that he had. instructions taped to the inside of his safe. He gave. me the combination once, but I forgot it.” He reached into his pocket and produced a piece of adhesive tape, coated now with lint and dirt. Stuck to it also was a shiny, iridescent disc the size of a quarter.
“Optical storage medium,” Cap said. “Smallest CD I’ve seen.” He slipped it into one of the hidden pockets of his shirt.
“Julie liked small things. He always said that the goal of technology is to do more with less.” The kid began weeping again.
“How’d he die?” Leila asked in her softest tone.
“He confronted Dandridge last week. They fought about something. Then gramps phoned me yesterday sounding really weird. He wasn’t himself. Hasn’t acted normal for a long time. He told me that I knew what to do and then he said goodbye.”
Cap pondered for a moment, then said, “Your grandfather disappeared four months ago. Where has he been?”
“He—” Jonathan’s words were interrupted by the sound of collapsing timbers.
“The house!” Leila cried.
“Stay here,” Cap said, running into the building. Inside, he quickly found the source of the noise.
A portion of the living room wall on the first floor had collapsed into a pool of reflective silver. “More microbots,” he said, the earpiece transmitting the message to those outside.
Pulling a small silicon capsule from one of the hidden pockets in his shirt, he tossed it into the center of the scavenging mass. It immediately melted as the microbots disassembled it, though more slowly than Cap
had expected.
Suddenly, the center of the pool changed. The capsule disgorged a hundred thousand copies of the microbot reprogrammed by Captain Anger. The shiny surface of the pool rippled gently as the machines fought it out in eerie silence on a microscopic scale. The scavengers proved no match for the reprogrammers: their circuitry logically prevented them from dismantling their own kind. The reprogrammers, though, obeyed just as relentlessly their own command to alter only the scavengers and to leave all other material unharmed.
The silver pool slowly thinned as the reprogrammed microbots spread out in search of more victims. The entire living room took on a silvery sheen. Now, though, nothing decomposed into raw materials and more microbots. Instead, the furniture, carpets, walls, and drapes looked as if they had been sprinkled with silver dust. Then, with the microbots spreading out even thinner, it seemed as if everything were coated with a sooty powder.
When the robots thinned out to just one layer thick, the color showed through again and the living room appeared normal. Normal, that is, except for the yawning cavity created by the scavengers. Damage already done could not be repaired. But the danger had passed.
Cap returned outside to see that the young Madsen walked with Rock and Leila toward the front of the house. Limped, more accurately, blood still dripping from the glass lacerations on the young man’s hands, arms, and shoulders.
The captain spoke to the trio. “Dr. Madsen must have used the phone in the living room when he called you. It was half-devoured by microbots. They’re partly solar-powered, so they’re slow workers in a dark room, which is why the whole block hasn’t been consumed. Our own version of the microbot will work faster on the same amount of light. It takes less energy to reprogram a microbot than to dismantle matter and build copies of itself.”
As the four walked toward the street, the kid suddenly pointed and yelled.
“Dandridge!”
He struggled to wrest himself from Rock’s grip and rush toward a man in a white lab coat. The bespectacled man looked up, saw them, and turned to run back to the chocolate-brown sedan parked at the curb. He jumped inside and flipped the ignition as Cap sped toward him. With a squeal of peeling rubber, the car roared beyond Cap’s reach and
accelerated up the street.
Cap dug into a cargo pocket and withdrew a small pistol. Taking careful aim, he fired one shot at the receding vehicle. A hole appeared in the trunk amid a small cloud of pulverized brown paint.
“Let’s roll!” he shouted to the others, ignoring the fact that he could just as well have whispered the command over the earcomm.
Captain Anger and his team ran to the van and jumped in, Jonathan tucked under Rock’s arm like a football.
They craved this excitement. Cap may have surrounded himself with men and women of exceptional intelligence and abilities, but the glue that bound them together was their shared lust for the galvanizing thrill of adventure. They who possessed powerful intellects and constantly used them needed equally powerful diversions. The members of Captain Anger’s inner circle found diversion aplenty in his fantastic exploits.
Cap gunned the engine into life and pulled away from the curb.
“We’ve lost him!” the kid cried, looking this way and that, his blond, bloodied hair whipping about the sides of his face. “I’ll bet he turned left, though. Back toward the university.”