Dean Koontz: Anti-Man

It was really too much to hope for, but we seemed to have lost them. We had jumped from Knoxville to Pierre, South Dakota, from that drab terminal to Bismark, North Dakota, and on to San Francisco. In the City of the Sun, we had walked unknown with our hands in our pockets and our faces open to the sky, feeling less like fugitives than we had any right to, grabbing a day of much needed rest and a moment to collect our thoughts before dashing on. We had spent the day buying gear for the last leg of our escape, eating our first decent meal in two days, and sitting through some atrocious toto-experience film just because it was dark in the theater and, therefore, safer for the two most wanted men in the world. At midnight, we had bought tickets and boarded the next Pole-crossing rocket flight that would take us over Alaska. As the high-altitude craft flashed above Northern California and into Oregon, I took Him into the bathroom at the end of the First Class compartment (fugitives should always travel First Class, for the rich are always too concerned with the way they look to notice anyone else) and locked the door. "Take off your coat and shirt," I told Him. "I want to see that wound."

"I tell you, it's hardly anything at all." He had been telling me that for a day and a half, stalling me, keeping me from looking at it. Right from the beginning, He had been somewhat indecipherable. Part of His personality was a closed door beyond which might lay a room or a mansion. I could not tell which. Now, again indecipherable, He seemed willing to risk infection, blood poisoning, maybe even death rather than let me examine the wound! But I had seen the World Authority copper shoot in the Pierre terminal, and I wasn't going to let Him go until I had given Him some sort of care. I had seen the blood, lots of blood, fountain up from His shoulder when the pin had torn into Him.

Him. Not much of a name, but what do you call the first android? Adam? No, too trite. Anyone who would have seriously suggested something like that would have been drummed right out of the laboratories, wrapped in a coat of tar and chicken pluckings. And would have deserved every bit of it. So, then, how about Harry? Or George? Leo? Sam? Actually, He was a scientific milestone of the first order, one of Man's most brilliant achievements. Somehow, naming a milestone Sam did not seem right to any of us. I had a dog once that I had never called anything but Dog, and I guess the situation with Him was much the same. The dog was totally doggy, everything a dog should be, the archetype of all canines, an oddly true stereotype of Man's Best Friend. He could hold no other name but Dog. To have called him Prince or Rover or Blackie would have been a gross indignity. And our android, flawless as a hydroponics apple, was the archetype, so it seemed, of Man. He: a fitting title.

"You've been putting me off now for — " I tried to argue.

"Don't worry about it," He said, His eyes blue-white and penetrating. It had always been His eyes that had upset the senators who came to investigate the project as a publicity boost for their sagging political reputations. Later, they would remember other peculiarities about Him and begin to question those too, but it always started with His eyes. Imagine a sky reflected blearily in a heavily-frosted pane of milk glass. Cut out two circles of that rimed blue and paste them in two globes of veinless white marble as alabaster-like as the skin of a Greek statue. Those were His eyes. There was no denying them, no escaping. They gleamed like ice in the sun, a droplet of mercury mirroring the ocean.

"Strip anyway," I said. He knew I was stubborn. Everyone that knew me could attest to that. "I want to see it. I'm the doctor around here."

"Not any longer."

"I can resign from society without giving up my degree and skills. Don't pride yourself that I would cancel out all my medical interests, hopes and dreams just for you, boy. Now get that coat and shirt off!" It felt good to be forceful after letting Him derail me so many times before. Funny that I should be considered the terror of interns for eight years, the scowling, black-eyed dragon who ate young doctors whole if they so much as appeared with wrinkled whites for duty, and yet allow myself to be put off by this non-man so easily. Wasn't I the same doctor whose nurse, working the same floor and duty shift with him, arrived half an hour early and left half an hour late rather than forget to prepare or finish something? Yet I must wrangle with this Adam for the simple purpose of perhaps saving His arm from gangrene. Perhaps, I told myself, it was because we were running, because I was a criminal and afraid. I had set up a new life style for myself, and the whorls of its pattern had rocked my self-confidence. That would have to change. What was I without my bluster? My towering rage? I scowled the intern-paralyzing scowl. "Hurry up!"

When it was put that bluntly, a severe command, He obeyed. He always obeyed commands. He was almost the perfect android. There had just been one incident when He had refused to obey a command, and that had been the same incident that had revealed the fact that He was developing abilities far beyond any we had anticipated. Considering the fact that World Authority research administrators anticipate everything (or so they proudly proclaim at every opportunity), the discovery shook up quite a few people. Quite a few of the wrong people.

I had been with Him that day on the ground floor of the testing lab, working on analysis of His reflex pattern (which had just then begun to show an extraordinary rapidity, especially in the areas of heat and light tropism) when the explosion had rocked the research complex. The floor trembled, windows rattled, plaster dust sifted down onto us. I didn't think about Him or leaving Him alone, but I grabbed my bag and ran, following the intercom directions to the sector of the disaster.

I worked for two hours in the smoking ruins, trying to do preliminary patchwork on the dying bodies-trying to convince myself that they still had a chance-while we waited for the base and the town ambulances to return from their agonizingly slow trips to the local hospital. When I had seen the animated form of a man I had earlier left for dead-damn dead! — under a crushing pile of debris, I thought I had finally flipped out of rational thought ways. Then I began to see others, six in all, men certainly dead only a short time before. He was doing it. He. I became aware of the military standing around, almost every important officer on the base and enough MPs to make a war movie. They were ordering Him to stop reviving people. It should have been that simple. Command and obedience. Instead, He wouldn't listen to them. He repeatedly disobeyed. Finally, they shot Him with narcodarts and put Him on ice until they could decide what was to be done.

Under the current social mores, it was perfectly correct and noble to keep someone from suffering or dying prematurely. The operative word there is "prematurely." In a world of nine billion, it was taboo — and suicidal — to bring anyone back from the dead. The ranks of the living, God knew, were almost more than the planet could bear. The government had successfully discredited the Crionics Association, had squashed all possibilities of producing Mercer Serum to regress the effects of aging. Here was a new threat every bit as frightening and impossible as anything they had faced before.

They talked to Him, explained to Him what disaster this could bring into the world. They examined His fingers and watched as He demonstrated His ability to reshape His hands into flesh scalpels, thin His fingers into three-molecule-thickness knives that could penetrate another man's skin, go into him and work like a miniature surgeon.