Viktor Koman - The Microbotic Menace

Racing across the harbor waters, the sun not yet risen in the blood-red morning sky behind them, Captain Anger piloted the Seamaster with a skill seen nowhere else in the world, except perhaps among his allies. Leila sat to his right in the co-pilot’s seat, arguably the next-best pilot of the bunch. And Rock frequently argued the point in defense of his own flying skills.

The sea thumped against the hull of the flying boat. Water sprayed noisily about outside the cockpit, drenching the windshields to create a blurred view of a world consisting of grey water, white foam, and coral sky. Cap stared straight ahead, left hand on the wheel, right hand on the throttles. Occasionally he glanced at the airspeed indicator.

Suddenly, the roughness smoothed as the jet lifted to a higher position on the water.

“On the top,” Leila said with excitement. Breaking free from earthly bonds thrilled her with its primal delight.

Cap fed full power to the engines. With a deceptively quiet roar they accelerated to liftoff speed. After an instant when the hiss of rushing water against the hull threatened to drown out all else, just as suddenly the noise disappeared, left behind and below as the jet climbed out over Los Angeles Harbor. Beneath them drifted the man-made islands named for three American astronauts who had died in the race for the Moon—Island Grissom, Island Chaffee, Island White. Cap banked the plane when it passed through 1000 feet and headed south along a flight path that skirted the California coastline.

Cap flew more by instinct than by instruments. It was that instinct, that feel for how an airplane flies that led him to consult the instruments.

“Knock the elevator trim up a notch,” he said to his co-pilot. “We’re dragging our tail.”

“It matches our weight-and-balance sheet,” she said, a little mystified.

“Shto tebye!” the Russian shouted. “Hey, Cap—smotri! Kid is stowaway! ”

Rock climbed forward with an indignant but unstruggling body tucked under his arm. He set the boy down behind the pilot’s seat.

Jonathan Madsen thumbed his stray blond hair behind his ears and stared defiantly at Cap.

“I’m not sorry,” the young man said. “I have a right to justice.”

“Really?” Cap said with a hint of a smile. “What right?”

“Revenge.” The stern look in Madsen’s eyes belied his age. “Dandridge killed my grandfather. I have a right to get even.”

Cap sighed, turning his attention away from the controls to let Leila take over for a moment.

“Johnny, vengeance is not justice. If killing Dandridge could bring your grandfather back, I’d be the first to pull the trigger. But the universe doesn’t work that way. A second killing won’t even the score, it will only drag it downward another point. We’re heading out to stop Dandridge from any further killing—”

“And you’d kill him if you had to, right?”

Cap put a strong hand on Johnny’s shoulder. “Yes, but only if there were no other way. Justice means making things right, and that’s the responsibility of the one who first caused the harm. If Dandridge dies, he wouldn’t be able to do anything to repair the harm he’s already done.”

“His staying alive won’t bring Julie back either.”

“True,” Cap said. “There are others, though, that could benefit from his talents if he chose to turn back toward good. That’s the only way he could make any sort of restitution.” He shifted his attention back to flying the jet, adding, “Reparation is preferable to revenge. It can actually improve the world. And it leaves the streets less bloody.”

The stowaway said nothing.

Uriah West, M.D., slouched in one of the seats that folded out of the fuselage wall and tried to doze. All the while, he mentally reviewed the operations he had performed during the last seven hours. All told, he and Cap—with Leila, Rock, Sun Ra, and several additional surgeons assisting—had spent those hours between their midnight meeting and this dawn flight performing brain surgery on one of the four zombie-like gunmen.

With the aid of the Institute’s computerized axial tomography equipment—basically a 3-dimensional X-ray machine—Tex had located the source of the problem in the patient: specialized microbots had attached themselves to nerves in the brain, cutting them with their microscopic scalpels and slipping a tiny silicon chip between the severed ends. Each chip, Cap discovered, possessed thousands of tiny holes, each ringed with an unbelievably small iridium electrode. The nerves had grown back through these holes, allowing the microbots not only to monitor nerve impulses, but to send their own signals to the gunmen’s

brains. In this way, Dandridge could order them to do anything he wanted them to do—including shooting at Captain Anger until they had exhausted all their ammo.

Dandridge—in his rush to escape—had left them on the equivalent of automatic pilot; they could make no decision for themselves and simply kept firing, following the programmed commands of the microbots even after the knockout gas robbed them of their consciousness.

Tex marveled at how Cap had removed one of the microbots from the first man’s brain and, with Flash, had analyzed it in the atomic force microscope, tracing its compact, three-dimensional circuits. With the aid of the supercomputer Cyclops, they developed in a few hours a different logic circuit and etched it onto a replacement microbot’s gallium-arsenide structure.

The new microbot would travel through the bloodstream in the brain, seeking out the other microbots and delicately sundering the connections between the machines and the patients’ nerves. The silicon chips would remain in the nerves— there was no quick way to remove them without causing massive brain damage—but the microbots would no longer be in control. Gradually, as the repair robot moved through the men’s brains, the effect of Dandridge’s mind control would be undone.

While Tex injected into a repair microbot the fourth and final patient, Sun Ra reported signs of voluntary motion in the first, recuperating patient.

Tex pondered the evil genius behind the microbot and the other genius that swiftly found a way to undo the evil. A chill ran through him as he recalled Cap’s first words after studying the device removed from the first man’s brain: “It seems Dr. Dandridge is not concerned with simply dismantling matter— he’s interested in dominating souls. That makes him more dangerously mad than I’d first thought.”

Tex saw the masseter muscles along Captain Anger’s jawline tighten up—a sure sign that he was formulating a plan to rid the world of Dr. William Arthur Dandridge.

A sudden, stomach-lurching drop interrupted Dr. West’s drowsy reverie as the Seamaster encountered an air pocket. When he opened his eyes,

Tex stared at a Cinerama view Pyotr Kompantzeff’s khaki-clad rump.

“I could do without the sight of your back forty,” Tex drawled, then added, “Make that yer back eighty, ya’ damn’ Roosski.”

“Sookihn sihn,” Rock said with a wide, sarcastic grin. “Your family tree

has your entire maternal branch still living in it eating bananas, and your horse-thief paternal ancestors were hanged from it.”

To say that Rock and Tex enjoyed baiting each other was to understate the case. West, a tenth generation American whose ancestors helped settle Texas, found the immigrant Kompantzeff to be an endless source of amusement, especially his thick Russian accent and foreign pattern of speech. For his part, Rock drew vast entertainment from observing the equally thickaccented Texan, in whom he saw astounding provinciality in his love of the Lone Star State and his small-town view of the world.

And it went without saying that the strong bond of friendship that held all of Captain Anger’s crew together belied the sometimes harsh and earthy banter between the two.