«Come on, kid,» shouted Hammer boisterously. «Whatcha got?»
Alaric came closer. His delicately cast features were set in concentration, his strange light eyes flashing like glacial ice, not a human gleam. He lifted his device and twirled a pair of dials.
«May be a weapon,» said a bandit uneasily and raised his rifle.
«Not… Alaric—» It was a hoarse cry from Wayne’s throat, and he made a clumsy lunge for the outlaw. Hammer swept one long arm in a careless blow and sent him crashing to the ground.
The gang-man squeezed the trigger on his rifle but never completed the motion. He was dead before that. Wayne, sprawled on his back, looking up through a whirling fog of grief and horror and hopeless defeat, saw the man’s body explode.
It went up in a white burst of steam, a crash of rending bone and tissue and a brief glare of incandescence. The rifle flying from him glowed cherry red, blowing up as its cartridges detonated. Before the fragments had fallen, something had swept the outer edges of the square, and where the guards had stood were steam-clouded heaps of charred bone and shredded flesh.
The crowd yelled, a single beast cry half of terror, half of surging death-lusting triumph, and swept down on the remaining gangmen. Most were too demoralized to resist. Others struggled, and got a few townspeople before they were trampled under.
Hammer roared, the bellow of a pain-crazed bull, as the mob raged toward him. A horse reared as its outlaw rider was yanked from the saddle. Two slugging blows, and Hammer had cleared a way to the mount. He sprang upon its back, howling, and the attackers fell away from his insane charge.
Almost, he made it. He was on the edge of the square when a man whose brother had been killed made a long jump and grabbed the horse’s bridle—grabbed it, and hung on till a dozen men held the gang boss secured.
Only one or two outlaws escaped. The rest, with the town in no mood for trials, were hanged that afternoon. Hammer asked not to be blindfolded, and they granted him that much. To the end, he stood looking out over the sun-glittering river, the rolling tree-clad hills, and the fair broad land green to harvest.
Wayne took no part in the executions. He had other things to think about.
After the celebrations, the unending parades and parties and speeches, the reorganization and the defense tightening, there was a rather grim conference in Wayne’s house. He and Karen were there, seated together before the fire, and Alaric sat opposite them, nervous and bewildered. A government representative was present, a lean man who looked older than he was, Robert Boyd by name and roving presidential agent by profession. In the corner, shadow-cloaked and unnoticed, squatted the shaggy troll-shape of the dog, his sullen eyes brooding redly on the others.
«You’ve heard the official account,» said Wayne, «Alaric, a mutant idiot savant, invented and built a weapon to defeat the outlaws. He’s been much made of, and nobody pays any attention to Pop Hanson—he’s the powerhouse watchman, and was rather rudely treated. One must make allowance for the eccentricity of genius, or so they say.»
«Well, one must,» nodded Boyd.
«Hardly. If so many of our people hadn’t died, I’d say this was a good thing. It taught us not to be complacent and careless. More important, it at least indicated that mutants can serve society as talented members.» Wayne’s eyes were haggard. «Only, you see, Al didn’t behave like a genius. He acted like a low-grade moron.»
«Inventing that—»
«Yes, going all around Robin Hood’s barn, committing violence and theft, working like a slave, risking his neck, all to build that weapon and use it. But he told me his dog warned him hours ahead of time. Certainly he was at the powerhouse early. Don’t you see, we could have been ready for the outlaws, we could have stood them off, driven their ill-armed force away with no loss to us if Alaric had merely gone to the police with that warning.»
Thunderstruck, Boyd swung his eyes to meet the blue vacancy of Alaric’s. «Why… why didn’t you?»
The boy stared, slowly focusing his vision and mind, face twisted with effort. He… his father had told him the day before… what was it now? Yes—«I… didn’t… think of it,» he fumbled.
«You didn’t think of it. It just never occurred to you.» Dazed, Boyd turned to Wayne. «As long as you said it yourself, I agree—idiot savant.»
«No.» Karen spoke very quietly. «No, not in any ordinary sense. Such a person is feeble-minded in all but one respect, where he is brilliant. I used to teach school and know a little psychology. Yesterday I gave Al some special tests I’d worked out. Science, mechanical skill, comprehension—in too many respects he’s a genius.»
«I give up. What is he, then?»
«A mutant,» said Karen.
«And… this weapon—?»
«Alaric tried to tell me, but we couldn’t understand each other,» said Wayne. «And the thing itself burned out very quickly in use. It’s just fused junk now. From what I could gather, though, and by deduction on that basis, I think it projected an intense beam of an inconceivably complex wave form to which one or more important organic compounds in the body resonate, They disintegrated, releasing their binding forces. Or perhaps it was body colloids that were destroyed, releasing terrific surface energies. I’m just as glad I don’t know. There are too many weapons in the world.»
«Mm-m-m—officially I can’t agree with you, but privately I do. Anyway, the inventor is still here—the genius.»
«It takes more than genius,» said Wayne. «It just isn’t possible for any human being to sit down and figure such a thing out in detail. All the facts are available, in handbooks and texts and papers—quantum mechanics, circuit characteristics, physical constants. But even if he knew exactly what he was after, the greatest genius in the world would have to spend months or years in analytical thought, then more time in putting all those facts together into the pattern he was after. And even then he wouldn’t know it all. There’d be a near infinitude of small factors interacting on each other, that he couldn’t allow for. He’d have to build a model and experiment with it, the empirical process known to engineers as getting the bugs out.
«In his incoherent way, Alaric told me his only difficulty was to figure out what to do to meet the danger. All he could think of was to make some kind of weapon. But he hardly spent a second working out the details of that devil’s engine, and his first model was as nearly perfect as his inadequate tools and materials permitted. He knew how to make it.»
With a shuddering effort, Boyd relaxed. He couldn’t look at that small, bigheaded figure in the armchair. The ancient human dread of the unknown was too strong in him. He asked slowly:
«What’s the answer, then?»
«Karen and I think we’ve figured it out, and what little Al can tell us seems to confirm our idea. But I’ll have to explain it in a roundabout way. Tell me, how does a person think?»
«Think? Why… well… by logic. He follows a logical track—»
«Exactly! A track. He thinks in chains of logic, if under that we include everything from math to emotional experience. Premise to conclusion. One thing leads to another, one at a time.
«Physics and math have been able to make their great strides because they deal, actually, with the simplest concepts, which are artificially simplified still further. Newton’s three laws of motion, for instance, assume that no force beyond the one set being considered is acting on a body in question; and the members of this set can be considered one at a time. We never really observe that. There is always friction, gravitation, or some other disturbing influence. Even in space there are externals. What saves physics is that these externals are usually negligibly small.