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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.
“Joh
“And you’d kill him if you had to, right?”
Cap put a strong hand on Joh
“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 co
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.
“Hell, boy,” Tex rumbled, “if your rear end were covered with grass, I could send a herd of twenty longhorns there on a winter graze.”
“And if your brains were petrol,” Rock growled, “you could not fill cigarette lighter.”
“Overpaid plumber!”
“Unindicted quack!”
They both gri
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Cowboy is too much afraid to call me out to showdown. Knows I would beat him to draw.”
The young man nodded, unsure about the burly rocket scientist’s degree of seriousness. “Captain Anger asked me to tell you that we’re about to descend toward Escollos Alijos.”
Rock and Tex exchanged glances. Both knew that they were about to face mortal danger. Both gri
Tex rolled one spur against the aircraft deck. “Well, pardner, let’s get ready to whump Dandridge’s donkey!”
Jonathan Madsen wondered what he was getting himself into.
•
Escollos Alijos comprised two small islands separated by a few miles of water. At least, that’s what they looked like on the Seamaster’s computerized map. From the air, though, something appeared terribly different.
In the glittering Pacific waters, the northern island revealed the summer colors of golden brown and dark green. The southern island, though, looked nothing like an ordinary island. It shimmered in the sunlight with the silvery glow of lifeless metal. Cap steered clear of the island, so they could not get close enough for a good view.