“None of your business. Put me down.”
Cap complied, keeping hold of the sledge hammer.
The kid with the shoulder-length yellow hair rubbed a sore wrist and stared up at the stranger. He paused for a moment, then broke and ran for the hallway. He galloped squarely into the block wall that was Pyotr Kompantzeff.
“Shto tebye —what have we got here?” Rock caught and held the frightened and angry kid in a Russian bear hug that defied escape. The captive swung a foot at Rock’s shin, but the ragged sneaker bounced off the thick bone and sinew of the burly man’s gristly leg.
“We’re not who you think,” Leila said, stepping into the kid’s field of view. “Put him down, Rock.”
Freed of Rock’s iron grip, the boy stared at the haunting, raven-haired woman in puzzlement. “You don’t work for Dandridge?”
Cap shook his head. “My name is Richard Anger. This is Leila Weir and Pete Kompantzeff.”
“Are you cops?”
Leila laughed. “Hardly.”
“We’re scientists,” Rock said levelly.
The kid eyed him up and down. “Yeah, right.” Rock looked more like an enforcer for the Russian Mafia than a scientist.
Cap leaned the sledge hammer against the wall. “Do you know Dr. Madsen?”
“Who said I should?” The teen’s voice was suspicious, cautious.
“You’re in his home, breaking into his safe.”
The kid shrugged. “So I’m a burglar. What does that make you?”
“Burglars don’t call the people who catch them murderers. Is Dr.
Madsen dead?”
The kid walked over to a chair and collapsed into it. Burying his face in one hand, he wept and pounded the chair arm with another. “Dandridge did it. I know he did. I’ll kill him.”
“What’s in the safe?” Cap asked.
The boy looked up, a guarded expression on his face. “Nothing. Money.
I need to get out of town.”
Captain Anger nodded. “I see. Maybe I can help.” He stepped over to the safe. “What’s your name?” he asked calmly, his sensitive fingers gently turning the dial.
“What’s it to you?”
Cap shrugged, continuing his work on the safe. “I just like to know the people for whom I serve as safecracker.”
With that, he stopped turning the dial and reached for the locking handle. “Well?”
“Jonathan Madsen.”
The handle rotated with a heavy clack. Cap swung the door open to look inside. “No money,” he said.
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.
