and Tex quietly watched him with anticipation.
“Friends,” he said, “when my father founded the Anger Institute, he sought to bring together the finest minds to engage in creation and invention for the betterment of mankind. He crossed national lines to do so, ignored the power-plays of governments, and invested his entire fortune in this venture. He thought that science alone could save humanity. What he did not understand was the human capacity to choose evil over good.
“My small contribution to this effort was to seek out the sort of thinkers and creators who were also people of action. Men and women who understand that science has no morality—only people can choose how any tool is used. A hammer can just as easily be wielded to smash a skull as
build a house.
“Our common goal is to stop the skull-smashers before they can swing those hammers.”
Captain Anger paused a moment, then said, “We’ve united before in such efforts. We were successful then. And with your help, I trust we will be again.”
“If we don’t get killed,” Rock muttered to himself.
Chapter Thirteen
Flight of the Seamaster
The jet engines of the Martin P6M Seamaster roared into life. Floating in the channel to the east of the domed shrine to its predecessor, the Hughes Hercules H-1 Spruce Goose, the flying boat lay low in the grey pre- dawn waters. The last of its kind, it had been rescued from an aircraft graveyard and completely rebuilt and restored by Captain Anger. In an age of utilitarian passenger airliners and specialized military aircraft, the Seamaster was a lovely anomaly: a large jet aircraft designed to take off and land on water. Graceful and sleek in design, its engines lay atop the wings, artfully hidden inside wide, thin air intakes. The tips of the high-mounted wings curved downward to touch the water and provide three-point stability between them and the streamlined hull.
The entire aircraft above the water line was painted a deep grey—a color that blended well with the sea and sky and clouds. The bottom of the buoyant hull had been painted a medium blue, with a smooth wave design at the waterline that served as camouflage while on the high seas.
Even though the design of the seagoing jet appeared archaic, the materials Cap used to restore the aircraft made it one of the most technologically advanced planes in the world. Instead of steel and aluminum, the plane’s fame and skin utilized plasma-hardened titanium—light, strong, and uncorrodible. And though the instrument panel and controls came from the original aircraft, much had been added in the way of avionics and electronic equipment. Instead of push-rods and cables, the controls consisted of fly-by-wire (more accurately, fly-by-optical fiber) connected to the sophisticated onboard computer (which in turn uplinked to Cyclops).
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
