Anti-man

only sound was a strange noise. I cocked my head and listened for a moment before I was able to identify it: helicopter blades pounding directly overhead…

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    IX
        
        I had been so tired and dejected that I had slept in my clothes, and I wasted no time now in getting to the window. I wiped a thin film of steam from it and pressed my face against the cold pane. But there was nothing to see; I was at a bad vantage point, looking out on the cliffs, most of the sky shielded by tall pines. I went into the living room to the row of windows that stretched across the front of the house. I could see it from there, hanging a hundred feet out from the cabin, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet in the air. It had the giant green letters W-A bent to form a globe painted on its side, the symbol of the World Authority military. It was not a troop transport, however. Only a scout. It swung out and swept along the hill, down to the base, up over a rise, and was gone. Abruptly, it turned and came back, drifting over the house, turning again, going away fast. I knew we had been found. The snow had stopped soon after I had come in the last time. It had not covered my last few sets of footprints.
        The sound of chopper blades faded. Died completely.
        Our time was up.
        I looked out at the snow, at the telltale markings, the ugly crimson stain of the elk's blood, the frozen red puddles. For the first time, I was retchingly nauseated with my killing spree. At the time, it had seemed an urgent assignment. I had plodded through it, shooting, hacking apart, dragging to the cabin, throwing down the cellar stairs, numb from my effort, sapped by cold and exhaustion. And all that had led to a reflex grab for the gun when that man had spotted me with the flashlight.
        Before, hunting had always been a sport, a pleasant test of my shooting skills. I had only shot birds, for there is something about a dead bird that carries no guilt. It is not the same as killing a warm rabbit, a soft-skinned elk. A bird is hard: pinions and beak and claws. It is almost not living, almost a mechanical construction. But the slaughter last night had been different, had been directed against other empathy-arousing beasts. It was not like me, not like me at all. I wondered, briefly, whether He had had anything to do with my sudden surge of blood lust.
        But that sort of talk could lead me nowhere but back to the Frankenstein theory, and I had outgrown that. Hadn't I? Yes. He was a boon to mankind. A few animal deaths were petty compared to what He would be able to do when He had finished changing and was ready to aid us.
        I started toward the cellar, checked myself. There was nothing He could do about the situation, for He was immobile. And perhaps I had been misinterpreting the helicopter. Maybe they didn't suspect. No, I was deluding myself by being optimistic. The wounded man had aroused suspicions. I got the rifle, loaded it, and checked the level of pins in my narcodart pistol. I pulled a chair up to the window and settled down to wait. I had promised Him time to finish whatever He was doing. I would see that He got it.
        I tried to set aside thoughts of murder. I tried to see what I would have to do as my duty, nothing more. Duty. Duty. Dutydutydutyduty… I ran the word through my mind like a rat in a maze, and it bounced off deadends everywhere it went. Duty. Wasn't it my duty to see that mankind got a chance at immortality? Wasn't it my duty to see that death was stopped, that-perhaps-aging was reversed, that youth, was a right and not a privilege to be eventually taken away by Time? I talked to myself, sitting there by the window. The words sounded hollow; they seemed to strike things in the room, slide to the floor, lying about my feet like cold grease-puddles gone hard. I imagined killing a man, what it would be like. I had almost done it last night. I could do it, I told myself. I could kill a man as long as I did not have to see the corpse at close range. Duty. Murder. Immortality. Death. Duty. Duty.
        When the troop transport came an hour and twenty minutes later, my nerves were shot. My hands trembled on the gun, and a tic had developed in my left cheek. The transport settled down two hills below, disgorging forty men in white snowsuits, all armed. I pushed back the curtain, slid the window open, and knocked out the screen with the rifle butt. I waited.
        Duty. Murder.