Ed saw the colossi there in the room--the originals of himself, his wife and his uncle--grimly clad for Mars. They had taken up positions a little behind this obstacle or that, not ready to trust entirely but more or less sure. He knew how it was--particularly with his other identity. There had to be this tense moment before someone, known or unknown, spoke. They were armed. At the hip that was still his own in a way hung the Midas Touch pistol that he remembered, though it was expanded seemingly a million fold. The outcome was different from what he could have hoped or expected. There was no voice of challenge or greeting from behind the drill. You could not see beyond the dark space around its jagged rim. There was only perhaps a small, intuitive warning before the neutrons of another Midas Touch struck, and a few of the atoms of metal and flesh and stone exploded in a narrow, sweeping curve, making a flash in which all visible details became lost and a volume of sound and quaking in a confined space that, of itself, could have killed. The little Ed Dukas could be proud of his forerunner, for he was quick enough to have half drawn his own Midas Touch, just as the blaze of light came. It didn't do any good. The lesser Ed's android consciousness was rugged enough not to be lost, even as he and his companions, tethered like beads on a string, were sucked upward into the swirling dust of the atmosphere. So he saw how the Midas Touch, discharged from behind the drill, cut slantingly, like a sword blade, across the room, its narrow beam slicing through the three giants almost simultaneously. Then, for a moment, coherence of impression was lost in swirl and glare and tumbling motion. But when the tumult quieted slightly and he floated on choppy air currents, he saw the crumpled, mountainous forms. Mitchell Prell--colossal version--had been chopped in two at the waist. The heads and shoulders of the other two giants had ceased to be. To Ed Dukas's micro-cosmic nostrils, the smell of burned flesh remained unchanged. Nor was his capacity for horror any different. It came after that small, numb pause of doubt of what he had just seen. He heard the lesser Prell and the lesser Barbara shout from beside him. They had not been torn loose from the joining strand--luckily. At first he thought that the attack had come from someone other than those who had trailed him. But then the drill point moved forward. From behind it stepped several men, wearing the trim vacuum armor of Interworld Security--usually honorable in the past but now sometimes made shaky and corrupt by the doubts within its own ranks and among the people about what, within the realm of human effort, was good or bad.