“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.

When the robots thinned out to just one layer thick, the color showed through again and the living room appeared normal. Normal, that is, except for the yawning cavity created by the scavengers. Damage already done could not be repaired. But the danger had passed.

Cap returned outside to see that the young Madsen walked with Rock and Leila toward the front of the house. Limped, more accurately, blood still dripping from the glass lacerations on the young man’s hands, arms, and shoulders.

The captain spoke to the trio. “Dr. Madsen must have used the phone in the living room when he called you. It was half-devoured by microbots. They’re partly solar-powered, so they’re slow workers in a dark room, which is why the whole block hasn’t been consumed. Our own version of the microbot will work faster on the same amount of light. It takes less energy to reprogram a microbot than to dismantle matter and build copies of itself.”

As the four walked toward the street, the kid suddenly pointed and yelled.

“Dandridge!”

He struggled to wrest himself from Rock’s grip and rush toward a man in a white lab coat. The bespectacled man looked up, saw them, and turned to run back to the chocolate-brown sedan parked at the curb. He jumped inside and flipped the ignition as Cap sped toward him. With a squeal of peeling rubber, the car roared beyond Cap’s reach and accelerated up the street.

Cap dug into a cargo pocket and withdrew a small pistol. Taking careful aim, he fired one shot at the receding vehicle. A hole appeared in the trunk amid a small cloud of pulverized brown paint.

“Let’s roll!” he shouted to the others, ignoring the fact that he could just as well have whispered the command over the earcomm.

Captain Anger and his team ran to the van and jumped in, Jonathan tucked under Rock’s arm like a football.

They craved this excitement. Cap may have surrounded himself with men and women of exceptional intelligence and abilities, but the glue that bound them together was their shared lust for the galvanizing thrill of adventure. They who possessed powerful intellects and constantly used them needed equally powerful diversions. The members of Captain Anger’s inner circle found diversion aplenty in his fantastic exploits.

Cap gunned the engine into life and pulled away from the curb.

“We’ve lost him!” the kid cried, looking this way and that, his blond, bloodied hair whipping about the sides of his face. “I’ll bet he turned left, though. Back toward the university.”

“Relax, boy,” Rock said. “Captain Anger fired slug with homing device inside.” He tapped his thick, short fingers at the keyboard of the van’s onboard computer. “Smotri, look at screen.”

On the screen, a digitized map of Palo Alto displayed a dizzying amount of information: Streets, riverbeds, buildings, topography, political boundaries, government buildings, hospitals, police stations. With a single keystroke, Rock made it show only the streets and two moving dots, one red and one blue. The blue dot remained at the center of the screen while the map rotated and moved.

“We are blue dot,” Rock said. “Top of screen is always front of van. Easier to visualize map overlaid on your real-world view. Red target is Dandridge’s car. We won’t lose him unless he abandons car or finds and destroys homer.” Rock switched the screen to its high-information mode and leaned back in his seat, very satisfied with himself.

Cap and Rock rode in the two front seats. The other two seats, in the compact laboratory/computer center at the rear, were occupied. Jonathan stood behind Rock’s seat, gripping it tightly to remain standing while the van pitched left and right, forward and back. Leila calmly stood at work in the back, pulling a medical kit from a compartment. With catlike steadiness in spite of the bouncing of the vehicle, she advanced on Jonathan and set the case down, opening it up and administering to his wounds.

“You look like the loser in a cat fight,” she said as she helped him off with his shirt. His skin glistened with sweat and blood, and he smelled of salt and garden soil

Slashes from the plunge through glass crisscrossed his arms and shoulders. Braced for the sting of antiseptics, he felt nothing as the beautiful woman sprayed each cut with a clear, painless liquid and pressed the sides of the wounds together. Much to his amazement, each laceration sealed shut as if glued together, leaving only a red line to indicate that there had ever been a cut.

“It’s a cyanoacrilate compound,” Leila said. “Sort of like super-glue for tissues. Seals the wound but eventually resorbs after healing.” She smiled wickedly. “If your guts had been blown apart, we could spray everything and create a seal to stop the bleeding. Then a surgeon could put you back together. This stuff has saved a lot of lives on the battlefield even before Cap perfected it for peacetime use.”

The van took a turn at high speed. Jonathan put a steadying hand out against the wall. Leila-remarkably-stayed in place simply by shifting weight on her lithe, smoothly muscled legs.

“We’re attracting interest of law enforcement!” Rock shouted. On his screen flickered yellow dots indicating the location of radio transmissions on police-band frequencies. Several of the yellow sparks sped toward the blue.