by Jerry
But there’s one escape they forgot about, and I will take it. When they come hunting, they won’t find me. Self-destruction is preferable to meeting those horrors face to face again.
THE HUNTING LODGE
Randall Garrett
A different sort of Hunting Lodge, too. The Lodge was a lot more than a house, and it had more tentacles than any octopus—and it was doing the hunting . . . for a man!
“We’ll help all we can,” the Director said, “but if you’re caught, that’s all there is to it.”
I nodded. It was the age-old warning: If you’re caught, we disown you. I wondered, fleetingly, how many men had heard that warning during the long centuries of human history, and I wondered how many of them had asked themselves the same question I was asking:
Why am I risking my neck?
And I wondered how many of them had had an answer.
“Ready, then?” the Director asked, glancing at his watch. I nodded and looked at my own. The shadow hands pointed to 2250.
“Here’s the gun.”
I took it and checked its loading. “Untraceable, I suppose?”
He shook his head. “It can be traced, all right, but it won’t lead to us. A gun which couldn’t be traced almost certainly would be associated with us. But the best thing to do would be to bring the gun back with you; that way, it’s in no danger of being traced.”
The way he said it gave me a chill. He wanted me back alive, right enough, but only so there would be no evidence.
“O.K.” I said. “Let’s go.”
I put a nice, big, friendly grin on my face. After all, there was no use making him feel worse than necessary. I knew he didn’t like sending men out to be killed. I slipped the sleeve gun into its holster and then faced him.
“Blaze away!”
He looked me over, then touched the hypno controls. A light hit my eyes.
I was walking along the street when I came out of it, heading toward a flitter stand. An empty flitter was sitting there waiting, so I climbed in and sat down.
Senator Rowley’s number was ORdway 63-911. I dialed it and leaned back, just as though I had every right to go there.
The flitter lifted perfectly and headed northwest, but I knew perfectly well that the scanners were going full blast, sorting through their information banks to find me.
A mile or so out of the city, the flitter veered to the right, locked its controls, and began to go around in a tight circle.
The viewphone lit up, but the screen stayed blank. A voice said: “Routine check. Identify yourself, please.”
Routine! I knew better. But I just looked blank and stuck my right forearm into the checker. There was ashort hum while the ultrasonic scanners looked at the tantalum identity plate riveted to the bone.
“Thank you, Mr. Gifford,” said the voice. The phone cut off, but the flitter was still going in circles.
Then the phone lit again, and Senator Rowley’s face—thin, dark, and bright-eyed—came on the screen.
“Gifford! Did you get it?”
“I got it, sir,” I answered quietly.
He nodded, pleased. “Good! I’ll be waiting for you.”
Again the screen went dark, and this time the flitter straightened out and headed northwest once more.
I tried not to feel too jittery, but I had to admit to myself that I was scared. The senator was dangerous. If he could get a finger into the robot central office of the flitters, there was no way of knowing how far his control went.
He wasn’t supposed to be able to tap a flitter any more than he was supposed to be able to tap a phone. But neither one was safe now.
Only a few miles ahead of me was the Lodge, probably the most tightly guarded home in the world.
I knew I might not get in, of course. Senator Anthony Rowley was no fool, by a long shot. He placed his faith in robots. A machine might fail, but it would never be treacherous.
I could see the walls of the Lodge ahead as the flitter began to lose altitude. I could almost feel the watching radar eyes that followed the craft down, and it made me nervous to realize that a set of high-cycle guns were following the instructions of those eyes.
And, all alone in that big mansion—or fortress—sat Senator Rowley like a spider in the middle of an intangible web.
The public flitter, with me in it, lit like a fly on the roof of the mansion. I took a deep breath and stepped out. The multiple eyes of the robot defenses watched me closely as I got into the waiting elevator.
The hard plastic of the little sleeve gun was supposed to be transparent to X rays and sonics, but I kept praying anyway. Suddenly I felt a tingle in my arm. I knew what it was; a checker to see if the molecular structure of the tantalum identity plate was according to government specifications in every respect.
Identity plates were furnished only by the Federal government, but they were also supposed to be the only ones with analyzers. Even the senator shouldn’t have had an unregistered job.
To play safe, I rubbed at the arm absently. I didn’t know whether Gifford had ever felt that tingle before or not. If he had, he might ignore it, but he wouldn’t let it startle him. If he hadn’t, he might not be startled, but he wouldn’t ignore it. Rubbing seemed the safest course.
The thing that kept running through my mind was—how much did Rowley trust psychoimpressing?
He had last seen Gifford four days ago, and at that time, Gifford could no more have betrayed the senator than one of the robots could. Because, psychologically speaking, that’s exactly what Gifford had been—a robot. Theoretically, it is impossible to remove a competent psychoimpressing job in less than six weeks of steady therapy. It could be done in a little less time, but it didn’t leave the patient in an ambient condition. And it couldn’t, under any circumstances, be done in four days.
If Senator Rowley was thoroughly convinced I was Gifford, and if he trusted psychoimpression, I was in easy.
I looked at my watch again. 2250. Exactly an hour since I had left. The change in time zones had occurred while I was in the flitter, and the shadow hands had shifted back to accommodate.
It seemed to be taking a long time for the elevator to drop; I could just barely feel the movement. The robots were giving me a very thorough going over.
Finally, the door slid open and I stepped out into the lounge. For the first time in my life, I saw the living face of Senator Anthony Rowley.
The filters built-into his phone pickup did a lot for him. They softened the fine wrinkles that made his face look like a piece of old leather. They added color to his grayish skin. They removed the yellowishness from his eyes. In short, the senator’s pickup filters took two centuries off his age.
Longevity can’t do everything for you, I thought. But I could see what it could do, too, if you were smart and had plenty of time. And those who had plenty of time were automatically the smart ones.
The senator extended a hand. “Give me the briefcase, Gifford.”
“Yes, sir.” As I held out the small blue case, I glanced at my watch. 2255. And, as I watched, the last five became a six.
Four minutes to go.
“Sit down, Gifford.” The senator waved me to a chair. I sat and watched him while he leafed through the supposedly secret papers.
Oh, they were real enough, all right, but they didn’t contain any information that would be of value to him. He would be too dead for that.
He ignored me as he read. There was no need to watch Gifford. Even if Gifford had tried anything, the robotic brain in the basement of the house would have detected it with at least one of its numerous sensory devices and acted to prevent the senator’s death long before any mere human could complete any action.
I knew that, and the senator knew it.
We sat.
2257.
The senator frowned. “This is all, Gifford?”
“I can’t be sure, of course, sir. But I will say that any further information on the subject is buried pretty deeply. So wel
l hidden, in fact, that even the government couldn’t find it in time to use against you.”
“Mmmmmm.”
2258.
The senator grinned. “This is it,” he said through his tight, thin, old lips. “We’ll be in complete control within a year, Gifford.”
“That’s good, sir. Very good.”
It doesn’t take much to play the part of a man who’s been psychoimpressed as thoroughly as Gifford had been.
2259.
The senator smiled softly and said nothing. I waited tensely, hoping that the darkness would be neither too long nor too short. I made no move toward the sleeve gun, but I was ready to grab it as soon as
2300!
The lights went out—and came on again.
The senator had time to look both startled and frightened before I shot him through the heart.
I didn’t waste any time. The power had been cut off from the Great Northwestern Reactor, which supplied all the juice for the whole area, but the senator had provided wisely for that. He had a reactor of his own built in for emergencies; it had cut in as soon as the Great Northwestern had gone out.
But cutting off the power to a robot brain is the equivalent of hitting a man over the head with a black-jack; it takes time to recover. It was that time lapse which had permitted me to kill Rowley and which would, if I moved fast enough, permit me to escape before its deadly defenses could be rallied against me.
I ran toward a door and almost collided with it before I realized that it wasn’t going to open for me. I had to push it aside. I kept on running, heading for an outside entrance. There was no way of knowing how long the robot would remain stunned.
Rowley had figured he was being smart when he built a single centralized computer to take over all the defenses of the house instead of having a series of simple brains, one for each function. And, in a way, I guess he was right; the Lodge could act as a single unit that way.
But Rowley had died because he insisted on that complication; the simpler the brain, the quicker the recovery.
The outside door opened easily enough; the electrolocks were dead. I was still surrounded by walls; the nearest exit was nearly half a mile away. That didn’t bother me; I wasn’t going to have to use it. There was a high-speed flitter waiting for me above the clouds.
I could hear it humming down toward me. Then I could see it, drifting down in a fast spiral.
Whoom!
I was startled for a timeless instant as I saw the flitter dissolve in a blossom of yellow-orange flame. The flare, marking the end of my escape craft, hung in the air for an endless second and then died slowly.
I realized then that the heavy defenses of the Lodge had come to life.
I didn’t even stop to think. The glowing red of the fading explosion was still lighting the ground as I turned and sprinted toward the garage. One thing I knew; the robot would not shoot down one of the senator’s own machines unless ordered to do so.
The robot was still not fully awake. It had reacted to the approach of a big, fast-moving object, but it still couldn’t see a running man. Its scanners wouldn’t track yet.
I shoved the garage doors open and looked inside. The bright lights disclosed ground vehicles and nothing more. The Hitters were all on the roof.
I hadn’t any choice; I had to get out of there, and fast!
The senator had placed a lot of faith in the machines that guarded the Lodge. The keys were in the lock of one big Ford-Studebaker. I shoved the control from auto to manual, turned the key and started the engines.
As soon as they were humming, I started the car moving. And none too soon, either. The doors of the garage slammed after me like the jaws of a man trap. I gunned the car for the nearest gate, hoping that this one last effort would be successful. If I didn’t make it through the outer gate, I might as well give up.
As I approached the heavy outer gates, I could see that they were functioning; I’d never get them open by hand. But the robot was still a little confused. It recognized the car and didn’t recognize me. The gates dropped, so I didn’t even slow the car. Pure luck again.
And close luck, at that. The gates tried to come back up out of the ground even as the heavy vehicle went over them; there was a loud bump as the rear wheels hit the top of the rising gate. But again the robot was too late.
I took a deep breath and aimed the car toward the city. So far, so good. A clean getaway.
Another of the Immortals was dead. Senator Rowley’s political machine would never again force through a vote to give him another longevity treatment, because the senator’s political force had been cut off at the head, and the target was gone. Pardon the mixed metaphor.
Longevity treatments are like a drug; the more you have, the more you want. I suppose it had been a good idea a few centuries ago to restrict their use to men who were of such use to the race that they deserved to live longer than the average. But the mistake was made in putting it up to the voting public who should get the treatments.
Of course, they’d had a right to have a voice in it; at the beginning, the cost of a single treatment had been too high for any individual to pay for it. And, in addition, it had been a government monopoly, since the government had paid for the research. So, if the taxpayer’s money was to be spent, the taxpayer had a right to say who it was to be spent on.
But if a man’s life hangs on his ability to control the public, what other out does he have?
And the longer he lives, the greater his control. A man can become an institution if he lives long enough. And Senator Rowley had lived long enough; he—
Something snickered on the instrument panel. I looked, but I couldn’t see anything. Then something moved under my foot. It was the accelerator. The car was slowing.
I didn’t waste any time guessing; I knew what was happening. I opened the door just as the car stopped. Fortunately, the doors had only manual controls; simple mechanical locks.
I jumped out of the car’s way and watched it as it backed up, turned around, and drove off in the direction of the Lodge. The robot was fully awake now; it had recalled the car. I hadn’t realized that the senator had set up the controls in his vehicles so that the master robot could take control away from a human being.
I thanked various and sundry deities that I had not climbed into one of the Hitters. It’s hard to get out of an aircraft when it’s a few thousand feet above the earth.
Well, there was nothing to do but walk. So I walked.
It wasn’t more than ten minutes before I heard the buzzing behind me. Something was coming over the road at a good clip, but without headlights. In the darkness, I couldn’t see a thing, but I knew it wasn’t an ordinary car. Not coming from the Lodge.
I ran for the nearest tree, a big monster at least three feet thick and fifty or sixty feet high. The lowest branch was a heavy one about seven feet from the ground. I grabbed it and swung myself up and kept on climbing until I was a good twenty feet off the ground. Then I waited.
The whine stopped down the road about half a mile, about where I’d left the Ford-Studebaker. Whatever it was prowled around for a minute or two, then started coming on down the road.
When it finally came close enough for me to see it in the moonlight, I recognized it for what it was. A patrol robot. It was looking for me.
Then I heard another whine. But this one was different; it was a siren coming from the main highway.
Overhead, I heard a flitter whistling through the sky. The police.
The patrol robot buzzed around on its six wheels, turning its search-turret this way and that, trying to spot me.
The siren grew louder, and I saw the headlights in the distance. In less than a minute, the lights struck the patrol robot, outlining every detail of the squat, ugly silhouette. It stopped, swiveling its turret toward the police car. The warning light on the turret came on, glowing a bright red.
The cops slowed down and stopped. One of the men in the car called out, “Senator? Are you on t
he other end of that thing?”
No answer from the robot.
“I guess he’s really dead,” said another officer in a low, awed voice.
“It don’t seem possible,” the first voice said. Then he called again to the patrol robot. “We’re police officers. Will you permit us to show our identification?”
The patrol robot clicked a little as the information was relayed back to the Lodge and the answer given. The red warning light turned green, indicating that the guns were not going to fire.
About that time, I decided that my only chance was to move around so that the trunk of the tree was between me and the road. I had to move slowly so they wouldn’t hear me, but I finally made it.
I could hear the policeman saying, “According to the information we received, Senator Rowley was shot by his secretary, Edgar Gifford. This patrol job must be hunting him.”
“Hey!” said another voice. “Here comes another one! He must be in the area somewhere!”
I could hear the whining of a second patrol robot approaching from the Lodge. It was still about a mile away, judging from the sound.
I couldn’t see what happened next, but I could hear the first robot moving, and it must have found me, even though I was out of sight. Directional heat detector, probably.
“In the tree, eh?” said a cop.
Another called: “All right, Gifford! Come on down!”
Well, that was it. I was caught. But I wasn’t going to be taken alive. I eased out the sleeve gun and sneaked a peek around the tree. No use killing a cop, I thought, he’s just doing his job.
So I fired at the car, which didn’t hurt a thing.
“Look out!”
“Duck!”
“Get that blaster going!”
Good. It was going to be a blaster. It would take off the treetop and me with it. I’d die quickly.