by neetha Napew
I stood there for a moment, panting, trying to regain my composure and shake off the seething animal blood-lust that was trying to take control of me. When my heart slowed a little, I took out my pin-gun and put half a dozen darts in his legs. Then I dragged him to his patrol car and was about to get him inside when I had a better thought. I turned, struggled him back to the auto-taxi, got the passenger-side door open, and muscled him onto the back seat. Closing the door, I went around to the driver’s side and got in. Just then, another car pulled into the recharging station and the driver climbed out.
I held my breath while he went about his business. It took him one helluva long time, or maybe it only seemed that way. He cleaned his windshield without bothering to plug his battery in first. Then he went inside, got something to eat, and brought it out to the car. He started on it while he plugged in the battery. Twice, he looked our way but made no show of interest and did not appear to be going to approach us. When the battery light flashed a soft blue, he disconnected the leads, closed the panel on the side of the car, and got in, still eating. When he departed, I started the patrol car and drove it around to the phones, then farther, completely behind the building and out of sight.
I left the taxi running and set to work securing him. I took off his uniform jacket and put it on over my arctic coat. Sitting down, behind the wheel of his patrol car, I would look a little more authentic. Then I stripped off his trousers and split them up the crotch. Using the two separated legs, I bound his hands and feet as securely as I could. I closed the taxi door and waited there a moment, making certain I hadn’t forgotten anything. The car would not be noticed back here, not until the proprietor of the station made his daily check of the premises. The cop would not freeze, for the taxi had enough power to run until tomorrow afternoon sometime, and the heater would keep him comfortable. Satisfied, I walked out front, back to the patrol car.
It was a luxurious tank, built for speed and reliability, yet not without such comforts as a small refrigerator in the dash for keeping something cold to drink, a little circular heating plate for warming cold coffee. I got down on the floor of the front seat and searched for the wires leading to the communications box to the right of the steering wheel. I found nine of them and spent twenty minutes tracing their connections before I felt confident enough to rip three of them loose. If I had examined the setup carefully enough, the communications box now lacked a visual pickup. That would make it easier to fool any central headquarters that might want to talk with the officer who should be in the patrol car.
I drew the car over to the charging posts and made certain the battery level was up to the top. When the blue light flashed, I disconnected, jumped behind the wheel and swung out of there, back onto the highway, bound for Cantwell, the park, the cabin, and Him.
For the first forty miles, I held the big car at slightly over a hundred, which was nowhere near its top speed, it being a much swifter vehicle than my auto-taxi on the trip down to Anchorage. I could have used the robot mechanism for even greater speed. The highway was eight lanes wide and equipped with auto-guide for robot vehicles. Somehow, I did not feel safe with a computer driving me in these circumstances: a fugitive running directly into the same forces he was trying to get away from. True, the computer system under the hood could have compensated for the slick roadway much more easily than I, could have maintained a speed probably in excess of fifty percent more than I now traveled. There was one drawback that bothered me enough to keep me from relinquishing the car’s control. A robot vehicle is attuned to a “siren” carried on all World Authority police wagons. When said siren wails, all robot vehicles in the immediate vicinity will curb and stop, will lock so that manual control cannot be restored. On the other hand, with me driving, even that slim chance of apprehension would disappear, for I would rather kill myself than submit to an easy catch after all that I had gone through.
I was wrestling with the wheel, barreling wildly along, when the first of the WA troops from Cantwell came roaring toward Anchorage on the wild-goose chase I had initiated. There were two buses of them, robot systems hurtling them along at better than a hundred and forty miles an hour. They shot by on the other side of the medial wall and were gone in the night and the snow. From that point on, I passed another WA vehicle every minute or so. I fancied that by the time I reached Cantwell there would be little or no WA force in evidence.
Two hours later, I parked the patrol car on a backstreet in Cantwell, got out and casually strolled away. When I had turned the corner, I stripped off the uniform jacket, balled it up, and stuffed it under the snow. I found the access highway to the park, slipped into the ditch behind the snowbank alongside it and worked back, following the growing value of the fence post numbers. When I found number 878, I clambered over the fence, dropped to the other side, suddenly aware of how tense I had been. My gut relaxed now, and my body shook violently, as if flinging off the suppressed terror that had filled me. I went to the bushes where I had left the sled, uncovered it, dragged it out, and turned it on. Then I was aboard, heading back up the long slopes toward the cabin and its warmth.
Forty minutes later, I brought the sled back through the panel in the wall of the utility shed, coasted it to its parking platform, and shut it down. I was home. Safe. Still free. And with the heat momentarily reflected elsewhere. I closed the twisted shed door, stomped through the driving snow back to the front door, and went inside, stripping away my gear before I could start sweating.
When I was down to my insulated trousers and boots, I walked into the kitchen, found that He was not there. “Hey!” I shouted. “I’m back. It worked.”
“Here,” He said.
I followed the sound of His voice to the cellar steps. It was somehow different than it had been only six or seven hours ago, thicker, even more difficult to understand. He was halfway down the cellar steps in a painstakingly slow descent, like an elephant trying to negotiate a ladder. He almost filled the narrow stairwell from wall to wall. His head narrowly escaped brushing the ceiling.
“You’ve grown even more.” I said.
“A little.” He did not turn to look at me, but moved down another step. His weight settled, making the steps creak and groan, and His great bulk shimmered and trembled.
“Why are you going down there?” I asked.
“The beef.”
“You need it already?”
“Yes,” He said, taking another step.
“I could have gotten it for you. I could have brought it up in chunks.”
“It’s better for me to go down. It’s more private here. I can change without upsetting you.”
“The temperature.”
“I won’t mind it,” He said. “I can adapt.”
“But the beef is frozen.”
“I can eat it that way,” He said.
I stood there, trying to think of another argument. For some reason, I did not want Him to go into the cellar, to continue His changes down there. I guess I had read too many stories about cellars, about dark rooms under the house where sinister things went on.
“I have to ask you for something now,” He said, interrupting my search for another argument.
“What?”
“Food,” He said. “I am going to need more food, maybe even before morning.”
Down another step. Creak, squeak, groan, moan of wood.
“What kind?” I asked.
“Whatever you can bring back.”
“Okay.” I started to turn.
“Jacob?”
“What?”
“I’m glad it worked. Thanks for the trouble.”
“It’s my neck as well as yours,” I said.
He went down another step into the cellar . . .
VII
I went outside with one of Harry’s guns and a pocketful of ammunition on the pretense of hunting. True, I was going to hunt. But the chief reason was that I had to get away from Him, gain time to think things out a little more thoroughly tha
n I had up to this point. I am basically a man of intellect, logic, and reason, not a man of violent passions and heroic actions. The most gut-inspired thing I had ever done was to kidnap Him. In fact, it was the only gut-inspired thing I had done. Even my relationships with women had been carefully planned intellectual plays with all the acts and scenes tediously considered before the affair started. It was not that I was cold and unfeeling, just that I liked to be sure of what I was getting into before I stuck out something that could be chopped off. Now things were being thrown at me faster than I could duck, and I needed to tote them up and find a sum that made sense.
The old Frankenstein tale kept coming back to me so that I could not think clearly. Mary Shelley be damned! She had written a book that still haunted me and which clashed too closely with my present reality. I knew He was not a beast that strangled little girls. I was not afraid of a great, stitched graveyard monster with a crazy-quilt body of once-dead parts who crept around in the night and looked for victims. But I was afraid of whatever the android was becoming. It was something I had not bargained for, something I might not be able to accept. Was the final change going to be that of the ugly caterpillar into the lovely, colorful butterfly—or was it going to be a strange reversal wherein the butterfly reverted into an ugly, stinging worm? Whatever, it was definitely more werewolfian than any writer of weird fiction had ever envisioned.
Yet He assured me so sincerely that these changes were necessary so that He might use His powers to help mankind. Did Dr. Frankenstein’s demon whisper sweet words in his ear too, promises of wonderful things to come? No! Wrong train of thought, Jacob Kennelmen. I believed Him. Despite the horrid mutation He had become, I still put credence in His words, still trusted Him as I had trusted no man since Harry. Suddenly, I laughed out loud at my comparison, for the android was not even a man! I was placing my trust in an artificially-cultured mass of tissues and organs that had been made—thanks to a science apparently better than God’s—superior to men. So be it. If I could not trust a being superior to Man, then it must follow that Man, being morally and intellectually lesser, was even, more untrustworthy. No, I had to stick with Him. I had promised Him that much. If He turned on me and devoured me to feed His great need for energy, then it would be as if the angels themselves had double-crossed me. Which was a distinct possibility, considering all of Man’s holy books reported the fickleness of angels, but a possibility that I would not bother myself with.
Having irrevocably committed myself to a course of action, I felt greatly relieved. I am like that. I despise sitting on a tight rope. If I can’t reach the other side safely, I would rather leap off and to hell with it. I was still afraid, but the anxiety over whether I was going to do the right or wrong thing drained away like the last of a filthy flood and left me purged. I unslung the rifle from my shoulder, loaded it, slammed the breech shut, and seriously set out for elk.
I found more wolves instead. Nasty looking fellows.
I didn’t know whether it was the same pack that He and I had fought off the previous night or whether it was a different bunch. I heard their howls before I saw them, lonesome and penetrating, animal and yet somehow human in tone. I had a heavy gun with me now, plus the narcodart pistol, and I was feeling braver than I really had any right to. I topped a hill that gave me a clear view down the length of a small valley that ran for approximately a mile before a crossrun of foothills broke it off. A hundred yards down that valley, a pack of eight wolves were worrying something they had killed. I could tell from the racket they were making that they had eaten their fill and were now merely showing off for the benefit of any other beast in the neighborhood, also playing a game with the tattered carcass, tearing it from each other and running a few steps with it. After a few minutes of this, they left the dead thing, turned as a group, and wandered up the valley toward me.
I dropped to the ground and flattened myself as much as I could, blending into the scenery. If they spotted me before I wanted them to, it would ruin my hunting plans—and might even get a little sticky when they charged. Eight of them coming at full tilt would make a formidable wall of teeth and claws.
The wind was blowing my way, away from the wolves. I knew they wouldn’t scent me. They broke into a lope for a few seconds, slowed and ambled again. When they were no more than a hundred feet from me, I aimed at the center of the lead demon’s skull and slowly squeezed the trigger.
Wham!
The blast slammed around the hilly countryside and mushroomed back at me with the force of a dozen heavy cannons. The wolf’s head shattered, and he was flung backwards six feet where he rolled over in the snow, leaking blood and dead, beyond question. The rest of the pack turned tail and ran down the valley until the darkness swallowed them. When we had fought them off with pin-guns, there had been no noise; it was the powerful rifle’s retort that had scared them off this time. Indeed, that blast had been louder than I had expected. When it came, it startled me as much as it did them. I waited a few minutes until I heard one of the wolves howl at the sky. I knew, if I lay still, they would come back. And wolves were easier to carry home than elk.
Ten minutes passed before the first of the pack sneaked back along the edge of the ravine, trying to conceal himself in the scanty vegetation there, slinking, visibly trembling, but still full of the desire and the ability to kill. I would not have seen him but for a barren spot through which he had to pass. I caught the dark movement out of the corner of my eye and turned to watch him. I left him alone. Timidly, he moved opposite the body of his former brother and approached the corpse, sniffing it all over and casting wary glances in all directions as if he sensed the presence of the force that had dealt the death blow. He raised his head and smelled the wind, but my scent was being carried the wrong way. He howled.
Shortly, his friends came to join him, prancing a little and trying to look brave.
I raised the rifle and sighted on the largest of the group, then had a better idea. Quietly, I put the rifle down and took out my narcodart pistol. It was smaller, and I had to remove even the thin gloves I was wearing to be able to handle it right. I leveled it at the group, swept them from left to right as I depressed the trigger. All were hit. I swept back again, just to make certain. Some of them tried to run but got only a few feet when the drugs affected them, sent them tumbling into the snow, legs akimbo.
I put the pistol away and walked down to the sleeping demons. They lay with their mouths open, their teeth bare and wet with saliva. They smelled of the dead meat they had eaten. Raising the rifle, I shot two of them and decided to let the others go. Making live flesh into dead flesh did not appeal to me. I wanted to do as little of it as possible.
With cord from my pack, I tied the three dead wolves together and dragged them back to the cabin. The three together outweighed me, and it was not an easy job. I thought, too late now, that I should have brought the magnetic sled at least part of the way. Fortunately, the snow packed in their coats and turned to ice under the influence of their dissipating body heat so that they formed a sort of sled of their own that glided across the spots the wind had made bare and across the places where there was a heavy crust.
When I got back to the cabin, I stacked the wolves on the porch and went inside. I opened the cellar door and flipped on the light which He had not bothered with. I went down the first two steps when His voice came from below, hollow and strange, His voice, and yet not remotely His voice, much different than it had been an hour and a half ago. “Jacob, stay where you are,” He said.
He meant it.
I stopped, looking down toward the bottom. The stairs came into one end of the cellar, and it was impossible to see anything of the basement room if you stood at the top of them. “What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Nothing wrong,” He said.
“Then I’m coming down.”
“No! I’m not—not pleasant to look at,” He said. “There has been a major change within the last hour. You had best stay up there.�
�
The voice was something like a seventy-eight r.p.m. recording being played at forty-five, though it was intelligible and still carried enough of His former tones to let me know it was definitely Him. “I think I can take it,” I said, starting down again.
“No!”
It was such a definite negative that I stopped on the fourth step, then turned and went to the top landing again. I was shaking all over. Scenes from the old horror story wound through my mind despite my earlier proclamation. Bolts in the neck . . . A series of heavy stitches across the forehead . . . malevolent eyes, eyes of a dead man . . .
“The changes,” I said. “What—“
“It became necessary to adapt my circulatory system to my newer form,” He said. It was eerie talking to Him and not being able to see Him. My mind conjured up worse apparitions, I was sure, than the one He must truly have possessed at that point. “It could not support the tissue I was making. I restructured it into a triple pump with external as well as internal vessels.”
I sat down on the top step because I did not trust myself to remain standing. “I see,” I said, seeing nothing. I have this complex about seeming stupid. It comes from having lived with Harry Leach for so many years. He would explain something to me, something so complex that only a team of specialists could fully understand it, and then he would say, “See?” And if I said no, he sulked and slunk around looking for simpler language to put it in, inevitably putting it so simply as to embarrass both of us. He never inferred that I was not as swift as he, but the aura of his frustration made me feel somehow inadequate. It was years and years, until I was finished with interning and had gained some confidence as a full-fledged doctor working on my own, that I came to understand myself in this respect, this threatening inferiority complex. I understand it now. I still can’t shake it.