He looked behind himself.
Teddy was still nowhere around.
There might still be time.
He jammed the key into the lock, more by accident than intent, twisted it and pushed the old-fashioned metal door open. The lights in the room beyond rose automatically, displaying a simple chair before a small round table in the center of the room. The single leg the table stood on was a foot in diameter. The top of the table was inlaid with bright keys, one for every letter of the alphabet, ten for numbers and combinations thereof, eighty-six others for various symbols— including monetary abbreviations, brackets, commas, periods, parentheses, scientific notations…
He sat in the cup-chair and leaned over the board, pressed the MESSAGE bar and watched the keys light up.
Still no Teddy.
Laboriously, he managed to key the first directive:
LOCK ALL EXTERIOR DOORS AND WINDOWS ON THE BOTTOM THREE LEVELS OF THE MANSION.
The wall across from him lighted abruptly, like a motion picture screen. Black letters blinked before him: DIRECTIVE OBEYED.
He typed: DO NOT OPEN ANY DOORS OR WINDOWS WITHOUT THE DIRECT COMMAND OF A HUMAN VOICE.
On the wall, it replied: MY SOUND RECEPTORS ARE NOT FUNCTIONING.
St. Cyr watched the keys dance up and down before his eyes, metamorphose into bright mushrooms, become keys again. He wondered if he could possibly afford to take a catnap; if he could knock off for half an hour, his head would be so much clearer when he woke.
He typed: DO NOT OPEN ANY DOORS OR WINDOWS WITHOUT BEING REQUESTED TO DO SO, MANUALLY, BY A MESSAGE PRECEDED BY THE CODE WORD — STALKER.
Flickering on the screen: YES, SIR.
St. Cyr: WITHOUT YOUR AUDIO RECEIVERS, CAN YOU IDENTIFY THE PASSENGER IN AN ELEVATOR?
NO, SIR.
He thought a minute, allowed the minute to stretch into a year, let it snap back into perspective again. He typed: CAN YOU DISTINGUISH BETWEEN A HUMAN AND A ROBOTIC ELEVATOR PASSENGER, WITHOUT YOUR EARS?
YES, SIR.
HOW?
ON GRAVPLATES, A ROBOT BRINGS NO WEIGHT TO BEAR ON THE ELEVATOR FLOOR, WHICH I MONITOR FOR SAFETY REASONS.
He typed: PERMIT NO ROBOT IN THE ELEVATORS.
YES, SIR.
He thought a moment, then added: ACCEPT NO PROGRAMMED COMMAND UNLESS IT IS PRECEDED BY THE CODE WORD — STALKER.
YES, SIR. PRECAUTION EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.
He slumped back in his chair, closed his eyes and yawned. On the insides of his eyelids, the stalker approached him, hands raised to embrace him. He did not like the vision, and he opened his eyes again to be rid of it. He leaned forward and typed: DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT HAS HAPPENED IN THIS HOUSE?
No letters lighted on the wall.
He nodded, corrected the message: STALKER, DO YOU KNOW WHAT HAS HAPPENED IN THIS HOUSE?
THE MASTER UNIT HAS GONE — BERSERK.
He shut off the keyboard and got out of his chair, though he would have liked to remain there for a long while. He crossed the small room, locked the door behind him, pocketed the key. He stumbled through the workshop and across the garage to the elevator doors without encountering Teddy. Perhaps he had reached the programming board in time to keep the master unit locked out. Perhaps they were safe in their fortress.
He stepped into the pink mouth when the lips opened hungrily.
He was swallowed.
Spit up. Still too sour.
In the sitting room, he saw that the others had finished their desperate barricade of chairs, sofas, lamps, draperies, bookshelves and cocktail tables. They had wedged the debris into the frame of the broken window so tightly that a certain force would be required to smash through — thereby providing them with some kind of warning.
Only Alicia was awake, fighting off the second phase of the drug's influence. She sat on a sofa, the only piece not worked into the window frame, watching over her family.
"It's done," he said.
Without feeling, as if she had to expend enormous energy to shape each word, Alicia said, "I thought you were dead."
"Not yet."
"Where would we be without you?"
"Happier?"
She shook her head back and forth, almost forgot to stop. "What you said needed to be said."
"Sleepy…" he protested.
"Lie down."
He lay down next to Tina and draped one arm across her narrow shoulders. She was warm. She was like a catalyst that brought the green-black nothingness sweeping over him.
SIXTEEN: Advice
Baker St. Cyr woke at two o'clock in the morning, sticky with perspiration, his heart pounding loudly in his ears, having just and barely escaped the cold embrace of the stalker on the broken road. The icy white fingers had actually brushed his cheek this time, the nails like polished stones as they raked gently through his hair. The touch had carried from sleep into the waking world, causing him to shiver uncontrollably.
"What's the matter?" Tina Alderban asked.
He opened his eyes and, for a moment, as he looked into her face, was terrified that the stalker had come out of the dream with him, had assumed a husk of flesh and blood. Then he realized that they were still lying on the floor, faces turned toward each other, and that his arm was still draped across her shoulder where he had put it before sinking into the drugged sleep. She was Tina, no one else.
"Nightmares," he said.
"Have them often?"
"All the time."
"The same one?"
Surprised at the question, he said, "Yes."
He removed his arm from her shoulders, for he felt that the price of that familiarity was going to be too steep for him to pay in terms of candidness and truth.
"What happened to the others?"
"See for yourself."
He sat up, wished that he had not, waited until the banging inside his skull settled into a more tolerable thumping, like a padded drumstick against a gong. He wiped at his cottony eyes and saw that the rest of the family was in much the same state as he was — except for Alicia and Hirschel, who appeared to be more fully recovered than anyone else.
"You were slow when the shooting started," Hirschel said. In his book, obviously, that was one of the worst things a man could be.
"I know," he said. "I guess it was the drug."
"No one else was so affected by it that they couldn't get off at least one burst," Hirschel insisted. He was not exactly angry — more concerned than anything.
"I was the first hit," St. Cyr reminded the hunter.
Hirschel shrugged and did not push the subject any more.
"What now?" Jubal asked. His words were slurred. He sat with Alicia on the couch, beside Dane, massaging his own temples in slow, circular movements of his fingertips. Dane looked thinner, darker, and more confused than ever. The superstitious folderol had been proved false, suddenly and violently. He had not yet gotten used to facing reality.
"Now," St. Cyr said, "we find another room on this level, one that doesn't have any windows large enough for Teddy to break through."
"You think he's still outside the house?" Hirschel asked. Clearly, he did not think so.
St. Cyr explained the trek he had made down to the manual programming chamber and what he had accomplished there.
"I underestimated you again," the hunter said, smiling.
"But don't get your hopes up," St. Cyr said. 'Teddy may have gotten back into the house before I issued those orders to the house computer."
"We'd have seen him before this," Jubal said.
"I doubt it. He knows that we have the vibra-guns. He's not going to attack straight-on unless he has absolutely no other choice. That's why I want to get us established in another room that can only be breached through a single door. We're going to limit his alternatives until he has no choice but to confront us at a disadvantage."
"If he's not in the house?" Jubal asked.
"Then we have an easy night ahead of us."
"He could kill the Worl
dwide Communications deliveryman and gain another day. Or, if it's a mechanical deliveryman, he could simply smash it up."
"No. The port office would wonder what had happened to their man. They'd try calling. Then they'd send someone else. If they lost two men in a couple of hours, the police would be swarming all over the mansion."
"The library has no windows and one door," Hirschel said. "That ought to be the kind of room you're looking for."
By a quarter of three that morning they had cycled open the library door, using the master key that St. Cyr had brought up from the basement — with the house computer "deaf," the locks could no longer be vocally coded — had left the door open as an invitation to the master unit, and had used books and furniture to form defended firing positions in the middle of the room. Then they had nothing to do but wait.
At twenty minutes past three in the morning, as they waited quietly in the library, Tina crept across the dimly lighted room and sat beside him where he was hunched behind an overturned writing desk. She said, "I have a suggestion to make."
"That is?"
'Take off the bio-computer shell."
"Now?"
Illogical.
"Yes. It almost caused your death once."
He grinned and looked away from the open door for a moment. He said, "How do you figure that?"
"You said yourself that you were so slow in recognizing the killer's identity only because the bio-computer kept rejecting the possibility of a robot criminal."
"But now it understands, has the data stored."
"The way I understand it," she said, "is that you have the data stored in your own brain cells. The bio-computer never retains any data beyond that which is put in it by the maker. It taps your own store of information, too, and makes use of that, but it never adds to its own."
"It's the same thing," he said.
"No, it isn't." She bit her lip, spoke rapidly, as if she were afraid he would stop her at any moment. "The bio-computer is programmed to reject in its considerations anything that appears to be unfactual, based on emotions. It might very well still reject the idea of a murderous robot."
"Where did you get all this theory on bio-computers?" he asked, glancing at the still-empty doorway, then back at the girl. Her eyes were terribly dark, beautiful.
She looked down at her delicate hands and said, 'I've been reading about them."
"Recently?"
"Today."
"Where'd you get the information?"
She motioned at the books around them. "Here. There was more than enough. You know, too, that the fedgov has often thought of issuing injunctions against further sales or use of bio-computers?"
"Yes," he said. "But they're always twenty years behind the times. Give them a few more years and they will require bio-computer shells for all federal police."
She looked up again and leaned forward, as if putting the musculature of her fine small body behind the words: "There are times where cold, logical reasoning does not work as well as emotionalism."
Illogical.
"Name one time," he said.
She looked at her hands again. "Between us."
"I guess so," he said. "But we were talking about how best to solve a case, with or without a bio-computer. That's something different again. And I still say it's safer and easier wearing a shell."
"What is your repeating nightmare about?" she asked.
He was startled by the abrupt change of subject. He had gone from a topic he knew he could win to one that he had never understood. "I don't know," he said.
"Of course you do."
"I'm being chased down a broken road," he said. He hesitated, and then, keeping his eyes on the door, he told her the entire dream.
"Do you know what's behind it? Have you ever submitted to psychoanalysis?"
"No."
"Doesn't the bio-computer try to help you understand the nightmare?"
"It tries."
"And can't?"
"Can't," he said.
"Then that's because you won't let it. The bio-computer isn't a sentient creature itself, you know. It isn't even half of a symbiote, in the true sense of that word. It's just something you use, like a tool. If you wanted to know what that dream meant, the bio-computer could help you learn."
"You've done a great deal of reading, haven't you?"
"Yes," she said.
"Then you know about the paranoid spells."
She nodded. "When you think it's actually taking over your mind; when you have a feeling there's something physical and living crawling around inside of you."
"That's it," he said, shivering at the exactness of the description.
She shifted her position, crossed her lovely, slim legs in Indian fashion and leaned with her palms against the cool, supple mounds of her knees. "Surely, if you understand that those attacks are only paranoid, you can't be saying that they prove the bio-computer is, in fact, sentient."
For a while he did not answer. When he realized she was not going to leave, that she was waiting, he said, "Most of the time it feels as if I'm not alone, as if it's someone to be with, share with, live with."
"And you can't bear to be alone?"
"Can't at all."
She said, "Then there are alternatives to the bio-computer."
He looked at her, thinking that it was best to face each other honestly right now, looked quickly away when he saw what he thought were tears in the corners of her eyes. He wished that Teddy would arrive soon, so that he would have something to shoot at. He wanted to see the pulse of the laser and watch the destruction the sound made as the light carried it against and into the robot's shell. He felt that the gun could bleed away a nameless tension that had overtaken him.
He said, "The alternatives are worse, because they involve too much responsibility."
"There must be something pretty awful behind your nightmare," she said, "to make you the way you are now."
"How am I now?"
"Cold, distant."
"Look who's talking," he said.
He regretted the insult as soon as he had spoken, but he did not have the will to retract it, even if it could be reeled back in and altogether forgotten.
She was hurt, but she tried not to show the hurt.
"You're right, of course. I'm the one who told you that in the first place. I feel cold, hollow, uncaring. But you were the one who was supposed to help me, to make me feel human, to warm me up. Do you think you ever can — so long as you're wearing that shell?" She answered her own question. "No, it just won't work. We'd have to be each other's crutch, or not at all."
As St. Cyr was framing his response, Teddy appeared in the library doorway and took a burst from Hirschel's vibra-rifle, square in the center of his body trunk.
SEVENTEEN: More Than a Case Is Ended
"You got him!" Dane shouted.
St. Cyr snapped, "Stay down!"
The boy dropped back behind a shelter made from a lounge chair and about a hundred hardbound volumes of popular Darmanian history which he had pulled from the shelves.
"I hit him square in the chest," Hirschel said. "But if the damage had been serious, he'd be lying there in the doorway. Do you see him?"
"No," Dane said sheepishly.
Tina was on her knees again, and she leaned close to St. Cyr to whisper, "May I stay here with you? I think this is a better firing position than the one I was in."
That was not the reason she wished to remain beside him, however. But he could not find heart to argue with her. "Stay," he said.
In the next instant Teddy shot through the doorway without warning, moving far faster than St. Cyr had ever imagined that he could. He had angled his body trunk ninety degrees from his gravplate mobility system, which was fitted under his base on a heavy ball joint. The result was that he came at them lying on his side, offering the smallest possible target. Even if they could snap a shot straight into his undercarriage, there were no mechanisms to be damaged, only the heavy ball j
oint that moved the gravplates, and this was too solid to succumb to a vibra-beam.
St. Cyr fired, missed.
"Look out!" Tina cried.
Teddy struck the writing desk behind which they were hiding, smashed through the top of it "feet first," showering splintered wood into the air, crumpling the piece of furniture like eggshell. His advance did not seem at all diminished by the collision. He struck St, Cyr's bad shoulder with nearly enough force to rip the detective's arm from its socket, then rocketed past, deeper into the library.
Hirschel fired, must have missed, and cursed.
Small hands pulled pieces of the desk from St. Cyr and brushed splinters from his face. "You all right?" Tina asked.
He blinked, nodded, and tried to sit up.
Across the room, Teddy soared to the high ceiling like a bat loose in a house, dropped behind Dane, leveled off and slammed hard into the boy as he turned to take aim with his pistol. Dane was tossed into the bookshelves as if he were made of clay; he got out one choked scream before he fell forward on his face. He might or might not be dead. Clearly, though, he was out of the fight for good.
"My rifle," St. Cyr said.
Tina said, "It's smashed."
"Where's your pistol?"
She looked around, came up with it.
"Give it to me."
Hirschel scored a hit, fell and twisted away as the robot dived in towards him.
St. Cyr fired three times in rapid succession as the master unit, though still lying on its side, parallel to the floor, passed length-on to him, offering an excellent target. All three of the shots, the pulses of light showed, were wide of the mark.
"Terrible shooting," she said.
"My shoulder hurts like a bitch," he said. That much was perfectly true. But the excuse for such inexcusably bad marksmanship on the part of a professional rang hollow even in his own ear; he had pulled off those three bursts of fire knowing they were wide.
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