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 c.o.c.ktail 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 s.h.i.+ver 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 a.s.sumed 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 concerned than anything. 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, ma.s.saging his own temples in slow, circular movements of his fingertips. Dane looked thinner, darker, and more confused than ever. The superst.i.tious 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 Worldwide 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 bas.e.m.e.nt-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 sh.e.l.l."

"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 ident.i.ty 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 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." 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.l."

"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 psychoa.n.a.lysis?"

"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, s.h.i.+vering at the exactness of the description.

She s.h.i.+fted her position, crossed her lovely, slim legs in Indian fas.h.i.+on 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 feels as if I'm not alone, as if it's someone to be with, share with, live with." 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 sh.e.l.l. 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."