"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 sh.e.l.l?" 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 joint that moved the gravplates, and this was too solid to succ.u.mb 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 eggsh.e.l.l. 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, pa.s.sed 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 b.i.t.c.h," he said. That much was perfectly true. But the excuse for such inexcusably bad marksmans.h.i.+p on the part of a professional rang hollow even in his own ear; he had pulled off those three bursts of fire knowing knowing they were wide. they were wide.

Teddy swung back on Hirschel just as the hunter gained his feet, struck his left hip and spun him violently around. Hirschel's knees caught on the arm of a chair and he went down hard, his head striking the back of the chair with a sickening dull thud. He did not move.

Teddy swung in St. Cyr's direction, located him and started forward at top speed.

St. Cyr shot, missed, shot again, fell to the side as the robot careened past.

"Give me the gun," Tina said, holding out a slim, brown hand.

St. Cyr pushed her rudely away as Teddy streaked back on them and pa.s.sed within an inch of the spot where her head had been. He rolled, despite his throbbing shoulder, and fired again. The pulse of light, tattling on his bad shooting, pa.s.sed two feet above the master unit.

What in h.e.l.l was wrong?

For once, the bio-computer had no suggestion.

Foolishly, Jubal had picked up a chair and was crossing the room in quick, heavy steps, brandis.h.i.+ng the impossible weapon as if he could frighten the robot away with the threat of a severe beating.

"Get back. Stay down!" St. Cyr called.

Jubal could not hear him, or did not want to. Perhaps, in this useless display of bravery, he hoped to cancel out everything that St. Cyr had said to him in the last several hours; wipe out his wife's and his daughter's agreement with that judgment; prove that, after all, he could could care about someone besides himself, something else besides his art. care about someone besides himself, something else besides his art.

Teddy rose, dived, leveled out and smashed the chair from the old man's hands, sending him tumbling backwards. He landed in a heap at his wife's feet. Alicia bent over him and patted his face. She seemed almost too calm as she pointedly ignored the chaos around her-and when it was all over, if she were somehow still alive, she would most likely have some screaming to do.

"Give me that gun!" Tina insisted.

"Stay down," St. Cyr said. "Or get out of here." He ignored her reaching hand and got clumsily to his feet. He did not dare look at his shoulder. The pain was bad enough. He did not want to have to match the pain with the sight of all that blood from the opened wound. Somehow he twisted fast enough to avoid Teddy's next pa.s.s, turned and stumbled into the rows of ceiling-high bookshelves that paralleled the rear wall of the room and took up a third of the chamber's s.p.a.ce. He leaned against a shelf of mystery novels and tried to regain his breath and at least some of his nerve. He had to be calm, because he simply had to shoot better.

A moment later Teddy found him. The master unit soared into the far end of the aisle between the books, struck straight for St. Cyr's chest. When the cyberdetective fell to avoid being battered to death, the robot checked its forward speed with surprising rapidity, curved up and to the right to avoid ploughing disastrously into the stone wall behind the wood paneling, and smashed noisily through the shelving and bound volumes on that side. It burst into the second aisle, which paralleled the first, in a rain of torn paper and splintered wood.

Tina appeared at the end of the first pa.s.sage and shouted, "Baker!"

"Get out of here."

She started towards him.

"For G.o.d's sake, run!"

Teddy exploded through the books and shelving again, destroying a good portion of the library's collection of 20th-century American authors, oblivious of any possibility of damage to his own mechanisms, then dropped at St. Cyr like a stone.

Tina screamed.

St. Cyr tried to run.

Instead of crus.h.i.+ng his skull down to his kneecaps as it had intended, the master unit glanced off his good shoulder and sent him tumbling like a clown. Full-length on the floor of the aisle, both shoulders jammed full of intensely hot pins, St. Cyr wondered why he had not yet tried to shoot the robot while it was limited in its maneuvers by the dimensions of the aisle.

A robot is harmless property.

He's a killer.

Illogical.

St. Cyr rolled, trying to make up for lost time, and nearly ground his teeth down to the gums in a single instant as pain cascaded through him like a torrent through a suddenly opened sluice gate. He fired straight up at the machine as it dived like a hammer for his head, chewed on what was left of his teeth, and rolled again.

He had missed.

A robot is harmless, valuable property.

Bulls.h.i.+t.

Useless emotion.

St. Cyr scrambled across the aisle, wriggled through the lowest shelf, pus.h.i.+ng the books ahead of him into the next pa.s.sageway. He crossed that and was into the third before Teddy smashed through the shelving after him.

"Baker!"

He looked around, could not see her.

He ran to the end of the aisle as Teddy smashed through from the second and soared after him.

"Baker, where are you?"

"Get out, dammit!"

He had forgotten Teddy, listening to her call. He sensed the imminence of disaster a second before it was to happen, threw himself to the left, screamed as his wounded shoulder caught the edge of a shelf. Teddy boomed through the place he had been standing.

"Baker!"

He pushed through the books into the fourth aisle, squirmed through another low shelf into the fifth and last pa.s.sageway. He was not as upset by the blank wall facing him as he should have been; for a long moment there, he had wondered if there would be an end to the aisles or if he had accidentally entered some unimaginably subtle purgatory in which the books went on and on forever.

No door here, though. Well, he had specified a room with only one entrance...

Somewhere farther back, toward the front of the room, Teddy tore another hole in the neatly racked books. A weakened shelf sighed as nails pulled slowly free, screeched abruptly like a stepped-on cat, and collapsed with a roar of spilled knowledge.

The house computer had referred to Teddy as a berserker. At the time, that had not been exactly true, for the master unit had been operating on a set of carefully laid plans. Now, however, when his plans had fallen through, he was indeed a berserker. Apparently, when Walter Dannery programmed the robot for murder, he thought to place in it a final directive to take precedence in a crisis: If If all else fails, throw caution to the wind, attack and destroy all else fails, throw caution to the wind, attack and destroy.

Three hundred and fifty pounds of master unit traveling at twenty miles an hour-say only ten or fifteen miles an hour in the confines of the room-generated how much force, how much impact, how much potential for destruction? Too G.o.dd.a.m.ned much. Shortly, there would not be any aisles in which to hide.

Books slapped to the floor again as shelving protested, splintered, and fell down before the robot.

Tina screamed.

Another crash.

Books fluttering like birds.

"Baker, help me!"

St. Cyr ran to the end of the aisle and, keeping to the wall, ran past the succeeding pa.s.sageways, looking quickly into each. He found both the girl and the robot in the second corridor. She had fallen in a mound of rumpled books and seemed to have twisted her ankle. The master unit was completing a turn, right in front of St. Cyr, that would take it back towards her in one last deadly plunge.

"Baker!"

She had seen him.

He fired at the master unit, missed.

He d.a.m.ned the bio-computer that was attached to him, knew that he had no time to stop, calmly deactivate it, wait for the filaments to leave his body, unplug it and put it down. She would be dead by then.

"Here!" he shouted.

He tossed the gun to her. It glanced off a s.h.i.+ny-backed book by her hand and clattered across the floor, stopping a dozen feet behind her.

"Hurry!" he shouted.

She turned and scrambled after the weapon, slipped, fell, pushed up, reached, had it.

Teddy started after her.

Suddenly St. Cyr knew that she would not have enough time to stop it. Teddy could take the vibra-beam long enough to slam brutally into her and pa.s.s on by her broken body. And as abruptly as that realization came, so came the breakdown in the wall of his psyche, the wall that had s.h.i.+elded him from certain portions of the past for a long, long time now. In that instant he knew who the stalker in his nightmare was, remembered Angela, remembered her face in death, saw dark hair and dark eyes, saw her metamorphose into Tina... He screamed and lunged forward, leapt for the robot that had already begun to move away from him.

Luckily, his hands caught under what would have been a chin if it were human; he tried to drag it backwards, like a child wrestling with a dog three times his size.

Teddy swiveled his head, attempted to wrench free of the detective, his angle of approach to Tina s.h.i.+fting as he failed.

Tina had turned and was holding the pistol before her in both hands. Like a caveman who thinks he can beat an armored tank with nothing more than a slingshot, thought St. Cyr as he rode the silver robot.

A robot is harmless, valuable property.