CHAPTER THREE

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Flat on her back, in what was becoming repetitive as a training loop, Shesha Haddon pondered whether she would survive this onset of friendship into a viable future.

She was not given long to think it through. Holt rolled his weight off her chest in record time for the sequence and said urgently, "This way, keep your head down." Three-seconds-fast scrabble on hands and knees, with nervous doubt whether she was not setting up a target every bit as vulnerable as her head, and Holt was pulling her to her feet in the shelter of a book-lined passageway.

They ran hand-in-hand for an intersection and zigzagged fifty meters before he called a halt. "Listen!" Even-paced footsteps sounded from far left and far right. Shesha opened her mouth to speak and found herself gagged by his free hand.

The androids had separated to the two end aisles, which ran the whole length of the sector. The one on the right had halted. His partner was moving in toward the center of a row. Midway, he turned again, through a connecting aisle, then followed the next row out to the perimeter. When he stopped, the other one began to move.

The pattern of search was simple but effective. In this sector, shelving ran in long parallel lines with staggered, connecting gaps. From either end a whole row was plain to see. With one covering, the other could work along and flush out the connecting alley. Then as it monitored the next, its fellow could repeat the drill and move up one.

Slow, but strategically sound. Eventually they would be driven back to the rear wall. Checkmate by two rooks.

Holt signaled for a further withdrawal, and they crossed three more rows before he stopped again. Here, two intersections had been widened to make a study alcove with a round table. Standing beside it was an empty library cart.

Footfalls from the rear were faint, but still clear. Shesha, with her mouth close to his ear, said, "What can we do?"

"Stand at the end of the row. Don't show yourself. Count the steps on that side. I want to know how long he's gone from the end. Also, how far away."

While she was busy, he loaded the cart, clearing two shelves to pack the lower tray and pile the top in a solid meter block. When he shoved it along to where she stood, she had it all worked out.

"Forty-three seconds on the long haul, thirty-five when the gap is nearer. He's four rows away on this ode. Just started another short trip."

It was very neat. Next time, he would narrow it to two. But it was the longer journey. Holt raced through the calculation. Everything depended on exact timing. He waited for the android to move, then he maneuvered the heavy cart into the aisle.

Fifteen meters to go. The android reached the gap, went through and turned into the home straight. Vectors were set out in Holt's head like lines in an animated diagram, with a precise collision point at the end of the row.

Very slowly, he got way on his ram, bending low, with his head level with the top of the pile. Then he put every ounce of effort into it.

Hands dropped on his waist. It was too late to tell her to stay out of it There was nothing he could do except guide the cart.

For a nonasecond, he thought that the extra force had defeated his timing and that they would reach and pass the row too soon, giving the android an open target with their backs. Pounding along, he could no longer hear the footsteps. Then the tin man was dead ahead, with its arm whipping up as an earnest of phenomenal reaction time.

One shot ripped into the top hamper as Holt dropped clear. Then the cart struck. The android went down like a rag doll. Shesha called, "Don't forget the other one," but Holt was throwing rubble aside to get at its console. He was sure that men had programed it and it was against logic that they would start something they could not stop.

It was struggling to orientate when he found the panel. Miniature switchgear, with a master key for non-op. When he threw it over, he was dealing with a collection of scrap. He had it by the legs and pulled it clear as the other began to fire from the end of the row. Shesha screamed, "Leave it!" Then when she saw he would not, she was beside him taking a leg. Three rows on, she used enough breath to say bitterly, "Are you some kind of zany collector?"

"Hold it."

Holt had the chest cage open and was fishing out a forearm replacement unit. Instead of a carbine, it was developed for maintenance capability with a selection of power spanners and screw bits. It was the clip mechanism that interested him.

Shesha was going frantic. "Be quick! You have no time!"

Holt had seen what he wanted—simple snap-on catches with multiple jacks to link up the cortex: local controls centered in the cybernetic limb.

He whipped off the carbine arm, pointed it inside the chest cavity, and fired twice. Shesha, with her back to a bookcase, breathing heavily, said, "But they're made of metal. It won't work against one of them."

"It depends where they're hit."

She put her finger on a major flaw in the argument. "But it matters wherever you're hit. And if you can see an android to shoot at—it can see you."

"So we make sure it doesn't see us until we're good and ready. Come on." With only one to dodge, it was easy enough to slip out of the net. Listening and moving, they worked around until they were between the remaining android and the elevator. Holt said, "It can go on for days without refueling. We can't. Eventually, it has to catch up. I've got to finish it. While I still can. Go to the end of the row."

Although it was unable to see them, the android's aural direction sensors had beamed delicately onto the conversation. It zigzagged through two intersections without stopping to check left and right. There was one row of shelves between them and it was hurrying for the connecting gap. Holt picked a bulky volume at random and lobbed it down the aisle. It dropped flat, with a percussive smack as the android's carbine arm appeared like a pointer.

For a second it wavered. First impressions had been that the action was on the left. Noise from the right was difficult to interpolate on the graph. But the logic of its construction had to be followed. It stepped clear and turned to left.

Holt was standing four square, like a competition marksman. He raked the target in a long burst, from hip to ovoid head, and was still firing into it, with ricochets screaming every which way, as it crumpled with seams hammered open and its head circling on its neck stall in a last frenetic surge of power. Shesha Haddon's voice stopped him. Even from short acquaintance, the act seemed out of character. The black eyes that looked at her hardly held recognition. He had become a stranger.

"What is it?"

"Gunnar. Enough is enough. It's finished."

"You didn't do what I said. You might have been in the way." She felt that it could have been put better. He could have said, "You might have been hurt", but, rapidly adjusting to the new era of violence, she recognized that it was not the time. Instead, she shifted the collection of scrap until she could unclip the carbine arm and preferred it like a good hound dog. This time she got a compliment from Attila. "You learn fast."

"I'm a very clever girl."

Holt checked the armament. An exhausted clip had poked itself out from the arm he had used. He ferreted around in the debris for more of the same and found four others neatly slotted in the chest cavity. With a return to civil usages that did not go unnoticed by the squaw, he said, "I want to look at the controls on this one. Could you go and dig out the spares from the other? Watch the switches or it might sit up and make a grab for you."

"I wouldn't like that."

Watching her pleasantly undulating walk down the aisle, Holt reckoned she was taking a chance, even with the mechanism at non-op. A second thought was that, in spite of appearances and the emotional bit, early on, she was a very cool operator. Too good to be a mole in Horizon Delta. He began a systematic check of the torso. One thing was for sure. There would be others of this type. If they were to make any progress, he had to know what made them tick.

Shesha Haddon collected three full clips in record time. The blank head had a malevolent look which was still present in imagination when she had covered it with the V of an open book. On the way to join the ganger, she stopped off at the table where they had spread the works on Wirral City. Holt had collected a sheaf of pull-outs of working drawings and schematic diagrams. She also picked out a folio, "Wirral City. The Dream Takes Shape," which at a quick glance, earlier, had seemed less banal than might have been expected.

Rehearsing what she would say, a dialogue began in her head. "Here are the clips, Gunnar, and I brought these. They could be very useful."

"That's fine. You think of everything. I really don't know what I did until I met you." Holt spoke first when she was still five paces off, straightening from the floor, with both carbine arms like grotesque extensions of his hands.

"What have you got there?"

"Literature on the city."

"Oh. Well. If you want to carry it, bring it along. There won't be much time for a quiet read. First things first. It's time we had a meal."

That was a reminder. Shesha stopped trying to put her finger on the spot where the conversation had gone off course. "I have to get my registration disk."

"The time for registration disks has long gone. By some quirk of chance, we're outside the reference grid of Horizon Delta."

"Does Horizon Delta know that?"

"Never allow yourself to be brainwashed by the assumptions of society. They may be wrong."

"Who said that?"

"Why couldn't I have just said it?"

"It doesn't sound natural. It sounded as though you were saying it in inverted commas." Holt thought it was a little hard that he should have drawn a critic. He said, "It strikes me that if you have one nonfeminine trait, it is a tendency to press too hard for the truth. Why couldn't you just accept it like a stone tablet? Actually, Sutton said it, and I think there's a lot of truth in it."

"But surely it depends on the society? A good society would be based on good principles and its assumptions would be worth accepting."

"Who decides what is good?"

"Well, you couldn't leave it to any deranged nut who wanted to please himself."

"To the average man in Horizon Delta we would be deranged nuts."

"But we know we're not?"

"I do. I'm not too sure about you."

Shesha was standing straight up against a bookcase as though cornered and prepared to sell life dear. It was important to her to get this relationship founded on rock. She said, "Why shouldn't I apply the proposition to what you say and refuse to be railroaded? You're losing the argument, so you have to be personal. I'm surprised you didn't say, 'I'm right, because I'm bigger.'"

"What are we arguing about?"

"I don't know. You started it."

Holt leaned his carbines carefully against a rack and put his hands on her shoulders.

"Shesha."

"Here, present."

"I'm very glad I met up with you. You're a vindication of all I've been thinking for years past. I intend to get out of this place. I would like you with me. Are you coming?"

"Yes."

"You could still go back. We could find your disk. There'll be danger. We might not do it. In fact, we can't be sure that there's anywhere else to go."

"I've already said yes. Are you trying to make me change my mind?"

"I don't want you to have any false ideas about it."

"Any assumptions."

"All right, it was pompous. Shall we get on?"

Still hanging on in the monitoring control, although it was long past his tour of duty, George Prenton had found a reasonable grouch. There was no hook-up with the lower levels of the Burton library complex, and Holt and the girl were out of sight.

He watched the special branch operators bring the reception area into order; but for him it was Hamlet without the prince. Or, more particularly, the princess, since Shesha Haddon was still a potent image on his voyeur's eye.

Normally, the office closed at eighteen hundred hours and a robot recorder ran a sample check until the morning shift, with provision for an alarm call, if a precinct security android felt the need. The skirmish in Burton library had come under that head. Being already on site, he had tripped a relay to hold fast on an all-stations call and sourly kept a vigil on the neat, tidying-up exercise that the ten special androids organized.

Two had peeled off the stick to go below and flush out the deviants. It would have been interesting to watch the brown one being cornered and destroyed.

Even with nothing better to see than a dog-eating-dog exercise of androids reprogramming other androids and setting them to work in a new way as an unskilled labor gang, he was held by the thought of what was going on.

Wanting to see the two hunters come back, carrying the quarry, he set up the elevator area on the main actualizer, so that he could stand close and see blood.

Consequently, it was like a direct blow when Holt and Shesha Haddon stepped warily from the elevator, not half a meter distant from where he stood on the perimeter of the holographic screen. Instead of being a figure laid over an android's shoulder, the girl was carrying an android's arm in the crook of her own.

They walked toward him, and before the image melted out of focus, she was so close that he could see brown skin through the lattice of chain mail. Sound being less selective than vision, her voice appeared to come from somewhere inside his own head in a warm contralto, after the picture had gone. "There's one by the kiosk, Gunnar."

Prenton fairly leaped from his console and was tuning for a wide-angle shot when the sound track erupted in a clatter of carbine fire. He had the whole reception area in view from a point above the street exit. A special android was draped over the counter with its right arm stiffly down and still firing a continuous burst into the parquet.

The librarian was stock still, neatly bisected from the crown of its dome—dead, but unwilling to lie down, with a spiral of ticker tape pulsing out from a slot over its left aural sensor. Bonnie and Clyde were running for the door under the viewing eye. Prenton had a foreshortened view of his Apsaras going ahead, while Holt stopped to check around the set. Then they were both gone. Belatedly, two special androids appeared from the corridors. One was the section leader, and he recognized that affairs were moving too fast. He extruded an aerial antenna from the crown of his ovoid head and put in a direct call for advice.

Prenton picked it up, although it was not for him. He heard the Alpha security office answer and the duty operator, whose voice he could identify, say coldly, "What is your problem? You have ten armed men. The instruction is to destroy the two deviants. Why have you not carried out the order?"

"Now we are seven," said the android with unconscious pathos. "These deviants are exceptional. It will be difficult to be selective. Others may be killed if we attack them in a crowded place. My program is definite on that point. Only a designated human may be restrained."

"Unless there is a special instruction."

"Of course, Excellency."

"You have it. The two deviants must be destroyed, wherever found. Is that clear?"

"Perfectly clear, your Excellency."

"Get on with it, then."

Prenton debated whether to inform Foden or the junior member of the team. He settled for Joanna Taubman. Indirectly, it was a line to the top administrator. It would let him know that the security office was not doing too well with a very small assignment.

He expected to get the general-purpose desk android and a picture of the Taubman home on the video screen; but to his surprise it was the girl herself. Head and shoulders, precisely tuned like a studio portrait, with a thin band of cerulean blue fabric lining the foreground to show that he was not talking to a nude.

She did not look all delight when she recognized the caller. Maybe she was waiting in the service lobby expecting a call that she wanted to keep to herself. That might well be necessary, with a security creep permanently on the premises.

"What is it?"

"I thought somebody ought to know that the trouble down in Burton is not cleared up. In fact, I reckon it could be very serious. Security has given the specials direct instruction to neutralize the two deviants. Wherever they are found."

"Will they resist?"

"They already have. Three specials have been destroyed. They are armed. If they shoot it out in a crowded place, there will be a riot."

"What are you getting at, Controller?"

It was his title, but Prenton recognized that it was used to put him in his place.

"Somebody ought to be ready with a decision. We can't afford to have more than one Woodslee."

"Like a decision to shut down a sector and use gas?"

"Like that."

"I'll put it to my father. If he thinks it necessary, he'll call an emergency session. But it couldn't get off the ground for an hour or two. Council members might be anywhere at this time." Prenton's sardonic eye made her add, "Well, you know what I mean, some of them have a long way to come."

It was not much improvement. She remembered, too late, Prenton's irritating habit of giving an erotic twist to the simplest statement. This was playing into his hands. Many leading Alpha citizens had set up offbeat establishments outside the city in the wasteland.

She signed off, coldly, with formal thanks for his public spirit.

Prenton, left looking at a blank video, thought, "Upstart bitch. Patronizing. The whole tribe make me puke. Keep your eyes wide open George, boy. Some little thing might come out of this to bait a hook for as big a fish as Dr. Gordon Taubman. Be a public benefactor and get them out of the body politic." Taubman, himself, received the latest bulletin in his second-floor belvedere at the back of the house. It was a handsome semicircular room with the straight wall lined with shelving that camouflaged a pivoting entrance section. The remaining 180 degrees of arc were entirely glassed. There was a sense of being suspended in mid-air.

Sitting at his desk, Taubman looked out on an uninterrupted vista of parkland. Even the boundary wall, set from the house in every direction, was concealed in a ha-ha.

The official residence of the Senior Administrator of Wirral City was, externally, a pastiche Georgian manor. No plug-in architecture for the elite. It had facilities for Council meetings and hospitality on the ground floor and family accommodation above. A force of military and general androids, one thousand strong with a grade-one executive computer, acted out the role of personal bodyguard for the chief citizen and final enforcement agency for any policy the Council might get up to. It was a position of strength, very much to Taubman's liking, and he had no intention of giving it up. Joanna Taubman announced herself to a grille on the left of the revolving section and got a curt invitation to go through. "What is it?"

He had hardly changed in all the years she had been one of the household. Thick-set, heavily built with a large, squarish face and underslung piranha jaw, Taubman was not a man for casual, grooming talk. When she was through the hatch, he waited for her to speak.

"Prenton thinks the two deviants on Delta are going to give trouble. He says security has given orders for a hot war. He thinks there ought to be a decision on the file to use gas."

"He takes a lot on himself."

"In this case, he could be right. But it is my belief that the deviants are harmless in themselves. I would like to see them brought up to Alpha."

"What does Guy say?"

"I haven't seen him; but from what he said earlier, he might agree with Prenton."

"And you think that would be bad?"

"The Council might think so, if they weren't asked."

"I'll take a look for myself. Fix it for me in the operations room. Get Guy along, if he's in." It was not widely known, certainly not by Prenton, that the monitoring equipment was duplicated at Government House. He was unconscious of the audience that joined him briefly and then bypassed his office to pick up the same transmission that he was getting.

With the resident expert at the console, the Taubman group picked up the action at the entrance to the Burton precinct refectory.

Conversation in the long, oblong dining hall faltered and died the death. It was the tail end of the dining period, but there were still several hundred citizens at the trough-Most had seen Shesha about the precinct, but in any public place she had instinctively been self-effacing, slipping in early or late and settling unobtrusively in a corner. This time, walking down the middle of the room with Holt, she was tracked in by every eye.

One of the android staff shuffled out from the pantry and stood in the way. Its file held no record of Holt, and it wanted to be clear before he tried to get on the ration strength. "All citizens must take meals in their own precinct."

Shesha Haddon, with more time to look around, saw.

That there would be no support from the human faction. Conditioned from birth to the system, they took it to be right. Also, they looked on Holt and herself as freaks. Given the word, they were likely to join the hunters.

Before she could take analysis any further, Holt had pitched his voice to carry to every part of the room and was saying, "Give me your program."

There was electric silence, as the crowd waited for the pay-off. When the android flipped out its black box and preferred it with obsequious zeal, there was as much disappointment as anything. They had expected to see the stranger cut to size.

Holt felt the atmosphere and to some extent understood it. He was aiming to publicize android frailty and hoped that interest in that angle would outweigh unpopularity for one playing God. He tipped every spool down the nearest food-disposal chute and handed it back. Then he made a public demonstration of control procedure. "Now this robot has no set program. Notice on the chest console there is a bank of micro switches. At present, it is working on the pre-set instruction tapes. This switch on the extreme right, as you face the panel, puts it over to manual control. Throw the key down. Then it responds to verbal direction. Watch."

Holt went through the drill and had the android do a quick-quick-slow shuffle around a table. A gray-haired man in the blue coverall of the medical service called out, "It might work for you. But you've got to stop the bastard first. You can't do fancy settings of its switches when it's beaten your head in."

There was a general mutter of agreement.

Holt said, "I know that. Maybe you'll think of a way around it. I'm just showing you the layout in case you find a situation where you can use it."

Continuing the brief, he set his tin man on a course for the door. "Stay at the door. Do not respond to any instruction except from me. Stop any other android of any kind entering this room."

"Very good, Excellency."

Holt picked out three more from the pantry and sent them on the same mission, stationing one at each of the entrances.

The man who had spoken up was busy gathering support. They watched Holt override the dispenser and collect two meals without a credit registration and finally surrounded his table in a jostling crowd. Shesha Haddon, rising to the occasion, went on eating as though the celebrity spot was her natural locale and, if asked, she would throw any peasant a biscuit.

Holt said, "What is it?"

A younger man, who had gotten himself to the front of the press, put the case. "What are you trying to do? This is a peaceful community. You're causing trouble. There'll be a report on this and we'll suffer. Entertainment vouchers stopped. Food restrictions. Besides, there has to be order. If everybody went around like you, there'd be anarchy. Didn't you ever hear the saying, 'If a man does no work, neither shall he eat'?"

Holt finished his pudding and shoved the disposal container into the chute. He said, "That's right You have the right of it. There has to be order. But it has to be of our own making. We have to say what form it has. No human being should take direction from a metal zombie." The gray man was in again with, "You haven't read your history. Until men gave the rule book to the androids, there was nothing but confusion. Food shortage, insecurity, disorder. You want to turn back the clock. What's this guard business at the doors? Are you expecting trouble?" Holt stood up and some of the truculence went out of the front rank. Violence, except in the Coliseum theatres, was a novel experience, and they reacted by being poised for flight. He spoke over their heads and brought in everybody in the hall "Listen, there's a change on the way and you'll have to get adjusted to it. I can't say I understand it all myself. But there's information here that will surprise you." He held up Shesha's collection. "Horizon Delta is only a small part of the city. There are levels open to natural light. I know we have been brought up to think that our enclosed world is a natural stride in progress. But it wasn't seen that way by everyone. I believe we have been sold short. God knows why. Maybe, at one time, people were ready to trade anything for security. There's something going on in Woodslee precinct, which might explain more. We are going there to find out. Think about what I say. Don't accept that whatever is, is right. It isn't by a long shot." Shesha Haddon gathered up her papers, tucked her surrealist carbine under her arm, and stood up beside him. The ring around the table was ten deep and showed no sign of moving aside to let them pass. It looked as though they would have more to fear from their own kind than the general-purpose androids. The mob was throwing up spokesmen all the time, in a sudden, late flowering of the ancient democratic tree. A small, dark woman climbed on a table at the edge of the crowd and shrilled like a witch, "Not so fast. Don't let them skip out and leave you to face the piper. Look at that great, brazen creature there with him. I've seen her. Who does she think she is, dressing like that? Nude as a needle under that net. All high and go-lightly. Thinks she's a nine-day wonder when she's a black freak of nature. Hold them, I say, and call the precinct security. Otherwise we'll all be imprecated." Support for the proposition had to contend with a diversion from the rear. The sentry at the main door was having no luck. Without a program to fall back on, it had stuck to its latest brief of refusing entry to androids. Getting no cooperation, the two special agents fired simultaneously and dropped it in a heap of scrap.

The effect on the crowd was immediate. Although they were hearing carbine fire for the first time, its menace was obvious. There was a rush for the three exits away from the noise. Timed to a nonasecond, two active types, who had reached the far doors together, flung them open as a special android began to shoot up the sentry at that end. The remnant of the burst screamed down the length of the diner. The woman's voice, notched up to a shrill falsetto, gave the public mind a focus. "It's that black witch. She has the evil eye. Give her to the androids." As the doors swung closed, Holt moved off and found he was alone. Shesha Haddon was still trying to sort out the personal attack. It was totally unexpected. She was used to being alone, but she had never felt direct antagonism. The sheer injustice of it blanked out the other danger. Holt was back in two strides and grabbed her arm. Fire from the other doors had the crowd milling toward the center, and he had to use his weight to beat a path to the pantry. Movement had shaken Shesha Haddon out of her state of shock, and she pulled free to take the counter in an independent vault. Behind the bar was an oblong service area with double doors leading to a preparation and storage room. Holt spared a second to check out the set as they went through. Special androids were methodically clubbing a way through the press. He reckoned, bitterly, that he had brought her to the dead end of the rat's alley of all time.

Between them, they shifted a heavy, steel-topped table and upended it against the door. There were two resident kitchen staffers, clearly full of doubt about how to react. He took their programs and set them to hold the barrier.

After the burst of action, Shesha was standing in the middle of the room as though she were fresh out of libido. She said, "There's no way out. She's right. I'm bad luck." There was not much time, but Holt saw that she was hurt and that therapy was needed before introspection turned the wound septic. "Don't ever think it. That was jealousy. Any woman alive would envy you. You're the most beautiful human being I ever saw. Now snap out of it and search around. There has to be a way."

It was a partial success. She was in fact the first to come up with an idea, as the posse lined up outside and began a systematic fire pattern to cut out the door.

She said, doubtfully, "There's a freight hoist. Brings up the staples from the service tunnel." Holt said, "Get in."

"What about you?"

"Get in. I'll follow."

Crouched in the small cage and all set up for urn burial, she dropped out of sight. The indicator winked down to Loading, and he counted three before the motor hummed to life again and it was on the return leg.

A carbine arm shoved itself through the remnants of the door and began to traverse from far left. He reckoned it was an even thing, whether he was shot or sliced by being slow for the cage, which he had to start before he could get in.

Then he was in darkness with a hammering overhead as the android fired blind into the open shaft. There was time, in a racing succession of thought, to review the events of the day. It was incredible. The stable, humdrum world of Horizon Delta had erupted around him. There would be no going back, no sweating it out for a lifetime like Sutton. For good or ill, he no longer had a choice. But that was as it should be. A human animal was dynamic. Forward or backward. Standing still was death. The big question was, which way was he set?

Shesha Haddon's brief spell in the box had left a faint residual pollen cloud that brought her into the equation.

It was forward. It had to be. She was resurrected from a golden age as an earnest of how it should be. As he crawled out, she said, "Where now?"

A hostage to fortune at that. Trusting him to have an answer.

"Woodslee, where else?"

"It's a long way."

"We have a lot of time."

"I hope so."

"Believe it. We are indestructible."

"If you say so."

"Say that again with absolute conviction."

"If you say so."

"Give me half a minute and I'll think of a suitable ballad to sing, when walking down a drab-gray service road with an exotic Scheherazade type."

"As I recall, she had a very dodgy time."

"Then we must hope that history does not repeat itself."