to get away from him.
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
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
