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 passage and shouted, 'Baker!'
'Get out of here.'
She started towards him.
'For God'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 crushing 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.
He's a killer.
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.
Bullshit.
St. Cyr scrambled across the aisle, wriggled through the lowest shelf, pushing the books ahead of him into the next passageway. 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 passageway. 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:
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 goddamned 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 passageways, 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 damned 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 shiny-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 pass 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 shielded 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 shifting 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.
St. Cyr's weight sufficiently deflected the master unit, sent it into the shelves beside the girl, where books had already been spilled. It brushed her skirt, nothing more.
Teddy tried to climb now; he rose a dozen feet, lifting the detective free of the floor.
St. Cyr's battered arms were so strained and bleeding that they had gone numb. He just hoped that the paralysis did not creep into his hands and force him to relinquish his hold on the master unit. How long could the damn thing go on like this? It was feeding a good bit of energy into its gravplate mobility-system to be able to perform like this. Its batteries couldn't last forever without a recharge from the house generator. No matter what happened to his arms, he could surely hold out longer than Teddy…
Smoothly, Teddy's arms raised, bent backwards in an impossibly complex movement that was no strain at all
