'Wait a minute,' I managed to say, my words hoarse and dry in my throat.
The android stopped, a dozen feet from me, still hidden by the shadows of the room. A swath of moonlight cut through a window and fell four feet in front of it, but where it now stood was in total blackness. 'What's the matter, Jacob?'
'I'm not sure about you,' I said, holding the rifle on it, my hands shaking, but my finger ready on the trigger.
'Not sure?' He started forward.
'Stop!'
He stopped. 'Jacob, I don't understand what you're saying. It's me. I'm not going to hurt you. The Hyde mother body is dead. Down there in the cellar. You want to go down and take a look? You want to prove it to yourself?'
'I'm sure the mother body is dead,' I said. 'But how can I know if the Hyde android was also down there- and that maybe it defeated the Jekyll android I came with?'
'You think I'm the Hyde android? The one that chased you through the tubeways?'
'That's right.'
He laughed and started forward, holding out His hands. He took two steps casually, then, as He was about to step into the swath of moonlight where I would be able to see His eyes, He leaped.
Unsteady as I was, I managed to fire the rifle and score a hit. The sound of the explosion in the room was like a thunderclap in a closet. The windows rattled, and my ears popped. The bullet must have ripped through His left shoulder, for He spun around like a top, clutching at it with His other hand, and went down in a heap. His fingers scrabbled at the baseboard as He tried to pull Himself up. I backed away from Him, until I was up against the doorsill. 'You are Hyde, aren't you?'
Despite the wound, He got to His feet and stood swaying, looking at me with eyes that were now plainly in view in the swath of moonlight. Mad, wild, ugly eyes. He did not answer me. He did not have to.
I fired again. The impact of the slug knocked Him off His feet, backwards into a chair which He toppled over as He went down. He landed hard, bouncing His head on the bare floor, and laid there, motionless for a moment. Dead? It was possible that I had inflicted too great a wound for Him to heal. Perhaps too many internal organs had been ripped apart, and He had ceased to function before He could bring his recuperative powers into play. Then I heard something that cancelled that train of thought: the heavy, rapid beating of His heart
I stood there, watching Him for a while, wondering what I should do. I was partly, surprised that I had been able to gun Him down so easily, even if He was the baser Hyde, part of the original mother body's character. Still, He resembled a man, and it was a wonder that resemblance had not kept me from shooting. But as I listened to His heart, I realized He was healing Himself as He laid there, and I knew what I had to do. I stepped forward to put another bullet in His back at a point where it would shatter His heart.
When I was three or four feet from Him, I realized that He had changed, that He was no longer in the form of a human being. He had maintained the rough outline of a sprawled body, apparently to lure me closer, but He was in an amoeboid form like the other mother bodies, a blob of flesh with exterior veins and no human features. I remembered what the Jekyll mother body had told me: after the first android had worked out the metamorphosis from human form to amoeboid form, the android selves that came later could make the change almost instantaneously without going through the laborious intermediate steps. I back-stepped, trying to get out of His way. As I moved, I saw the quick movement of the growing pseudopod as it lifted out of the main flesh mass and came at me, rising over my head like the arm of Death.
I backed into a hassock, fell over it, and rolled to the wall. The change of direction confused the pseudopod, and it smashed into the bare floor and groped around for a moment as if it could not quite believe I had avoided it. But I knew I would not avoid it again, or for long. It was more intelligent, faster, more sensitive. This was a one- sided fight, and we both knew it. I hunched against the wall and fired the rifle at the mother body. The slug tore through the gelatinous mass and out the other side, carrying a good hunk of tissue with it. The pseudopod that had been projected at me quivered, rippled as if in spasm, and drew back into the mother body to convalesce.
I got to my feet and started moving as carefully as possible toward the door which was ten feet to my right, I knew that if I made much noise getting there, the mother body would be alerted by the vibrations and snare me before I was halfway there. Still, the floor creaked under me, the beast sensed my flight, and a thick arm of flesh shot out and slammed into the wall inches before me, blocking the way.
I shot into the mother body to make it withdraw its arm, but it shivered, contracted, and kept the arm in place.
Trapped…
The arm turned and began to corral me back the way I had come, back into a corner formed by a heavy chair and the wall. Once in that corner, I would be unable to escape. I could crawl over the chair, perhaps, but I would most assuredly be snared before I had clambered beyond it. I was surprised, momentarily, at how clear and quick my mind was. In the presence of death, with fear sharper and greater than at any other time in my life, my senses had been honed to their sharpest edge. Then I felt the backs of my thighs touch the chair, and I knew there was absolutely nowhere else to go. The mother body would know that too. The pseudopod came at me, suddenly moving with the greatest speed.
What I did next was a small miracle. No, not really a miracle. It was the result of a natural function of the body. You hear about similar cases all the time in the newspapers and stats. A monorail slips off the track and falls to the earth with a full complement of passengers. A man's wife is pinned in the wreckage. Without thinking, he lifts a ton or ton and a half of debris and heaves it off her, a feat he would never be able to perform if he were not ridden by the demon Fear. It is, of course, the result of an extra helping of adrenalin pumped into his system, not a supernatural act. To a lesser degree, I performed a similar feat when the pseudopod swept at my face. I whirled, grasped the chair and lifted it above my head. The chair only weighed fifty or sixty pounds-but it had been bolted to the cabin floor at each of its four legs. I had torn those bolts loose in one wrenching spasm of effort. I swung the chair, thrust it into the pseudopod. The amoeboid flesh curled around the chair, momentarily unaware that it had not grasped me. While it figured out the situation, I turned, got to the window, used the butt of my rifle to smash it open, and went through onto the porch, down onto the snow to the magnetic sled.
I started to get into the front seat, then stopped. If I left, nothing would have been gained. The Hyde mother body inside that cabin would go into the cellar — or remain where it was-and set up a food-seeking network, secure deer, wolves and rabbits, and begin to produce other android selves. The Jekyll mother body back in Harry's cellar would not be able to come seeking it until it had produced androids of its own. Then they would be evenly matched, just where we had started less than an hour ago. No, the only hope for any of us was for me to go back in there and kill the Hyde mother body.
I didn't relish that idea.
But I stopped trying to run. I turned back to the cabin.
At the doorway, the Hyde mother body was dragging itself outside.
I took ammunition out of my pocket and loaded the rifle to its full eight-shot capacity. Then, walking to the porch steps and going to the top of them, I aimed into the mass of pink-tan flesh and fired. Once. Twice. Three times.
The Hyde mother body jerked, rolled backwards. Chunks of it laid behind it, dead, but the main mass sealed the wounds and tried to recover.
I fired the other five bullets into it, then quickly reloaded.
The mother body had pulled away from the door and was six feet inside. I walked to the doorway and pumped four more shots into it. It flopped around now, moved away from me as swiftly as it could. It was trying to get to the cellar steps. I moved around it and fired the other four shots into it, making it move into the living room instead. It was obviously quite badly hurt, for the holes were not healing as quickly now. Some of them seemed not to be healing at all. Some of the veins had been punctured and had let loose quantities of blood. It had sealed those off and redirected the blood flow, but the loss had still weakened it. I was wounding it faster than it could recover.
While I reloaded, my fingers steady now, the mother body moved deeper into the living room, seeking escape and finding none. When I slipped the eight shells into the rifle chambers, I was left with only three more in my pocket. I would have to bring all of this to an end with eleven shots. With what I had in mind, it was just possible- just maybe. I slammed the gun together and fired four times into the mass of flesh, aiming for the largest, pulsating
