Dark of the Woods

and stood back to look her over. “In one piece?”

“No broken bones. Though I guess I'll ache pretty terribly by tomorrow.”

“An ache can be borne. I don't know quite how we'd handle a broken leg or something like that. The speedheal doesn't have the facilities.”

She turned and looked up at the top of the ridge. “Well, we've broken through right enough.”

“And if anyone is on the trail,” he said, “that should bring them running. Come on, let's get a move on.”

“The suitcase,” she protested. “It has the blanket and the plastic in it.”

He looked at the tons of snow at the bottom of the ravine. “We'd never find it, even if we had days to look. We'll just have to make do with what we have.”

“Not down there,” she protested. “I held onto it until after I was stopped by the tree. It's in this mound, right here somewhere.”

He looked up to the point where they had stood, where the slide had struck, them. “You held on to that heavy case all the way down?”

“I knew, if we lost it, we'd not have any heat when we slept and that would mean the end of it. Right?” She looked so serious and yet so elfin at the same time that he burst into laughter.

“What's so funny?” she asked.

“You. I had my rucksacks strapped on, and they were very nearly ripped off me. Yet you had presence of mind enough to clutch that damned suitcase and make it stay with you. Lady, remind me never to challenge you to a fist fight.”

The suitcase was near the surface, and they uncovered it in a few minutes. It had been dented when it struck the tree, but was otherwise undamaged. When Davis started up the hill with it, she insisted he let her take it. He tried to argue, realized that would lead him nowhere, and finally let her have it.

“Now, dammit, let's get going,” he said, grasping her elbow and helping her up the side of the ravine toward the top which was no longer drifted shut.

Proteus came behind. His plasti-plasma was gurgling quite a bit, and his cataracted sight sensors swiveled and twisted, as if something like the avalanche might strike again.

But something worse happened.

“What are they?” Leah asked as they pulled themselves onto level ground and began walking across the short table of the mountaintop.

Paralleling them to their right were three blue spheres, each as large as a one-man plane, painted with flat light-absorbing paint that did not gleam or reflect the slightest minim of dim sunlight. Even as he watched, they arced, changed course, angled in toward he and Leah. There were no men inside them, he knew, but that did not make the situation the least bit better for them.

“Sherlock robots,” he explained, watching the advancing balls of blue with fascination. “They must have brought them in and set them loose before dawn. I wouldn't have thought' a backwoods world like this would have any. They most likely released them at three different locations. They've been closing in on us all night, coming toward one another as their data was correlated, shared, and factored. They've got the most sophisticated tracking gear the Alliance possessses, all microminiaturized and stuffed in that shell. You can't escape one of them.”

“How do they kill?” she asked gloomily, her large, oval eyes fixed to the middle of the trio of globes.

“They don't. But don't look relieved about that. They're just as deadly as if they were killers. But with heat sensors, sound sensors, visual apparatus, infrared scanners, encephalographic trackers, and a complete library of card indices on every public act you and I have engaged in, they have no room for weapons. But they've certainly already radioed our position back to the Alliance soldiers. You can expect a squadron of police to be dropped in here within minutes— if the weather isn't too bad to permit that.”

The Sherlocks slowed.

The snow continued to fall.

“What do we do?” Leah asked. “Just wait to be picked up?”

VIII

He did feel standing there with the wind whipping his coat tightly against his legs — with the weight of their supplies on his shoulders, with his nerves still unquieted from the near disaster of the snowslide — like doing nothing heroic, like waiting for them and going with them as meekly as they could possibly desire, letting them do to him whatever they wished. But he reminded himself that such thinking was selfish and that “us” should not be ignored in a rush to consider 'the bone-aching exhaustion and the desire for rest and peace that plagued “me.” With so many miles left to go before they would reach Tooth, their chances for survival were slim. How much easier and less painful it would be to die under the guns of the Alliance soldiers than under the sapping wind and cold of Demos's winter.

Intellectually, he was aware that the death wish that now flitted about the back of his mind was a holdover from earlier days, from those dark hours in his childhood when he found rebuff from both parents and turned to his books for solace given second-hand where none of first-hand nature was obtainable. He read books of stories about the supernatural, of demons and devils, angels and spirits. In those days, it seemed as if it would be so much more bearable to be dead, to inhabit the regions of the netherworld creatures where odd and magical things transpired and where there were no great emotional tangles that made you sick deep in your stomach, no fights and scoldings that made you shake like an old man with the ague.

But he was no longer a child.

And there was solace to be had in this world, in the land of the living. If only he could keep both of them alive long enough to enjoy it and strengthen the bond of affection that joined them, he might eventually learn to stand up to adverse conditions without hesitation, without first falling back on the deathwish and the easy way out of a bad position.

“Gun forward!” he directed Proteus. “Fire one!”

The projectile struck the center Sherlock, tearing the delicate and complex machine into thousands of whirling, twisted pieces of junk. Now he had added yet another crime to his string of punishable acts on his record: willfully destroying a major piece of Alliance property. He wondered how many years that carried with it, and he felt an elation rise in him the likes of which he had not felt since he was a boy and had secretly violated one of the many rules his mother or father laid down for him.

The other two detection robots curved away to avoid the same fate, but he shouted for Proteus to track the one on the right and fire when on target. He was rewarded with a flash of green-blue light as the casing of the second Sherlock split and poured forth a long stream of mechanical guts.

He turned to look for the third of the devices, but he could not locate it. “Damn!” he snapped.

“It disappeared between the trunks of those trees, straight ahead,” she said.

“Let's go. It'll have to follow us. Maybe, if we make it move, well get a look at it.”

They struck out for the trees, moving as swiftly as the terrain and the weather permitted. Proteus floated ahead of them, watchful of the deep shadows through which they must pass. Now that the Sherlocks had been identified by Davis as enemies, the protection robot would be constantly alert until the third device had been demolished. It did not withdraw its projectile weapons barrel through its flawless shell but maintained it in firing position as it scanned the woods with all of its senses. It was more likely to have luck finding the Sherlock than it would have had finding a man under the same conditions, for the Alliance detection system would be radiating leaked power plus the traceable sensor emanations of its multiple tracking facilities. By the virtue of the very same instruments it used to keep touch of them, Proteus could keep its position known.

They entered the copse of trees and weaved between the smooth boles, following the path of some mountain deer herd which had passed this way and provided an easier thoroughfare than they had been used to in the last several hours.

“It only takes one of them, doesn't it?” Leah asked, marching along behind him, bent a little to accommodate the weight of the suitcase.

“What?” he asked, not looking back. There wasn't any time to look back now.

“One Sherlock. To let them know where we are.”