shut his computer and worked himself into bed.
He awoke when a dreadful yowl came from downstairs. At first he rolled over and pulled his pillow over his head, trying to get back into his interrupted dreams. Then he thought he heard a bang followed by a crash, and reluctantly opened one eye. He saw the door was ajar and knew instantly what was going on. It had happened before. Peter and Pinball were having a fight.
He almost yelled Mom before he remembered and sat up, cursing. He was going to have to handle this himself. He was vaguely worried for Peter, as Pinball was armed tonight. Climbing into his chair, he fumbled with the junk strewn over his workbench and finally came up with the garage door opener. He stabbed the button about ten times for good measure, then rolled his chair toward the door. As an afterthought, he put the controller in the wheelchair’s basket, taking it with him. The house was dark, hot and still. The walls were still radiating the heat of the summer day, and although the upstairs windows were open, there was no breath of wind to cool the house.
Trying to be quiet, Chuck rolled his chair to the top of the stairs using arm-power. He paused there for a moment, listening. He could hear nothing but the crickets outside and the vague sound of cars on the interstate, five miles east. He rode the escalator arm downward.
At the bottom of the stairs he hit the hall light, and nothing happened. He flipped the switch several more times, then remembered that he had left it on in the first place. A fuse must have blown down here, because the upstairs lights were still working. The downstairs was on a separate circuit, and the fuse box was located outside the house. Frowning, he unstrapped his chair from the grip of the escalator and then paused. He heard the whine of an electric motor, coming from the back of the house. Pinball was coming.
“Damn,” he muttered, pulling out the garage door opener again and pressing the button with unnecessary force. His thumb sunk deep into the plastic box, but still the high-pitched sound continued. There was a thump from the archway at the end of the hall that led into the family room, Pinball had miscalculated and run into the wall with one wheel. The sounds shifted as it reversed directions and corrected its course. For the first time, Chuck felt a sliver of fear run through his heart. Suddenly, it was hard to breathe, and for no apparent reason, his limp legs started to ache, dead nerves sending ghost-impulses up his spine. He looked back up the stairway, and realized that he didn’t have time to strap himself in and ride up to the top, especially in the dark. If he tried to make it without the harness, he could slip off the metal platform quite easily.
His tongue darted out and he chewed his lip. Down the hall, the tiny red glow-lights on Pinball’s motherboard could be seen, coming out of the gloom. Chuck wondered what the cattle prod would feel like it if touched his legs. Would they jump of their own accord, like frog legs in a skillet?
Pinball was closing fast. Chuck made his decision and rolled into the kitchen. Pinball followed the sounds with the guidance of its motion detectors, swinging through the opening without a hitch. As Chuck rounded the kitchen island he pulled the trashcan out from underneath it and dumped it behind him, directly in Pinball’s path. He caught a brief whiff of orange peels and moldy meat, then he rolled out into the living room. He glanced back and saw a snapshot of Pinball as it rolled through a pool of light coming in from the streetlamp outside. The cattle prod was lowered and leveled, ready for action. The two wheels spun together with smooth precision and the spokes flashed silvery lines of reflected light that seemed to hang in the air for a moment as it passed. Then Pinball ran into the dumped garbage and began trying to get past it, trying to negotiate a path over a loose mess of eggshells and cereal boxes.
In the living room, Chuck paused, breathing hard. He knew that he had about thirty seconds to think before Pinball’s program timed out and it backtracked, using its software map of the house to find another way. It would probably make it around the other side of the kitchen island within a minute. He used this minute to pull out the garage door opener and a penlight he kept in the wheelchair’s basket that he had forgotten about until his mind had tightened with adrenalin at that moment. With the penlight gleaming in the dark living room, he quickly learned that it was not the battery, but rather the spring for the button that was the problem. The contact wasn’t being made, it was that simple. All he had to do was get a screwdriver and open up the casing, fool with the spring and maybe brush the contacts a bit and it should work like new. The only problem was that Pinball wasn’t going to let him have that much time.
“This is crazy,” Chuck shouted in frustration. He tossed the garage door opener on the couch and snapped off his penlight.
“I should just grab you and switch you off!” he shouted at Pinball, who was still grinding gears, thumping its bike tires into the yellow plastic trashcan. Then there was a snapping sound and a terrific flash of blue electricity as the prongs contacted with the metal surface of the refrigerator.
Immediately, Chuck thought two things: Damn, Mom will be ticked if it scorched the paint and There’s no way I want that thing to touch me.
Not knowing what else to do and needing time to think, Chuck drove his wheelchair across the room and parked it between the armchair and the wall. While programming Pinball to the task of patrolling the house, he had played this game many times before. If he was quiet and still, Pinball would probably never find him here. If it did notice him, it would in all likelihood take him as a piece of furniture. Unexpectedly, Pinball emerged from the hallway rather than the kitchen. It cruised by the coffee table, did an abrupt right turn and headed back toward the kitchen entrance where it had last located Chuck’s voice.
Chuck smiled and couldn’t help feeling proud. Pinball had reasoned out another course, had attempted to cutoff and surprise its opponent. He frowned after a moment, however, at the implications of this. Pinball was not programmed to think of things like this unless it was sure there was a break-in in progress. The machine rolled into the kitchen from the other entrance, and he could hear its tires rubbing on the vinyl flooring.
He decided to make a run for the stairs again, he couldn’t very well spend the night imitating an armchair in the dark. Before he reached the hall his wheels crunched over the broken shards of a lamp that was lying on the floor. Trying to hurry, he drove over this like a tank revving over a hedgerow and then ran into another lump, this one felt soft under his wheels. He looked down and felt sick. It was Peter. Behind him Pinball wheeled out of the kitchen and charged across the living room, having picked him up again with its sound-directional unit.
Taking the time to roll around Peter, hoping the cat was only stunned, Chuck raced into the hallway. Behind him was a vicious snapping sound and another blue spark. He glanced back and saw that Pinball was repeatedly shocking the cat, making Peter’s muscles jump with electric current.
“God help me,” he muttered, rolling swiftly for the stairs. Soon Pinball tired of zapping Peter and followed him. While Chuck backed his chair into the escalator harness he watched Pinball charge him out of the gloom, looking for all the world like a small self-propelled field gun, its electric lance raised like the barrel of a cannon.
What if it gets to me, like it did the cat? Chuck’s mind screamed at him. What if it stunned him, knocked him out of his chair, maybe? Wouldn’t it go on zapping him every time the charge built up, following him as he tried to crawl away? Could he drag his dead legs fast enough? Would his heart stop?
Giving up on the harness which was fighting his groping fingers, he stabbed the UP button and the held onto the railing to steady himself. The platform tipped and neatly dumped him off, then continued up the stairs without him, disappearing into the dimness. Fortunately, he managed to keep his seat in the wheelchair and had a second or two to face the culmination of Pinball’s charge down the hall. The prongs stabbed right between his legs and made contact with the metal chair. The jolt wasn’t as bad as it could have been, it just felt like a buzzing sensation, a sharp uncomfortable pain in his hands and back where he was touching the wheelchair.
Then he grabbed Pinball’s spinning tires and lifted the machine right up, like a father grabbing a naughty child. The wheels gave a sudden, life-like spin in his grasp, and the cattle prod dove past his face and down. He realized that the prong must be going down toward his crotch, between his limp legs, and he grabbed the rod, his hand closing on the prongs themselves and he took a second sickening jolt. His stomach rolled over and went hard in his guts, while he ripped loose the cattle prod before the capacitor could charge up again, tearing it loose from the snap-ties and dropping Pinball back to the hall carpet. The machine bounced and clattered, then paused for a second, getting its bearings. It then bumped into his numb shins, following the imperatives of its tiny, insect-like mind.
“If my legs would move, I’d kick you across the room,” Chuck told it.
Around noon the following day Sylvia Mather came home. She walked in the front door and found the broken lamp.
“Sorry, I must have nudged it as I went by,” said Chuck, who was waiting for her.
