Fred Saberhagen Specimens

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the foot of the stairs again as Dan turned to come back down. The door-chime
sounded, cheerful bing-bong
, followed without an interval by the crab's buzzing voice, pitched very low:
"Do not answer."
He had been right, then, it couldn't put him back under direct physical
control while it was still working on Wanda. The chime sounded again, almost
before the enemy had issued its order. And then a third time, with no polite
pause at all between. As it had sounded when the police came before. Whoever
was out there now might well have seen his basement light go on and off, and
they could see his car was in the garage. Let it not be Nancy, but no it
couldn't be, at least not her alone, the feet had been too numerous on the
porch.
The repeated chimings of the doorbell were joined by the fist that pounded on
the door. Dan thought he heard a sleepy complaint voiced by Wanda up above.
"Remember your children," the voice beside him scraped, now even more softly
than before. It came now from a little closer beside him, near the floor. The
house was dim, but with streetlights and shopping-
center lights washing in through the unshaded windows, he could quite plainly
see the tremoring cable-limbs, and the modest bulge on the smooth back. That
was the high point on the low silhouette, the logical place for the senses to
be located.
"They're what I'm thinking of," he whispered, below the pounding and the
chiming, and thrust his hands into the pockets of his robe.
The battering on the door abruptly ceased. From upstairs a floorboard creaked;
Wanda must be up, wondering what was going on.
Out on the porch, a man's low voice rumbled something, ending with:
"& warrant."
A woman's voice replied with a few words, again only the last of them being
plainly audible to Dan: "& key."
Surely the people Out on the porch must be able to hear his heart.
The metal beast that stood beside him turned to face the door, and something
in its body clicked, and a dark stubby nozzle was suddenly visible projecting
from the center of its hump toward the door. The sound was answered on the
instant by another click, this one from the
front door's lock, as a key was scraped in to set its tumblers and the bolt
shot back.
Dan's right hand came out of the pocket of his robe, holding Sam's water
pistol which he had picked up and loaded at the sink. In the same motion he
aimed as best he could, and squeezed off the pistol's soundless stream at a
range of about five feet against the enemy's unliving back.
It was as if he sent live steam against a living nerve. Quick as a flea for
all its mass, the crab leaped clear of the floor, going as high as
Dan's head into the air. As it twisted in midair convulsively, one of its
outflung limbs caught at the collar of Dan's robe. Whether it had intended a
grab at him or not, he was jerked forward so violently that he left his feet.
Even as he flew, he cried out a wordless warning to the people at the door.
And even before he hit the floor, he felt the full power of the enemy's direct
interior control crack down on all his muscles, with a force that must be
meant to kill.
In the same moment Wanda screamed loudly from upstairs, and the vise of
control left Dan as quickly as it had come, before it could do him injury; the
enemy must still be psychically entangled with her nervous system. And
simultaneously the crab came down from its own agonized leap, hitting the wood
floor like a falling safe.
The momentary seizure of control had cost Dan his water pistol, which was lost
somewhere on the floor. He did not stop to look for it, but came out of his
somersault into a crouch, and ran crouching for the kitchen, ran like a
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sprinter getting off the blocks, for the sink filled with cold water, for the
bottle to be thrown like a grenade. Upstairs, Wanda screamed again, and for
the time being Dan was free.
Even as he crossed the living room, the front door was swinging wide; and from
the corner of his eye Dan caught sight of a man crouched there with what
appeared to be a pistol in his hand.
The collector's remote-control unit was struggling to regain its coordination.
Its electronic nerves were still shocked and partially incapacitated by drops
of the corrosive liquid that had been sprayed along its skin, that had run in
around its laser nozzle through seals and grommets rusted and weakened by
agelong exposure to this deadly, watery atmosphere. It was unable to react in
time to prevent the potential specimen Dan Post from getting out of the room.
Though it
swiveled its laser and sent one burst of destructive energy after him, its aim
was still effected by the water; and by the time it adjusted its aim
Dan was out of sight. The ray missed its moving target.
Part of the wall beside the entrance to the kitchen exploded into flames as
the fragile-looking pencil of light struck home. The color of the beam changed
from red to blue to green and back again, in a rapid randoming designed to
prevent effective defense by reflection; and the interior of the house was
lighted up by it in a rapid strobe effect.
The collector through its mobile unit saw that men at the front door, taking
shelter behind the woodwork at each side, had now drawn weapons and were
starting to take aim. The collector recognized the weapons as handguns of some
kind, and thought it likely that great technological progress had taken place
in this field in the century and more since it had last been able to examine
the native firearms.
Therefore it could not afford to ignore the threat those handguns represented,
and it turned its laser against the police at once.
The mobile unit's aim was still slightly erratic, as its circuits struggled to
recover from the shock of the destructive water. Again flames leaped from the
wall, this time on either side of the doorway;
and the fragile-looking beam lanced out into the night, straight and thin as a
draftsman's line. A gray-haired man standing awkwardly in the middle of the
walk went down, and a treetop a block south of Benham
Road burst into fire.
Less than a full second later, both policemen at the sides of the open door
were firing back, and the collector realized that its wariness of their
weapons had been unnecessary. The guns were only projectile-
throwers not essentially different from those of a century before, devices
that used the force of exploding chemicals to send bits of heavy metal
spinning outward at no more than a few hundred meters per second; those
bullets which were aimed accurately struck without damage to the
remote-control unit's outer surface, which had been designed to withstand any
weapons that the designers could imagine primitive life-forms being able to
employ.
But how could the designers, in the dry chemistry of their silicon brains,
ever have imagined that any kind of life, let alone intelligence, could
flourish on a world where solids and liquids and gases alike were rich in
water?
The potential specimen Dan Post had come to understand the collector's
vulnerability, evidently, and was in the kitchen now grabbing a container, a
plastic bowl, and starting to fill it at the sink. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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