But it was only a crude matron robot. “No males allowed here,” she said primly. She had recognized the male arm and acted immediately, as she was supposed to.
Sheen came through, touched the robot, and it went dead. “I have shorted her out, temporarily.” She went to a sink and ran water over her hands. Then she stepped into an open shower and washed her whole body, with particular attention to any portion that might have come into contact with the powdered androids.
Stile heard something. “Company,” he said. How was he going to get out of this one? The only exit was the iris through which the next woman would be entering.
Sheen beckoned him into the shower. He stepped in with her as the door irised. Sheen turned the spray on to FOG. Thick mist blasted out of the nozzle, concealing them both in its evanescent substance. It was faintly scented with rose: to make the lady smell nice.
In this concealment, Sheen’s arms went about him, and her hungry lips found his. She evidently needed frequent proof of her desirability as a woman, just as he needed proof of his status as a man. Because each was constantly subject, in its fashion, to question. What an embrace!
When the room was clear again, Sheen turned the shower to rinse, then to dry. They had to separate for these stages, to Stile’s regret. He had swung again from one extreme to another in his attitude toward her. Right now he wanted to make love—and knew this was not the occasion for it. But some other time, when they were safe, he would get her in a shower, turn on the fog, and—
Sheen stepped out and ran her fingers along the wall beside the shower stall. In a moment she found what she wanted, and slid open a panel. Another access for servicing machinery. She gestured him inside.
They wedged between pipes and came out in a narrow passage between the walls of the Man’s and Lady’s rooms. This passage wound around square corners, then dropped to a lower deck where it opened out into a service-machine storage chamber. Most of the machines were out, since night was their prime operating time, but several specialized ones remained in their niches. These were being serviced by a maintenance machine. At the moment it was cleaning a pipefitting unit, using static electricity to magnetize the grime and draw it into a collector scoop. The maintenance machine was in the aisle, so they had to skirt it to traverse this room.
Suddenly the machine lurched. Sheen slapped her hand on the machine’s surface. A spark flashed, and there was the odor of ozone. The machine died, short-circuited.
“Why did you do that?” Stile asked her, alarmed. “If we start shorting out maintenance machines, it will call attention—”
Sheen did not respond. Then he saw the scorch mark along her body. She had taken a phenomenal charge of current. That charge would have passed through him, had he brushed the machine—as he had been about to, since it had lurched into the aisle as he approached. Another assassination attempt, narrowly averted!
But at what cost? Sheen still stood, unmoving. “Are you all right?” Stile asked, knowing she was not.
She neither answered nor moved. She, too, had been shorted by the charge. She was, in her fashion, dead.
“I hope it’s just the power pack, not the brain,” he said. Her power supply had, she had thought, been weakened by her disassembly during the bomb scare. “We can replace the power pack.” And if that did not work? He chose not to ponder that.
He went to a sweeping machine, opened its motive unit, and removed the standard protonite power pack. A little protonite went a long way; such a pack lasted a year with ordinary use. There was nothing to match it in the galaxy. In fact, the huge protonite lode was responsible for the inordinate wealth of Planet Proton. All the universe needed power, and this was the most convenient power available.
Stile brought the pack to Sheen. He hoped her robot-structure was standard in this respect; he didn’t want to waste time looking for her power site. What made her special was her brain-unit, not her body, though that became easy to forget when he held her in his arms. Men thought of women in terms of their appearance, but most men were fools—and Stile was typical. Yet if Sheen’s prime directive and her superficial form were discounted, she would hardly differ from the cleanup machines. So was it foolish to be guided by appearance and manner?
He ran his fingers over her belly, pressing the navel. Most humanoid robots—ah, there! A panel sprang out, revealing the power site. He hooked out the used power pack, still hot from its sudden discharge, and plugged in the new.
Nothing happened. Alarm tightened his chest. Oh—there would naturally be a safety-shunt, to cut off the brain from the body during a short, to preserve it. He checked about and finally located it: a reset switch hidden under her tongue. He depressed this, and Sheen came back to life.
She snapped her belly-panel closed. “Now I owe you one, Stile,” she said.
“Are we keeping count? I need you—in more ways than two.”
She smiled. “I’d be satisfied being needed for just one thing.”
“That, too.”
She glanced at him. She seemed more vibrant than before, as if the new power pack had given her an extra charge. She moved toward him.
There was a stir back the way they had come. It might be a machine, returning from a routine mission—but they did not care to gamble on that. Obviously they had not yet lost the enemy.
Sheen took him to the service side of a large feeding station. Silently she indicated the empty crates. A truck came once or twice a day to deliver new crates of nutro-powder and assorted color-flavor-textures, and to remove the expended shells. From these ingredients were fashioned the wide variety of foods the machines provided, from the vomitlike pudding to authentic-seeming carrots. It was amazing what technology could do. Actually, Stile had once tasted a real carrot from his employer’s genuine exotic foods garden patch, a discard, and it had not been quite identical to the machine-constituted vegetable. As it happened, Stile preferred the taste and texture of the fake carrots with which he was familiar. But Citizens cultivated the taste for real foods.
He could hide inside one of these in fair comfort for several hours. Sheen would provide him with food; though this was the region for food, it was all sealed in its cartons, and would be inedible even if he could get one open. Only the machines, with their controlled temperature and combining mechanisms and recipe programs, could reconstitute the foods properly, and he was on the wrong side of their wall.
Stile climbed into a crate. Sheen walked on, so as not to give his position away. She would try to mislead the pursuit. If this worked, they would be home free for a day, perhaps for the whole week. Stile made himself halfway comfortable, and peered out through a crack.
No sooner had Sheen disappeared than a mech-mouse appeared. It twittered as it sniffed along, following their trail. It paused where Stile’s trail diverged from Sheen’s, confused, then proceeded on after her.
Stile relaxed, but not completely. Couldn’t tell the difference between a robot and a man? Sniffers were better than that! He should have taken some precaution to minimize or mask his personal smell, for it was a sure giveaway—
Oh, Sheen had done that. She had given him a scented shower. The mouse was following the trail of rose—and Sheen’s scent was now the same as his. A living hound should have been able to distinguish the two, but in noses, as in brains, the artificial had not yet closed the gap. Fortunately.
But soon that sniffer, or another like it, would return to trace the second trail, and would locate him. He would have to do something about that.
Stile climbed out of his box, suffered a pang in one knee, ran to his original trail, followed it a few paces, and diverged to another collection of crates. Then back, and to a truck-loading platform, where he stopped and retreated. With luck, it would seem he had caught a ride on the vehicle. Then he looped about a few more times, and returned to his original crate. Let the sniffers solve that puzzle!
But the sniffer did not return, and no one else came. This tracking operation must have been set up
on the simplistic assumption that as long as the sniffer was moving, it was tracking him. His break—perhaps.
Time passed. The night advanced. Periodically the food machines exhausted a crate of cartons and ejected it, bumping the row along. Stile felt hungry again, but knew this was largely psychological; that double handful of regurgitated pudding should hold him a while yet.
Where was Sheen? Was she afraid to return to him while the sniffer was tracking her? She would have to neutralize the mech-mouse. Far from here, to distract suspicion from his actual hiding place. He would have to wait.
He watched anxiously. He dared not sleep or let down his guard until Sheen cleared him. He was dependent on her, and felt guilty about it. She was a nice … person, and should not have to—
A man walked down the hall. Stile froze—but this did not seem to be a pursuer. The man walked on.
Stile blinked. The man was gone. Had Stile been nodding, and not seen the man depart—or was the stranger still near, having ducked behind a crate? In that case this could be a member of the pursuit squad. A serious matter.
Stile did not dare leave his crate now, for that would give away his position instantly. But if the stranger were of the squad, he would have a body-heat scope on a laser weapon. One beam through the crate—the murder would be anonymous, untraceable. There were criminals on Proton, cunning people who skulked about places like this, avoiding capture. Serfs whose tenure had expired, but who refused to be deported. The Citizens seldom made a concerted effort to eradicate them, perhaps because criminals had their uses on certain occasions. Such as this one? One more killing, conveniently unsolved, attributed to the nefarious criminal class—who never killed people against the wishes of Citizens. A tacit understanding. Why investigate the loss of an unemployed serf?
Should he move—or remain still? This was like the preliminary grid of the Game. If the stranger were present, and if he were a killer, and if he had spotted Stile—then to remain here was to die. But if Stile moved, he was sure to betray his location, and might die anyway. His chances seemed best if he stayed.
And—nothing happened. Time passed, and there was no further evidence of the man. So it must have been a false alarm. Stile began to feel foolish, and his knees hurt; he had unconsciously put tension on them, and they could not stand up to much of that, anymore.
Another man came, walking as the other had. This was a lot of traffic for a nonpersonal area like this, at this time of night. Suspicious in itself. Stile watched him carefully.
The man walked without pause down the hall—and vanished. He did not step to one side, or duck down; he simply disappeared.
Stile stared. He was a good observer, even through a crack in a crate; he had not mistaken what he had seen. Yet this was unlike anything he knew of on Planet Proton. Matter transmission did not exist, as far as he knew—but if it did, this was what it would be like. A screen, through which a person could step—to another location, instantly. Those two men—
Yet Sheen had gone that way without disappearing, and so had the mech-mouse. So there could not be such a screen set up across the hall. Not a permanent one.
Should he investigate? This could be important! But it could also be another trap. Again, like a Game-grid: what was the best course, considering the resources and strategy of his anonymous enemy?
Stile decided to stand pat. He had evidently lost the pursuit, and these disappearing people did not relate to him. He had just happened to be in a position to observe them. Perhaps this was not coincidental. The same concealment this service hall offered for him, it offered for them. If they had a private matter transmitter that they wanted to use freely without advertising it, this was the sort of place to set it up.
Yet aspects of this theory disturbed him. How could serfs have a matter transmitter, even if such a device existed? No serf owned anything, not even clothing for special occasions, for working outside the domes or in dangerous regions. Everything was provided by the system, as needed. There was no money, no medium of exchange; accounts were settled only when tenure ended. Serfs could not make such a device, except by adapting it from existing machines—and pretty precise computer accounts were kept for sophisticated equipment. When such a part was lost, the machine tally gave the alarm. Which was another reason a criminal could not possess a laser weapon without at least tacit Citizen approval.
Also, why would any serf possessing such a device remain a serf? He could sell it to some galactic interest and retire on another planet with a fortune to rival that of a Proton Citizen. That would certainly be his course, for Citizens were unlikely to be too interested in forwarding development and production of a transport system that did not utilize protonite. Why destroy their monopoly?
Could the self-willed machines be involved in this? They might have the ability. But those were men he had seen disappear, and the machines would not have betrayed their secret to men.
No, it seemed more likely that this was an espionage operation, in which spies were ferried in and out of this dome, perhaps from another planet, or to and from some secret base elsewhere on Proton. If so, what would this spying power do to a genuine serf who stumbled upon the secret?
A woman appeared in the hall. She had emerged full-formed from the invisible screen, as it were from nowhere. She was of middle age, not pretty, and there was something odd about her. She had marks on her body as if the flesh had recently been pressed by something. By clothing, perhaps.
Serfs wore clothing on the other side? Only removing it for decent concealment in this society? These had to be from another world!
Stile peered as closely as possible at the region of disappearances. Now he perceived a faint shimmer, as of a translucent curtain crossing the hall obliquely. Behind it there seemed to be the image of trees.
Trees—in a matter-transmission station? This did not quite jibe! Unless it was not a city there, but a park. But why decorate such equipment this way? Camouflage?
Stile had no good answers. He finally put himself into a light trance, attuned to any other extraordinary events, and rested.
“Stile,” someone called softly. “Stile.”
It was Sheen, back at last! Stile looked down the hall and spied her, walking slowly, as if she had forgotten his whereabouts. Had she had another brush with a charged machine? “Here,” he said, not loudly.
She turned and came toward him. “Stile.”
“You lost the pursuit,” he told her, standing in the crate so that his head and shoulders were clear. “No one even checked. But there is something else—”
Her hand shot out to grab his wrist with a grip like that of a vise. Stile was strong, but could not match the strength of a robot who was not being femininely human. What was she doing?
Her other hand smashed into the crate. The plastic shattered. Stile twisted aside, avoiding the blow despite remaining inside the crate; it was an automatic reaction. “Sheen, what—?”
She struck again. She was attacking him! He twisted aside again, drawing her off balance, using the leverage of her own grip on him. She was strong, but not heavy; he could move her about. Strength was only one element in combat; many people did not realize this, to their detriment.
Either Sheen had somehow been turned against him, which would have taken a complete reprogramming, or this was not Sheen. He suspected the latter; Sheen had known where he was hiding, while this robot had had to call. He had been a fool to answer, to reveal himself.
She struck again, and he twisted again. This was definitely not Sheen, for she had far greater finesse than this. It was not even a smart robot; it was a stupid mechanical Good; he could handle it, despite its strength. Ethically and physically.
Her right hand remained clamped on his left wrist, while her left fist did the striking. Holding and hitting! If any of those blows landed squarely, he would suffer broken bones—but he was experienced in avoiding such an elementary attack. He turned about toward his left, drawing her hand and arm along with him, until he
faced away from her, his right shoulder blocking hers. He heaved into a wraparound throw. She had to let go, or be hurled into the crate headfirst.
She was too stupid to let go. She crashed into the crate. Now at last her grip wrenched free, taking skin off his wrist. Stile scrambled out of the wrecked crate. He could junk her, now that he knew what she was, because he knew a great deal more about combat than she did. But he couldn’t be quite sure she wasn’t Sheen, with some override program on her, damping out most of her intellect and forcing her to obey the crude command. If he hurt her—
The robot scrambled out of the crate and advanced on him. Her pretty face was smirched with dirt, and her hair was in disarray. Her right breast seemed to have been pounded slightly out of shape; a bad fall from the wraparound throw could account for that. Stile backed away, still torn by indecision. He could overcome this robot, but he would have to demolish her in the process. If only he could be sure she wasn’t—
Another Sheen appeared. “Stile!” she cried. “Get under cover! The squad is—” Then she recognized the other robot. “Oh, no! The old duplicate-image stunt!”
Stile had no doubt now: the second Sheen was the right one. But the first one had done half her job. She had routed him out and distracted him—too long. For now the android squad hove into sight, several lumbering giants.
“I’ll hold them!” Sheen cried. “Run!”
But more androids were coming from the other end of the hall. It seemed the irate Citizen no longer cared about being obvious; he just wanted Stile dispatched. If these lunks were also powdered with stun-dust or worse—
Stile charged down the hall and lunged into the matter-transmission curtain, desperately hoping it would work for him. The androids might follow—but they could be in as much trouble as he, at the other end. Intruding strangers. That would give him a better fighting chance. He felt a tingle as he went through.
CHAPTER 5
Fantasy