He fell, rolled, and heard something tinkle against the wall above him, at the exact spot where he had been standing only a moment ago.

  He came up against a small coffee table, clutched it, and brought it on its side betwen himself and the robots.

  A burst of tiny, silver needles studded the wood.

  He stood behind cover of the table and heaved it at the mechanicals as they reached the bottom of the staircase. It knocked them off balance and gave him a moment to flee. He turned toward the dining room in time to confront a second pair, their faces expressionless, all wearing identical raincoats and slacks and shoes.

  To his right, there was a small, Connecticut window, many-paned with small, thin wooden struts between the sections of the glass. He flung himself sideways, closing his eyes and throwing his arms about his head, smashed through the window and struck the yard with his wounded shoulder. The place where the bullet had grazed him broke open and began to bleed again.

  He got up and ran, back along the house to the alleyway behind the garage. Once in the open, where the neighbors might see him, he began to walk, though he kept a steady, brisk pace. Every few hundred feet, he looked back to see if they were following. They weren't.

  He had gone two blocks when the white sphere intruded on his mental horizons, drew down on him and tracked along the perimeter of his telepathic shield.

  Furious, he directed a blast of psionic power at it. It seemed to yellow, shrink and retreat. When it did not return during the next four blocks of his route, he knew that his telepathic abilities had continued to develop and that he was now capable of using his psionic power as a weapon, on a smaller scale but similar to the eyeless alien's ability.

  But what good did that do him? They had Della.

  * * *

  XIV

  She wakes up and reaches out and feels cold sheets. When she opens her eyes on the dark room and his absence finally registers on all levels, she withdraws her hand, beneath the covers, holds her breasts and tries to keep her breathing even.

  She listens for him.

  She throws off the covers and gets out of bed, slips on her tongs and goes to the bedroom door. She opens it, steps into the hallway and stops again to listen for him.

  Silence.

  “Pete?'

  Silence yet.

  Perhaps, she thinks, he is dwnstairs, sitting in an easy chair, reading. He likes to read in the mornings.

  “Pete?”

  But why doesn't he answer her?

  She starts down the stairs.

  Her heart is thudding. She has a hollow ache in her stomach. She feels a weakness behind the knees.

  When she is halfway down the stairs, she sees the shape move at the bottom. At this hour, shortly after seven o'clock, the front room is in all but complete darkness. But it must be Pete.

  “What are you doing down there?” she asks.

  He comes out of the shadows.

  He isn't Pete.

  He is a complete stranger who-

  No, he is the man from the Emerald Leaf Motel, the stranger Pete swears he sees everywhere.

  Men have never frightened her, no matter how crude or fresh or direct they get. Still, this man, in this place, in this awful silence-this man frightens her.

  “What do you want?”

  He smiles.

  He says, “We will not harm you, Mrs. Mullion.”

  “We?”

  Another man appears behind the first. They are twins.

  “Stop right there,” she says.

  They continue up the steps, towards her.

  “We will not cause you any pain, believe me,” the first man says.

  She turns to run, swaying on the stairs.

  She can't seem to lift her feet.

  Arms touch her from behind.

  “Stop it!” she shouts.

  “No pain-”

  A shroud falls over her mind. She feels blackness welling up, consuming her, soft and warm and gentle. She struggles against it, without success. As it swallows her completely, she thinks of all the things she fears, lets them roll through her mind, hideous vision after hideous vision

  Then she sleeps.

  Then she wakes.

  She is sitting in an easy chair in the living room, with no idea how she has gotten here. In her mind, some alien presence holds down her will to act. She tries to lift her arms from the arms of the chair, and she finds that she cannot do even this simple thing.

  She now discovers a terror she has never known before, the horror of complete helplessness. Visions of cerebral hemmorages, of paralysis and lifelong dependency on others fit across her mind. If this is what has happened to her, she will kill herself. She will not be a vegetable all her life, watching Pete wait on her, hand and foot.

  “Relax, Mrs. Mullion,” a voice in the darkness says.

  She does not turn her head to look for the speaker. Someone else turns it for her.

  She sees him, and she remembers the twins.

  “You will not be harmed,” he says. “Just relax and play along with us. You can't do otherwise anyway. We guarantee your safety.”

  She tries to question him but still cannot speak.

  “We'll be upstairs,” he says. Then he climbs the steps, out of sight.

  * * *

  XV

  “Della?”

  “Who's there?”

  Confusion, fear mixed with anticipation

  “Pete.”

  “Where are you?”

  “With you.”

  “I don't see you? Where? How can you hear me when I can't talk?”

  A glow, slight but warm, anxious to burgeon

  “I don't understand. Are you here, in the living room?”

  “In your mind. I'm not physically with you, love, but mentally and emotionally I am.”

  “Mind reading? Are you telling me you're reading my mind?”

  “And projecting my thoughts into yours.”

  “I'm dreaming.”

  “You aren't. Try to accept it, and try to be calm.”

  “But I don't understand I”

  “Must you?”

  “Yes!” Silence. Then: “Well, not right away, not if you say you can't explain at the moment.”

  “I can't explain. But I will.”

  “Okay.”

  Then she realizes they are waiting for Pete and that, no matter what they might say, they are here to get Pete, to hurt Pete-or to take him away and keep him again and let him come home without knowing where he has been

  Pete broke his telepathic probe of Della's mind. Now he knew what had happened to her this morning. He realized he was cursing them, angrily, out loud. Other diners in the pizza shop were looking at him speculatively. He took a bite of the pizza before him and chewed on it, not because he was hungry, but because it was something to do, something to keep him from cursing.

  He knew that he was going to have to go back to the house and get Della. He almost enjoyed the prospect of doing a little damage to those plasticfaced sonsofbitches.

  “Right now, there's very much to do. I'm going to come into the house, in a little while, to get you.”

  “These men-”

  “They aren't men. And I can handle them.”

  “But-”

  “I can handle them.”

  “But don't take chances.”

  “I won't have to.”

  “Pete?”

  “Love?”

  “How long have you been able to-to read minds, to do this thing?”

  “Tonight.”

  “Have you read mine?”

  Doubt, anxiety, but a certain thrill as well

  “Yes.”

  “Much?”

  “Some.”

  “You're avoiding answering me.”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Just tell me-do you love me?”

  “Yes. Very much.”

  “Come and get me.”

  “In time. I just want you to remember to be calm, not to get involved, not to move until I tell you to. Even when you feel them losing control of you, don't leave the chair. Stay where you are and wait. No matter what. I don't want you getting hurt.”

  “Okay, Pete.”

  “I'll be in within the hour.”

  “You're breaking contact?”

  “Yes. I can't afford to exhaust myself.”

  She projected images of comfort, love and sex. He did not wish to withdraw, but he did.

  * * *

  XVI

  He had taken up a position behind a long, shaggy hedgerow across the alleyway from the back of his house. The ground was warm and dry though uncomfortably stony. He could see the kitchen where only a night light burned. Now and then, he fancied that he could see movement beside the kitchen curtains, as if someone stood there, watching the rear lawn. But he could not be sure of that, and he did not want to make his move until he was certain of a lot of things about the trap they had laid.

  Along the side of the house, the dining room window was dark, while the living room window emitted a strong, yellow light. Della was still sitting there, in her chair, They could not hope to fool him again, so easily. They were counting on his love for her to draw him back in some abortive attempt to free her.

  They would be surprised, an hour or so from now, to find themselves holding the dirty end of the stick.

  Ten minutes later, the rear door opened, and one of the mechanicals looked out, staring intently at the corner of the garage where a bed of tall marigolds grew. He came over to it and satisfied himself of something or other, then returned to the kitchen and closed the door.

  It was exactly the sort of thing he had been hoping for. It showed him that one of them waited in the kitchen and indicated the others were most likely situated all over the house, keeping a watch on all approaches. Too it was evidence that, since he had driven the last mind probe away, they could not locate him telephatically - which meant his own power was at least equal to theirs, and perhaps superior.

  He stayed with the hedge but crawled farther along until he could not see the kitchen windows and could not be seen by anyone waiting there. He stood up, brushed himself off, and crossed the alley to the garage doors. He searched along the bottom sill, found the lever, depressed one end of it and lifted. The door swung overhead with only one scratchy bit of noise to draw anyone's attention. He was sure it could not have been heard inside the house.

  He crept along the dark shape of the car until he was kneeling beside the interior door which connected with the kitchen. Cautiously, he rose and looked through the corner of the glass. In the soft, blue light of the twenty-five watt safety lamp on the stove, the mechanical man leaned against the kitchen table, commanding a moderately good view through both kitchen windows. He was the only one in the room.

  Pete bent down, rested his back against the wall and opened his mental shield to permit a contact ribbon of telepathic energy to weave outwards.

  Immediately, the alien master, through the consciousness of his nearest robotic servant, sensed the emanations of his prey. The white sphere of the mechanical pseudo-mind bore down on Pete's own mind-

  -and blazed and ashed, smoked and dissolved, under a bolt of psychic energy which he delivered to it.

  The quasi-sentient wire circuits melted, becoming nothing more than glimmering slag. The liquid, sealed core of the manufactured mind cracked open and evaporated.

  Pete pushed away from the wall and got to his feet. He turned to the small window in the door and surveyed the kitchen. The robot lay still by the kitchen table.

  He opened the door, entered the kitchen, closed the door gently, and listened to the stillness of the house.

  He heard footsteps. A second robot, apparently the one which had been watching the side lawn from the dining room windows, appeared in the doorway to the kitchen, looking just the slightest bit surprised.

  Pete sought its white, spherical mental analogue, cracked it open like an eggshell and snuffed it out.

  It fell with a loud clatter and bounced twice without even a whimper of pain. Its face, from its mouth to its left eye, was melted, the features run together like wax.

  He had no more time for observation after he looked away from that ruined countenance, for he saw a third mechanical in the doorway. It was probably the one he had heard descending the stairs moments ago, and it held the amber, glasslike weapon.

  He twisted sideways as the first burst of silver darts whisked past him and chewed up the plaster. They made a humming sound as they quivered, like a dozen one-, pronged tuning forks. The plaster seemed just the slightest bit damp where they had penetrated it.

  He fell to the floor as the robot fired a second burst. The spines hissed past him, over his head. Had he been standing, they would have caught him in the chest and neck.

  He reached out, searching for the featureless, round mechanical pseudo-mind and the thought filament that would be trailing out behind it.

  “Please, please, please-” the robot chanted.

  Pete laughed aloud as he found the thing's mental analogue. He stabbed deep into it with a long, curved, imaginary knife, the edge of which he imagined to be serrated. The skin of the sphere split; air hissed out. It burst into a cold, white flame, ashed and dissolved, ceasing to be a thinking unit.

  The mechanical man sighed once and fell onto the table, bounced from it and struck the floor, hard.

  He laughed again. This was what it was like to come back from the brink of doubt, anxiety, to come from what you thought were the borderlands of insanity to a complete mastery of the world and all in it. He was exhilarated.

  He directed a thought to Della: “There's only one more of them. I'll have you free in a minute.”

  “Be careful.”

  “Yes.”

  He entered the living room and looked up the steps.

  “No!” her thoughts screamed.

  “What?”

  He searched through the chaos of her thoughts and could not find the exact source of her fear. All that swirled there were images of him, of his corpses, dead and cold and gone from her forever. And roiling over the corpse were roaches, centipedes, snakes

  “Think clearly!”

  She seemed to calm herself.

  “He went out the front door,” she thought.

  “Who?”

  “That last of them. I thought you knew!”

  As the full impact of what she said reached him, he swung about, facing the darkness of the dining room. Just then, the fourth and last of the inhuman hunters appeared there. He was holding a second amber pistol.

  Pete threw himself at the thing.

  It fired, missed, and backstepped away from him, calling his name over and over again and urging him to cooperate.

  He rolled and struck the robot's feet, sending it tumbling backwards. It struck its head on the corner of the dining room table, sloughing off a few inches of the malleable plastic flesh. But that was all that it did. The thing did not seem either hurt or dazed. It grappled with him, bringing its superhuman resources into the fight.

  The amber weapon flew free of the robot's fingers, clattered against the hutch, spun around once on the carpet and was still.

  They rolled; the mechanical man had the top. He weighed so much that he might have cracked Pete's hips if he had wanted to do so. Instead, he leaned forward, holding the man beneath him, and clamped one hand over Pete's mouth and nose.

  He smiled, waiting.

  Pete could barely struggle against the heavy machine. He sucked desperately for breath, and he felt the first tingling of suffocation begin in his lungs.

  “Painless, really,” the mechanical said in the new-caster's voice.

  As dizziness ballooned, he began to feel the thoughts of those nearby pouring across the threshold of his consciousness.

  He was innundated by Della's almost mindless fear as she watched him being strangled to death.

  It was her fear-and the ensuing rage he felt towards the eight-fingered alien for generating that fear-which drove him up from the brown shadows that had begun to blanket him. He blinked his eyes and looked into the robot's simple smile. He obeyed instinct this time and bit the robot's palm. He caused the machine no pain, but he managed to chew away most of the plastic flesh and gain breathing space. The steel would not mold to his contours and could not seal the air out effectively enough.

 

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