“Cain?” I shot to the robot. “You heard?” “The road does not go far,” responded the robot.
“It runs into a network of other smaller roads, and one
very large one going off to the southwest.”
“The longest one will do,” I responded. “Is there a
landing place two or more kilometers from any
settled area?”
“There is,” the robot replied. “I shall feed you its
coordinates.”
He did and I stored the information in the computer.
I turned back to Marsha and her group. “What you got in mind, hon?” I asked her. “Roads mean cars and trucks of some kind,” she pointed out. “That means water tanks for the irriga-tion system. We might as well get something out of
this other than moral satisfaction.”
I thought it over, looked at George. He shrugged.
“Will it fit in the lock?” he asked.
“Depends,” I responded. “Hon, if you can find one that fits, go to it. Anything else, too. Otherwise, raise
your hell and git.”
She nodded, then suddenly froze. There was the sound of a whirring motor somewhere
near, approaching.
“Quickly!” she called to the others. “Into the
bushes and freeze!”
They didn’t need any extra urging. She took a mighty leap and was so far back she risked edging forward
to get a view of the road.
There was a truck coming, a little angular affair,
with single headlight. A three-wheeler. She scanned to see the driver, but there was no driver. It was an
automated vehicle.
Nobody moved, nobody breathed, as the thing came
up to within a few meters of them, whirred past, and vanished down the road without a pause.
“Whew!” she breathed. “Nervewracking, that. Well,
c’mon, gang. Let’s head into town.”
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They proceeded slowly to the edge of the quad. Many lights were on, she could tell by the colors reflecting off the grassy center plot, but there seemed to be no one stirring outside.
“Damn!” she exclaimed angrily. “No trucks. Well, okay, then.” She turned to the group. “Anybody feel like they have to shit?”
Several did, in fact, and she urged them to do it in the quad, on the grass, depositing as they did huge cultures of the virus.
The operation needed a little more light, but you could almost swear that the edges of the grass around the three piles of manure were turning a dull pink even now.
“Look at the piles!” George cut in sharply. “Keep looking until I tell you to stop!”
They complied, and he played little tunes to the piles relayed by the Choz to the ground. He was instructing the virus as to its rate of multiplication, I knew, stepping everything up to maximum speed.
Near the end of this, someone decided to come out of one of the quads.
We heard the door slide open, and switched to the first Choz who looked up. Someonelooked like a man, hard to tell with the baggy clothes. He was humming something, and he started across the area, hardly looking where he was going.
“Everybody!” I called. “Contact!”
He almost bumped into Marsha.
“Excuse me,” he mumbled, face still staring at the ground.
He saw something strange there, and his face came up, meeting Marsha’s gaze.
His mouth opened, and he screamed so terribly we could feel it way up in orbit. The man was terrified.
He started to back away, then just stood, a few meters back, gaping. Marsha lost her patience, and made a feint for him, and he screamed again and ran
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as fast as he could back to the door from which he’d emerged, yelling and screaming.
There were the sounds of movement, calls, and some additional lighting snapped on, making the quad a blaze of color.
“Scatter!” she yelled at them. “Meet back at the road when you’re done!”
They leaped in all directions. One headed for the generating plant on to one side, another to the water system, yet others to their assigned stations. Marsha stood her ground and glared at the lights she could sense but not see.
“Okay, you bastards! C’mon out and fight!” she yelled, although they could not hear her.
Three humans acted as if they did, though. There was no way of telling if one was our first contact they tended to look alike to us, I discoveredbut they came out of the same building and gaped at her for a moment.
She turned and faced them, scanning them carefully. One held what seemed to be a wrench. No other weapons were visible. The one with the tool appeared to be the leader, and he advanced on her, the others following cautiously, nervously.
“Hey, beastie,” he whispered gently. “Nice beastie. What are ye, beastie? C’mon to Papa Njumo now, take it easy. …”
He kept murmuring reassuringly, but the wrench was held in a nasty way.
Marsha let him approach, doing a wide scan to make certain there were no surprises. There were several other humans in open doorways, but these three were the only ones that made any kind of move.
“Jeez! What the hell is it?” one of the nervous fol-lowers managed. “I ain’t never seen nothin’ like it before. Them eyesjeez!”
“Shut up!” Njumo ordered sharply through clenched teeth and broad smile. “If I can get close in enough I
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can brain it, I think.” His tone softened again. “Nice beastie, come to Papa, beastie …”
“Why, that son of a bitch!” Marsha exploded, and leaped high into the air at the trio. She judged her distance perfectly as only a Choz can gauge a leap, forehooves pushing the two men behind Njumo, hind legs kicking into Njumo’s shoulders and, perhaps, his skull as she gave an extra push in the air for effort.
She crashed into the two men, and sprawled with them. Choz aren’t lightshe weighed a hundred fifty kilos if she weighed oneand when she rolled over onto one of them he screamed in pain. She recovered quickly as the buildings erupted with construction personnel, mostly yelling conflicting orders and running around, watching her warily.
Scanning that the three she tackled were out for the count, she whirled and poised for another spring.
“Watch it!” I warned anxiously. “They can hurt you, you know!”
“The hell with them!” she sneered. “God! It’s been so long! They’re so small, so soft, so slow! Hah! I’ll show ‘em what a Choz woman can do!”
She leaped at a bunch, who were taken aback both at the speed and the duration of the leapperhaps twenty, twenty-five meters!
I knew what she was feeling, feeling for the first timethe power of the Choz in the open, the freedom, the tremendous control when we were in a place like that for which we were designed.
She hit a row of men and women who froze in fear as she came upon them, like some flying horror. She struck the first two, and they careened into others. It was almost comical the way they fell into each other, going down in sequence.
“Get one of the borers from the construction shed!” someone yelled. “Nail it!”
She spotted the woman who yelled it, probably a construction foreman, and leaped again, tearing into her.
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“Marsha!” I yelled. “Get the hell out of there! Enough, already!”
She was breathing hard, but it was more from excitement than the exercise.
“Hell, no!” she responded. “Let’s really give them something to remember!”
With that, she leaped for an open doorway, and entered the building. She knew her way well enough, as would I; they were all alike, every one, everywhere.
There were no locks in the perfect society; she bounded up the short stairs and nudged the panel next to a second-floor apartment. The door slid open, barely large enough for her, and she barged in.
A woman was in there, totally nude, watching the excitement from her window. She turned as Marsha stormed in, and screamed. Marsha stopped, then slowly approached the terrified woman. She shied back into a comer, trapped. Marsha approached her, so close that the woman could smell her breath.
Then the power-drunk Choz smiledI don’t know how I know that, but I doand caressed the woman in some nasty places with her tongue. Her fun over, she shot some webbing at those nasty places and turned for the window.
The quad was full of people; she could hear them, but the window blocked the sonar. They were the sealed type, too. No way.
“Marsha!” I screamed. “No!”
She charged the window, striking it first with her huge, extremely powerful hind feet, smashing the plasticine into millions of tiny crystals. Still almost ten meters up, she straightened out, and had the sounding before she landed.
“If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I wouldn’t have believed it,” George murmured.
The quad was a sea of humans now, but there were other things there as well.
“Marsha!” I yelled. “Robots! Get out of there! Jump over if you can!”
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They were the big kind, the construction kind, not easily bypassed. They had the quad hemmed in, and the humans quickly retreated behind them, leaving her exposed.
She stood her ground, but she was scared again now, suddenly, in the face of those huge, terrible machines.
“They’ve got me cut off!” she almost yelled in panic. “I don’t”
“Why doesn’t the protective sound come?” I shouted at George.
George was transfixed. “I don’tunless … Oh, my God! You remember all the times we saw it, right from the start! It was always the males. Bar! Always the males! Never Eve, never the others!”
He was right, I knew with certainty. In that Bible that Moses and George followed in different ways, women were the weaker, dependent sex.
“Everyone! All males! Get to that quad! Marsha needs you!” I yelled.
“Ahead of you!” came several responses, but a quick check showed they were a short distance away.
“George!” I called. “Do you have enough virus to disable them?”
He shook his head. “One, maybe. No more!”
Not in many years had I felt so helpless, so cheated. Nobody, I thought angrily, beats Bar Holliday.
My head cleared. “George! Get that virus to the operators! The robots can’t shoot any animal life on their own!”
The great things were closing in fast. They wanted a narrow field of fire, to avoid hitting the buildings.
“Locked in!” George called. “Marsha! Scan the cabs!”
She had panicked and was looking every which way, but she snapped out of it.
George played some tones, first at one, then the second, then the third. The fourth, however, he missed,
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and the first three weren’t instant; it would take time for the virus to start dissolving their clothes, causing the diversion.
Then suddenly, four more were there, behind them, and we saw the clouded vision of the panic defense in action. Things seemed to slowbut George jumped.
“The laser!” he yelled. “One of them is on and we can’t see it!”
Marsha looked confused, then sprang in a giant leap right at one of the lumbering automatons.
A beam followed, we found, slicing off a section of the construction robot she’d landed alongside.
The operator of that one was frozen by the defense sounds, feeling too much pain to react, and she was able to jump again.
The wild laser lashed through, out of control, and beyond the two other robot borers. Pieces of machin-ery were chipped off, and flew, and the beam cleared, striking out. We saw Marsha’s vision blur as something hit her. She screamed and dropped like a stone.
“The hell with this!” I growled. “I’m going in!”
We dropped suddenly down almost to the edge of town. I opened the lock anxiously and called the others.
“Marsha’s hurt!” came a call from one of the others, I couldn’t tell which. “And so’s Shem! Bring litters!”
We had a couple for emergency purposes, and Cain strung one quickly around me.
“Stay here, George!” I commanded as the older man made to follow. “Cain! Come with me!”
The robot scuttled out the lock, and I kept up as best I could, dragging the sledge.
It wasn’t far to the site. I didn’t have time for re-criminationsthe males couldn’t hold that panic beam deliberately, and I knew it might quit at any time, bringing the laser canons to bear on us.
Cain picked up two limp forms and put them on the sledge; one of the women spun webbing to hold them, and I was off, Cain pacing me.
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I made the lock and dropped the web-rope from my teeth.
“George! Get them back here!” I ordered crisply. “Let’s go!”
I started the emergency takeoff procedures, and counted anxiously as first one, then all the others fairly leapt into the air lock. I closed it, fed the pressuriza-tion in, and gunned it. Ship’s sensors showed two bulky shapes closing fast, and I knew that I would have little time to spare.
We were far out into space when I dared relax, having made the short L-jump as quickly as I could match vector and velocity.
Only then I was able to look at the two injured Choz.
One, a male caught in the wild fire, was obviously deadperhaps the first Choz of the new breed to die. A Fourth, Shem had been a good, inquisitive boy with a knack for mechanical concepts, I remembered sadly.
Marsha was still alive, although that was almost a matter of opinion. She was out cold, and I surveyed the damage. A part of her left ear gone, some teeth broken, and
Her hind legs were gone, as if sliced off by a giant meat cleaver, along with her tail. There was massive hemorrhaging, but George was at work with his tone board and seemed to be winning that battle, a battle that needed to be won quickly.
“She needs a transfusion,” George said after a while. “No, don’t jump to volunteer. We haven’t anything to do it with. I’ve done the best I can for now, and we’ll just have to wait. If she makes itwell, then we’ll see.”
I bit my lower lip in anxiety. “George,” I said gravely. “Supposesuppose she does pull through, somehow. Can the virusregenerate that much?”
He shook his head. “I have no idea. If anybody can pull through, she will. She’s got guts, that giri-