Davis screamed to draw the wolfs attention. It turned from her, staring at him with hot coal eyes, its jowls quivering and slopped with crimson. He shouted at it again, screaming nonsense syllables. It looked at him, snarled, bared teeth that were jagged and strong. It turned back to her and started to move in toward her neck.
Davis grabbed a fistful of leaves and snow, packed them together and threw the ball at the beast. It bounced off its flank, and the wolf turned to Davis again, padded away from the girl. It leaped—
Proteus shot the animal, flicked on the vibra-beam and fried its body while it was still in flight. The charred corpse crashed at Davis’s feet, its yellow teeth bared in a crisped snarl.
“Go away!” she said, making as if to get up and run.
“I’m not married,” he said. “Anyway, not to anyone but you.”
She stopped trying to get up and collapsed back onto the snowy earth, looked up at him strangely for a moment, then started to cry, though he knew she was not crying in sadness.
Proteus hummed around the trees, alert, searching, its sensors seeking heat and sound and sight and even olfactory stimulation.
He went to her, knelt, took her wounded arm. It was not a serious bite, though it was swollen and blue. Clots had formed, but it should be cleaned and sterilized and lathered with speedheal ointment and a speedheal bandage. He tried to get his arms under her, but she fought him.
“What are you trying to do?” he asked, angrily trying to make her hold still.
“They’ll put you in jail,” she said.
“I’ve got the money to fight it.”
“But you’ll lose everything.” She bit him on the hand.
“Goddamned little she-wolf!” he said, laughing.
“You’ll lose everything!” she repeated.
“Look,” he said, pointing to dark shapes moving toward them through the yil trees. “See those?”
“Wolves.”
“Right. Very good. Now let me tell you something. I am going to stay right here if you won’t let me take you out of the woods. I’m going to wait for those wolves and kill them one at a time, with Proteus, until there are too many for the robot to handle. Then I’ll let them kill both of us if I can’t stop them with my hands. Proteus can only do so much, you know. He wasn’t designed to work at optimum efficiency in some exotic situation like this.”
As if in confirmation of all Davis had said, the robot’s plasti-plasma began gurgling loudly. It could, of course, handle these wolves long enough to scare them off, but there was no sense telling her that.
“But you’ll lose everything!”
“Money. Some fans. We’ll fight it, and we’ll win it.”
She looked at him, seemed to wilt, as if she had been holding herself stiff and alert through sheer willpower. As she sagged and whimpered that the bite on her arm hurt very badly, he lifted her in his arms much as he might have carried a child, careful that her wings were folded and would not get torn or bent by his rough handling. As he turned to find their way back to the fields, the wolves moved in even closer.
To his right, one of the hefty, slavering monsters hunched its shoulders and hung its neck low to the ground, pawed at the earth. Its hind legs tensed, all the muscles standing out even through the thick coat of hair.
“Gun right!” he ordered Porteus.
The machine turned.
The wolf bounded two steps, soared into the air . . .
. . . erupted like a match head in the searing brilliance of the vibra-beam, died howling like a banshee.
The other beasts backstepped a bit, lowered their heads and made deep moaning noises that the wind snatched and carried away, changed into the crying of children, then the buzzing of bees, then nothingness.
Davis carried her back over the leaf-covered log, worked around the thrusting teeth of the rock formation, snagging her toga several times and looking up anxiously at each halt to make certain Proteus was still watchful. The wolves paralleled their exit, staying behind the trunks of the yil trees, their scarlet eyes flashing now and again in the dense gloom —the only signs of their presence outside of an occasional brutish mutter.