Then he went and strapped on his gun.
Outside, it was raining. Cold rain. It sliced the hairlike fog that wrapped the trees and spit-curled the darkness. It crawled his skin with aching dampness, chilled his bones to the marrow. There was no lightening. The blackness was impenetrable.
He found the car in front of the house after first looking in the garage. The door swung open to the touch of his thumb as the lock recognized his print. Climbing in, he started the engine, swung across the narrow secondary road to the ramp of the autoway. Punching coordinates for the Medical Arts Building he leaned back, closing his eyes as the car maneuvered into the high-speed lane of the twelve lane autoway.
He took control of the car at the bottom of the ramp and drove onto Sycamore Avenue. A hundred yards ahead, a barricade slashed the road, ringed with portable yellow lights that bathed the slick pavement in ugly amber flush. The reflection of the bulbs in the ice-slushed puddles, curling and wiggling, reminded him of a carnival midway after closing time on a damp Saturday night near the end of the season. Aching with the realization that carnivals were but another thing necessarily outlawed as protection against killerbot mass-murders, he pulled the car into the shadow of the portable barricade wall. Bursts of bullets rang across the roof and down the trunk until he was shielded by the metal partition.
“Mr. Cullen said to send you right to the front,” the officer said, opening the door for Jacobs. “You’re going to have to dress for it, though.”
“How many dead?”
“Fourteen civilians. Nine of us.”
“Nine!”
The officer winced at the implied criticism. “Nothing could be done, Captain. It opened fire before rush hour. Senseless, that. The first part of the staggered rush would have been coming down this street fifteen minutes later. If it had waited, it could have killed five times fourteen. So we went in with dart-proofs, ’cause it was using darts. How could we guess it would have two weapon systems? A dart-proof suit is structured to stop needlepoint pressure. A bullet is something else again.”
Jacobs accepted a bullet-proof jacket from a second man, laced the front tightly shut and hung a heavy bib over the lacing. The officers helped him into a pair of bulky slacks of thick, cross-hatched nylon pressure resistants. “Tell Cullen I’m coming through,” he said, shuffling uncomfortably toward the edge of the barricade, slipping the bulky nylon-steel mesh hood over his head.
A hundred yards of bare street stretched between this barricade and the next. The second implacement was a portable metal well behind which Cullen and four officers crouched, watching the tenth floor of the Medarts Building through tiny lenses imbedded in a portable barrier. Cullen, radio to ear, looked back at the first barricade as he learned of Jacobs’ arrival. A moment later, he and the other four men opened fire on the tenth floor window, providing Jacobs with a sort of cover.
Jacobs shuffled around the barrier and began a labored progress across the no-man’s land.
Yellow light danced over his shoulders and shivered in the puddles, shattering like glass when he slopped the icy water with his feet.
He was thirty yards along before the killerbot saw him and turned its attention from the men at the barricade to him. There was a tinkling of darts against the rough fiber of the suit. But they fell away like wind-driven dandelion puffs suddenly deprived of propulsion. Quickly sensing the uselessness of the dart weapon, the killerbot opened fire with its frag slugs.
But that was impossible! Killerbots couldn’t reason like that! If they could, they certainly would revolt at having been used for disposal weapon carriers. Take a man; bleach his brain; throw away his memory, crumpled and useless; program him with basic human habits and an automatic, unsensing minor vocabulary; program him with a destruction mission; turn him loose. That is a killerbot. It can’t reason in the heat of battle. Or never had been able to before. . . .
The bullets weren’t penetrating the heavy armor, but they rained down too fast to let him walk a straight line to the front barricade. It was like walking in a raging wind, a spurting progress, unsteady and unsure.