“Be still,” he told it, shuddering. “Keep away!”
It withdrew from him, and he fled up the stairs, darted into the safety of the bedroom.
One had gotten in. He saw the moving shadow, froze as it skittered near him, touched him. “Out!” he cried at it. “Go out!”
It left, clicking nervously. He felt after the light switch, trembling, fearing the dark, the emptiness. The room leapt into stark white and green. He closed the door on the dark of the hall, locked it. There were noises downstairs, scrapings of furniture, and deeper still, at the foundations. He did not want to know what happened there, in that dark, in that place where the strange azi were lodged.
He was human, and they were not.
And yet the same labs had produced them. The tapes . . . were the difference. He had heard the man Itavvy say so: that in only a matter of days an azi could be diverted from one function to another. A born man put in the pens had come out shattered by the experience.
I am not real, he thought suddenly, as he had never thought in his life. l am only those tapes.
And then he wiped at his eyes, for tears blinded him, and he went into the bath and was sick, protractedly, weeping and vomiting in alternation until he had thrown up all his supper and was too weak to gather himself off the floor.
When he could, when he regained control of his limbs, he bathed repeatedly in disgust, and finally, wrapped in towels, tucked up in a knot in the empty bed, shivering his way through what remained of the night.
vi
The freight-shuttle bulked large on the apron, a dismal half-ovoid on spider legs, glistening with the rain, that puddled and pocked the ill-repaired field and reflected back the floodlights.
There were guards, a station just inside the fence. Raen ordered the car to the very barrier and received the expected challenge. “Open,” she radioed back, curt and sharp. “Kontrin authorisation. And hurry about it.”
She had her apprehensions. There could be delays; there could be complications; ITAK could prove recalcitrant at this point. The azi with her were untried, all but Merry. As for Mundy, in the truck behind . . . she reckoned well what he would do if he could.
The gates swung open. “Go,” she told Merry.
Her own aircraft, guarded by ITAK, was at the other end of the port. She ignored it, as she had always intended to ignore it, simply giving ITAK a convenient target for sabotage if they wished one.
It was the shuttle she wanted. Beta police and a handful of guard-azi were not sufficient to stop her, if her own azi kept their wits about them.
Shuttle-struts loomed up in the windshield. Merry braked and half-turned, and the truck did go too, hard beside them. Raen contacted the station again. “Have the shuttle drop the lift,” she ordered. There were guards pelting across the apron toward them, but her own azi were out of the truck, forming a hedge of rifles, and that advance slowed abruptly.
Evidently the call went through. The shuttle’s freight lift lowered with a groaning of hydraulics that drowned other sound, a vast column with an open side, lighted within.
“Crew is not aboard,” she heard over the radio. “Only ground watch. We can’t take off. We’re not licensed—”
“Merry,” she said, ignoring the rest of it. “Get a squad aboard and take controls. Have them call crew and ground service to get this thing off, and take no argument about it. Shoot as last resort . . . . move! My azi,” she said into the microphone, “will board. No resistance and there’ll be no damage.”
Merry had bailed out of the car and gathered the nearest squad. She opened the door, the gun in one hand, microphone in the other. Other figures exited the truck, dragging one who resisted: Mundy; stilt-limbed ones followed. The police line disordered itself, steadied.
“Kontrin,” a voice said over the radio, “please. We are willing to co-operate.”
Rain blew in the open door of the car, drenched her, slanted down across the floodlights, hazing the stalemated lines. Mundy fought and cursed, disturbing the momentary silence: nuisance, nothing more. Police would not move for so slight a cause, not against a Kontrin; policy would work on higher levels.