Hell's Gate

CHAPTER 8

“Was it all very sordid?” she asked.

“If you want to make it like that.”

“Ouch. I guess I asked for that. Maybe he made me into a masochist.”

“And I'm not going to lay here and build your confidence by ranting and raving about how good it was, what a beautiful thing we have together.”

“Because that's not necessary?” she asked. “Ummm. I guess then what I'm feeling is maybe not so silly.”

“And what are you feeling?”

She turned on her side, brought the long clean lines of her body against him. What he felt now was not desire so much as a warm contentment at the touch of her, an appreciation of her line and form and loveliness.

“I'm feeling that this somehow pieced us together. I can tell a difference in you. In the way you treat me. You are human, warm, open now. You were an enigma before. And I feel more complete than I have since the divorce. It isn't just sex. I could have plenty of that any time. We're like two pieces of a dollar bill that has been torn in half somewhere along the line. One piece ends up in the wallet of an old man in New Jersey, the other in the wallet of a young man in Milwaukee. One day both turn up in Miami in a restaurant. The old man's half falls out of his wallet when he pays the cashier. The young man sees it, takes out his own half, finds they match. Its so impossible you want to hold your breath for fear of blowing the halves apart.”

She snuggled against him, her mouth against his neck. Her fingers traced patterns on his chest. The smell of her was warm and feminine, musky, yet sweet. He could see why she had been attracted to him from the first. She had married a man she thought she understood and found a demon in him. This time, she would be drawn to a man more complicated, one she could not fathom, in the hope that a simple, sincere man lay beneath the surface. Iron Victor would have presented the mystery she wanted to start with. Soft Victor was the simple, sincere man she sought

Suddenly he felt like an ogre worse than any Henry March, for he was concealing so much from her when she had leveled so totally with him. “Come on,” he said, getting out of bed and slipping into a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, loafers without benefit of socks. “There's something I have to show you.”

“Your explanation now?”

“Right.”

She slipped into his robe, which was enormous for her, followed him into the hall, past Intrepid who had been lying watching them. He remembered Intrepid had not been fed and watered, but found she had taken care of that after all.

He took her to the bedroom where the robot lay, turned the thing over for her inspection. He told her the story, beginning with the morning he had awakened in the cave and set out to buy the Jacobi house, omitting only the fact that he had killed Harold Jacobi, She sat very still and quiet.

She accepted the story, despite its apparent absurdity. Partly, this was because she was reluctant to consider her lover a madman, partly because there were the marks of the vibrabeam to prove what he said. There were also the featureless, lockless trunks.

“It's now a quarter to one,” he said. “Which means you will pack and leave before the shooting starts.”

“Bull!” she said shortly.

“You might get hurt.” It was an inane statement, one of those lines from a book that are verbal translations of such visual obviousnesses that they cancel themselves out. Perhaps in a moment of stress, all men were reduced to the formula plotting of the fiction they read, mouthing inanities from other stories.

“And you might be hurt too. You might need someone like you did last night.”

“Look, Lynda,” he said, ignoring the finality, “you'll be in my way.”

“Bull.” She just wasn't playing the part of the fragile heroine the way she was supposed to. “Are you throwing me out?”

“Of course not! But if you stay all night, people will think-”

“You have no neighbors, and I could really give a damn about what they thought if you did. What concern I have for the opinions of the general populace could be placed in a Coke bottle without obscuring the bottom.”

“That was a pretty heated delivery,” he said, grinning in spite of himself.

“I can stay then?”

“You can stay.”

Her reaction, surprisingly, was like that of a small girl. She threw her arms around him, giggling. She was an intriguing, multilevel woman, terribly adult one moment, delightfully child-like the next. The result was sort of a delightful, playful schizophrenia.

“But now we have only half an hour to decide what to do.”

She wanted to stay. She had made that quite clear. There was no way he could persuade her that it would be best all around if she left.

She wanted to stay. She most definitely did.

Still, she shuddered.

As they discussed what should be done, Salsbury bent to work on the hand of the robot, disconnecting the vibrabeam weapon within the core of the plastic finger. Lynda expressed amazement that he knew the weapon was detachable and knew how to go about detaching it. He was somewhat surprised himself, but had learned to live with the often hidden tidbits of knowledge that now and again surfaced when they were needed. In ten minutes, he had the vibratube in his hand, the simple stud-end trigger ready against his thumb.

In the end, after much planning and alternate planning, they decided not to go into the cellar where, perhaps, the robot would be able to solicit aid from the lizardy aliens. Instead, they moved the furniture in the living room to form a fortress of stuffing, wood, and springs behind which they could hide and observe the cellar door. There was no way of being certain another robot would be sent, though the lizard-things must surely have known the first failed. If they knew that, they would consider it an enormous fluke, and would think it could never happen twice.

Indeed, had he been Harold Jacobi, it never would have happened again, for he would have been stone dead. But he was quicker than a man should be, cleverer, and now he had a vibrabeam tube himself.

One-thirty came and went in silence. They did not speak for fear of missing some vital sound from below. Even a moment's distraction might mean the difference between success and failure-and failure would, of course, mean death. There was no ringing noise, no thrumming moan. He remembered that the portal had not required the strange vibrations to open itself ever since that night when full visual contact had been made; that night the demons looked through the wall as if only a pane of glass separated them from Salsbury.

At twenty minutes of two, ten minutes into their silent vigil, they heard soft footfalls on the steps… coming up

Linda was positioned beside him, shielded by a couch. He was at the end of the same piece of furniture, looking through a crack between the sofa and the easy chair they had pulled next to it. She had her head above the back of the sofa, watching the door. He put a hand on her skull and pushed her down out of sight. She started to protest, then remembered the need for silence. Or perhaps she remembered what the vibrabeam had done to his bathroom door and suddenly had begun to extrapolate on what it might do to flesh. She stayed down, safely behind him, waiting.

As he watched, the cellar door swung easily into the living room. It shielded the bulk of the robot from him, but he was in no great hurry to make contact with it. Salsbury knew he could take the machine before it could reach either of them; that realization made for a great deal of confidence.

A moment later, the robot stepped from behind the door, very alert and cautious as if even its steel and glass brain could know fear. It started along the wall, staying where the moonlight from the windows did not touch. When he was but a few feet from the stairs that led to the second story, Salsbury thumbed the stud on the vibrabeam tube. The cold waves of sound flashed out in a golden stream, struck the machine and made it bounce and buck as if a sledge hammer had been swung into its guts. It lurched, turned, its blue eyes sparkling flatly in the darkness, seeking.

Rising to stand beside him, Lynda grasped Salsbury's arm and sucked in her breath. The lack of any emotion on the robot's face, the deadly blankness so like a psychotic's countenance, was enough to chill anyone. It had nearly sent Salsbury climbing the walls the first time he had been confronted with it.

The beam continued to play.

Victor fancied he could hear things breaking inside the robot. Its entire body hummed with the impact of the killing waves.

It stumbled toward them, raising its firing arm, pointing the brass finger. Salsbury ducked, trying to hold the vibrabeam on his opponent. But it wavered, swept across the stair railing to the mechanical's left. The wood splintered, popped, danced into the air in hundreds of shards, rained down on Lynda and him where they stood ten feet away.

The mechanical's own beam smashed into an easy chair, blew a cloud of smouldering stuffings into the air. The littlest pieces, glowing orange, came down and stung their bare arms where they touched. Lynda slapped at her robe and at Salsbury's clothes to keep them from catching fire.

Salsbury depressed the firing stud again. The robot backed, trying to avoid the weapon. But there was nowhere it could go. It came up against the wall, shivering like a man left in his underwear on the tundra. Seconds later, it pitched forward, smashed onto its face. It tried to get up, managed to make it to its knees, then crashed forward again, bouncing on the carpet. Its fingers groped at the nylon, trying to find something to help pull it erect. The brass tip of the weapons finger was bright with reflected moonlight. Then, at last, it was still.

“You got him!” Lynda cried. She was reacting like the little girl again, exuberant despite the still pervading terror of the scene about her.

Salsbury stood, his knees cracking painfully, aimed the vibrabeam at the robot's head and blew its metal skull open, spilling its mechanics onto the rug.

It was over.

His entire body seem to expand, to swell with triumph.

He turned to Lynda to say something… and caught the movement of the second killer out of the corner of his eye.