Anti-Man

I ran for the bedroom, slid that portal shut behind me, and thumbed the lock on it. A slug snapped into the door, came through, leaving a hole as big as a quarter near the top, and cracking the plastic of the portal, until it looked like a spider web. That would go down in a second. One solid push, and the pieces would fall inward, and He would be on top of me.

I turned, started for the bathroom, and remembered the guard-bot alarm that would bring a mechanical policeman from the storage vault at the far end of this floor. I ran to the bed, depressed the button in the wall, then hurried into the bathroom as He struck the bedroom door behind me. I slammed this final barrier, locked it, and looked around for something to push against it. There was nothing. Everything in the bath was bolted down. I sat on the commode to the left of the door, out of line of any bullets, and waited for the guard-bot, hoping it would make it in time.

I could hear Him in the bedroom. The door to the living room had given in with a crash, and He was through, only one plastic door away from me. Then He was against the bathroom door, and His voice came to me through the plastic, faint, husky, a dry whisper. "Jacob… Jacob, are you in there?"

"What do you want?" I asked.

"You," He said.

"But why?"

"Jacob…"

"Help!" I shouted as loud as I could. It was useless, of course. The apartments in that building were almost perfectly soundproof. And the most isolated room of all was the bath. Still, I shouted, because I felt a need to vocalize my terror. There was something in His voice, in the harsh, ugly tones of His whisper that I had never heard before. It was, I fancied, madness. He spoke like a psychotic, His words couched in a madman's cadences.

I do not know how long I shouted. When I stopped, my voice hoarse, I was aware of a rapping on the door. For a moment, I almost laughed at the absurdity of His knocking now, after blasting His way this far. Then I heard the voice, which must have been calling me for some time. "Dr. Kennelmen," it said. It was not a whisper, but a healthy male baritone. "This is your guard-bot. You called me. I have come in response. Dr. Kennelmen. This is your guard-bot. You called me. I have come — "

I unlocked the door, pushed it open, and stepped into the bedroom. The guard-bot, a slightly more complex form of the Clancy, hovered a few feet away, its pin-gun barrels uncapped and pointing out of the roundness of its underside. "You called me," it said. "I have come. Is anything wrong?"

"Come with me," I said, leading the way through the apartment. I searched all the rooms and closets until I was satisfied that He had gone. I had expected Him to stay, for I was certain it would be nothing for Him to handle the guard-bot. But the place was empty.

"Is there anything you want?" the guard-bot asked, the words coming out of its speaker grid with a faint whistling sound.

"Stay right here," I said. "I'm packing to leave. If you see or hear anyone approaching, summon me at once." And I left him in the living room while I stuffed clothes and toiletries into an overnight case. He walked me to the elevator and rode to the roof with me, waited while I got a helicar. When I lifted off into the night sky over New York City, he turned and floated back into the lift, sent it down with an electric signal.

The computer under the dash of the helicar asked me my roof destination. When I could not think of anything to say, the central traffic control computer housed in the old Empire State Building, cut in, demanded immediate notification of destination, and warned that I would be set down and my helicar privileges canceled if I tried to sabotage the traffic control pattern. I asked for a random flight out of the City, over the Atlantic. The central computer cut out, and my car's own brain began devouring information sent it by central and plotting a random course to slip between the lines of regular traffic.

When you have a few hundred thousand vehicles in the air over one city-from passenger liners to military craft to helicars to drop capsules being spit out of intercontinental rocket bellies-you need a highly complex regulator like the central traffic control computer in eighty-one floors of the Empire State. The other floors of the building house the offices and work areas of the technicians and staff who care for that same computer. One accident in the air can be like a domino collapse. If two craft on a top level of traffic collide, they may take down a dozen or two other pieces of air traffic before they smash into the roofs below.