CHAPTER II-3
976 Words
He let out a yell, staggered back, and collapsed with a dizzy swaying of his entire bulk.
I gripped Claire’s wrist again. “Trust me, and don’t look back,” I whispered urgently. “We’ve got to keep moving!”
We were out of the shop before the big cop could flatten out on the floor. We ran swiftly across the pavement outside, and climbed into my beetle.
“You made him sit down!” Claire gasped.
“For a minute,” I whispered. “I took the bark out of him, but not the bite. When he gets up a general alarm will go out, and then we’ll be in the deadliest kind of danger.”
Swiftly the beetle picked up speed, sweeping up the driveway with a dull roar. I looked at Claire, sitting straight and still at my side. I felt a fierce surge of exaltation. I’d broken the law for a beautiful woman for the first time in my life.
We were getting acquainted fast.
Perhaps it was the heady wine of exhilaration which made me reckless. But I said something to her that I had wanted to say in the shop, in defiance of the man’s presence.
“Claire,” I whispered.
She looked at me as if startled. “Claire is my name.”
“Sure, I know,” I said. “You just said you liked me. Could you say, ‘I love you!’”
“I love you,” Claire said. Her voice was strangely toneless, automatic.
“Say it again,” I urged.
“I love you,” Claire said.
There it was; but it just didn’t mean anything to her. I could tell by the way she said it.
Would it mean anything later? Whether it would or not, right at the moment I knew I’d have to think and move fast. When a general alarm goes out every traffic tower becomes a scanning trap. With luck, you can outwit a Security Police network on the human level; the law isn’t infallible, and never was. But when invisible beams fasten on you, and start working you over, the odds against you really start mounting.
Put a frog in a glass of water—any ordinary bullfrog, mottled green and brown—and it will start shedding skin cells at a prodigious rate. No two frogs are exactly alike, and a frog in a glass would have little chance of keeping its identity a secret from a determined biologist.
We were in the same kind of trap. I knew that before we could travel a mile, identity-ray projectors would scan my skin, hair and optic disks. They would scan me from head to toe, with scant regard for my modesty. They wouldn’t miss a square inch, and the whorl-findings would be flashed to Central Identification; and at Central my name disk would slide from the big general file, and go clicking into an emergency alarm slot.
They’d have me tabbed in nothing flat.
I reached over, and gripped Claire’s arm. “When we get out—keep close to me,” I warned. “We’ve got to make a dash for it.”
I halted the beetle in the middle of the block, flush with the curb.
The old subway entrance was fifty feet away. I knew we’d have to reach it in a quick sprint. As we turned from the car a siren started screaming, and out of the corner of my eye I could see that a police beetle was heading straight toward us from a distance of perhaps two hundred feet.
Directly ahead the level was blocked. I reached for Claire’s hand and we started off.
“Don’t look back!” I warned.
Surprisingly, Claire was good at running. She ran swiftly at my side, her feet clattering on the hard pavement. The siren sound rose higher, became a shrill, terrifying drone. Half way down the block three Security Police officers descended from a careening beetle, and raced toward us, letting the car plunge on under automatic controls.
It was then that Claire made her first serious mistake. My advice must have made a deep impression on her, for she kept close to me as I ran; too close. Thinking she was at least two feet from me I swerved sharply, and collided with her, hurling her violently back against a traffic guidepost.
The post was magnetically energized. It caught and held her firmly, and a chill struck at my heart. I grasped her by both shoulders and stared at her in alarm. “Hold perfectly still!” I warned. “One wrench will free you, but you’ve got to stand firm!”
Obviously, there was a band of metal under her dress. It shocked me to realize that I hadn’t even had time to ask the man about that. Just how much metal had been used to manufacture Claire?
When I had helped the man lift her from the tank, her body had seemed soft and yielding enough. But just how much metal had been used? A band less than six inches wide would have held her fast to a magnetized traffic post. But what if Claire was more of an artificial woman than I had dreamed?
It was one hell of a time to have such thoughts. Grimly I told myself that metal magnetized to only a moderate extent wouldn’t hold fast if I gave it a really violent wrench.
I exerted all my strength, and Claire swung clear. As she lurched forward into my arms one of the running officers opened fire on us. The bullet went wild, splintering the traffic post at its base. I grabbed Claire’s wrist and we started running again.
She was still good at it. It seemed only an instant before we reached the subway entrance and were swept into its dark, protective embrace.
As the clamor from outside fell away our feet set up a hollow echoing that resounded through the darkness until even the terrifying siren wail dwindled to a far-off, ghostly mockery of sound.
Then we stopped for breath, and Claire swayed toward me. I caught her in my arms and held her tightly, whispering words of reassurance to her until her trembling ceased.
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