"Jordan," called Docchi as he entered the control compartment. Jordan wasn"t there. Nona was, still gazing serenely at the gravity indicator.
Lights were streaming from the corridor on the opposite side of the compartment. Docchi hurried over. Jordan was just inside the entrance, the toaster clutched grimly in his hand. He was. .h.i.tching his truncated body slowly toward the stern.
Coming to meet him was Anti--unarmed, enormously fat Anti. She wasn"t walking; somehow it seemed more like swimming, a bulbous, flabby sea animal moving through the air. She waved her fins against the wall and propelled herself forward.
"Melt him down!" she cried.
It was difficult to make out the vaguely human form of the geepee. The powerful, shining body blended into the structure of the ship itself--unintentional camouflage, though the robot wasn"t aware of that. It was crouched at the threshold of a cabin, hesitating between the approaching dangers.
Jordan raised the weapon and as instantly lowered it. "Get out of the way," he told Anti.
There was no place for her to go. She was too big to enter a cabin, too ma.s.sive to let the geepee squeeze by her even if she wanted it to.
"Never mind that. Get him," she answered.
A geepee was not a genius even by robot standards. It didn"t need to be. Heat is deadly; a human body is a fragile thing. This it knew. It ran toward Anti. Unlike man, it didn"t need magneslippers. It had magnetic metal feet which could move fast, and did.
Docchi couldn"t close his eyes, though he wanted to. He had to watch.
The geepee torpedoed into Anti. And it was the robot that was thrown back. Relative ma.s.s favored the monstrous woman.
The electronic brain obeyed its original instructions, whatever those were. It got to its feet and rushed toward Anti. Metal arms shot out with dazzling speed and crashed against the flesh of the fat woman.
Docchi could hear the thud. No ordinary person could take that kind of punishment and live.
Anti wasn"t ordinary; she was strange, even for an accidental, living far inside a deep armor of flesh. It was possible that she never felt the crushing force of those blows. Amazingly, she grasped the robot and drew it to her. And the geepee lost the advantage of leverage. The bright arms didn"t flash so fast nor with such lethal power.
"Gravity!" cried Anti. "All you"ve got!"
She leaned against the struggling machine.
Gravity. That was something he could do. Docchi turned, took two steps before the surge of gravity hit him. It came in waves, the sequence of which he was never able to disentangle. The first wave staggered him; at the second his knees buckled and he sank to the floor. After that his eardrums hurt. He thought he could feel the ship quiver. He knew dazedly that an artificial gravity field of this magnitude was impossible, but that knowledge didn"t help him move.
It vanished as suddenly as it had come. Painfully his lungs expanded.
Each muscle ached. He rolled to his feet and lurched past Jordan.
He didn"t find the ma.s.s of broken flesh he expected. Anti was already standing.
"Oof!" she grunted and gazed with satisfaction at the twisted grotesque shape at her feet. The electronic brain had been smashed, the body flattened.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
"Are you hurt?" asked Docchi gently, awed.
She waggled the extremities of her body. "Nope, I can"t feel anything broken," she said solemnly. She moved back to get a better view of the robot. "I"d call that throwing my weight around. At the right time, of course. The secret"s timing. And I must say you picked up your cue with the gravity well." Her laughter rolled through the ship.
"It wasn"t I," said Docchi.
"Jordan? No, he"s just getting up. Then who?"
"Nona," said Docchi. "It had to be her. She saw what had to be done and did it. But how she got that amount of gravity--"
"Ask her," said Anti with fond irony.
Docchi grimaced and limped back into the control room, followed by Anti and Jordan. Nona was at the gravity panel, her face pleasant and childlike.
"Gravity can be turned on or off," said Docchi puzzledly, searching her face for some sign. "And regulated, within certain narrow limits.
But somehow you doubled or tripled the normal amount. How?"
Nona smiled questioningly.
"Gravity engineers would like to know that too," said Jordan.
"Everybody would like to know," Anti interrupted irritably. "Except me. I"m too pragmatic, I suppose, but I want to know when we start the rockets and be on our way."
"It isn"t that easy," sighed Jordan. "A retracted combustion cap in flight generally means at least one burned-out tube." He made his way to the instrument panel and looked at it glumly. "Three."
"A factor." Docchi nodded. "But I was thinking about the robot."
Anti was impatient. "An interesting subject, no doubt. What about it?"
"Where did it get instructions? Not radio; the hull of the ship cuts off all radiation. The last we knew, it was in our control."
"All right, how?"
"Voice," said Docchi. "Cameron"s voice, to be exact."
"But he was in the rocket dome," Jordan objected.
"Think back to when we were loading the tank. We had to look through the telecom and the angle of vision was bad. We couldn"t see much of the cargo lock. Anti couldn"t see anything that wasn"t directly overhead. Both Cameron and the geepee managed to get inside and we didn"t know it."
Jordan hefted his weapon. "Looks like we"ve got another hunt on our hands. This time a nice normal doctor."
"Keep it handy," said Docchi, glancing at the toaster. "But be careful how you use it. One homicide and we can forget what we came for. I think he"ll be ready to surrender. The ship"s temporarily disabled; he"ll consider that damage enough."
Jordan found the doctor in the forward section of the ship. Cameron knew better than to argue with a toaster. In a matter of minutes he was in the control room.
"Now that you"ve got me, what are you going to do with me?" he asked.
Docchi swiveled away from the instrument panel. "I don"t expect active cooperation, of course, but I like to think you"ll give your word not to hinder us hereafter."
Cameron glared. "I promise nothing of the kind."
"We can chain him to Anti," suggested Jordan. "That will keep him out of trouble."
"Like leading a poodle on a leash? Nope," said Anti indignantly. "A girl has to have some privacy."
"Don"t wince, Cameron," objected Docchi. "She really was a girl once, an attractive one."