Dean R. Koontz - Anti-Man

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Dean Koontz – Anti-man

[Version 2.0 by BuddyDk – august 3 2003]

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I HAD SAVED HIM, KNOWING HE COULD DESTROY

OUR WORLD.

In a world of nine billion people, it's sui-cidal to bring anyone

back from the dead. The android could reshape His fingers into

three-molecule-thick knives that could go into a man's skin like a

miniature surgeon and heal—even resurrect. He declined to

stop.

Faced with an order to “disassemble” Him, I kidnapped

Him. Then He began to change —His shape, His voice, His

goals.

Watching Him, I was less frightened of our pursuers than I

was of what I had done. Was the final change going to be the

ugly caterpillar into the lovely, colorful butterfly, or would the

lovely butterfly revert into an ugly—deadly—worm?

ANTI-MAN

Dean R. Koontz

PAPERBACK LIBRARY

New York

PAPERBACK LIBRARY EDITION

First Printing: July, 1970

For Edward L. Ferman who helped at the start of things . . .

Paperback Library is a division of Coronet Communications, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Paperback Library”

accompanied by an open book, is registered in the United States Patent Office. Coronet Communications, Inc., 315 Park Avenue

South, New York, N.Y. 10010.

It was really too much to hope for, but we seemed to have lost them. We had jumped from Knoxville

to Pierre, South Dakota, from that drab terminal to Bismark, North Dakota, and on to San Francisco. In

the City of the Sun, we had walked unknown with our hands in our pockets and our faces open to the

sky, feeling less like fugitives than we had any right to, grabbing a day of much needed rest and a moment

to collect our thoughts before dashing on. We had spent the day buying gear for the last leg of our

escape, eating our first decent meal in two days, and sitting through some atrocious toto-experience film

just be-cause it was dark in the theater and, therefore, safer for the two most wanted men in the world.

At mid-night, we had bought tickets and boarded the next Pole-crossing rocket flight that would take us

over Alaska. As the high-altitude craft flashed above North-ern California and into Oregon, I took Him

into the bathroom at the end of the First Class compartment (fugitives should always travel First Class,

for the rich are always too concerned with the way they look to notice anyone else) and locked the door.

“Take off your coat and shirt,” I told Him. “I want to see that wound.”

“I tell you, it's hardly anything at all.” He had been telling me that for a day and a half, stalling me,

keep-ing me from looking at it. Right from the beginning, He had been somewhat indecipherable. Part of

His personality was a closed door beyond which might lay a room or a mansion. I could not tell which.

Now, again indecipherable, He seemed willing to risk infec-tion, blood poisoning, maybe even death

rather than let me examine the wound! But I had seen the World Authority copper shoot in the Pierre

terminal, and I wasn't going to let Him go until I had given Him some sort of care. I had seen the blood,

lots of blood, fountain up from His shoulder when the pin had torn into Him.

Him. Not much of a name, but what do you call the first android? Adam? No, too trite. Anyone who

would have seriously suggested something like that would have been drummed right out of the

labora-tories, wrapped in a coat of tar and chicken pluckings. And would have deserved every bit of it.

So, then, how about Harry? Or George? Leo? Sam? Actually, He was a scientific milestone of the first

order, one of Man's most brilliant achievements. Somehow, naming a milestone Sam did not seem right

to any of us. I had a dog once that I had never called anything but Dog, and I guess the situation with

Him was much the same. The dog was totally doggy, everything a dog should be, the archetype of all

canines, an oddly true stereotype of Man's Best Friend. He could hold no other name but Dog. To have

called him Prince or Rover or Blackie would have been a gross indignity. And our android, flawless as a

hydroponics apple, was the archetype, so it seemed, of Man. He: a fitting title.

“You've been putting me off now for—” I tried to argue.

“Don't worry about it,” He said, His eyes blue-white and penetrating. It had always been His eyes

that had upset the senators who came to investigate the project as a publicity boost for their sagging

political reputa-tions. Later, they would remember other peculiarities about Him and begin to question

those too, but it always started with His eyes. Imagine a sky reflected blearily in a heavily-frosted pane of

milk glass. Cut out two circles of that rimed blue and paste them in two globes of veinless white marble

as alabaster-like as the skin of a Greek statue. Those were His eyes. There was no denying them, no

escaping. They gleamed like ice in the sun, a droplet of mercury mirroring the ocean.

“Strip anyway,” I said. He knew I was stubborn. Everyone that knew me could attest to that. “I want

to see it. I'm the doctor around here.”

“Not any longer.”

“I can resign from society without giving up my degree and skills. Don't pride yourself that I would

cancel out all my medical interests, hopes and dreams just for you, boy. Now get that coat and shirt off!”

It felt good to be forceful after letting Him derail me so many times before. Funny that I should be

con-sidered the terror of interns for eight years, the scowl-ing, black-eyed dragon who ate young

doctors whole if they so much as appeared with wrinkled whites for duty, and yet allow myself to be put

off by this non-man so easily. Wasn't I the same doctor whose nurse, work-ing the same floor and duty

shift with him, arrived half an hour early and left half an hour late rather than forget to prepare or finish

something? Yet I must wrangle with this Adam for the simple purpose of perhaps saving His arm from

gangrene. Perhaps, I told myself, it was because we were running, because I was a criminal and afraid. I

had set up a new life style for myself, and the whorls of its pattern had rocked my self-confidence. That

would have to change. What was I without my bluster? My towering rage? I scowled the

intern-paralyzing scowl. “Hurry up!”

When it was put that bluntly, a severe command, He obeyed. He always obeyed commands. He was

almost the perfect android. There had just been one incident when He had refused to obey a command,

and that had been the same incident that had revealed the fact that He was developing abilities far beyond

any we had anticipated. Considering the fact that World Authority research administrators anticipate

everything (or so they proudly proclaim at every opportunity), the dis-covery shook up quite a few

people. Quite a few of the wrong people.

I had been with Him that day on the ground floor of the testing lab, working on analysis of His reflex

pattern (which had just then begun to show an extra-ordinary rapidity, especially in the areas of heat and

light tropism) when the explosion had rocked the re-search complex. The floor trembled, windows

rattled, plaster dust sifted down onto us. I didn't think about Him or leaving Him alone, but I grabbed my

bag and ran, following the intercom directions to the sector of the disaster.

I worked for two hours in the smoking ruins, trying to do preliminary patchwork on the dying

bodies-trying to convince myself that they still had a chance-while we waited for the base and the town

ambulances to return from their agonizingly slow trips to the local hospital. When I had seen the animated

form of a man I had earlier left for dead—damn dead!—under a crushing pile of debris, I thought I had

finally flipped out of rational thought ways. Then I began to see others, six in all, men certainly dead only

a short time before. He was doing it. He. I became aware of the military standing around, almost every

important officer on the base and enough MPs to make a war movie. They were ordering Him to stop

reviving peo-ple. It should have been that simple. Command and obedience. Instead, He wouldn't listen

to them. He repeatedly disobeyed. Finally, they shot Him with nar-codarts and put Him on ice until they

could decide what was to be done.

Under the current social mores, it was perfectly correct and noble to keep someone from suffering or

dying prematurely. The operative word there is “pre-maturely.” In a world of nine billion, it was taboo—

and suicidal—to bring anyone back from the dead. The ranks of the living, God knew, were almost more

than the planet could bear. The government had suc-cessfully discredited the Crionics Association, had

squashed all possibilities of producing Mercer Serum to regress the effects of aging. Here was a new

threat every bit as frightening and impossible as anything they had faced before.

They talked to Him, explained to Him what dis-aster this could bring into the world. They examined

His fingers and watched as He demonstrated His ability to reshape His hands into flesh scalpels, thin His

fingers into three-molecule-thickness knives that could penetrate another man's skin, go into him and

work like a miniature surgeon. They were horrified by the possible applications of such a talent. Try as

they might, however, they could not convey their horror to Him. He had been given a mind freer than any

mind in history. Where a man rarely uses a third of his brain, He used nearly a hundred percent of His.

Completely unshackled as He was, He held true to what He had deduced as the highest values of

exist-ence. One of these was to prolong human life as long as possible, as healthfully as possible. Since

He re-fused to let men die when He could delve into them and correct or heal them with His magic

fingers, let the strange time-reversal touch draw together their de-teriorating flesh, He was a menace to

World Authority. Since He could get into parts of the liver or kidneys where no mortal surgeon could

ever reach, delve into the alveoli of the lungs and scrape out the cancer cell-by-goddamned-cell, He

could not be allowed to exist. We had given Him a conscience, and He had given Himself new systems

that enabled Him to re-shape His hands. We had given Him a complex human-type brain that was almost

totally operative, and He had begun to surpass Man in a speeded evo-lution consciously wrought. Given

all that we knew about Him, all we had built into Him, we should have expected something like this. But

we had not. And now the panic began.

It was decided by the project directors, who sit behind large desks with nothing to do but decide

things they know absolutely nothing about, to junk the project and disassemble—disassemble: that's just

the word the idiots used!—the first android, partly be-cause of His ability to increase Man's lifespan

(after scientists had been working frantically to hold it down to eighty-five, after World Authority Secret

Police had liquidated countless researchers who were trying to lick the immortality secret on the sly in

private laboratories), and mostly because it was frightening for the military to face a superhuman who

could evolve Him-self, who could adapt His body, given sufficient time, to the optimum efficiency. They

saw Him as a poten-tial threat, not as a tool by which men could learn and grow. They didn't even want

to know how He was able to restructure Himself. They just wanted to “disassemble” as completely and

swiftly as possible, striking all knowledge of the project from the records.

That same night, I kidnapped Him.

Don't ask my why. If we had to explain ourselves, life would be one constant flow of words, and still

the angels would shake their heads in dissatisfaction. I guess it had to do with seeing Him revive men I

had left for dead. That shakes a physician, believe me. I just could not allow those marvelous hands or

the mind that made them to be broken down into pseudo-flesh components, smashed and burned in

modern witch-craft. It was as if Picasso had been standing by when the drunken SS troops destroyed

priceless paintings on Paris museum walls with the points of their bayonets. What was there to do but

act?I went to the lab that night, woke Him, told Him the situation, and left with Him. I had the keys to the

lab, keys to His quarters, and the guards thought nothing of my coming and going. They thought nothing

of me taking Him with me, for they had never seen Him, had no way of knowing He was more than just

another doctor or technician. The laboratory remained peaceful. Until the next morning.

That had been a week ago. We had been running ever since.

Fast.

Now, in the bathroom of the world-circling com-mercial rocket miles above the western edge of the

old United States, He removed His shirt and stood before me, a magnificent specimen, all muscle and no

fat He had developed a new tissue-building process, He told me, by which all food material not used for

energy was converted into a new sort of muscle fiber which dissolved as easily as fat when needed to

pro-duce energy, though the body- did not have to suffer the burden of useless tissue when it was not

needed. The wound on His right shoulder was an inch or so deep and three to four inches long. It had

stopped bleeding, though no scab or clotting seemed to have formed. I guess He stopped the blood,

though I don't know exactly how.

“It'll need stitches,” I said, spreading the sides of it and surveying the torn flesh. It wasn't pretty at all,

and it had a faintly bluish tinge that I could not identify except as a bruise, which it was not. “I can do a

rough stitching with what I have in my bag, but-”

“No,” He said. “I'm completing new systems.”

“So?”

“I'll be able to speed heal myself in another half hour.”

“You serious?” Sometimes I am exceedingly dense.

“That's why I said you did not have to bother.”

I swallowed, let the wound go. The flesh snapped back into place as if it were made of rubber. “I

see.”

He put His arm on my shoulder, and we had quite suddenly exchanged roles so that He was the

father image, I the son. Again I wondered how the terror of the interns had come to this low point. There

was paternal concern in His stabbing blue eyes, a faint, anxious smile playing about His thin, red lips. “I

still need you, Jacob. I'll always need someone to talk to, someone who understands me. You're such a

part of me now that our relationship can never cease to be a vibrant one.”

“Well,” I said, avoiding His eyes, “let's get back to the debarking hold. It'll soon be time to make our

drop, and we don't want to miss that.”

We left the bathroom and walked the length of the main passenger compartment where two hundred

travelers read magazines or sipped one of their three allotted drinks, or puffed their allotted joint of pot,

or even napped. Oh, yes, or watched Mason Chambers on their individual Comscreens; The famous

muck-raker leaned toward his audience, his thin cap of gray-black hair threatening to part and bare his

carefully concealed baldness, and said: “Just who does Secre-tary Libermann think we are—cretins?

We cannot be convinced that the World Authority Police cannot capture the android and the

infamous Dr. Kennelmen. With all of the facilities available to the police, such a thing isn't feasible. No,

dear viewers, it is some-thing else—something more sinister. Conjecture this, if you will: The World

Authority has discovered some-thing about the android that makes it the most im-portant find of the

century, something so valuable that no price can be placed on it. Something the Coun-cil would like to

keep to itself and its own, to the privileged of this world. By staging this false escape, proclaiming the

android dangerous and killing it on sight, they will impress on the public the fact that the research on

androids has been abandoned. They will be free to continue it secretly to reap the benefits themselves!”

He smiled triumphantly and looked at his notes. He was tough on everyone, even the sacro-sanct

Council. There would be a lot of lights burning in the Capitol tonight as the best minds in the govern-ment

tried to find some way to silence Mason Cham-bers. Too bad the old boy was on the wrong track. He

was right about the marvelous discovery, the value of the century, but that was as far as he carried it

correctly.

The length of our walk down the main compartment, I waited tensely for someone to leap and shout,

“That's them!” But no one did. We stepped through the open hatch into the debarking chamber and

breathed a little easier. The officer on duty was a slim, dark-haired man in his early thirties. He had a long

nose, separat-ing slow, heavy-lidded eyes that gave him a slightly saurian and very stupid look. He sat

reading a low-quality papsheet and puffing on a cigarette, letting the smoke leak out of a tiny hole at the

edge of his mouth. It was almost impossible that he could be ignorant of our presence, but he studied the

sheet intensely and pretended we were not there. At last, I said, “We'll be disembarking at Cantwell,

Alaska.”

He looked up reluctantly and folded the papsheet. “That's a helluva place.” He shivered and

grimaced. “Had a duty station with the airline there for two months once. Cold. Snow. Wind like you

wouldn't believe. Threatened to quit, so they transferred me.”

“We have relatives there,” I said, trying to sound as natural as I could. I am not the greatest thespian

to walk the boards since Burton, believe me. My feet freeze, and my head turns to mud when I have to

speak to a group of interns. Perhaps that's why I am so tough and hard-boiled around them: because

they scare me. Despite my shyness, I had been surprised these last few days how easily I could fool

people when my life was staked on pulling the wool over their eyes. Necessity may be the mother of

invention, but naked fear was the bitch that gave birth to my cool-ness.

“Ticket?” He looked us over thoroughly while I fumbled for the two yellow pieces of paper, the

ciga-rette bobbling in his mouth, the ash dangerously long. I was afraid that somewhere in his simple

brain-box two synapses would flop open, and he would connect pictures he had seen in the papsheet

with the two rumpled men standing before him. Over the week He and I had been playing cat and mouse

with the World Authority, running and running like mechanical wind-up toys, trying to gain time for Him

to develop Him-self to the point where He wouldn't have to run, our pictures and descriptions had

graced the front pages of every papsheet in the world at least six out of the seven days. Here we were

spotted in Lisbon, here in Acapulco, here in New York City. Luckily, the debark-ing officer on this ship

seemed the type to skip the news sections and dwell on the gossip pages and the comics. For the first

time in my life, I thanked the powers that be for anti-intellectualism.

“Ticket,” I repeated, finally producing our stubs and handing them over without so much as a single

nervous tremor.

“You're paid up clear into Roosha,” he said, looking us over again. He had apparently never been

taught that it was rude to peruse a person as thoroughly as you did a book. “Do you know that you're

paid up clear into Roosha? Why pay up clear into Roosha if you were going to get off here?”

“A last minute change of plans,” I said. I was feel-ing the strain of two days and nights without sleep

and without benefit of honest-to-Hippocrates warm food except for that meal we had gotten at the

backstreet restaurant in San Francisco. I didn't know if my lies were coming out like lies or whether he

would accept what I said at face value. Apparently, there was some degree of verisimilitude to my

rantings, for he shrugged and carefully entered the numbers of our stubs in the departure book. If the

World Authority crashed the fake names we were now using—and they certainly would,

eventually—here was a record, a set of clerical footprints for them to seize upon and follow.

“That capsule at the end,” he said. He consulted a pendant watch that hung on a fine chain around his

neck. “We'll be dropping you in eleven minutes.”

We moved down the line of egg-shaped, crimson globes that nested in the bays in the floor. The

officer came after us, slid back the heavy cover on the last egg. “Dropped before?” he asked, obviously

hopeful that we would say no and allow him to show his superiority with a long, detailed, condescending

lecture.

“Many times,” I said. I wondered what he would have done if I had said fourteen times in the past

week.

“Remember to strap tight. Grip the padded wheel until the beam contact is made, and don't unstrap

until ground control directs you to.”

I waited until He moved into the capsule and took the left seat, then I squeezed through the oval

entrance-way and climbed into the right. The officer frowned. “Let's see you grip the wheel,” he

snapped. We gripped it, though there was no need to prepare this far ahead. “That's better,” he said. He

eyed me suspiciously, obviously trying to remember something. “Don't let go of that wheel until beam

contact,” he repeated. He was getting to be a bore.

“We won't.”

He shook his head. “I don't know. You people never seem to learn. Lots of people drop without

gripping the wheel. Then, when freefall surprises them, they get excited and grab for anything, cut

themselves on file console— And when the jolt from beam contact comes— Brother! Fireworks! They

jump and throw their arms around, break their fingers on things—”

“We'll grip the wheel,” I said, feeling as if I were confronted with a broken record. I longed to reach

out and swat him so that he could get on with other parts of his speech.

“Be sure to.”

“We will.”

“We sure will,” He said, smiling at the officer with that winning grin of His.

The officer nodded, hesitated as if there were some-thing he wanted to say. And, of course, there

was something he wanted to say. Down deep in the sticky mud of his brain, there was a little voice telling

him just who we were and what he should do about it. Fortunately for us, the voice was muffled by so

much mud that he could not understand what it was saying. Finally he shrugged again, slid the cover shut

and turned the latches on the outside, locking us in. I knew that his mind was struggling to make

connections. I had come to know that look by now, the gaze of some-one who is sure he knows us.

Sooner or later, this drop officer would remember who we were. I only hoped it was not until we were

out of Cantwell Port and on our way.

“Don't worry, Jacob,” He said, flashing His chalk-white teeth in a broad, flawless smile and eating

into me with those ice eyes of His.

He was trying to cheer me.

So I smiled.

Suddenly, lights flashed and buzzers bleeped. We dropped. . .

Down . . .

Dropping from a high-altitude passenger rocket is not uncommon. Thousands of capsules are

discharged every day, millions in a year, though I suppose the process will remain a marvel to the

earth-bound masses for another twenty years. When you have an over-crowded world with billions of

people who want to move often and rapidly, you cannot have a transporta-tion system that stops at every

station on the route. Not too many years ago, the answer was to change flights. Take a regular major

airline into the nearest big city to your destination, then transfer to a smaller company for the last leg of

the journey. But the ports grew too crowded, the air controllers too frantic. With the coming of the

rockets, the best answer was found swiftly and employed even faster. You encapsulate the passengers

who want off at backwater places and shoot them, like a bomb, out of the rocket's belly without

lessening the speed of the mother ship. They fall for a mile, two, three, then are caught by a control beam

broadcast from the alerted receiving station and lowered gently into the receptor pod. But those first few

moments of freefall . . .

After what seemed like an overlong fall, we were gripped by a control beam. For a moment, I had

the fleeting paranoid fear that they had recognized us and deemed to eliminate us simply by letting us

smash unbraked into the unyielding earth of Cantwell, Alaska. Then we were safe, floating softly, being

drawn down. The beam settled us into a pod, and the officers there, a wizened old gentleman surely past

retirement age and a young trainee who watched and listened to his superior with carefully feigned awe,

unlatched the hatch and slid it back, helped us out. We signed our arrival forms with our fake names,

waited while the old man copied our stub numbers in a ledger (the boy looking eagerly over his shoulder

but unable to com-pletely mask his boredom), and we were on our way.

From the capsule pods, we walked down a long, gray fluorescent-lighted service tunnel and into the

main lobby of the Port Building. I found the passenger service desk and inquired about a package I had

mailed myself when we had first set foot in San Francisco just a day earlier. We had gone to a ski shop

and purchased complete arctic rigging, packaged it in two boxes, and mailed it from Kenneth Jacobson

to Kenneth Jacobson, the pseudonym I was then using, to be held for pickup at the passenger service

desk in Cantwell. I had to sign a claim check and wait while the clerk checked the signature with that on

the stub. When he was satisfied, he handed over the packages. We each took one and moved outside to

the taxi stalls.

Outside, it was snowing. The wind howled across the broad promenade and echoed like hungry

wolves in the thrusting beams of the porch roof. It carried puffs of snow with it that clogged in the

window ledges and drifted against the walls. The drop officer aboard the high-altitude rocket had been

right. Cantwell was a place of cold and snow and, most of all, wind. Still in all, the place has an

undeniable charm, especially if you were addicted to Jack London Yukon stories when you were a boy.

We went down a set of stairs into the auto-taxi docking area and found a four-seater in the line. The

taxis were fairly busy with arrivals, and I realized we had been unlucky enough to arrive just before a

sched-uled rocket landing and pickup. I opened the back door of the taxi and put my box in, turned to

take His. Just then, a taxi bulleted into the stall next to us and flung open its doors.

“Quick!” I said to Him, grabbing his box of gear and sliding it onto the back seat alongside my own.

A tall, elegantly dressed man got out of the other car and pushed past us toward the stairs without

even an “excuse me” or a “pardon.” I didn't really care, just so he kept going and left us alone. But that

was not to be the way of things. He went up two steps and stopped as if he had just been knifed. He

whirled, his mouth open, his hand fumbling for a weapon beneath his bulky coat.

He must have been employed by World Authority in some capacity, for he could not otherwise have

possessed a weapon. But I had worked for World Authority too. I drew my narcodart pistol and

sprayed him with six low-velocity pins in the legs where the bulky coat could not deflect them. He

staggered, went down on his knees. He plucked at the darts, then realized it was too late for that; the

drugs they contain, chiefly Sodium Pentothal, react much too fast to be torn free. He was a big man, and

he was fighting the drowsiness as best he could, though it was just a matter of time until he would be out

of action. I fired again, fast, but before he passed out, he managed to get in a weak but audible call for

help. It echoed through the Alaskan night.

I opened the front door of the taxi and grabbed Him by the elbow to usher Him in. A spatter of pins

broke across the roof, inches from my face, ricocheting away like little slivers of light. The gunman had

been trying for the back of my neck but had misjudged and fired slightly to the left. I whirled, searched

the taxi stalls for the gun-man.

Ping, ping, ping . . . Another burst rattled over the roof of the car, nowhere near us this time.

“I saw movement to the right,” He said, crouching with me. “Back there by that blue and yellow

two-seater.” He had drawn His own dart pistol, one He had “pro-cured” in that sports shop where we

had gotten the arctic gear, lifting it and an ammunition clip from the shelf while I distracted the clerk with

our big order. “Do you see which one I mean?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps I should—”

“Wait here,” I said, lying on my stomach and slithering along the retaining wall, keeping under the cars

parked there, working my way toward the vehicle He had pointed out. There was a hard-packed layer

of snow on the lot and my front side nearly froze as I slithered over it. Now and then, the snow was

melted into slush where a warm taxi engine had rested near it. I felt absurd, like some cheap movie actor,

but I was also afraid, which blotted out any embarrassment I might otherwise have felt. Fear can work

miracles. I had hitched my star to His. If they caught us now, before He had finished His revolutionary

evolution, I had no idea what they might do to me.

Behind me, He stood and fired a barrage toward our enemy, drew an answering hail for His trouble.

That helped me pinpoint the location of our gunman. I moved cautiously, trying to make as little noise as

possible. Still, my shoes dragged on the snow and the pavement and gave off little scraping noises that

carried well in the cold air.

I circled around him, always beneath taxis except for the short spaces between them when I had to

wriggle across three or four feet of exposed territory. When I had gone a row beyond him, I came out in

the open and moved in on his rear. I slid along behind a limousine taxi for large parties until I felt I was

directly behind his position. Raising my head carefully—narcodarts could blister and scar delicate facial

tissues, puncture an eye and sink into the vulnerable brain—I looked around. Our target was a Port

guard in World Authority uniform. I could not tell whether he had recognized us as the first man had or

whether he was shooting just because he had seen me take out the other fellow. Either way, I had to stop

him. I stepped out into the open and aimed at his buttocks.

I must have made some noise, for he turned in the last second, almost lost his balance on the slippery

surface.

I struck him with a dozen pins, and he toppled to the left, grasping at the taxi. For a moment, it

appeared that he was going to make a valiant effort to rise and return my fire. Then he slid noisily to the

pavement and laid still, breathing softly.

For a moment, I felt good.

Then bad luck returned.

The watchman patrolling the taxi lot via closed-circuit television must have spotted some of the

action. It was pure bad luck, for if he had been occupied with any of the other dozen cameras that

scanned other portions of the port, he would not have found anything until we were long gone. Overhead,

the big arc lights came on so that filming could proceed. If there was to be a court case, the film, taken by

sealed cameras, would be ad-missible. I dropped behind the taxis and laid panting, trying to think. In

minutes, that watchman would have sent someone out to investigate, someone with weapons, and we

would have to handle them too if we expected to get out of here as free men. But our luck could not

con-tinue forever, not as it had through all the narrow escapes of the last week. So what was I mad

about? Why not just give up? I could say to Him, in way of explanation: “Well, you know how luck

changes. You can't expect luck to stay good for long.” And He would smile, and that would be that. Like

hell! I didn't fancy going back with World Authority guards to some trial where my chances were, simply

put, miserable. Still, I wasn't a fighting man. I would make a mistake when I came up against the

professionals. Several mistakes. One mistake too many. Then it would be all over. Perhaps forever . . .

“Jacob!” He called in a loud whisper.

Staying behind cars and away from the line of sight of the two mounted cameras, I hurried back to

Him where He crouched at our taxi. We would have to move damned fast now. The watchman might

know who had been causing the trouble, but the stranger in the great-coat would most definitely have an

alarm out for Dr. Jacob Kennelmen and His Fearsome Android within five minutes of his revival.

Rotten luck, rotten luck, rotten luck, I cursed to myself. If we could have left that lot unnoticed, we

would have been perfectly in the clear—at least for a few months, long enough for Him to develop into a

complete creature. Now World Authority would have police and soldiers swarming over Cantwell by

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DeanKoontz–Anti-man[Version2.0byBuddyDk–august32003][Easyread,easyprint][Completelynewscan]IHADSAVEDHIM,KNOWINGHECOULDDESTROYOURWORLD.Inaworldofninebillionpeople,it'ssuicidaltobringanyonebackfromthedead.TheandroidcouldreshapeHisfingersintothree-molecule-thickknivesthatcouldgointoaman'sskinlikeamini...

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Dean R. Koontz - Anti-Man

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