Dean Koontz - Anti-Man

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.

For a full twenty minutes, we wove in and out of the pattern, swinging to all points of the compass, rising and going back down to make way for commercial and private craft already assigned to that position. Other craft slid by us on all sides, sometimes as close as five or ten feet, the drivers inside perfectly visible in the glow of their cabin lights. Then we were into clearer air, over the Atlantic, beyond the most used airlanes, even out past the holding patterns for transoceanic flights. I could lean against the window and look down on the sea below, where medium-sized waves curled off toward the continent, capped with white foam, otherwise black as oil. Above, there was a heavy cloud layer from which a light snow filtered. The wipers clicked on and thumped back and forth across the windscreen.

I asked the dash computer if it would be possible to go above the clouds since they were so low, and it obliged, because it could work out the maneuver without disturbing the traffic pattern. Suddenly, the clouds were below me, and the almost-full moon lay cold and serene in the black sky overhead.

"What do you do when God is out to get you?" I asked aloud.

"Pardon?" the computer said.

"Ignore me," I said.

"That is impossible, sir. My pickups function constantly and are beyond my control."

"That must get boring," I said, "listening to all your passengers' problems."

"On the contrary," the helicar said, "that is my only contact with the outside world."

I knew then that the central traffic computer had tapped this cab again to see if things were functioning properly. The simple brain and simple voice-tapes of the helicar would not have been up to this sort of banter.

"I'll try not to talk aloud," I said.

"Very well."

And there was silence again.

But what could you do when the omniscient was watching? When the omnipotent was about to make His move. But was He omniscient? No, that was doubtful. He had not shown any signs of knowing all that was going on and would go on. He was not omnipotent either, or He would not have been frightened off by the guard-bot. What had He said there in Harry's cabin? He had denied that He was the immovable object, but had stated that He was the irresistible force. And that summed Him up quite well. Parts of Him could be killed. He could be temporarily defeated. But, in the end, He would win because He could tap the flow of life and return to fight again and again in other copies of Himself. So the answer to the question, "What can you do when God is out to get you," was — "Nothing."

No. Wait. There was one thing.

"Kill Him," I said.

"Who?" the computer asked.

"Sorry. Thinking aloud."

"I don't mind. Passengers are my only — "

"Link to the outside," I finished for it. Then we were both quiet again.

Kill Him. Yes, it was possible. Maybe. Perhaps. Possibly. I would have to go back to Cantwell, back to the mother body in the cellar of Harry's cabin. I would have to go well enough armed to take Him out quickly and completely, so He had no chance to heal Himself. I would have to get near enough without arousing His suspicions, or without letting Him kill me. How? Well, I could think about that. I could work on it and come up with something.

Why? Why would I want to kill Him when I had gone to all that trouble to help Him? Why kill Him after I knew that He was God, and, therefore, the greatest force for good in the universe. Or was He? Who could state with assurance that this God was a benevolent one? Suddenly, I could see one instance in which He might wish to see me dead. Suppose He was not benevolent. Suppose He was not even God, as He claimed. Suppose, instead, He was what He logically appeared to be: a superior species, the first of its kind, able to reproduce in hours and at will. And suppose He would be more pleased in a world composed of his own kind. Suppose all those things, and you could not help but be a little frightened. If He were about to initiate a war against mankind, it would be quite sensible to destroy me before continuing, for I was the only one who knew His sanctuary, the only one who even partially understood what had happened to Him in the last several days.