A werewolf among us

you know about the paranoid spells."
    She nodded. "When you think it's actually taking over your mind; when you have a feeling there's something physical and living crawling around inside of you."
    "That's it," he said, shivering at the exactness of the description.
    She shifted her position, crossed her lovely, slim legs in Indian fashion and
leaned with her palms against the cool, supple mounds of her knees. "Surely, if
you understand that those attacks are only paranoid, you can't be saying that they prove the bio-computer is, in fact, sentient."
    For a while he did not answer. When he realized she was not going to leave, that she was waiting, he said, "Most of the time it
feels
as if I'm not alone, as if it's someone to be with, share with, live with."
    "And you can't bear to be alone?"
    "Can't at all."
    She said, "Then there are alternatives to the bio-computer."
    He looked at her, thinking that it was best to face each other honestly right now, looked quickly away when he saw what he thought were tears in the corners of her eyes. He wished that Teddy would arrive soon, so that he would have something to shoot at. He wanted to see the pulse of the laser and watch the destruction the sound made as the light carried it against and into the robot's shell. He felt that the gun could bleed away a nameless tension that had overtaken him.
    He said, "The alternatives are worse, because they involve too much responsibility."
    "There must be something pretty awful behind your nightmare," she said, "to make you the way you are now."
    "How am I now?"
    "Cold, distant."
    "Look who's talking," he said.
    He regretted the insult as soon as he had spoken, but he did not have the will to retract it, even if it could be reeled back in and altogether forgotten.
    She was hurt, but she tried not to show the hurt.
    "You're right, of course. I'm the one who told you that in the first place. I feel cold, hollow, uncaring. But you were the one who was supposed to help me, to make me feel human, to warm me up. Do you think you ever can—so long as you're wearing that shell?" She answered her own question. "No, it just won't work. We'd have to be each other's crutch, or not at all."
    As St. Cyr was framing his response, Teddy appeared in the library doorway and took a burst from Hirschel's vibra-rifle, square in the center of his body trunk.
     

SEVENTEEN: More
Than a Case Is Ended
     
    "You got him!" Dane shouted.
    St. Cyr snapped, "Stay down!"
    The boy dropped back behind a shelter made from a lounge chair and about a hundred hardbound volumes of popular Darmanian history which he had pulled from the shelves.
    "I hit him square in the chest," Hirschel said. "But if the damage had been serious, he'd be lying there in the doorway. Do you see him?"
    "No," Dane said sheepishly.
    Tina was on her knees again, and she leaned close to St. Cyr to whisper, "May
I stay here with you? I think this is a better firing position than the one I was in."
    That was not the reason she wished to remain beside him, however. But he could not find heart to argue with her. "Stay," he said.
    In the next instant Teddy shot through the doorway without warning, moving far faster than St. Cyr had ever imagined that he could. He had angled his body trunk ninety degrees from his gravplate mobility system, which was fitted under his base on a heavy ball joint. The result was that he came at them lying on his side, offering the smallest possible target. Even if they could snap a shot straight into his undercarriage, there were no mechanisms to be damaged, only the heavy ball joint that moved the gravplates, and this was too solid to succumb to a vibra-beam.
    St. Cyr fired, missed.
    "Look out!" Tina cried.
    Teddy struck the writing desk behind which they were hiding, smashed through the top of it "feet first," showering splintered wood into the air, crumpling the piece of furniture like eggshell. His advance did not seem at all diminished by the collision. He struck St, Cyr's bad shoulder with nearly enough force to rip the detective's arm from its socket, then rocketed past,
deeper into the library.
    Hirschel fired, must have missed, and cursed.
    Small hands pulled pieces of the desk from St. Cyr and brushed splinters from his face. "You all right?" Tina asked.
    He blinked, nodded, and tried to sit up.
    Across the room, Teddy soared to the high ceiling like a bat loose in a house, dropped behind Dane, leveled off and slammed hard into the boy as he turned to take