Dark Of The Woods

enough to clutch that damned suitcase and make it stay with you. Lady, remind me never to challenge you to a fist fight."
    The suitcase was near the surface, and they uncovered it in a few minutes. It had been dented when it struck the tree, but was otherwise undamaged. When Davis started up the hill with it, she insisted he let her take it. He tried to argue, realized that would lead him nowhere, and finally let her have it.
    "Now, dammit, let's get going," he said, grasping her elbow and helping her up the side of the ravine toward the top which was no longer drifted shut.
    Proteus came behind. His plasti-plasma was gurgling quite a bit, and his cataracted sight sensors swiveled and twisted, as if something like the avalanche might strike again.
    But something worse happened.
    "What are they?" Leah asked as they pulled themselves onto level ground and began walking across the short table of the mountaintop.
    Paralleling them to their right were three blue spheres, each as large as a one-man plane, painted with flat light-absorbing paint that did not gleam or reflect the slightest minim of dim sunlight. Even as he watched, they arced, changed course, angled in toward he and Leah. There were no men inside them, he knew, but that did not make the situation the least bit better for them.
    "Sherlock robots," he explained, watching the advancing balls of blue with fascination. "They must have brought them in and set them loose before dawn. I wouldn't have thought a backwoods world like this would have any. They most likely released them at three different locations. They've been closing in on us all night, coming toward one another as their data was correlated, shared, and factored. They've got the most sophisticated tracking gear the Alliance possessses, all microminiaturized and stuffed in that shell. You can't escape one of them."
    "How do they kill?" she asked gloomily, her large, oval eyes fixed to the middle of the trio of globes.
    "They don't. But don't look relieved about that. They're just as deadly as if they were killers. But with heat sensors, sound sensors, visual apparatus, infrared scanners, encephalographic trackers, and a complete library of card indices on every public act you and I have engaged in, they have no room for weapons. But they've certainly already radioed our position back to the Alliance soldiers. You can expect a squadron of police to be dropped in here within minutes—if the weather isn't too bad to permit that."
    The Sherlocks slowed.
    The snow continued to fall.
    "What do we do?" Leah asked. "Just wait to be picked up?"

Chapter Eight
    He did feel standing there with the wind whipping his coat tightly against his legs—with the weight of their supplies on his shoulders, with his nerves still unquieted from the near disaster of the snowslide—like doing nothing heroic, like waiting for them and going with them as meekly as they could possibly desire, letting them do to him whatever they wished. But he reminded himself that such thinking was selfish and that "us" should not be ignored in a rush to consider the bone-aching exhaustion and the desire for rest and peace that plagued "me." With so many miles left to go before they would reach Tooth, their chances for survival were slim. How much easier and less painful it would be to die under the guns of the Alliance soldiers than under the sapping wind and cold of Demos's winter.
    Intellectually, he was aware that the death wish that now flirted about the back of his mind was a holdover from earlier days, from those dark hours in his childhood when he found rebuff from both parents and turned to his books for solace given second-hand where none of first-hand nature was obtainable. He read books of stories about the supernatural, of demons and devils, angels and spirits. In those days, it seemed as if it would be so much more bearable to be dead, to inhabit the regions of the netherworld creatures where odd and magical things transpired and where there were no great emotional tangles that made you sick deep in your stomach, no fights and scoldings that made you shake like an old man with the ague.
    But he was no longer a child.
    And there was solace to be had in this world, in the land of the living. If only he could keep both of them alive long enough to enjoy it and strengthen the bond of affection that joined them, he might eventually learn to stand up to adverse conditions without hesitation, without first falling back on the deathwish