Hell's Gate

the mystery had not yet been solved. Meanwhile, he brought sketching materials down to the front porch stoop and made ready to draw a realistic view of an elderly Dutch Elm at the corner of the drive. Lynda and Intrepid left to walk in the orchard. With his tools in his hands, he felt more at rest than ever before.
        He did not know what would happen within the next half hour.
        As he started drawing, he realized that, though he was not Victor Salsbury the artist, he was an artist in his own right. In moments, he had outlined a drawing, blocked it, gave it shape. Instead of filling in detail, he flipped to another sheet and did an impressionistic view of the same elm. It took longer, but it proved that he was not merely a renderer, but creative as well. Whoever had educated him for the role of Victor Salsbury had done a rather thorough job.
        Shortly after two, as Victor was fleshing out the first sketch into a full landscape, Intrepid came through the front door to the closed porch door, barked to be let out. Victor called for Lynda, decided she must still be in the orchard. “You want out?” he asked the dog, reluctant to stop sketching.
        Intrepid barked again.
        Salsbury did not stop to think that Intrepid only barked in situations of great strain. Other times, he snuffled. The dog came through the open door, watched Salsbury return to his work. After a moment, he shook his big head as if satisfied Salsbury was his master, padded along the side of the house. He looked into the orchard, then turned and faced the man with the pencils.
        Out of the corner of his eye, Salsbury saw the dog running toward him, thought nothing of it. But as he got closer, Salsbury realized that the mutt's playfulness could ruin his drawing. He brought up an arm to ward him off and was bowled from his step onto the grass as the dog hit him, still running top speed.
        The dog rolled past him, not making a sound, came onto his feet as Salsbury was shaking his head and reaching for his sketch pad. Before he realized what was happening, the dog charged again. This time, his teeth were bared. They were unnaturally, supernaturally long and sharp.
        “Intrepid!” he shouted.
        The dog leaped.
        Salsbury whirled sideways, out of his path, felt claws scrabble weakly at him as the beast went by.
        “Stop it!”
        But the dog came again.
        This time, the beast waited until the last moment to leap, then leapt to Salsbury's right so that the man whirled into him instead of out of his way. Salsbury felt teeth graze his shoulder. The dog's claws hooked in his shirt and the tops of his jeans, and it came around for another nip.
        He avoided the vicious bite with no room to spare, saw another one coming. He grabbed the animal's front paws and pried them off, threw it, kicking, into the hedges. The dog lay for a moment, as if groggy, then bounded to his feet and came between Salsbury and the porch door-the only escape route.
        “Intrepid!” he shouted again, trying to make the canine come to its senses.
        Then he saw its eyes.
        They were flat and blue.
        The eyes of another robot, not the eyes of his noble mutt… A deadly imitation.
        Sometimes, just as the worst is transpiring, you think of how monumentally stupid you have been, of all the warning signals you have ignored, of all the things you should have seen and interpreted as leading inexorably to the disaster now at hand. Standing there facing the mechanical killer, Salsbury thought of a number of things that should have put him on his guard. Firstly, there had been no place in the cellar for a man-sized robot to hide when they had investigated it last night; but a dog killer was considerably smaller. Secondly, if the first robot had been able to broadcast reports through the barrier to the lizard-things, it certainly would have reported Intrepid as a nuisance. Preparing a killer in a familiar form, therefore, would have been a logical next step. Thirdly, if this was Intrepid, how had he gotten into the house without Lynda to open the back door for him? Fourthly, Intrepid never barked except when extremely excited. This robot had made a mistake in that line, and Victor had obliged it by overlooking the error. Five: he had left his vibratube upstairs, thinking he would not need it until the portal opened again at one-thirty. But he had ignored all the signals, the