Midnight

had drawn him here, but he had thought they'd come from the computer.
    Grimacing as the electronic wail spiraled higher and swelled into painful decibels, Sam let his gaze rise from the man-machine's open mouth to its "eyes." The sensors still bristled in the sockets. The beads of ruby glass glowed with inner light, and Sam wondered if they registered him on the infrared spectrum or by some other means. Did Coltrane see him at all? Perhaps the man-machine had traded the human world for a different reality, moving from this physical plane to another level, and perhaps Sam was an irrelevancy to him, unnoticed.
    The shriek began to fade, then cut off abruptly.
    Without realizing what he'd done, Sam had raised his revolver and, from a distance of about eighteen inches, pointed it at Harley Coltrane's face. He was startled to discover that he also had slipped his finger off the guard and onto the trigger itself and that he was going to destroy this thing.
    He hesitated. Coltrane was, after all, still a man—at least to some extent. Who was to say that he didn't desire his current state more than life as an ordinary human being? Who was to say that he was not happy like this? Sam was uneasy in the role of judge, but an even uneasier executioner. As a man who believed that life was hell on earth, he had to consider the possibility that Coltrane's condition was an improvement, an escape.
    Between man and computer, the glistening, semiorganic cables thrummed . They rattled against the skeletal hands in which they were clamped.
    Coltrane's rank breath was redolent with both the stench of rotting meat and overheated electronic components.
    Sensors glistened and moved within the lidless eye sockets.
    Tinted gold by the light from the screen, Coltrane's face seemed to be frozen in a perpetual scream. The vessels pulsing in his jaws and temples looked less like reflections of his own heartbeat than like parasites squirming under his skin.
    With a shudder of revulsion, Sam squeezed the trigger. The blast was thunderous in that confined space.
    Coltrane's head snapped back with the impact of the point-blank shot, then dropped forward, chin on his chest, smoking and bleeding.
    The repulsive cables continued to swell and shrink and swell as if with the rhythmic passage of inner fluid.
    Sam sensed that the man was not entirely dead. He turned the gun on the computer screen.
    One of Coltrane's skeletal hands released the cable around which it had been firmly clamped. With a click-snick-snack of bare bones, it whipped up and seized Sam's wrist.
    Sam cried out.
    The room filled with electronic clicks and snaps and beeps and warblings.
    The hellish hand held him fast and with such tremendous strength that the bony fingers pinched his flesh, then began to cut through it. He felt warm blood trickle down his arm, under his shirt sleeve. With a flash of panic he realized that the unhuman power of the man-machine was ultimately sufficient to crush his wrist and leave him crippled. At best his hand would swiftly go numb from lack of circulation, and the revolver would drop from his grasp.
    Coltrane was struggling to raise his half-shattered head.
    Sam thought of his mother in the wreckage of the car, face torn open, grinning at him, grinning, silent and unmoving but, grinning… .
    Frantically he kicked at Coltrane's chair, hoping to send it rolling and spinning away. The wheels had been locked.
    The bony hand squeezed tighter, and Sam screamed. His vision blurred.
    Still, he saw that Coltrane's head was coming up slowly. slowly.
    Jesus, I don't want to see that ruined face!
    With his right foot, putting everything he had into the kick, Sam struck once, twice, three times at the cables between Coltrane and the computer. They tore loose from Coltrane, popping out of his flesh with a hideous sound, and the man slumped in, his chair. Simultaneously the skeletal hand opened and fell away from Sam's wrist. With a cold rattle it struck the hard plastic mat under the chair.
    Bass electronic pulses thumped like soft drumbeats and echoed off the walls, while under them a thin bleat wavered continuously through three notes.
    Gasping and half in shock, Sam clamped his left hand around his bleeding wrist, as if that would still the stinging pain.
    Something brushed against his leg.
    He looked down and saw the semiorganic cables, like pale headless snakes, still attached to the computer and full of malevolent life. They seemed to have grown, as well, until