Soft come the dragons

it could not be a completely successful ruse. It would be after him, no question there.
    Through the partition, he heard the door to the shooting range give, crash inward to admit the Hound.
    He drifted off slowly through the old cellar, letting his eye adjust to the intense dark. After a few minutes, he could distinguish the vague outlines of fallen beams and broken tables, rotted, shattered chairs, and a few stretches of shelving that had once held ammunition but were now bowed and warped away from the walls, covered with ugly lumps of fungus. He moved from the first cellar into the second.
    The panel he had removed was wrenched away from the wall in the first cellar, and light from the shooting range flooded in to dispel the gloom. The Hound came quickly after.
    He turned toward the third cellar and moved as fast as he could. He slammed his stump shoulder into a half fallen beam but kept on moving.
    The Hound came faster.
    When he got to the entranceway of the fifth cellar, he found that there had been a cave-in, and the beams and rock of the ceiling had collapsed to effectively bar his escape. If he had a half an half, maybe an hour, he could move enough of the rubble to get through. But the Hound was literally breathing down his neck—though the breath was the warmth of laboring machinery.
    He turned on his pursuer. It was coming in from the third cellar, moving around a pile of ruin there. It fired three pins. Fita-fita-fita . . .
    He moved aside when he saw its intent. The darts studded the rubble wall behind him. He sent his servo-hands to a beam lying in the Hound's pathway, had them worry its tenuous connections with the ceiling. Just as the Hound passed beneath, the beam snapped loose and crashed onto the ball of the hunter. But it only deflected the demon machine's advance. The Hound swerved, bobbled, but recovered and swept closer, firing three pins.
    All three missed.
    Ti was surprised, for he had not had time to take evasive action, and Hounds were not known to be sloppy marksmen.
    The Hound fired three more.
    All three missed.
    And Ti realized why. He was turning them aside with his psi power! The second time, he had been more conscious of it. He stood, back to the closed door to chamber five, and waited for the Hound to fire again. It did. And, again, the darts shot to either side, deflected suddenly from their target. Over the next several minutes, he deflected another two dozen of the slender spines, until the Hound was convinced that its nasty little weapons system was of no use in the situation. It stopped, bobbling gently a dozen feet away, and regarded him with all its measuring devices. A moment later, it sent its two servos toward his neck . . .
    He reacted quickly, or he might have been strangled. He called his own servos to him. Four feet from his face, the enemy hands and his own met and locked, metal fingers laced metal fingers. He flushed full power into the hands and set them the task of breaking the Hound's fingers.
    But the Hound seemed to have similar ideas. Its own servos wrenched at Ti's so that the four members swayed back and forth in the air, now gaining an inch or two for their master, now losing the same amount of distance. Finally, with both sets at full power and firmly clenched, they did not move at all but merely strained in frozen tableau against one another. When the grav plates and their connections erupted in sparks and smoke, they did so on all four hands. The servos dropped to the floor as if they were a single creature, a metal bird with shot pellets in its wings. Now both hunter and hunted were handless.
    Hunter and hunted. Ti suddenly realized the nomenclature was no longer adequate. Both deprived of hands and Ti able to stop the Hound's pins, neither was the hunter. He moved by the Hound toward the shooting range. He had discovered another application of his power this night. He mused that necessity always brought out his abilities. It had been necessary to feed himself that day long ago, and he had lifted the spoon. And now it had been a necessity to control the pins. Now he knew he could influence small objects even in high-velocity transit, just as he could lift the spoon.
    He moved into the shooting range. The Hound had ceased to follow but bumped purposelessly against the cross-beams as if its mind had been in its hands and as if a loss of ability had led to a loss of purpose. Ti floated up the stairs and into the hallway of the house again. He could hear