Soft come the dragons

others have seen print in book form elsewhere—thus easily repaying me for the rewriting. Thanks, Fred. One other thing. Now and again, a reader will accuse me of using too much violence in some of my stories. Rest assured, I am no violence junkie. Only an immature nation makes war, and only an immature man has to "prove" his worth with a fist or a gun. When you read "A Season for Freedom," don't look only at the violence and wrinkle your nose; violence is a way of life with our nation, and what I wanted to say was: "If we don't do something about it soon, look what war is going to do to all of our minds. . . ."
     
     
    the theater was a thunder-lizard's maw gorged with people, the seats jutting in rows of imitation teeth, casting black shadows in the flush of yellow half-light. The screen pulsed with colors, its rectangular orb awash with delusions. The two-dimensional inhabitants of that false, flat reality moved into view before a pounding blue-white surf behind the black and yellow and crimson credits that crawled like well-trained insects up the broad screen, always in perfect time with the tinny music.
    And, abruptly, the air was filled with deadly steel bees.
    Jacobs slipped from his seat, dragging Anne with him to crouch in the sheltered trough between the rows as darts rang against the metal backing of the chairs. He had his gun out, searching.
    Carefully, he raised his head and looked about the theater, open to attack, and spotted the blonde. She was fifteen rows back. She had stripped down the top of her organdy dress to free her breasts, marred by the thin, red surgical lines. Below each scar were six pinholes: dartgun barrels that punctured the skin like gigantic pores. Jacobs knew the breasts were hollow of flesh and contained, instead, dart clips and firing mechanisms packed in a silicone shell. The war had just begun and already he knew the basic mechanisms.
    He aimed.
    The blonde whirled—not out of malice, but in her preprogrammed fire-pattern—twelve barrels swinging in his direction. Jacobs depressed the trigger. The automatic burped out three fragmentation slugs. They tumbled the blonde backward in the dark, a final sputter of darts ringing from the backs of the seats in front of her . . .
    Ringing. . . .
     
    Ringing. . . . He woke to gloom.
    For several seconds, he was not certain whether reality was: A—the bed and the peaceful room clothed in gray light, or B—the half-darkened theater and the killerbot spewing thin death across the rows of patrons. He blinked his eyes, yawned, felt his ears pop. The ringing was the phone, not thousands of metal thorns ricocheting off theater seats. He reached out, answered it. "Lo?"
    "Phil?"
    "Hmmm?"
    It was Cullen. Reedy voice, whined words. He was second in command—first in command on this, Jacobs' one night off —on the Northside Sector antikillerbot force and was capable enough to keep things purring. Or should be. . . .
    "Seems like a bad one, Phil."
    "Where?" He fought to maintain drowsiness in hopes he might yet return to dream-filled unconsciousness. All sleep was dream-filled now days.
    "Medarts Building. Tenth floor. He's extremely well-armed. Darts and bullets."
    "Both?" That sent a shiver through him. It was difficult enough to implant a single weapon system into a human body. Even with the new neutral synthetic fibers that composed most of the mechanisms, the body fought the rejection of alien tissues. Supposedly, it would never be economically feasible to build more than one weapon into a killerbot. Recovery and healing time required for two systems was six times as long. Half a dozen single-system killerbots could be prepared and dispatched in the same time needed to finish one double-systems bot. But if Euro had come up with a way to make it pay off, a method of reducing healing time. . . .
    "Both," Cullen confirmed.
    "Maybe you have two of them trapped up there."
    "Could be. But I don't think so. Even assuming there are two up there, the battle pattern is unusual. They don't fire in a preprogrammed grid; they only fire when there is a target."
    "Impossible!" It had to be! If that killerbot were firing at targets instead of on a pattern, it meant the damn thing had some control of its finer reasoning powers. But if you gave a killerbot reasoning powers, it would soon reason that it had once been a human being, that it had been stripped of its humanity, that its mind had been bleached, its stomach or chest or thigh contaminated with a