Soft come the dragons

away, directly in front of the car.
    He slammed down on the accelerator, flipped the melting bars to full power, felt the jolt when T went under the wheels, as the second android was struck a glancing blow that tore its arm off. The engine was whining. He could not make a swift escape through the drifts, for the melting bars would not be able to work fast enough. He wrenched the wheel to the left, spun the Champion around, and shot back along the trail he had burned into the clearing in the first place. He passed Jameson who leaped out of his way. The two androids were lifeless.
    "We're free!" he shouted excitedly.
    The vibra-beam sliced a neat hole through the rear window and struck Laurie on the temple. She slumped across him, dribbling blood from one ear . . .
     
    He could personify the moon: the moon peered down patronizingly. He could make a girl into a rose: she was a rose, soft and gentle. He could forge metaphors, hammer out similes; he could allocate so much alliteration to just so many lines. But he could not stop the bleeding from her ear.
    He could rise up in the morning like a dragon from the sea.
    With the sun over his shoulder, he could warp words to say his thoughts.
    He could lie down at night, satisfied as a god must be.
    But stopping the blood was beyond his powers.
    She was stretched across the back seat, face up, pale and ghostly in what little moonlight filtered through the tinted windows. Cauvell lashed himself into the bucket seat, gripped the wheel viciously. Where to? How long would he have until all roads were blocked? The forest clearing was fifteen miles behind, but the world had shrunk to the size of an orange in recent years, and fifteen miles was hardly the length of one seed. The thing, perhaps, was to find a small town and—with the gun—force a doctor to care for her. Hide the Champion in the doctor's garage. He turned the engine over, wheeled into the twisting lane, and spun his wheels over the snow.
    Thin rust trickled from her ear—liquid.
    Caldwell twenty-six miles . . .
    Caldwell nineteen miles . . .
    He was ten miles from Caldwell when the helicopter fluttered over the tree tops that sheltered much of the road. The car was bathed in sickly yellow light. He swerved left, right, darting out of the beam. But they broadened the shaft and covered both lanes with it. Bullets cut up the pavement in front of him. One pinged off the hood. A few vibra-beams sent little sections of the pavement boiling. Then, abruptly, there was darkness and no helicopter.
    Slowing, he rolled down the window, listened. No whupa-whupa of fiercely beating blades. It was gone. It vanished; it did not simply drift away. Perhaps it had crashed. Yet there was no explosion, no crashing sound. He rolled the window up and drove on. They had spotted him near Caldwell, and he must bypass that town now. Forty miles away lay Steepleton.
    He looked over the seat, felt his stomach flop at the sight of her, comatose and pale-dark. He pressed down on the accelerator.
    Steepleton thirty-two miles . . .
    Steepleton twenty-four miles . . .
    At the boundaries of Steepleton there was a roadblock. Seven men, seven androids. And they knew damn well whose car was coming; they had their weapons raised . . .
    Death is not something that creeps about in black robes, slavering. Death cannot be seen . . .
    It can't!
    And yet his world was a graveyard. The moon rode high above clouds like pieces of torn shrouds flapping madly to the tune of the winds in the dead trees. He struggled up the hill in the cold air, the wind-born explosions of snow forcing him to squint.
    "Good evening," said the mortician.
    He said good evening . . .
    "Dust to dust," the embalmer said from his perch atop a monument steeple.
    "Ashes to ashes," said the sexton.
    He ignored all of them. He pushed onward, toward the summit of the hill where the sepulcher bit at the sky, a broken tooth. Somewhere a muffled drum. Somewhere a passing bell . . .
    He pushed his shoulder against the stone door, felt the rusted hinges move a bit, heard them squeak, heard the rats run inside. Stepping in, the moonlight flooding in behind him, he advanced to the sarcophagus. They had buried her in a limestone coffin, for that facilitated the rotting of the corpse. Somehow, that filled him with rage. He thrust the immensely heavy lid free, looked down at her pale face. Gently—oh! so gently—he lifted her out, placed her upon the marble slab where no coffin yet lay.
    Somewhere a