"Hey!" I called.
He did not answer.
I strained my ears and could hear the sounds of combat of some sort. There was a shuffling sound of feet on ice, a slapping of flesh as if blows were being exchanged, the grunting and breathing of heavy exertion. But there were no screams or curses as you would expect, and the lack of them made the inhuman aspect of the battle all the more pronounced.
"Are you all right?"
Still no answer.
Except the grunting and shuffling and heavy breathing.
I started toward the cellar stairs, thinking I might help Him somehow, then had the prickly sensation in the back of my neck that the Hyde android had come in from outside while I had not been looking. I imagined I could feel His eyes on me, sense His straining fingers as He reached out to grasp my neck I whirled back to the door, ready to cry out, and saw that there was no one there. Just the same, I went back to the door and waited out the battle, hoping the Hyde mother body would succumb to the Jekyll android-though I had nothing to offer, but hope.
The sounds of battle suddenly changed. The shuffling and grunting ceased and were replaced by a harsh hissing noise that reminded me of air escaping from a balloon. I recognized that sound as the same the pseudo-flesh had made outside when the Jekyll android had burned it away from me. One or the other of them was burning the moisture out of its enemy's flesh, turning it into dry, gray powder. "Are you all right?" I asked again.
Silence, but for the hissing.
"Hey!"
Hissing
I looked over the snow fields, searching for movement, almost wishing I would see some, so that I would not feel as utterly useless as I did now. But there was nothing out there-just whiteness and coldness and wind.
Then the hissing ceased, and there were footsteps on the stairs. I sighed with relief, for I knew the Hyde mother body could not walk. It had to be my Jekyll android coming back. Or The thought came to me like a grenade exploding in front of my face. Or: the Hyde android, the one who had shot at me, and who had broken into my apartment, the one who had chased me through the tubeways of the Bubble Drop system The Hyde android might have been down there when the mother body was destroyed through the Jekyll's chain reaction in its molecular structure. The Hyde may have been waiting for the Jekyll. And, now that the fight was over, it could be either of them coming up those stairs…
XVI
For an eternity, for eons and eons, the footsteps sounded on the cellar stairs, rising slowly toward me. My hands trembled, so that the rifle would not remain steady, and I was sweating although there was no heat in the cabin. Frantically, I tried to think of some way to differentiate between the benevolent Jekyll android and the malevolent Hyde. They looked exactly the same, were of the same height and the same weight. Undoubtedly, they would walk the same, sound the same, gesture in the exact same way. There was only one thing I would never forget the difference in their eyes. The eyes of the Hyde android were wild, rimmed with white all around, open wider than the eyes of the Jekyll android.
Then the cellar door pushed open wider, and an android entered the room. In the shadows, I could not see its eyes
"It wasn't quite dead," the android said. "I finished it off."
"Wait a minute," I managed to say, my words hoarse and dry in my throat.
The android stopped, a dozen feet from me, still hidden by the shadows of the room. A swath of moonlight cut through a window and fell four feet in front of it, but where it now stood was in total blackness. "What's the matter, Jacob?"
"I'm not sure about you," I said, holding the rifle on it, my hands shaking, but my finger ready on the trigger.
"Not sure?" He started forward.
"Stop!"
He stopped. "Jacob, I don't understand what you're saying. It's me. I'm not going to hurt you. The Hyde mother body is dead. Down there in the cellar. You want to go down and take a look? You want to prove it to yourself?"
"I'm sure the mother body is dead," I said. "But how can I know if the Hyde android was also down there- and that maybe it defeated the Jekyll android I came with?"
"You think I'm the Hyde android? The one that chased you through the tubeways?"
"That's right."
He laughed and started forward, holding out His hands. He took two steps casually, then, as He was about to step into the swath of moonlight where I would be able to see His eyes, He leaped.
Unsteady as I was, I managed to fire the rifle and score a hit. The sound of the explosion in the room was like a thunderclap in a closet. The windows rattled, and my ears popped. The bullet must have ripped through His left shoulder, for He spun around like a top, clutching at it with His other hand, and went down in a heap. His fingers scrabbled at the baseboard as He tried to pull Himself up. I backed away from Him, until I was up against the doorsill. "You are Hyde, aren't you?"
Despite the wound, He got to His feet and stood swaying, looking at me with eyes that were now plainly in view in the swath of moonlight. Mad, wild, ugly eyes. He did not answer me. He did not have to.
I fired again. The impact of the slug knocked Him off His feet, backwards into a chair which He toppled over as He went down. He landed hard, bouncing His head on the bare floor, and laid there, motionless for a moment. Dead? It was possible that I had inflicted too great a wound for Him to heal. Perhaps too many internal organs had been ripped apart, and He had ceased to function before He could bring his recuperative powers into play. Then I heard something that cancelled that train of thought: the heavy, rapid beating of His heart
I stood there, watching Him for a while, wondering what I should do. I was partly, surprised that I had been able to gun Him down so easily, even if He was the baser Hyde, part of the original mother body's character. Still, He resembled a man, and it was a wonder that resemblance had not kept me from shooting. But as I listened to His heart, I realized He was healing Himself as He laid there, and I knew what I had to do. I stepped forward to put another bullet in His back at a point where it would shatter His heart.
When I was three or four feet from Him, I realized that He had changed, that He was no longer in the form of a human being. He had maintained the rough outline of a sprawled body, apparently to lure me closer, but He was in an amoeboid form like the other mother bodies, a blob of flesh with exterior veins and no human features. I remembered what the Jekyll mother body had told me: after the first android had worked out the metamorphosis from human form to amoeboid form, the android selves that came later could make the change almost instantaneously without going through the laborious intermediate steps. I back-stepped, trying to get out of His way. As I moved, I saw the quick movement of the growing pseudopod as it lifted out of the main flesh mass and came at me, rising over my head like the arm of Death.
I backed into a hassock, fell over it, and rolled to the wall. The change of direction confused the pseudopod, and it smashed into the bare floor and groped around for a moment as if it could not quite believe I had avoided it. But I knew I would not avoid it again, or for long. It was more intelligent, faster, more sensitive. This was a one-sided fight, and we both knew it. I hunched against the wall and fired the rifle at the mother body. The slug tore through the gelatinous mass and out the other side, carrying a good hunk of tissue with it. The pseudopod that had been projected at me quivered, rippled as if in spasm, and drew back into the mother body to convalesce.
I got to my feet and started moving as carefully as possible toward the door which was ten feet to my right, I knew that if I made much noise getting there, the mother body would be alerted by the vibrations and snare me before I was halfway there. Still, the floor creaked under me, the beast sensed my flight, and a thick arm of flesh shot out and slammed into the wall inches before me, blocking the way.