“Say again?”
“There are bones in there from the bank’s last visitors.”
“Oh.” Chaka shook her head. “We need a new approach.”
“Good.”
“Think about Mike.”
“What about Mike?”
“Gray boxes. Maybe we can find its gray box and shut it off at the source.”
Avila’s eyes registered respect. “That’s a good idea. You think it would be in the building?”
“We have to assume it is. If it isn’t, we’re not going to find it.”
Avila sat down on a fallen log. “There’re closed doors in the passageways. They’re the only places I can think of to look. But they’re almost certainly locked. Or warped. Or both. So unless we can find a way to guess the right door and take it down in a couple of seconds, I don’t think the prospect is good.”
“How many doors?”
Avila closed her eyes and pictured the corridors. “Six,” she said. “Or maybe eight.”
“Pity you didn’t pay more attention.”
“I was busy. Why don’t you stick your head in the window and look? If you push in a little bit you can see down one hallway.”
“You made your point,” Chaka said. She tried to get to her feet but was driven back by a wave of vertigo.
“The weapon is a little like the wedges,” said Avila.
“Yeah,” said Chaka. She was damp with perspiration, and her eyes were closed. “Except that the thing they have means business.” ‘It doesn’t kill,” Avila said.
“No. But it takes the fight out of you.” She lay quietly for several minutes, and Avila thought she’d gone to sleep. But Chaka took a deep breath, opened her eyes, and eased into sitting position.
“Feeling better?”
“A little. Listen, how about if we just walk in and jump the thing. That ought to work.”
“That sounds like a last resort,” said Avila. “I might have a better idea.” She looked through the window. The table was still standing motionless in the middle of the lobby, apparently watching its victims. “It strikes me there’s a humanity in these procedures that we might be able to turn to our advantage.”
“A humanity?”
“The weapons don’t kill. The ones in the bank don’t. The ones Mike gave us don’t.”
“But they scramble your head pretty well.”
“Chaka, you and Quait were shot and are still alive. That shows a reluctance to kill. Maybe that reluctance will give us a chance.”
Chaka strolled in through the back door, carrying a leather bag, trying to appear simultaneously casual and concerned. She took several steps into the lobby, stopped, looked around, carefully smothered her reaction to the piles of bones, and pretended to spot the two men on the floor. “I’m Dr. Milana,” she said to Quait. “Have you been injured?”
“Yes,” said Quait, who looked puzzled but was smart enough to play along. “Broken ribs, I think.”
“Who’s in charge here?” she asked loudly. “And who,” asked the ceiling, “summoned you. Doctor?”
“We were told there was a medical emergency here.” She knelt beside Quait and put her ear to his chest. “Good thing I happened to be in the neighborhood. This man has an irregular heartbeat. He’s going into Quadristasis.” Quait groaned.
“We’ll have to get him to surgery immediately.” She turned to Flojian and peered into his eyes. “This one, too. Injured iris. Can you walk, sir?”
“I think so, Doctor.”
“Just a minute. No one goes anywhere until the police get here.”
The voice came from above somewhere, but beyond that she couldn’t narrow it down. The role called for her to glare indignantly, but it was hard to do when there was no target.
She tried anyhow. “Who are you?” she demanded. “What’s your authority here?”
“Technoguard Security Systems. We’re hired—”
“All right, Technoguard Security Systems. One of these two men may die unless he gets immediate medical care. The other may suffer permanent eye damage. I’ve no intention of allowing that to happen. So if you want to stop us from leaving you’ll have to shoot me too.”
“I don’t think so, Doctor.”
Chaka helped Quait to his feet. She signaled for Flojian to follow, and began edging toward the door.
“If you persist, I will simply target the two malefactors again.”
“If you do that, you’ll probably kill this one. Is that what you want?”
“The weapon is nonlethal.”
“Nonlethal? Whose bones are these?”
“They belong to previous malefactors.”
“Whom you killed.”
“They died awaiting the police. I merely apprehended them.”
“You killed them. Why were you holding them for the police?”
“Because they tried to rob the bank.”
“And why is that a reason to have them arrested?”
“Don’t be foolish. Bank robbery is a violation of the criminal code.”
“And I put it to you that murder is a violation of the criminal code. You should be turned over to the police. For capital crimes.”
She kept moving.
“It’s not true.”
“Of course it’s true. And you’re about to do it again. You’re determined to kill these men by keeping them here and refusing them the medical assistance they desperately need.”
“That is not so.”
“It is so. And you know it is so.”
She’d reached the rear corridor. The table stood swaying but otherwise motionless in the middle of the lobby. Its weapon had not tracked them. It was still aimed toward the counter.
“Police have been summoned.” The voice went to a higher pitch.
“Summon them again,” said Chaka. “We’ve caught a murderer.”
“Brilliant,” said Quait. They walked away from the bank in a jubilant mood, shaking hands and embracing all around.
“That wasn’t even the plan,” laughed Chaka.
“That’s right,” said Avila. “The plan was for her to distract them long enough for me to make a run into the side corridor. There was a decent chance that the device that controls the table would be behind one of the doors. I was hoping to reach it and shut it off. But she was doing so well, I stayed put.”
“I saw the doors,” said Flojian. “What makes you think they wouldn’t have been locked?”
“If I couldn’t get in, or the table came after me, Chaka had a rock in the bag.”
“She was going to hit it with a rock?” asked Flojian.
“Yes,” said Chaka. “It was a big rock.” She showed them. There’d be a lot going on, and we thought I might get a good shot at it.”
They all laughed.
“Listen,” Avila said, “it’s not as desperate as it sounds. We had a backup plan too.”
“What was that?”
Chaka did a double thumbs-up. “You were great in there, Flojian,” she said. And she hugged him. “The backup idea was to build a fire outside the window. There’s a stiff wind, and we might have been able to get enough black smoke inside to shake things up. Maybe even set off some sort of anti-fire system. Who knows? But we’d have got a lot of confusion.”
“Confusion?” Quait looked back at the heavy shrubbery surrounding the building. “You’d have got a conflagration. Those bushes would have gone up like dry timber.”
“Well, yes,” she said reluctantly. “We knew that. That’s why it was the backup plan.”
“To the other wild idea,” laughed Flojian.
Avila sighed. “I wouldn’t make fun of it. She got you out.”
The strange sort of half-life that had generated the sound in the pole and the response in the bank seemed to infest Ann Arbor. Lights came on outside a stone house as they approached, and blinked off as the last horse (hurried along by Chaka) passed. Elsewhere, a few bars of soft music drifted from a three-story brick building and repeated over and over until they were out of earshot. In a glade, Flojian leaned against a forty-foot-long metallic fence and was startled when a bell rang and three gates sprang open. (There were a dozen gates altogether in the fence, but the others stayed motionless.)