“How fast could you put it back together?”

The mechanic gnawed at his lip. “Half an hour if I had isome help,” he said. “But—”

“Suzi,” Hosato said, turning to his partner. “Go with Rick here and help him as much as you can.”

“Hey, I can’t take tune to train a Class Two…”

“I am a Class Eight robot,” Suzi replied coldly. “And am more than capable of following simple orders.”

“A Class Eight?” Rick looked at her speculatively. “Say, Hayama, what are you doing with a Class Eight?”

“Sshh!” Hosato held up a hand for silence, then beckoned the mechanic closer.

“What’s through that door?” he whispered, pointing to the ruined metal door af the side of the shop.

“The new corridor,” Rick whispered back. “It runs past the main computer building and comes out—”

Hosato motioned him to silence again, and they listened. Coming from the door was the muffled whine of motors moving toward them down the corridor.

“Get to work on the sand crawler.” Hosato whispered the order as he started sealing his Nirija suit.

“But what are you?” Rick began, then for the first time focused on the blaster in Hosato’s hand. “Hey, where did you get the blaster. And what’s with the funny outfit. Who are…?”

Hosato finished sealing the suit and vanished.

“I suggest we do as he says,” Suzi said to the stunned mechanic. “I’m sure he will explain later, if we get the time.”

Hosato didn’t delay to see the final resolution of Rick’s dilemma. He moved across the room in a smooth glide and stepped through the ruined doorway into the corridor.

There were three of them moving slowly down the corridor. He had never seen a robot try to “sneak” but guessed this was their attempt to duplicate that form of motion. At these speeds, their motors were next to noiseless. If Hosato had riot already been alerted and nervous, it is doubtful he would have heard them at all.

Instead of opening fire immediately, Hosato took a moment to plan his attack. In theory, he should have nothing to fear. His suit gave him invisibility and therefore invulnerability. If the robots’ camera eyes did not register a human form, they would not fire. Even his blaster was rigged to establish contact through his palm, and shared the same light-relay mechanism as his suit. He was totally invisible and safe—in theory. Of course, relying on theories was a sure way to guarantee an early retirement.

There was always the possibility that cameras were not the robots’ sole means of sensory input. Heat sensors, movement detectors, any one of a number of devices could detect his presence, and then he would be in a shoot-out with three machines that didn’t miss.

The robots were a scant fifteen feet away. His plan of action set, Hosato opened fire.

Standing off-center to the right of the corridor, he fired point-blank at the lead robot. Dropping to one knee, he fired again immediately at the robot at the rear of the formation. Not waiting to observe the results of his first two shots, he dived to his left, rolling to the side of the corridor, and from a prone position fired again at the final robot.

He rolled again, still prone, to the center of the corridor, and froze, studying his targets. Observing no sign of continued activity from the robots, he drew a deep breath and waited for his heartbeat to return to its normal pacing. Realization suddenly struck him. Between his second and third shots, the last robot had returned fire, the bolt from its blaster sizzling the air over Hosato as he rolled across the corridor.

He shot a quick glance behind him to check his retreat route. The smoldering body of a security guard lay just inside the door.

That’s what the robot had fired at. It was reacting to the security guard’s intrusion into the corridor. Had Hosato been on his feet, he would have been caught in the line of fire, invisible or not!

He suddenly saw another blaster being poked cautiously into the corridor, a blaster held by a hand with a uniform sleeve showing.

“Hold your fire!” he called, quickly breaking the seal on his suit.

He rolled to his feet and confronted the bewildered guard who cautiously followed the blaster into the corridor.

“How did you—?” the guard began.

“How do we get into the main computer building?” Hosato demanded.

“We can’t!” the guard responded automatically.

“Look, don’t you understand?” Hosato pressured. “If we can knock out that computer, the robots will be minus a brain. That’s where they’re being controlled from.”

The guard’s face hardened. “That’s a top-security area,” he recited. “Orders state that unauthorized personnel—”

Hosato almost hit the man in his frustration but gamed control of himself.

“Where’s Sasha?” he demanded. “We’ll get your orders changed right now.”

“The chiefs been hurt,” the guard informed him. “Just before we collapsed the main tunnel, she…”

But Hosato was gone, pushing his way into the maintenance shop. Chaos reigned in the shop. There were people packed into every available space, all shouting at each other. Bits of conversation came to Hosato as he made his way through the crowd.

“it’s got to be the main programming. They couldn’t just…”

“has been in the family for two hundred years, and you just…”

“the brains God gave an ant, you’d quite poking around in the mechanics and help us figure…”

“Billy Billy Maria, have you seen…?”

“long until they burn a new corridor, we’ve got to…”

He found her at last. She was lying on the floor. James was trying to keep the crowd from stepping on her, but with limited success.

“Hosato!” the boy cried, spying him as he covered the final distance through the press of bodies. “Sasha’s—”

“I heard,” he said, dropping to one knee beside the fallen security chief. “How is she?”

It was a rhetorical question, and he ignored the boy’s answer as he took in the situation at a glance. Sasha’s right arm was gone below the elbow. There was no bleeding, probably cauterized by the same blaster bolt that took her arm, but she was in deep shock.

“Carolyn’s dead,” James shouted in Hosato’s ear.

“Who?” he replied absently.

“Carolyn. The red-headed girl in your room. When we were…”

Someone, pushed backward by the crowd, walked directly across Sasha’s body. Hosato pushed savagely at the legs, then stood up, casting about desperately. A familiar face caught his eye.

“Doc!” he called.

The maintenance man was embroiled in an argument with a red-faced couple and didn’t respond. Hosato stretched out, got hold of his arm, and physically dragged him out of the conversation.

“We’ve got an injured person down here, Doc. Is there someplace we can take her where she won’t get trampled?”

“Try the garage. Rick chased everybody out of there while he was working on the crawler.”

“Thanks!” Hosato said, releasing his hold on the mechanic.

“Say,” the man asked, “are you headed back there?”

Hosato was scanning the crowd, trying to pick a path. “Yes,” he replied absently.

“Can you take these to Rick?” the man said, forcing a wad of papers into Hosato’s hand. “Maybe he can make head or tails of them.”

“Sure,” Hosato acknowledged. “Come on, James.”

He stooped and picked Sasha up in his arms. Even with James breaking a path through the crowd, it was hard maneuvering. The door to the garage was worst of all. There were so many people in front of it Hosato had to momentarily set Sasha down and physically shove people away before he could get it open. As it was, he and James barely got Sasha through before the jostling crowd slammed the door shut behind them.

“I told you to stay out of… Oh, Hayama.” Rick emerged from under the sand crawler he was working on. “What’s… Oh, my God!”

“She’ll be okay,” Hosatc said, easing his burden to the ground. “How’s the work going?”