Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [5]
His hesitation probably made no difference; there would have been no time for a riposte and no effective blow he could have dealt. There were three intruders coming at him now, and they hurled themselves upon him with inelegant but deadly effect. He flailed his arms desperately, but there was no way he could keep them all at bay.
With his arms still threshing uselessly, Silas was thrown back and knocked down. His head crashed against the wall and the pain was renewed yet again. The pain was almost instantly contained and constrained, but it could only be dulled. Merely deadening its fury could not free his mind to react in artful or effective fashion. There was, in any case, no action he could take that might have saved him. He was outnumbered, and not by fools or frightened children.
One of the intruders bent to pick up the fallen gun, and he began firing even as he plucked it from the floor. Silas felt a trio of needles spear into the muscles of his breast, not far beneath the shoulder. There was no pain at all now, but he knew that whatever poison the darts bore must have been designed to resist the best efforts of his internal technology. These people had come equipped to fight, and their equipment was the best. He knew that their motives must be similarly sophisticated and correspondingly sinister.
It was not until the missiles had struck him and burrowed into his efficiently armored but still-frail flesh, that Silas Arnett called to mind the deadliest and most fearful word in his vocabulary: Eliminators! Even as the word sprang to mind, though—while he still lashed out impotently against the three men who no longer had to struggle to subdue him—he could not accept its implications.
I have not been named! he cried silently. They have no reason! But whoever had come to his house, so cleverly evading its defenses, clearly had motive enough, whether they had reason enough or not.
While his internal defenses struggled unsuccessfully to cope with the drug which robbed him of consciousness, Silas could not evade the dreadful fear that death—savage, capricious, reasonless death—had found him before he was ready to be found.
Two
D
amon Hart had never found it easy to get three boxes of groceries from the trunk of his car to his thirteenth-floor apartment. It was a logistical problem with no simple solution, given that his parking slot and his apartment door were both so far away from the elevator. Some day, he supposed, he would have to invest in a collapsible electric cart which would follow him around like a faithful dog. For the moment, though, such a purchase still seemed like another step in the long march to conformism—perhaps the one which would finally seal his fate and put an end to the last vestiges of his reputation as a rebel. How could a man who owned a robot shopping trolley possibly claim to be anything other than a solid citizen of the New Utopia?
In the absence of such aid Damon had no alternative but to jam the elevator door open while he transferred the boxes one by one from the trunk of the car. By the time he got the third one in, the elevator was reciting its standard lecture on building policy and civic duty. While the elevator climbed up to his floor he was obliged to listen to an exhaustive account of his domestic misdemeanors, even though he hadn’t yet clocked up the requisite number of demerits to be summoned before the leasing council for a token reprimand. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to ride all the way on his own; two middle-aged women with