At last Siegel was satisfied with the status boards. He pulled the helmet down onto his head and entered cyberspace. The two birds began picking their way across the gentle slope of the hill to get clear for takeoff, stalking across the ground with the liquid grace of quicksilver furies.

I swiveled back to my own screens to monitor their progress. The first of the units spread its wings as if testing the air. It angled its surfaces this way and that, then abruptly caught what little breeze still dared to rustle the leaves, flapped twice, and lifted effortlessly up into the sky. The second one followed immediately after.

Both of the birds circled once, getting their aerial bearings, then flapped for height. They tore upward through the day with the brutal splendor of eagles. Here, art and technology intersectedand gave our eyes the mobility of the wind.

The images on our screens steadied and focused, even as the birds twisted and dove through the air. Evasive maneuvers were automatic on this model, with compensatory intelligence in the image processing. Not that evasive maneuvers would do much good if the tenants swarmed. That was always a possibility, sometimes even the flicker of a shadow across the top of a shambler was enough to set the tenants off. Then the sheer weight of numbers would be enough to bring these gauzy marvels fluttering clumsily down to the ground. I hoped it wouldn't happen, but if it had to happen, robots were more expendable than humans.

"Okay," I said. "Put them on automatic, circling high and wide. Tell them to watch their shadows. Let me have the prowler now."

"Up and running," said Siegel. He pushed the helmet up off his head and tap-danced across his keyboard again. "Sher Khan is hot to trot. Tarkus is on standby."

"Good." Sher Khan was the newer of the two beasts; a P-120, he was a sleek and graceful killing machine, a pleasure to use. Tarkus was an earlier model, a T-9, more tank than animal. He was loud and clunky, and a little too big to go casually diving into worm nests; but he was better armored than Sher Khan and had greater firepower, so we used him mostly for defensive operations. Unlike the towering spiders that stalked the countryside unattended far weeks at a time, the prowlers burned faster and hotter and required much more frequent tending; but operating under the direct control of a trainer, the mechanimals provided a brutal combination of mobility and firepower that significantly increased the kill-ratio per kilodollar.

The P-120 had been originally designed for armed reconnaissance. Built for use against urban guerrillas, it was fast, silent, and deadly. Now, retrofitted for going down into worm nests, its unique capabilities were proving particularly well suited to subterranean missions. Low and pantherlike, Sher Khan had six slender legs and looked like the disjointed mating of an elongated cheetah and a titanium snake; but the uplifted head was larger and more sinister-its jowls were gun barrels.

It also had the most advanced LI ever put into a cyber-beast. Sher Khan's optical nervous system contained enough processing power to handle the data flow of a small government, or a large corporation. The density of nerve endings throughout its bodyespecially in its metal musculature and polymoid-armor skinwas greater than that of a living creature. The P-120s weren't programmed; they were trained.

The technology for the prowlers and the spybirds, and all the other hard animals—the spiders, the rhinos, the balrogs, the torpedo-fish—had been developed so secretly that not even the President had known the full range of the cyber-beast program until after the abortive invasion of the Gulf of Mexico. In less than twenty hours, a hundred years of national paranoia had suddenly paid for itself; the ground opened up and the cyber-beasts boiled out into the open air like all the furies of hell. The enemy never had a chance; the creatures hit their lines like a chainsaw.

Now the secrecy was over, and the paranoid investment was paying for itself all over again. Lockheed's deadly predators were out roaming the wilds again, this time hungering for a different kind of prey. They slid silently through the smoldering night, all their eyes and ears and radars probing relentlessly for worms and gorps and all the other dreadful things that lurked in the darkness. Together, the gossamer spybirds and the dreadful prowlers searched the remotest areas of wilderness, all the hills and gullies too dangerous and inaccessible for human surveillance. They worked on their own or assisted recon teams wherever they were needed.

It was a lethal partnership, forged in fire and fury. The spybirds soared aloft, spotting targets, sometimes even marking them with transmitter-darts; the cyber-beasts tracked, closed, and killed. Where it was safe, the prowlers flamed their targets; where it wasn't, they pumped hundreds, thousands, of exploding granules into the unlucky victim. Their confirmed-kill rating was over 90 percent. Target sighted, target destroyed.

If attacked or overpowered, the beasts would self-destruct explosively. More than one nest of worms had been annihilated that way. The machines couldn't stop, couldn't slow down, couldn't retreat; they didn't know how to do anything but hunt and kill and return to the tender for maintenance and rearmament.

And I wished the army hadn't kept them a secret for as long as they had. We could have used them in Wyoming and Virginia and Alaska-and especially in Colorado.

Rumor had it that the next generation of prowlers would look and act just like worms. The micro-prowlers would be millipedes. I hoped it wasn't true. I didn't want humans working with worms of any kind, not even mechanimal ones. A mechanimal simulation of worms in metal form would be an intolerable horror.

"Marano?" I said to the other van. "Have you got us covered?"

"You're as safe as a baby in its mother's arms," she laughed.

"Thanks, Mom," I said. I reached up and pulled my own virtual-reality helmet down and over my head. I fitted it comfortably over my eyes and ears, and abruptly, after the initial shock of reality adjustment, I was looking out through the glistening eyes of Sher Khan, listening through his precision ears.

The outside world took on the familiar color-shifted, sound-shifted strangeness of A-weighted cyberspace. Because the cyberthings were capable of seeing and hearing way beyond the limited range of human eyes and ears, the sensory spectra had to be compressed, adjusted, and compensatorily translated to create a corresponding perception for the human partner. Now I could see everything from heat-shimmers to radio emissions; I could hear the groaning of the earth and the high-pitched squeals of stingflies and shrikes. Fortunately, the virtual-reality helmet made no attempt to emulate the chemical environment that would have assaulted my nose had I been outside. If it had, I doubted very much that anyone would ever have put one on a second time.

"Coeurl?" asked the prowler, a soft questioning meow. It was a sound cue to let me know that the creature was armed and readyand scanning its surroundings with deliberate curiosity. "Coeurl?"

I tilted my head up and Sher Khan leapt forward. We glided across the flank of the slope and up toward the waiting shambler grove.

"Hot Seat," April 3rd broadcast:

The Guest: Dr. Daniel Jeffrey Foreman. Creator of the Mode Training. Acting Chairman of "The Core Group." Author of thirty science fiction novels, several embarrassing tele vision scripts, six books on lethetic intelligence engines and the machine/human interface, and twelve volumes on "the technology of consciousness." Because of the mane of white hair that floats around his head, he is sometimes described as: "an elf doing an Einstein impersonation."

The Host: Nasty John Robison, aka "The Mouth That Roared." In the words of his critics: "He is the ugliest man in the world." "His acne-scarred skin, flapping jowls, and gro tesquely squashed nose look like the worst possible cross between the uglier end of a bulldog and a vampire bat." "His gravelly voice has all the charm of a trash collection vehicle at three in the morning." "His manner is execrable and abusive; his interviews aren't conversations, they are calculated attacks." "Obsequious, dangerous, cunning, and vicious-and that's if he likes you." "An ugly and monstrous little boy who has finally achieved his lifelong dream; the opportunity to get even with everybody in the world who he thinks ever did it to him, and that's everybody in the world." "Only a fool or a messiah would risk an appearance on Nasty John's hot seat. So far, there haven't been any messiahs."