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The monk put out a hand to stop him. "Where's your badge? What's your number and prefix. I'm
going to have to put this in your record."
"No, I'll just leave."
Holding him by the shoulder, the monk insisted, "I'm sorry, I have to report all intruders. Where
is your identi-fication badge?"
SEN glanced down at his empty lapel. "I lost it."
"But that's a violation. I'm going to notify the authori-ties. This is beyond my jurisdiction."
The monk turned to head back toward wherever he came from. Frenzied with fear, SEN
pounced on his back, knocked the white-robed figure to the floor.
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"No! Give. . . give me time!"
The monk began shouting, struggling. SEN kicked at hun, dropped to all fours on top of him and
grabbed at his cowl.
"Time!" he snapped, his voice hoarse with violence and terror. "Time! Time! Time!" And with
each word he pounded the monk's head against the plastistone flooring.
When he stopped, the monk's white robe was splattered with red and his eyes were staring up
sightlessly at OMM's benign face.
SEN rocked back on his heels, staring in horror at the monk. Slowly he looked up at the portrait.
"OMM. . . OMM. . . what have I done?"
He looked back at the body. In the struggle, some pills had spilled from the pocket of the monk's
robe. They were scattered around the floor now, red pills and blue, yellow and white. SEN scooped a
handful of them indis-criminately and swallowed them with a huge, hard gulp.
THX sat slumped across the computer desk's keyboard. He wanted to be dead, but he wasn't
even unconscious.. He just stayed there, without the strength or will to move.Destroyed, she was
destroyed. And the baby . . .they're going to . . .
Suddenly a hand grabbed his shoulder.
He wheeled around. It was SRT, his black face very serious now. "Come on," he said, "there
must be a hun-dred police robots prowling around here. We've got to get out."
"What difference does it make?"
SRT eyed him. "You want to get caught? Destroyed, maybe?"
Shakily, THX got to his feet. "No. . . not yet. I have to do something first."
The Mercicontrol police dispatcher was sitting at a bank of viewscreens very similar to the station
of an observer. But his screens showed what a platoon of police robots were seeing. Except that, in the
main screen, di-rectly in front of him, he had patched in the observer's overhead view through the fisheye
lens of THX and SRT.
His earphones were alive with calls:
"Both felons located in Computer Central Files, are 621B, Row 44-8-9. Apprehension pending."
"I have a nonaccidental death in Cathedral 090, Con F. Are there any felons reported in that
area?"
"Budget control, we need a cost analysis on the THX 1138 account. Include all interest and
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inflation per-centages."
"Monetary unit total: 649 and rising."
"Mercicontrol dispatch, budget control reports ex-penditure on 1138 prefix THX is 649 and
rising."
The dispatcher nodded absent-mindedly. He was mani-pulating control switches madly, fingers
flying over his keyboard as he tried to coordinate the actions of a full platoon of police robots.
The two fugitives were standing now, starting to move off.
"No, no," he shouted into his lip mike. "Take the central aisle, 04; 07 take the main left. I want
you to make a net. Cover every aisle, surround station 4350. . ."
The dispatcher was sweating hard.
"They're heading down the left central aisle in the northward direction. Who's closest? Take 34,
units 09 through 17. . . cover all the north exits. Full speed!"
"Monetary unit total: 1000 and rising."
Suddenly Control's knife-edged voice said in his ear-phones, "Do you realize that the man with
THX 1138 is not SEN 5241?"
"Yessir!" the dispatcher replied instantaneously. "We're running an identification check on him,
sir."
"Where is SEN 5241?"
"We. . . we. . . lost track of him, sir. All observers have been alerted to report his location as
soon as he's spotted, sir."
"I see." Control's voice was like icewater being poured over the dispatcher. Or molten lead.
"Sir?" the dispatcher called, trembling. "Sir, we could use another two platoons of police officers.
The Com-puter Central File area is so big. . . as you know, sir. And the robots are very slow. But one
man can't handle more than a single platoon, so we'd need at least two more dispatchers. . ."
"Economically unfeasible within the allotted budget for apprehension of these felons," Control
answered. "You'll have to get them with the one platoon assigned."
"But sir. . ."
"The responsibility is yours," said Control, with finality.
The dispatcher shivered. "Yessir."
With SRT leading them, they got to an exit door at the far end of the vast computer area. A
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