Hell's Gate by Dean Koontz

planning and alternate planning, they decided not to go into the cellar where, perhaps, the robot would be able to solicit aid from the lizardy aliens. Instead, they moved the furniture in the living room to form a fortress of stuffing, wood, and springs behind which they could hide and observe the cellar door. There was no way of being certain another robot would be sent, though the lizard-things must surely have known the first failed. If they knew that, they would consider it an enormous fluke, and would think it could never happen twice.
        Indeed, had he been Harold Jacobi, it never would have happened again, for he would have been stone dead. But he was quicker than a man should be, cleverer, and now he had a vibrabeam tube himself.
        One-thirty came and went in silence. They did not speak for fear of missing some vital sound from below. Even a moment's distraction might mean the difference between success and failure-and failure would, of course, mean death. There was no ringing noise, no thrumming moan. He remembered that the portal had not required the strange vibrations to open itself ever since that night when full visual contact had been made; that night the demons looked through the wall as if only a pane of glass separated them from Salsbury.
        At twenty minutes of two, ten minutes into their silent vigil, they heard soft footfalls on the steps… coming up…
        Linda was positioned beside him, shielded by a couch. He was at the end of the same piece of furniture, looking through a crack between the sofa and the easy chair they had pulled next to it. She had her head above the back of the sofa, watching the door. He put a hand on her skull and pushed her down out of sight. She started to protest, then remembered the need for silence. Or perhaps she remembered what the vibrabeam had done to his bathroom door and suddenly had begun to extrapolate on what it might do to flesh. She stayed down, safely behind him, waiting.
        As he watched, the cellar door swung easily into the living room. It shielded the bulk of the robot from him, but he was in no great hurry to make contact with it. Salsbury knew he could take the machine before it could reach either of them; that realization made for a great deal of confidence.
        A moment later, the robot stepped from behind the door, very alert and cautious as if even its steel and glass brain could know fear. It started along the wall, staying where the moonlight from the windows did not touch. When he was but a few feet from the stairs that led to the second story, Salsbury thumbed the stud on the vibrabeam tube. The cold waves of sound flashed out in a golden stream, struck the machine and made it bounce and buck as if a sledge hammer had been swung into its guts. It lurched, turned, its blue eyes sparkling flatly in the darkness, seeking.
        Rising to stand beside him, Lynda grasped Salsbury's arm and sucked in her breath. The lack of any emotion on the robot's face, the deadly blankness so like a psychotic's countenance, was enough to chill anyone. It had nearly sent Salsbury climbing the walls the first time he had been confronted with it.
        The beam continued to play.
        Victor fancied he could hear things breaking inside the robot. Its entire body hummed with the impact of the killing waves.
        It stumbled toward them, raising its firing arm, pointing the brass finger. Salsbury ducked, trying to hold the vibrabeam on his opponent. But it wavered, swept across the stair railing to the mechanical's left. The wood splintered, popped, danced into the air in hundreds of shards, rained down on Lynda and him where they stood ten feet away.
        The mechanical's own beam smashed into an easy chair, blew a cloud of smouldering stuffings into the air. The littlest pieces, glowing orange, came down and stung their bare arms where they touched. Lynda slapped at her robe and at Salsbury's clothes to keep them from