Red Planet Blues

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Before removing each slab, I’d used my tab to take photographs of the specimens in the ground, and wider shots that established their precise locations and orientations; I’d placed my phone in the shots, so that dimensions could be worked out, too.

  I couldn’t literally cover our tracks—or the buggy’s—but the ever-shifting Martian dust would do that soon enough. Still, I did make an effort to hide the wounds I’d just made in the soil.

  Juan’s buggy, like most models, had a trailer hitch, and I hooked up a line so that I could drag both wrecks, one behind the other. I wouldn’t take them back to New Klondike because people would ask awkward questions about how they’d come to be destroyed, and because hauling that much weight all the way would make the journey take forever. But I did drag them thirty kilometers—not back east, in the direction we’d come, but south. They’d doubtless be stumbled upon at some point, but they would be nowhere near the Alpha.

  I then finally got to give Juan’s buggy a workout. This part of Isidis Planitia wasn’t quite as good as the Bonneville Salt Flats, but it still let me pull some great skids, and I spun the buggy through a couple of three-sixties, just for fun. And then, at last, I headed home. I had no really good map of how to get there—and I wouldn’t have been able to retrace the course to return here—but I knew the dome was to the east, and so I just started driving that way, confident I’d eventually pick up the New Klondike homing beacon. And, indeed, after about ninety minutes, I did.

  The sun had reached the western horizon behind me by the time I was approaching New Klondike. When I was back in phone range, I checked in with Pickover; he was safe in his apartment and happier than I’d ever heard him. He’d found the map aboard the descent stage—it had been rolled up for storage, he said, but was as big as a kitchen tabletop, a fact he knew because he now had it covering his own and was poring over it excitedly.

  As I got closer to the dome, I saw that Mudge and Pickover had put the descent stage down vertically on one of the circular fused-regolith landing pads; it was resting on articulated tripodal legs that must have been previously stored within the hull. The pads were numbered with giant yellow painted numerals at three places on their rims; this one was number seven.

  There’d be some paperwork to take care of before the descent stage could be brought inside to the shipyard. I drove on to the garage building near the south airlock and returned Juan’s buggy, pleased to see that although it was mud-splashed, it was otherwise no worse for wear.

  I then entered the dome, returned my rented surface suit—getting the damage deposit back this time—and headed to my little windowless apartment. On the way, I listened to the voice mail that had accumulated while I was out, including a message from Diana that said Lakshmi Chatterjee had had a cancellation and could see her to talk about her poetry tomorrow at 2:00 p.m. It was less necessary now, I suspected, to bug Shopatsky House; Dirk had almost certainly been her accomplice. But it was still probably worth finding out if Lakshmi had revealed the location of the Alpha to anyone else or was planning another trip out to it.

  Despite all I’d been through today, I was totally clean—the surface suit had kept all the dust and mud out. But I definitely needed a shower. Once I got home, I stripped and headed into the stall, opting to treat myself to a water rinse. (The irony was that it was water showers that were noisy; sonic showers were ultrasonic and didn’t interfere with your hearing—not a lot of people sang while taking sonic showers.)

  But while other sounds were being drowned out by the jets of H2O, someone must have jimmied the lock on my apartment door. Or maybe they’d broken in earlier, and had simply been hiding until now. Either way, when I turned off the nozzles, what I heard was not the drip-drip-drip that I really needed to get fixed, but rather a low, unpleasant voice that said, “Freeze.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  The door to my shower stall was alloquartz—not bulletproof, but, as they used to say about watches that you could get wet, bullet-resistant.

  I turned slowly in the little stall so that I was facing the intruder, and so he might feel a little intimidated. The air was steamy, and there was the transparent door between us, with beads of water on it, but I’d lay money that the mug facing me was a transfer. Unfortunately, my money was in my wallet, in the other room, along with my pants.

  The guy was big, the kind of bruiser that people would have called “Moose” on a planet that had any. He was aiming a gun at me—and, indignity of indignities, I soon recognized that it was my own.

  “What can I do for you?” I said, as amiably as I could manage. He hadn’t told me to stick my hands up, so I hadn’t.

  “You have something I want.” His voice was slow, thick.

  I looked down. “That’s what all the boys say.”

  “Stow it,” said the man. “I’m talking about the diary. We can do this one of two ways. You tell me where it is, I get it, I leave, and you go towel off and put baby powder on your butt. Or you make me rip this joint apart looking for it, and I leave powder burns right above that six-pack of yours.”

  “You make a tempting case for the former option,” I said.

  It clearly took him a moment to digest this, but then he nodded. “Good.”

  “It’s in a safe in my living room. The safe opens to simultaneous scanning of my fingerprint and me uttering a passphrase—a combination lock, if you will.”

  He jerked the Smith & Wesson to indicate I should step out. If he’d been standing closer, I might have been able to slam the alloquartz door into his arm—my bathroom wasn’t much bigger than a closet—but that wasn’t going to work. As I opened the door, he moved out into the living room. I dripped my way across to join him.

  “Where’s the safe?” he asked.

  “In the wall. Behind the couch.”

  The couch was a threadbare affair upon which I’d pursued many a threadbare affair. It was heavy—it pulled out into a bed, for those occasional times I had an overnight guest who wasn’t going to share mine—but not so heavy that I couldn’t easily move it in Martian gravity. Still, I indicated for Moose to take an end, in hopes that his doing so would destabilize the situation enough that I could recapture my gun. But he was a transfer: he bent and put his left hand under the bottom of the couch and swung it away from the wall all by himself, without once taking the gun off me.

  The safe couldn’t be installed flush with the wall, of course; that would have made it protrude into my neighbor’s apartment, and Crazy Gustav and I made a point of staying out of each other’s way. Instead, it jutted from the wall at floor level. It was about forty centimeters tall and wide, and half that deep. Moose looked disappointed: he’d probably been hoping for a standalone unit he could just grab and run off with, but the safe’s back was clearly fused to the wall. “Open it,” he said in the same cow’s-moo voice he’d used before.

  I crouched next to it, making it look like a random choice that I happened to be between the safe and him. I placed my thumb on the little scanning plate, which of course not only read the pattern of ridges but also checked the temperature and looked for a pulse. I then uttered my favorite quote: “‘Experience has taught me never to trust a policeman. Just when you think one’s all right, he turns legit.’”

  The lock moved aside with a chunk, I grabbed the pistol from within—one should always have a spare of anything vital to one’s profession—rolled onto my side, swung the gun around, and aimed it at Moose.

  The big transfer stared at me. “What are you going to do?” he said. “Shoot me? It’ll just bounce off.” He lifted his gun higher, as if taking a bead. “I, on the other hand—”

  “—still don’t have what you came for.” I jerked my head toward the safe. He could see it had a few things in it—I kept some mementos of Earth in there—but the diary was conspicuously absent. I was still more or less supine, and he was towering over me from the other side of the couch. I shifted my aim from his chest to the ceiling-mounted lighting unit and squeezed off a sho
t. The room was plunged into darkness. I was hoping he didn’t have the infrared-vision upgrade, whereas I knew the layout of my apartment intimately. I sprang to my feet and worked my way along the wall my place shared with Crazy Gustav’s unit to the wall that separated this room from my bedroom.

  My neighbors might call the police at the sound of a gunshot, and the police might come if they were called—but I was surely on my own for at least the next few minutes. I was betting Moose didn’t have much experience with a revolver; the safety had still been on, I’d noted, when he’d been aiming it my way. Still, if he did get hold of me, he doubtless had strength enough to snap my neck.

  Being naked, my footfalls weren’t making any noise on the carpetless floor, whereas Moose’s clodhoppers were coming down with thuds. If I could get to the bathroom, I could lock the door behind me and hole up in the alloquartz shower stall until help arrived—an ignominious way to survive, but what the heck.

  But before I’d gotten that far, the damn main door to my apartment swung open, emitting light from the corridor. Of course: Moose had broken the lock on it when he’d let himself in. Silhouetted on the threshold was Dr. Rory Pickover. Moose swung around and fired—I guess he did know how to use the gun after all. Pickover was propelled backward by the impact and stumbled into the opposite corridor wall. He winced in pain as he looked down at his torso, then looked up with his plastic features drawn together. His voice was full of barely controlled rage. “I am getting really tired,” he hissed, “of people shooting bits of metal into my chest.” He crouched low then leapt, all his transfer’s strength against Mars’s feeble gravity. It was impressive—you fall in slow-mo on Mars, but you leap even faster than you can on Earth—and he slammed into Moose’s chest, knocking him backward onto the couch.

  I had never seen a transfer hit another transfer before, and, to be honest, Pickover fought like a girl: like a super-strong, excimer-powered girl. He smashed Moose in the face, and the sound was like two metal buckets crashing together. Moose was now seated on the couch, and I got my arm around his neck from behind. I couldn’t cut off his air supply, but I could flip him over the back of the couch, and I did so. Pickover, meanwhile, grabbed the bottom of the couch in the little gap between it and the floor caused by the stubby couch legs, and he flipped the thing right over, and then he pushed it like a snowplow blade against the wall, trapping Moose in the triangular space.

  I’d danced out of the way just in time and got to my feet, aiming the gun at the opening nearest Moose’s head, in case he tried to come out. Pickover sat on the couch, and after a moment I clambered on it, too—which was quite uncomfortable for me, since my butt had to rest on the right angle between the couch’s back and the unupholstered bottom.

  Our combined weight was more than Moose could push off him, at least starting in a cramped space where he couldn’t get any leverage. As we sat there—me naked, Pickover with a smoking bullet hole in his chest (and another favorite shirt ruined, I imagined), furniture upturned—Crazy Gustav happened to appear in the corridor, heading to his apartment. His sandy hair, as always, was askew, and he looked at me from his pinched, stubbly face. “Hey, Lomax,” he said, “you really know how to class up a joint.”

  I crossed my legs demurely. “Thanks.” I thought about asking him to call the cops, but Crazy Gustav had no fondness for them, and we seemed to have the situation under control. So instead, I just tipped my nonexistent hat at him, and Gustav went into his apartment, shaking his head.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Iwanted to go get some clothes, but my weight was part of what was keeping Moose trapped. “Okay, big fellow,” I called out. “Let’s start with the basics. Who are you?”

  “Nobody,” he rumbled from beneath us, his voice muffled.

  “Captain Nemo was nobody,” I said. “Everybody else is somebody.”

  “Not me.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Don’t have one.”

  “Come on. People have to call you something.”

  “Trace.”

  A cool name for a copy, I thought. “I take it you’re hired muscle, Trace. But hired by who?” If he corrected me to “Hired by whom?” I’d fire a shot through the couch at him.

  “Actual.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “That’s all I ever call him. Actual.”

  “He a good boss?”

  “You kidding?”

  “No. If he sucks, maybe you want to change allegiance. Is he a good boss?”

  “He’s skytop.”

  I knew a lot of old-fashioned slang—old movies did that to you—but I hadn’t heard that one for a while; Trace might as well have called him “groovy.”

  “And where is this . . . this skytop gentleman? Down on Earth?”

  “No.”

  “Here on Mars?”

  “No.”

  “Where then?”

  “Figure it out.”

  I took a breath. “Fine, be that way—but don’t say I didn’t give you a chance. Anyway, the professor and I can’t very well sit here all day. So, first things first: toss the gun out from under there.”

  Trace didn’t do anything.

  “Well?” I said.

  “I’m thinking.”

  His transfer brain operated at the speed of light, instead of the pokey chemical-signaling rates used by biologicals, but stupid had its own velocity, and I waited while he weighed his options.

  And, at last, he reached a conclusion. The Smith & Wesson went skittering out from underneath and came to rest beneath my framed Casablanca movie poster. I couldn’t go retrieve the gun just now, but at least we were making progress.

  But then I heard that annoying ping that I could only hear when the front door to my place was open: the elevator had arrived. There were the sounds of people moving along the corridor, and then Detective Dougal McCrae and Sergeant Huxley were standing there in the open doorway, looking at us. Mac was in plain clothes and had his piece out, and Hux, in his dark blue uniform, was carrying that garbage-can-lid thing that I knew was the broadband disruptor. “We had a report of two gunshots,” Mac said, rolling the R in “report.” “And I recognized the address.”

  It didn’t seem the time to point out that all gunshots make a report—well, unless a silencer is used.

  Mac went on. “We sometimes let one go. But two?”

  “Thanks for dropping by,” I said. “There’s a transfer behind the couch. A thug. He broke in here.”

  “While you boys were having some fun,” said Huxley.

  “While I was in the shower, you cretinous pinhead.”

  Mac raised his voice. “This is the New Klondike Police. Come out with your hands up. And I should warn you, we have a broadband disruptor. Don’t make us use it.”

  Trace had two options, neither of which was particularly dignified. He could crawl out head first on my right, or he could worm his way out feet first on my left. I could tell that he’d opted for the former by the way the couch was now shaking beneath us.

  When he was no longer behind the couch, he rose and held up his hands; the galoot was big enough that his fingertips were touching my ceiling.

  “If you gentlemen will excuse me,” I said, and I headed to the bedroom, pausing along the way to pick up my S&W. I quickly threw on some clothes—by this point, the dry air we had under the dome had sucked up all the moisture, and I was no longer wet. I put on black jeans and a T-shirt that was so dark blue you’d have thought it was also black if you didn’t have the jeans to compare it to.

  I thought about taking a moment to comb my hair; in my business, it didn’t hurt to have a slightly wild-and-crazy look, but right now I was downright Gustavian. But no sooner had I picked up the comb than I heard an all-too-familiar electronic whine. I ran out of the room and saw, in the stark light spilling in from the corridor, Trace standing spread-eagled with all his limbs vibrating and a look of agony on his face. “Jesus!” I shouted. “Rory, get out! Get out right away!” />
  The paleontologist looked puzzled but he knew by now to heed my advice. He dashed out into the corridor. Huxley was holding the disruptor in both hands, with the disk aimed squarely—or roundly—at Trace.

  Mac could have intervened but he didn’t; he simply kept his own gun trained on the transfer. After about ten more seconds, Huxley pulled out the control that deactivated the disruptor, and Trace collapsed like a skyscraper undergoing controlled demolition.

  “Why’d you do that?” I demanded.

  Huxley sounded defensive. “He came at us,” he said. “He came right at us.”

  “Aye,” said Mac. “He did. I’d warned him we had a disruptor, Alex—you heard me. But . . .” He lifted his hands philosophically.

  Normally, one of us might have rushed in to look at a downed man to see if he was still alive, but I doubted any of us knew how to tell with a transfer. Huxley put down the disruptor, leaning it against the wall that had the poster for Key Largo. I called out, “Rory! It’s safe to come back!”

  Dr. Pickover appeared in the doorway a moment later. “Is he—” But even the transfer hesitated over whether “dead” was the right word.

  I prodded Trace with my foot—I hadn’t had time yet to put on shoes or socks. He didn’t move. “I think so.”

  “All right,” said Mac. He lifted his left arm and pointed at his wrist phone to let me know we were now on the record. “We had reports of two weapons discharges. Who shot first?”

  “I did.”

  “Then you’ll have to—”

  I cut Mac off and pointed up. “I did—but I shot out the light, see? I agree hitting the switch would have been more genteel, but there’s actually no regulation against shooting inanimate objects. I thought my chances were better in the dark.”