by Yoss
I went over the other options once, purely out of curiosity. Two of the most reasonable were Bellringer-Vándalo and Inconsciente-Twister. Doesn’t surprise me Gaussical was the one they went for. At least it gives you an idea of what it’s about. And reminds you that spoken languages are sometimes woefully incapable of expressing certain concepts.
I felt great now. Oh yes. So the fugitive was one of those statistically near-impossible Psi oddballs who could alter, through some as-yet undiscovered means, the shape of the Gaussian bell curve that describes the statistical probability of any number of events. The macroscopic equivalent of Maxwell’s famous demon, according to a pozzie named Einstein who knows more about physics than Sandokan Mompracem does about alien languages and customs.
Which did nothing to clear things up for me. Then Einstein put it in clear, pedestrian terms: the guy could make it rain inside a closed room. He could generate errors in a computer processor. He could make the molecules in one body momentarily intangible to another body. Fortunately the Uncertainty Principle is universal, so even a Psi case like that couldn’t decide beforehand which of all the possible fluctuation effects would occur in any given instance. In the rare cases when a Psi might be able to concentrate hard enough to produce a more controlled, voluntary effect, the Law of the Conservation of Energy says that other completely random events would have to occur simultaneously. Like the gravity-free microzone where my poor pal Zorro’s whip and sombrero floated up in the air.
So that’s why the aliens were so worried.
The case of Makrow 34 would have given Heisenberg himself a giant headache if he’d had to explain it. Or maybe the strange power was so strong in him, he could laugh at the laws of physics.
The prisoner didn’t need to carry weapons. He was a lethal weapon himself. The Colossaur and the human did well to free him as soon as they could. Nobody in his right mind fights by hand if he can get hold of a good maser. Taking on Zorro and the Grodo was the most those two could manage, and that only because they were caught by surprise. On their own, they could never have outfought a well-armed and alert positronic robot. But when the freak started messing with the odds, it was a different story.
Achilles never had a chance. It was a mercy he died without understanding what hit him. First his maser missed, then it stopped working; it could just as easily have exploded or turned into a block of ice—an unlikely but theoretically possible thermodynamic event. Something, in any case, would have happened to keep him from hurting Makrow. The fact is, all the statistical fluctuations of Heisenbergian hell were arrayed against Achilles. He never could have truly harmed the Cetian.
When I really leaned on them, the alien merchants confirmed my suspicions. And, of course, they apologized for not giving us the information sooner. But criminal or not, Makrow 34 was one of them, so the contents of his file had been classified. Go figure.
Now, as the case officer, I had permission to review his file. If I needed to know any other details, I could count on their sincere and complete cooperation. So long as I requested them far enough ahead of time and went through the proper channels and blah blah blah.
Understood?
Yep. Totally. I understood too well. Carte blanche in the Solar System or no, I wouldn’t have anything remotely like free access to information. They’d give me all the authority I needed, but they wouldn’t tell me anything I hadn’t already found out on my own. So not only did I have to find a needle in a haystack, blindfolded, I had to grab it and pocket it—knowing that if I tried the needle might stab me, the hay might burst into flames, a roof beam might fall onto my head, I might be charged by a bull that hadn’t been there a second before, or I might be turned into a frog in the blink of an eye.
So what if the frog I’d be turned into would be a positronic robot frog. I still had to try.
At least there was one bit of hope amid all the tragedy: the records of the docking module energy sensors showed that the fugitives’ fuel reserves were almost empty, and they hadn’t had time to refill them. The two or three crystals they had left wouldn’t be enough for even one hyperspace jump. They have to go to some hideout, somewhere in our own Solar System. Probably in the asteroid belt. Makrow 34 was familiar with it and his rumored energy treasure would be waiting for him there. Somewhere. That’s where I’d have to go to find them. It would be a matter of time. A matter of combing through all the asteroids, one by one.
Simple, right? The sort of fun I enjoy on weekends. I sent out an order—low priority—to every human police frigate, telling them to let me know if they saw anything out of the ordinary. Given the fugitive’s exotic Psi capability, though, I figured they wouldn’t find so much as the shadow of his ship. And I was right about that.
Want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself. As I said, it was up to me to find the needle in the haystack.
Anybody would have thought my hunt was doomed to fail. If Makrow’s treasure was what they said it was, as soon as the outlaws reached it they’d have more than enough energy to beat it from the Solar System and take three spins around the galaxy before I could find them.
But fortunately for me, that sort of childish logic doesn’t work for space, gravity fields, and especially the bizarre geography of hyperspace.
Get near the hyperspace jump-off point, you’re automatically in the zone that the Burroughs detectors sweep. If their ship tried, they’d set off every alarm in the station. Plus a barrage or two of antimatter-headed missiles. I prayed to all the gods I don’t believe in that Makrow and his sidekicks would risk it. That would have made the endgame easier. Getting themselves disintegrated would have saved me so many hassles.
Likewise, if by some impossible means (Gaussical means, that is) they managed to escape the radar installations, well, once that monster left our jurisdiction, his adventures would be somebody else’s responsibility, you know.
In cases like this, I always ask myself what Philip Marlowe would do, but on this occasion it did me no good. After rereading the complete works of Chandler for the millionth time, I gave up. From what I could tell, there were no Gaussicals on Earth in the 1940s, no aliens, no hyperspace jump-off points in the Oort Cloud, no potential hideouts the size of an asteroid belt where a criminal could lie low.
Or rather—all those things did exist, but they didn’t count for anything in the game of hide-and-seek. As for the bad guys’ weapons, Marlowe and company had also had it pretty easy in Los Angeles compared to me. What’s a lead-filled blackjack and a couple of revolvers next to having all the laws of probability turned against you?
My buddies offered me all the help they could. It wasn’t much. They didn’t have any suggestions either. My best friend, Chester Spillane, even loaned me his collection of Mike Hammer novels and twentieth-century detective movies, in case I could find any inspiration in them.
I read and watched them all. Good thing I was so meticulous. And lucky for me, my friend had such a wide definition that his detective holotapes included a bunch of cop comedies, restored from old celluloid prints.
48 Hours. Leads: Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy. Archetypes, almost caricatures. The simple, slightly brutish but honest white policeman. The clever, sardonic black criminal (small-time criminal, of course, so viewers could identify with him: bad, but not that bad). Not much in the way of research, though pretty entertaining. The thing is, it made an idea bubble up through my germanium-foam circuits.
Why not follow the white cop’s lead? Fight fire with fire. Use a bad guy to trap another bad guy.
Homeopathy. Like seeks like.
Since the Burroughs obviously didn’t keep any Cetian smugglers, murderers, thieves, or swindlers on hand, it was logical and completely inevitable that, after a quick trip to the station’s nanoelectronic workshops, half an hour later I’d be walking into the force-field cell for my first meeting with Vasily Fernández.
Five
I had read his file. It clearly said what he was: a little guy with no relevant
qualities. That’s all he was, at first sight. A high-security cell isn’t the best place for bulking up on steroids, installing a super-cyborg arm, or getting plastic surgery. He still was more skinny than stout, more short than tall, just another Slavic-Latino, ordinary face, average intelligence.
But did I say no relevant qualities? Sorry, my mistake.
A minor detail. Almost nothing. The statistical genetic lottery has also cursed him with the strongest, most uncontrollable, least comprehensible, least desirable Psi gift of them all.
You guessed it. Vasily Fernández was the only other known Gaussical. Not counting that first furious Grodo, I mean. He was also the only Gaussical born on Earth in the past 150 years. That is, since the aliens made contact with the human species. If there were others before him (I suspect that Alexander the Great and Napoleon Bonaparte may have been Gaussicals, for example, but I can’t prove it), they probably had the same experience he did at first: they had no idea what they were.
Orphaned so young he never knew his parents, after leaving the charity orphanage Vasily began to make his way as a purse-snatcher, pickpocket, small-time thief, forger, and two-bit flimflammer. And he seemed to be doing a decent job of it. His hard work earned him a nickname, El Afortunado, for his incredible luck.
But his career took a wrong turn when he finally realized that what he was getting away with couldn’t be a simple matter of good luck—or bad luck for everybody else. Having access to information supposedly off-limits to Homo sapiens (one of these days the aliens are going to have to get serious about the dark Web), he connected the dots and realized he was a living unlikelihood, a Gaussical. That made him cocky, ambitious; he figured there was no chance he’d ever get caught. He was right about that for several months. So long as he stuck to Earth, Mars, and the asteroids.
But when he tried expanding his operations to the Burroughs, for reasons he never spilled, it only took my buddies five days to detect and catch him. I admit it wasn’t easy. Vasily worked alone, he was slippery and cautious, and while his weird abilities never came close to the controlled power that Makrow 34 displayed in his escape, my buddies Ivan and Miyamoto suffered a few setbacks during the investigation that they put down to bad luck—until it occurred to them to add an anti-Psi force field to their “hunting gear.” That was the end of the strange happenings. Soon they netted their fish, and then Vasily El Afortunado’s forays came to a stop. After that, Ivan was no longer just Ivan; he became Ivan Stalin.
But even as he fell, El Afortunado somehow managed to land on his feet. His track record and psychological profile showed that he wasn’t a deviant or a sociopath. In plain words, not such a bad guy. He just didn’t know a better way to make a living than by dodging the law. He hadn’t committed any serious crimes on Earth, Mars, or the asteroids, and hadn’t caused significant damage. On our station he simply hadn’t had time to do much. So he avoided the death penalty usually meted out to wanton Psis and only got ten years in prison.
He’d done three of them right here on the Burroughs, of course. Anywhere else in the Solar System would have been unthinkable. The aliens wouldn’t have allowed humans to access the necessary Psi-proof force-field technology in a thousand years. So it was either keep him here, let him go, or kill him. The humans never would have accepted the second option, and the aliens refused to consider the third, so here he stayed.
A good thing, too. Their paranoid precaution would now give a huge boost to me, the Galactic Trade Confederation, and—if he treated me straight—maybe even Vasily himself.
“I got nothing to tell nobody they ain’t already dragged out of me a hundred times with their damn drugs, and I ain’t interested in the shitty benefits of any fucking rehab program,” he politely informed me by way of greeting when I stepped into his cell. “Maybe they made me a snitch against my will, but they won’t make me a bootlicker for the aliens like you guys. Come on, pozzie, you look ridiculous in that B-movie detective get-up,” he went on. “Who do you think you are, Dick Tracy?”
I activated the compressor pumps in my chest and sighed. It sounded exactly the way I wanted: melodramatically impressive. The truth is I was worried, though. Did he know as much about twentieth-century crime fiction as he seemed to?
I’d have to tread carefully. I’d already figured out from his file that he’d be a hard nut to crack. He was a perfect example of a person convinced that, if the world had had enough of him, he’d had enough of the world. He was kind of right about that, from his point of view: he didn’t have anyone or anything waiting for him on the outside.
But I had to get him on my side. I didn’t have any choice, if I wanted to catch Makrow 34 before he screwed over the entire Solar System. Only one choice for him, and it had to be yes.
I took off my fedora, like I was getting ready for a long, sincere conversation, and pulled what looked like a supersophisticated wristwatch from a trench coat pocket to show him. “My name is Raymond, Vasily, and I’m here to make you an offer you can’t refuse—not unless you’re a complete idiot. Know what this is?”
It was a rhetorical question, of course, but he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “I suppose it’s your videophone-ballscratcher-wristwatch, Dick Tracy,” he growled, and I felt a little better. My trick had worked: at least now I knew he’d never seen The Godfather. If that was true, and the gods were smiling on me, maybe he hadn’t watched 48 Hours either. It seemed he was just a fan of the yellow-hatted cop in the funny pages.
“Wrong. It’s a portable anti-Psi field generator. Pure nanotech, an experimental prototype, courtesy of our good friends from the Galactic Trade Confederation. Don’t let the shape fool you. You wear it around your neck, not your wrist.”
He shrugged, a perfect show of not giving a damn, but I caught a dim spark of interest deep in his green eyes. He’d taken the bait! Now all I had to do was reel him in slowly, carefully, and I’d have him.
“So,” I went on, feeling more and more sure of myself. “Want to know what it does? It goes around a Psi criminal’s neck, and whenever he’s about to use his ability, this little baby activates and stops him. It doesn’t have to stay on all the time—a real energy-saver. Sweet invention, isn’t it?” A sly grin came across Vasily’s face. It didn’t take Psi powers to guess what he was thinking. “Oh, I almost forgot. Some paranoid sadist who’s allergic to trusting other people’s good intentions decided at the last minute to add a little explosive capsule to the design. A precisely calculated quantity of Ultrasemtex. There’s no risk it might blow up by accident from getting bumped or what have you, but if somebody tries taking it off and ditching it—boom!” I luxuriated in the explosive onomatopoeia. “The guy ends up minus a head, and nobody around him gets a scratch. That’s why we don’t put it on your wrist or ankle—some people wouldn’t mind trading a limb for freedom. Especially with all the regeneration tech they have these days, it’s not like losing a hand is forever. But even a Grodo can’t live long without a head.”
“Neat toy,” Vasily allowed. “But what’s it to me? I ain’t no fucking alien lover.”
We’d have to do something about his language.
“This interesting little device represents your conditional freedom,” I said, and tossed it into his lap, casual. “The decision is yours. If you agree to wear it and give me some help, you won’t have to spend the next seven years of your sentence in this little box. Well, let’s call it six years, because they tell me your behavior has been exemplary. They’ll knock a few months off, count on it.”
El Ex-Afortunado lifted his hands—then stopped, halfway to his neck. “I knew it was a trick. Pozzies never play square.” He dropped the collar like a kid who’s tired of a toy and pushed it my way with one foot, scornful. “Might as well leave, pozzie. I’m doing okay here. I got room to exercise, I got enough books to read and enough tapes to watch to last me three lifetimes, all the virtual sex I could want, and—”
“And nobody to share it with and nobody to talk to. No streets, no freed
om, no real life.” I cut him short, triumphant, and picked up the collar without offering it to him a second time. “So don’t tell me you’re not interested, because I’m not going to believe you.”
“Hmm, maybe,” he admitted, reluctantly. “Come on and spit it out, pig. Tell me what you want from me. You gotta have something pretty heavy on your hands or you wouldn’t be taking a chance with a superdangerous Gaussical like me.”
I didn’t set him straight about how dangerous he was—not yet. I told him the whole story in broad strokes, even about the stash of energy crystals that Makrow 34 might have hidden somewhere in the asteroid belt.
When I was done, Vasily let out a short but infectiously lighthearted laugh.
“I get it. Cute little assignment your bosses dumped on you, pozzie. Interesting. Maybe I even know somebody knows something about this Makrow guy. Ain’t too many Cetians out in the asteroid belt. Ain’t supposed to be any at all, right? One thing I’m not clear on: you want me to help you find a needle in a haystack, then grab it without getting stabbed?” He was using my own metaphor. I guess humans have a limited number of analogies in Standard Anglo-Hispano. I nodded, glad to see how well we understood each other. “But all you offer me is to spring me from this force-field cage so as I can spend the rest of my life with an electronic dog collar.”
“Plus we erase your record. You get a clean slate,” I added, suspecting he was going to turn me down. But I wasn’t about to give up.
“A clean slate.” Vasily cleared his throat loudly and spat on the immaculate pseudo-wood floor of the cell. The nanocomponents built into the phony parquet began bustling around the little puddle of sputum, absorbing it with the efficiency you’d expect from alien tech. He looked on with a hatred bordering on tenderness. “Oh, pardon my manners. I just can’t get used to this air conditioning,” he said snidely. “Besides, the little bugs are fun to watch.”