And then Cassandra did the most astonishing thing. She’d had no compunctions about bending back his fingers with her bare hands. And she hadn’t hesitated when it came to plunging her naked thumb into his eye. But now that she was going to hurt him down there, she seemed to want no direct contact. She started looking around the room; for a second, she was looking directly at the closet door. I scrunched back against the far wall, hoping she wouldn’t see me. My heart was pounding.
Finally, she found what she was looking for: a wrench, sitting on the floor. She picked it up, raised the wrench above her head and, and looked directly into Pickover’s one good eye—the other had closed as soon as she’d removed her thumb, and had never reopened as far as I could tell. “I’m going to smash your ball bearings into iron filings, unless …”
He closed his other eye now, the plastic lid scrunching.
“Count of three,” she said. “One.”
“I can’t,” he said in that low volume that served as his whisper. “You’d ruin them, sell them off—”
“Two.”
“Please! They belong to science! To all humanity!”
“Three!”
Her arm slammed down, a great arc slicing through the air, the silver wrench smashing into the plastic pouch that was Pickover’s scrotum. He let out a scream greater than any I’d yet heard, so loud, indeed, that it hurt my ears despite the muffling of the partially closed closet door.
She hauled her arm up again, but waited for the scream to devolve into a series of whimpers. “One more chance,” she said. “Count of three.” His whole body was shaking. I felt nauseous.
“One.”
He turned his head to the side, as if by looking away he could make the torture stop.
“Two.”
A whimper escaped his artificial throat.
“Three!”
I found myself looking away, too, unable to watch as—
“All right!”
It was Pickover’s voice, shrill and mechanical, shouting.
“All right!” he shouted again. I turned back to face the tableau: the human-looking woman with a wrench held up above her head, and the terrified mechanical-looking man strapped to the table. “All right,” he repeated once more, softly now. “I’ll tell you what you want to know.”
“You’ll tell me where the alpha deposit is?” asked Cassandra, lowering her arm.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
“Where?”
Pickover was quiet.
“Where?”
“God forgive me …” he said softly.
She began to raise her arm again. “Where?”
“Sixteen-point-four kilometers south-southwest of Nili Patera,” he said. “The precise coordinates are …” and he spoke a string of numbers.
“You better be telling the truth,” Cassandra said.
“I am.” His voice was tiny. “To my infinite shame, I am.”
Cassandra nodded. “Maybe. But I’ll leave you tied up here until I’m sure.”
“But I told you the truth! I told you everything you need to know.”
“Sure you did,” said Cassandra. “But I’ll just confirm that.”
I stepped out the closet, my gun aimed directly at Cassandra’s back. “Freeze,” I said.
Cassandra spun around. “Lomax!”
“Mrs. Wilkins,” I said, nodding. “I guess you don’t need me to find your husband for you anymore, eh? Now that you’ve got the information he stole.”
“What? No, no. I still want you to find Joshua. Of course I do!”
“So you can share the wealth with him?”
“Wealth?” She looked over at the hapless Pickover. “Oh. Well, yes, there’s a lot of money at stake.” She smiled. “So much so that I’d be happy to cut you in, Mr. Lomax—oh, you’re a good man. I know you wouldn’t hurt me!”
I shook my head. “You’d betray me the first chance you got.”
“No, I wouldn’t. I’ll need protection; I understand that—what with all the money the fossils will bring. Having someone like you on my side only makes sense.”
I looked over at Pickover and shook my head. “You tortured that man.”
“That ‘man,’ as you call him, wouldn’t have existed at all without me. And the real Pickover isn’t inconvenienced in the slightest.”
“But … torture,” I said. “It’s inhuman.”
She jerked a contemptuous thumb at Pickover. “He’s not human. Just some software running on some hardware.”
“That’s what you are, too.”
“That’s part of what I am,” Cassandra said. “But I’m also authorized. He’s bootleg—and bootlegs have no rights.”
“I’m not going to argue philosophy with vou.”
“Fine. But remember who works lor whom, Mr. Lomax. I’m the client—and I’m going to be on my way now.”
I held my gun rock-steady. “No, you’re not.”
She looked at me. “An interesting situation,” she said, her tone even. “I’m unarmed, and you’ve got a gun. Normally, that would put you in charge, wouldn’t it? But your gun probably won’t stop me. Shoot me in the head, and the bullet will just bounce off my metal skull. Shoot me in the chest, and at worst you might damage some components that I’ll eventually have to get replaced—which I can, and at a discount, to boot.
“Meanwhile,” she continued, “I have the strength of ten men; I could literally pull your limbs from their sockets, or crush your head between my hands, squeezing it until it pops like a melon and your brains, such as they are, squirt out. So, what’s it going to be, Mr. Lomax? Are you going to let me walk out that door and be about my business? Or are you going to pull that trigger, and start something that’s going to end with you dead?”
I was used to a gun in my hand giving me a sense of power, of security. But just then, the Smith & Wesson felt like a lead weight. She was right: shooting her with it was likely to be no more useful than just throwing it at her. Of course, there were crucial components in an artificial body’s makeup; I just didn’t happen to know what they were, and, anyway, they probably varied from model to model. If I could be sure to drop her with one shot, I’d do it. I’d killed before in self-defense, but …
But this wasn’t self-defense. Not really. If I didn’t start something, she was just going to walk out. Could I kill in cold … well, not cold blood. But she was right: she was a person, even if Pickover wasn’t. She was the one and only legal instantiation of Cassandra Wilkins. The cops might be corrupt here, and they might be lazy. But even they wouldn’t turn a blind eye on attempted murder. If I shot her, and somehow got away, they’d hunt me down. And if I didn’t get away, she would be attacking me in self-defense.
“So,” she said, at last. “What’s it going to be?”
“You make a persuasive argument, Mrs. Wilkins,” I said in the most reasonable tone I could muster under the circumstances.
And then, without changing my facial expression in the slightest, I pulled the trigger.
I wondered if a transfer’s time sense ever slows down, or if it is always perfectly quartz-crystal timed. Certainly, time seemed to attenuate for me then. I swear I could actually see the bullet as it followed its trajectory from my gun, covering the three meters between the barrel and—
And not, of course, Cassandra’s torso.
Nor her head.
She was right; I probably couldn’t harm her that way.