Fortunately, Shopatsky House was on the outer rim, with a backyard that no one could see unless they happened to be right on the other side of the dome, looking in. I used the switchblade I’d gotten from Dirk to cut through the molding on all four sides of the window. Pressing in at the bottom made the heavy pane angle out at the top, and I managed to get it to fall toward me. I jockeyed it the half meter down to the ground.
There was no way short of wearing a full surface suit to avoid leaving DNA and other identifying things behind, and so I didn’t even bother to try to cover my tracks. After all, I’d been in the house earlier with Lakshmi’s permission; if Mac’s people ever did investigate this break-in, that fact would exonerate me.
I looked around the small home and quickly found the writing station. Lakshmi apparently wrote with a keyboard; there was one sitting on a little table next to a recliner chair, opposite a monitor wall. I understood that those who were serious about words and how punctuation was wielded preferred keyboards to voice-recognition.
I looked everywhere in this room that might conceal a paper diary, but it clearly wasn’t here. I moved into the living room, which had the roll-top desk, and started looking through its cubbyholes and drawers but, again, bupkes.
I went to the wall that had the bookcase leaning against it, and looked at each of the spines in turn. As I’d noted before, they weren’t alphabetical but chronological, with Lakshmi’s own books at the end. There were about eighty books in all, and—yes, yes, there it was: a short hardcover volume, with no printing on the spine, inserted at the far right of the second shelf from the top.
The thick front cover was blank, too, but the title page said, “Journal of Denny T. O’Reilly.” The pages were filled with text in a nice font—a proper little book.
I heard a sound, wheeled around, and saw the front door sliding open. There was no way for me to make it out the same way I’d come in without crossing the line of sight of whoever was coming in. I ducked farther into the room with the bookcase, then peered around the jamb of that room’s open doorway to see who was entering.
My heart jumped. It was as if I were seeing a ghost.
A beautiful, brown-haired, brown-eyed, brown-skinned ghost.
It was Lakshmi Chatterjee, back from the dead.
I moved deeper into the room. The entryway wasn’t carpeted, and I could hear what sounded like hard-soled shoes being dropped. I didn’t hear anything else for a bit, which might have meant she was just standing there, but more likely meant she was now walking barefoot. I didn’t know how she’d been rescued, but she was probably sweaty and tired; if she was like me, she’d head for the shower—and I wasn’t sure where that was in this house. If it was off the other room, no problem—I could make good my escape while she was in there. But if it was off this room—and there was another closed door opposite the one I’d just come through—well, then, I was in trouble.
She took a right, not a left, and I let out my held breath—but she was going first to the kitchen, not the bathroom, damn it. Still, if she buried her head in the refrigerator, I might be able to sneak past her. I heard sounds that I couldn’t quite identify, and then some sort of machine started up. I ducked back out of view and waited. It took her a few moments to emerge from the kitchen, and when she did so, she was magnificently, totally, wonderfully nude. The washing machine must have been in, or just off of, the kitchen; I recognized now the sound of electrostatic spin cleansing.
She turned left, facing me in all her curvy perfection, and her mouth dropped open in absolute shock.
“Hello, Lakshmi,” I said, stepping toward her, my gun in my hand.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.
“I might ask you the same thing. How’d you get home?”
“None of your damn business.” She noticed that I was holding the diary. “Put that back.”
“Not a chance.”
“You walk out of here with it, and I’m calling the police.”
“Let’s call them right now. Tell them what you tried to do to Dr. Pickover and me.”
“Let’s do that,” she said, hands now on her lovely hips. “Tell the whole solar system where the Alpha Deposit is.”
I considered my options. I could just shoot her—but the body would eventually be discovered, and Mac would have no trouble tracing the bullet to my gun. I could simply run for it—she doubtless had no idea yet that I’d removed the back window, and so would be surprised when I headed that way instead of toward the front door. Or I could stay here and see what developed; it is, after all, not my norm to run out on a beautiful naked woman.
I decided, somewhat reluctantly, to simply leave. I walked slightly toward her, pointing the gun at her, then headed for the little office, now backing away from her. I made it most of the way to the hole where the window had been, reholstered the gun so one of my hands would be free to climb out, turned around, and—
Pow!
She’d grabbed something heavy—I didn’t know what—and thrown it at me. On Earth, she’d have needed a baseball pitcher’s arm to hurl whatever it was so far, but here it was easy. She might have been a lousy aim with a shotgun, but she hit me right between the shoulders. The impact sent me tumbling over her windowsill, and I went headfirst into her backyard—my noggin, sadly, not hitting soft ferns but rather the large sheet of alloquartz I’d removed earlier. It took me a second to regain my senses. I was scrambling to my feet when I heard Lakshmi shout, “Freeze!”
I didn’t exactly do that. Instead, I rolled onto my butt and sat looking up at her as she leaned out the window, perfect breasts hanging down.
“Or what?” I said. There was no way she had a concealed weapon.
“Or you die.”
“How?”
“The self-destruct device in that book you’re holding.”
“Oh, come on!”
She shrugged as if it were of no real concern to her. “Look inside the back cover.”
I did so and, lo and behold, stuck there was a piece of plastic about the size of an old-fashioned business card and several millimeters thick—the kind of explosive someone had cleverly nicknamed “cardite.” Such things had transceiver chips inside them and could indeed be detonated by remote control. I tried to rip the back cover off the book, but the hardcover binding was too tough.
“You don’t have the remote,” I said, looking back at Lakshmi.
“Wanna bet?”
“Reiko Takahashi has it.”
“No, she doesn’t. It’s geared to my computer.”
“You’re bluffing.”
“Try me. It’ll blow the book to bits—and take off your arm, at least, it if doesn’t outright kill you.”
“Let’s call Miss Takahashi and find out,” I said, lifting my left arm to bring my wrist phone closer to my face.
“You seem to think you’re in the driver’s seat here, Mr. Lomax. You’re not.” She spoke over her shoulder: “Persis?”
It was hard to make out from here, but her computer—that red cube I’d seen before sitting on the roll-top desk—replied in a female voice: “Yes, Lakshmi?”
“In thirty seconds from my mark, detonate the explosive in the book—and please do a countdown.”
“Mars seconds or Earth seconds?” asked Persis. Since the Martian sol was 1.03 times the length of an Earth day, Martian seconds were 1.03 times as long as Earth ones.