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 shot. 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.