“When you hear the crunch, you’re there,” Hauser said encouragingly.
Gee, thanks for telling me that, Doctor! Quaid leaned back against the wall and rested, with the alien tentacle still wedged up his nose. He felt blood trickling through the sinus cavity, somewhere in there, like boiling brine percolating through cold limestone caves. Oooooh, suffer! His nose felt so swollen that it seemed his eyes must be pushed to the sides of his face, like those of a frog.
Meanwhile, Hauser was still talking. He walked into a close-up on the screen. “Now this is the plan. Get your ass to Mars and take a room at the Hilton. Flash the Brubaker ID.” There was a flash shot of the fake identification in the satchel. “That’s all there is to it. Just do what I tell you, and we can nail the sonovabitch who fucked us both.” Hauser’s tone became more personal. “I’m counting on you, buddy. Don’t let me down.”
The TV turned itself off, Quaid was left in the dark, overwhelmed by more than the pain.
He had gotten his information. He was, or had been, Hauser, a Mars Intelligence agent. That explained his special abilities with hands and guns. An agent was a cleaned-up name for killer, in the name of the mission. He had been on the wrong side, and now was on the right side, so his former pals were now his enemies.
But if they had caught him after he changed sides, as obviously they had, why hadn’t they simply killed him? Why go to such extraordinary trouble to set up a man they would consider to be a traitor on Earth, with a doll like Lori and a decent if dull job? He had thought it could be to protect him until he testified about something, but it seemed to be his enemies who had set him up like this. That knocked the sense right out of it. So there was still a hell of a lot he didn’t know.
Well, at least he knew where to find the answers. He took a deep breath, took hold of the tentacle, and yanked it from his nose. It came out, streaked with blood and mucus, while the agony flared again.
Dizzy with the pain, he looked at the glistening silver pea held in the gory little claw. So this was the bug! His first thought was to throw it away, but then he had a better notion.
He unwrapped the towel from his head and used it to mop the blood from his hands and face. Then he fished out a Mars bar. He had no appetite at the moment, but didn’t need it.
He saw rats in the shadows. The word had spread again: free food. Well, he was in an obliging mood, though his nose felt as if it had been crushed in a big rattrap. “Get in line, fellows,” he murmured to the rats. “I want every one of you to have an equal chance.”
BEEEEP! A bright red dot flashed on the tracking device. “I got him!” Richter exclaimed. He led the agents through the factory at a run.
Quaid began to repack the satchel. He was about to add the videodisc device when flashlight beams cut through the dusty air. He dropped the machine and ran toward a pile of rubble as a hail of bullets saturated the room. Whoever was firing was taking no chances.
Quaid vaulted silently from the window and ran as fast as his legs could carry him.
Richter and his men swung left and right like heat-seeking missiles. The tracking device showed the quarry’s exact location. The fool must have forgotten how to mask the signal, if he had even been aware of it. Maybe he had done something to interfere with it without realizing, and now was doing something else.
“He’s moving,” Richter said. “In here!” He sprinted through a door, into the designated room.
Something moved. They unleashed a firestorm of bullets that tore up the room.
The shooting stopped. Suddenly it was very quiet. There was no body in sight. What the fuck? Richter checked the tracking device.
The red dot was there, moving. There was a sound, loud in the silence.
“There!” Richter cried.
The automatic rifles fired another burst. A tin can flew up, riddled.
He checked the tracker again. The red dot was moving away. “No, there!” He pointed under a stalled assembly line.
They ran along the line, firing under the belt.
Still no body—and still the dot was moving on the tracker, just beyond the place they had fired at last. Did the man have nine lives?
There was a skittering sound, moving across the floor in the darkness. They fired at the sound, blasting into a pile of junk.
Richter passed his light over the pile. Quaid’s body was not there.
He looked at the tracker again, puzzled. The flashing dot clearly indicated that Quaid was directly in front of them. But he wasn’t. There was only the junk.
Richter slid his light beam over the rubble, and illuminated—
A terrified rat, with a fragment of a Mars bar wrapper in its mouth. The tracker was pinpointing the rat.
Now he caught on. The asshole had fed the bug to the rat, maybe in the candy. They had been chasing the rat, while the quarry got away.
They had been outmaneuvered—again.
Infuriated, he blasted the rat to smithereens.
As a red haze of fury cleared from his eyes, Richter became aware that Helm was standing beside him, holding the remains of the videodisc player. It had been hit by a stray bullet and now squawked like a broken record. Richter slowly turned his head and watched a static-ridden snippet of the recorded message on the cracked screen.
Only a small shard of the disc remained, but there was enough to recognize Hauser’s voice saying: “…Get your ass to Mars squrtrk Get your ass to…”
CHAPTER 14
Ship
Helm drove again. Richter, fuming, composed himself for a formal report. He set the videophone on record and watched as his own image appeared on the screen, as if it were a reflection.
“It’s not looking good,” he said. “He remembers all his field techniques, and he’s been getting help from, get this, Stevens, and God knows who else.” He grimaced, in the manner of a good man beset by incompetence; let Cohaagen make of that what he would. “I put all spaceports on highest alert, but if he doesn’t turn up by takeoff, I’ll grab the first shuttle and be waiting for him on Mars.”
He pressed a button. The disc reversed, then replayed: “…waiting for him on Mars.”
Good enough. He ejected the videodisc, turned to an agent in the back seat, and handed him the disc. “Beam this to Cohaagen, after I’m gone.”
The man nodded. He didn’t need to know why the message was being handled this way, he just had to follow orders. By the time Cohaagen tried to countermand, it would be too late.
Richter intended to nail his quarry, no matter who stood in the way, even if it was his boss.
Through the moving windshield wipers he saw the spaceport coming into view. Well, one thing about going to Mars: it would get him out of this fucking rain! Mars was dry, desert dry; there would never be any rain there.
Next day Richter strode through the empty lounge section of the vessel. Several security guards rushed to keep up with him. The space cycler vibrated and rumbled in preparation for takeoff.
“We’ve looked everywhere,” a security man said. “Baggage, the galley—”
“Staff quarters,” the second security man added.
“What about the landing gear housing?” Richter asked tersely.
The two security men looked at each other. Obviously this had been overlooked.
“I’ll check it out,” Helm said. He headed down some stairs.
Richter passed a porthole. Through it he saw the complex engines and wings of the space cycler. It was a heavy-duty passenger craft, slower but more comfortable than the shuttles. Tourists were fussy about things like acceleration and free-fall, though it was more efficient to accelerate quickly and then coast. Anything for the damned tourists!