Red Planet Blues

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.

I had never seen a transfer hit another transfer before, and, to be honest, Pickover fought like a girl: like a super-strong, excimer-powered girl. He smashed Moose in the face, and the sound was like two metal buckets crashing together. Moose was now seated on the couch, and I got my arm around his neck from behind. I couldn’t cut off his air supply, but I could flip him over the back of the couch, and I did so. Pickover, meanwhile, grabbed the bottom of the couch in the little gap between it and the floor caused by the stubby couch legs, and he flipped the thing right over, and then he pushed it like a snowplow blade against the wall, trapping Moose in the triangular space.

I’d danced out of the way just in time and got to my feet, aiming the gun at the opening nearest Moose’s head, in case he tried to come out. Pickover sat on the couch, and after a moment I clambered on it, too—which was quite uncomfortable for me, since my butt had to rest on the right angle between the couch’s back and the unupholstered bottom.

Our combined weight was more than Moose could push off him, at least starting in a cramped space where he couldn’t get any leverage. As we sat there—me naked, Pickover with a smoking bullet hole in his chest (and another favorite shirt ruined, I imagined), furniture upturned—Crazy Gustav happened to appear in the corridor, heading to his apartment. His sandy hair, as always, was askew, and he looked at me from his pinched, stubbly face. “Hey, Lomax,” he said, “you really know how to class up a joint.”

I crossed my legs demurely. “Thanks.” I thought about asking him to call the cops, but Crazy Gustav had no fondness for them, and we seemed to have the situation under control. So instead, I just tipped my nonexistent hat at him, and Gustav went into his apartment, shaking his head.