Red Planet Blues

THIRTY-TWO

The visible moose turned to face us, looking startled. I ran toward the door on the right and hit the keypad, and pounded out the skeleton-key numbers as fast as my phone read them back to me. I had my gun out, just in case Rory wasn’t alone, and—

And he wasn’t. The paleontologist was lying on his back on the one and only examination bed in the sickbay. He’d been strapped down, doubtless with the aid of the meese, and his work shirt removed—small consolation, I’m sure, that this time he wasn’t going to lose another favorite garment. Looming over him was a scrawny, pale man with shoe-polish-brown hair in his mid-thirties—younger than me, but a toothpick; there was no question which of us would win in a fight. Still, the man was holding a cutting laser, which he’d been in the middle of using to make a vertical incision in Rory’s chest, not unlike the one I’d seen Horatio Fernandez carve in Trace’s corpse. A deepscan was displayed on the wall; it took me a second to realize that it was showing the interior of Rory’s torso.

I gestured with my gun at the pale man. “Drop the laser and put your hands up.”

“Alex!” said Rory, lifting his head to look at me.

“Hands up!” I said again to the scrawny man, who had ignored me. Meanwhile, next door, Mac shouted, “I said, freeze!” I was torn; if he needed backup, I should perhaps go help him. But a moment later, I heard Mac say, “That’s better. This is a broadband disruptor. It’s already taken down one of you today. Don’t make me use it again. Keep your hands above your heads.”

I cocked my pistol and aimed it at the thin man’s face. “Make like your goons,” I said. “Reach for the sky.”

The man set down the laser and did so. His arms were skeletal.

“Who are you?” I demanded.

“Take a hike,” he replied in a reedy, weak voice.

I turned my phone, attached to the suit’s left wrist, so that it could see his face. “Identify this person.”

“Error twenty-three,” replied the device, which I had programmed to use Peter Lorre’s voice. “No probable match.”

I shook the damn thing off and looked back out into the corridor. Mac was now marching the meese toward the airlock. I turned back to the emaciated man. “What the hell are you doing opening up Dr. Pickover?”

Rory answered that: “I told the goons the diary is sealed inside my torso.”

I made an impressed face. “And is it?”

“Yes. I had Fernandez put it in there for safekeeping.” I looked at the deepscan. There was indeed the ghostly outline of an object the right size next to one of the ballast cylinders. “The goons threatened to kill Reiko if I didn’t give them the diary. I had to tell them where it was.”

There were two chairs in the room, padded enough to be comfortable even under Earth gravity. I set my fishbowl on one of them, then pointed to the other one; the scrawny man sat on it and lowered his hands. I moved back to Pickover. The restraints were built into the medical bed, but although a patient couldn’t undo them once strapped in, the release mechanisms were plainly labeled. I lifted the latch for each of the four restraints, and Rory sat up, the incision on his chest opening a bit as he did so. A biological would be rubbing his wrists and ankles now to restore circulation, but Rory just sat there, looking daggers at his captor.

“Let me have the diary,” I said.

Rory hesitated for a moment then did what the skinny man had been about to do before I’d interrupted him: he stuck a hand through the plastiskin and foam rubber just below his metal sternum, rummaged around, and pulled out the diary—still missing its back cover, but sealed now in a plastic bag. He handed it to me.

The bag was slick with clear lubricant. I didn’t want the damn thing slipping around, so I removed the little bound volume from the bag and shoved it into my surface suit’s hip pocket.

“What’s become of Miss Takahashi?” I asked.

Rory’s face lit up. “She escaped, Alex—with my help; I created a diversion. Those big blokes wanted to get rid of her; they want to get rid of everyone they think knows where the Alpha is, and they figured she must know, because she’s read the diary.” Rory was now putting his work shirt back on. “I kept telling them the diary doesn’t disclose the location, and Reiko told them the same thing, but they didn’t believe us.”

I spoke to my phone while keeping my gun aimed at Rory’s captor. “Call Reiko Takahashi.”

“Shunted to voice mail,” said Peter Lorre.

“Call Horatio Fernandez at NewYou.”

Three rings, then: “Hello, Alex.”

“Horatio, has Miss Takahashi returned?”

“No.”

“She escaped”—I looked at Rory—“how long ago?”

“Forty minutes, I’d say.”

“She escaped forty minutes ago. And I’m with Dr. Pickover.”

“I’ll let you know when she arrives here.”

I shook the phone off. “Who are you?” I said again to the seated man.

“Get stuffed.”

“My phone would know you if you were a longtime Mars resident—so you aren’t. I’ll assume you came here on this ship, and you’re too chicken to go out into the dome. That’s probably wise: New Klondike is a rough place, and it wouldn’t be long before someone there decided to snap you in two.” I took a step closer. “I might even decide to do it myself, and—”

I hadn’t paid any attention to his clothing until now, but the shirt he was wearing was burnt orange with a circular patch over the left breast, a patch bearing the “ISL” logo of InnerSystem Lines; it was a uniform top. “Christ, you’re part of the crew.” I spoke to my phone again. “How many crew on the Kathryn Denning?”

“Two,” wheezed Peter Lorre. “A primary bowman and a backup bowman. The former normally travels awake, while the latter makes the voyage in hibernation and is only thawed out in emergencies.”

“So which are you?” I demanded.

“Go climb a tree,” said the man.

“There aren’t any for a hundred million kilometers,” I replied. I looked at the phone again. “Get the names of the two bowmen from the InnerSystem office here.”

“A moment.” Then: “The primary bowman is Beverly Kowalchuk. The backup is Jeffrey Albertson.”

“So you’re Albertson,” I said. I gestured with my gun for him to get to his feet.

He hesitated for a moment then did get up. It was the exact opposite of the effect one normally observed with someone newly arrived from Earth. Usually, the freshly thawed stand with way too much energy and actually lift themselves off the ground a bit; I’m tall enough that I’d bumped my head on ceilings a few times shortly after my own arrival here. But Albertson got slowly to his feet, wincing as he did so; if he was weak here, movement back on the mother world must have been excruciating for him.

“Those thugs of yours,” I said. “One of them has already been fried—by the broadband disruptor you just heard that police officer talking about. We haven’t identified him yet, but we will—same with whoever it is inside the other two.”

The thin man shrugged. “Uno and Dos are the only names they’ve got.”

Pickover brightened. “Oh, I get it! Alex, the third one wasn’t called Trace; rather it was Tres—Spanish for three; sounds the same, but spelt different. Uno, Dos, Tres.”

“Huh,” I said. “How high do the numbers go, Jeff?”

“Jump off a cliff.”

“So what the hell’s the matter with you, anyway?” I asked, not expecting an answer.

Rory was now standing beside me. “My grandfather looked the same way,” he said. “It takes a lot out of you.”

“What does?”

“Well, I suppose it could be anything, but…”

I waved the gun. “On the examining bed.”

Albertson glared at me, but then did as I’d commanded. He simply sat on the bed’s edge, but it was enough. The ship’s computer obviously recognized him, even if my phone hadn’t, and his medical records came up on a monitor in the room. I scanned them quickly. “‘Stage-four lymphatic cancer.’ And those numbers don’t go any higher.” I looked at him. “Tough luck. I wouldn’t want to die in jail.”

Albertson crossed his arms defiantly in front of his chest. I idly wondered if I could bring myself to rough up somebody in such bad shape, and—

“Oh, my,” said Pickover. He’d been looking at Albertson’s medical record in more detail; I imagine the scientific gobbledygook meant more to him than it would have to me. “Alex, look at this.”

He was pointing at some text on the screen. I squinted to make it out, and—

And I guess this wasn’t Albertson after all. Not only was the date of birth given, but the computer had also helpfully calculated his age and placed it in brackets after the date: “78 years.”

I turned back to him, and—

And—

God.

And he was the backup bowman. He—Christ, yes. I’d never heard of anything like this, but…

He looked like he was in his thirties. Biologically, he probably was in his thirties.

“You’ve been doing this forever,” I said. “For decades. You keep making trips back and forth between Earth and Mars—spending eight months or more each way in hibernation. I didn’t know it was possible to do that many stints in deep freeze, but—”

Cancer.

A man who’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer decades ago.

“You’re Albertson, all right,” I said. “But that’s not the name you were born with—was it, Willem?”

“Why don’t you—”

“Take a long walk off a short pier? The nearest one of those is back with the trees.”

Rory was staring at the man now, his eyes wide. “My… God,” he said. “Willem Van Dyke—I never thought I’d see you in the flesh, but…” He shook his head. “The disease has taken a lot out of you, but, yes, I can see it now. Well, well, well. There are a million things I’d like to ask you about the second expedition, but…” He drew his artificial eyebrows together, and his voice turned angry. “Christ, you almost killed me!”

Van Dyke slid off the examining bed. “I did no such thing. That incision in your torso can be sealed easily enough. And besides, you can’t be killed.”

“Not here,” said Rory. “Not now. Before. You’re the one who brought the land mines along on the B. Traven. You’re the one who booby-trapped the Alpha. Damn it, you blew half my face off! You could have killed me!”

“You can’t be killed,” Van Dyke said. “You’re not alive.”

Rory spluttered in a mechanical way. I looked at Van Dyke. “Those mines were passive protection,” I said, “and you planted them long ago. But when you learned that Denny O’Reilly’s granddaughter was coming to Mars, you decided you had to take active steps, right?”

Van Dyke said nothing. I let out a theatrical sigh. “You’re not getting how this works, Billy-boy. I ask you questions, you answer—or you die. It’s really not a difficult concept.”

Van Dyke was looking not at me but at the wall where a freeze-frame of the deepscan of Rory was still being displayed. I suppose it galled Van Dyke that Rory could have comfortably taken the scanner’s radiation forever, when it was radiation exposure that had given Van Dyke cancer. But he said nothing.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll tell you. You knew Denny O’Reilly had a mistress whose last name was Takahashi, of course. And you work for InnerSystem Lines—you get to see the passenger manifests for all their ships; you check them each time you return to Earth. When you saw there was a Reiko Takahashi booked to come to Mars, you got curious. It didn’t take much digging to find out who she was. And, well, a collector of one sort knows collectors of other sorts: she’d doubtless made inquiries about selling the only extant copy of her father’s diary—and you figured it might note the location of the Alpha. Couldn’t have something like that kicking around. And so you sent in the clones.”

“They’re not clones,” Van Dyke snapped.

“Work with me,” I replied. “You’ve spent most of the last thirty-plus years on ice. Physically, you’re—what?—thirty? Thirty-two?”

Van Dyke glared at me defiantly for a moment, and I raised the gun higher. “Thirty-eight,” he said at last. And then, acknowledging that he didn’t even look that old despite the ravages of cancer, he added, “I stay out of the sun.”

“I guess it’s a good deal for InnerSystem Lines,” said Rory. “Your training stays fresh. From your point of view, it’s been only a couple of years since you first started your job. You just thaw out for a few days or weeks between each journey, while this ship is prepared for its next voyage.”

“I usually don’t even bother coming out of deep freeze here on Mars,” Van Dyke said. “When I do come back to living here, I’m going to come back in style.”

“You’re going to transfer,” I said.

Van Dyke snorted.

“What?” I said.

“Like I would ever do that.”

“But that’s the cure for cancer. Hell, that’s the cure for everything.”

“No,” said Van Dyke. “It isn’t—but there will be a cure for cancer.”

“That’s what they’ve been saying forever,” said Pickover. “But it seems like it’s always twenty years in the future.”

“The are making progress,” Van Dyke said. “I check, every time I come out of hibernation. I’m guessing it’s just ten years off now…”

“And if you can stay on ice for most of that time,” I said, “you can get the cure.” I shook my head. “But why not just transfer? I know it was hellishly expensive back when you were first diagnosed, but—”

“That’s not the reason.”

I frowned and it came to me. “Lakshmi—the writer-in-residence here—told me that you’re devoutly religious. Is that why you haven’t transferred?”

“Transferring,” he said. “Such crap. It’s not the same person.”

Rory tilted his head to look at the man who’d been slicing him open. “People feel differently about it now.”

“God doesn’t,” said Van Dyke.

Rory couldn’t dispute that and so he fell silent.

“And what are you going to do when they find a cure?” I asked. “When you’re well again?”

“Go fly a kite.”

“Okay. I’ll tell you. Weingarten and O’Reilly promised you a share of the proceeds from the Alpha. And you want what you think is coming to you. When you’re well, you’re going to work that claim.”

“And you’re out to stop anyone who might exploit it first,” said Rory.

“Hence hiring the thugs with Dazzling Don Hutchison’s face,” I added. But then I found myself taking a step backward. “No,” I said. “No, wait a minute. You didn’t hire those guys.” The word “skytop” was echoing in my head—the decades-old slang Tres had used. “Christ, you are those other guys. You’re—my God—you’re all three of them. You have transferred. That’s why Tres called you ‘Actual’—you’re the actual Willem Van Dyke, and they’re copies.”

Van Dyke looked like he was going to deny it. But someone who had gone to such extraordinary lengths to stay alive doubtless had a certain appreciation for what my Smith & Wesson could do to him. “I’ve made proxies, that’s all,” he said, in his thin, disease-ravaged voice. “I’m the real me; I’m the one with the soul. Those are just knockoffs. I made a deal with the guy who runs NewYou here to produce them in secret.”

“Horatio Fernandez?” Rory asked.

“No, no. His name is—”

“Joshua Wilkins,” I supplied.

“That’s him. Nasty man, but he could be bought. I had him create the three Dazzling Dons a couple of years ago.”

“It’s illegal to make multiple versions of the same person,” Rory said. “It’s obscene to do so.”

“They were disposable—and they aren’t people.”

“What do they think about that?” I asked.

“Same thing I do, of course.”

“Why three guys who look the same?”

Van Dyke lifted his eyebrows as if it were obvious. “To remind them that they aren’t real people. They’re ersatz; interchangeable; disposable.”

I nodded. “And I bet they were supposed to be each other’s alibis—one would be seen in public while the others did whatever needed to be done to protect the Alpha; they were never meant to all be seen in the same place at the same time. But then one of them was shut down, and so you figured a bigger force was needed next time.”

And that explained why Tres had rushed Huxley, even though Mac had told him they had a broadband disruptor. Tres was probably as ignorant of what one could do as Willem Van Dyke had been; they all had minds three decades out-of-date.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”

“Where?”

“Prison, ultimately, I imagine.”

“I’m not going to jail,” Van Dyke said.

“No? You roughed me up, shot Dr. Pickover, and then kidnapped him and Miss Takahashi with the intention of murdering them.”

“I did no such thing. Uno, Dos, and Tres did all that, not me. And Tres is deactivated, and Uno and Dos are already in police custody.”

“You masterminded it all.”

“You’d have a hard time proving that.”

I stole a line from Mudge the computer. “Be that as it may.”

“Regardless,” said Rory, “you booby-trapped the Alpha.”

“Even if I did—and I admit nothing—that’s outside the police’s jurisdiction.”

I gestured with the gun. “Walk.” I picked up my helmet and got him out into the brightly lit corridor, followed by me and then Rory. I continued to speak: “If I were you, I’d do a deal with the police. You said it yourself: you’ve only got a couple of years left. Don’t waste them in court. Cop a plea, pay a fine, forget about the Alpha, and get back to being on ice—and, who knows, maybe someday they will find a cure for cancer.”

The corridor switched from carpeted to uncarpeted as we approached the airlock, and our six footfalls were now making a fair bit of racket.

The airlock door was closed. I wondered how Mac had managed to get through; there’s no way he could have crammed himself and the two meese in all at once. It was a puzzle in logic—the kind Juan Santos enjoyed.

There were also three of us, but there was no reason we had to all go through at once. It was a toss of a coin whether Rory should exit first, or Van Dyke and I should. Of course, Van Dyke needed to get into a surface suit to do so, but there was a surface suit hanging by the door, and—

Ah, and it had the name Jeff Albertson on it. Well, he was part of the crew.

The light above the inner airlock door suddenly changed from green to red: someone was coming through from the other side. I supposed Mac could be returning, after having handed over the meese to other cops. Or it could be Bertha or someone else from the shipyard, or Beverly Kowalchuk or one of the local InnerSystem staff. Without knowing who it was, it seemed premature to get Van Dyke into a surface suit; maybe there was a moose out there named Cuatro, and having Van Dyke suited up would be playing right into his giant hands. “Don’t bother changing,” I said. “Not yet.”

I held my gun in front of me with both hands and aimed it at the airlock door. It wasn’t long before the light above it changed back to green, the door popped open that fifteen centimeters to reveal the recessed handle, someone pulled the door aside the rest of the way, and—

And a transfer with holovid star Krikor Ajemian’s face was standing there in front of us.