Red Planet Blues

TWENTY-TWO





There was a sign outside Shopatsky House that I hadn’t seen the last time, because I’d approached it then from the opposite direction. It was a white rectangle with dark green lettering, and it talked about who Stavros Shopatsky had been and explained that although some might view this site as a tourist attraction—as if Mars got many tourists—it was actually a private home with a hardworking author within, and people should be quiet and respect the writer’s privacy.

But the sign, like so much in New Klondike, had been vandalized. Someone had carved “Books Suck” into it. Everybody’s a critic.

Most homes had their front doors well secured—and some other potential entrance that was easy to break in through. I went around back. The grounds were covered with ferns that did well in the dim sunlight we got here.

It used to be people left a spare key under a rock—and Mars had plenty of rocks. But unless you were a transfer, you probably used a biometric lock these days, and few people stored a spare finger somewhere in their backyard. I did a cursory search anyway but didn’t find anything. Still, there was a big window in the back—writers, I hear, like to stare out into space, which must be good work if you can get it. The window was probably alloquartz or shatterproof glass, but the molding around the window might, I thought, be made of less-stern stuff, and indeed that turned out to be the case.

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.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake!” declared Lakshmi. “Mars seconds!”

Nothing happened for a moment, and then Lakshmi realized she had to say, “Mark.” She did so, and I heard Persis counting down.

“Thirty. Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight.”

“Toss the book aside, Lomax.”

I drew my gun. “Abort the countdown, Lakshmi.”

I was hoping she wouldn’t think of the obvious. But she did; she crouched down beneath the windowsill, out of my line of fire.

“Twenty-two. Twenty-one. Twenty.”

But since she was crouching, she wasn’t looking. I scrambled forward, just below the sill, surged to my feet standing on the alloquartz pane, grabbed Lakshmi by her wrists, hauled her out through the window, rolled back on my spine, and flipped her past me onto the bed of ferns.

“Seventeen. Sixteen. Fifteen.”

I tossed the book aside; unlike cordite, cardite wasn’t finicky about such things.

“I don’t think either of us wants that destroyed,” I said, jerking my head toward it as I pulled my gun again and aimed it at Lakshmi, who was now appealingly spread-eagled with her tushy facing up.

“Persis,” she said, “abort!”

There was only one problem. Persis apparently couldn’t hear Lakshmi now. “Eleven. Ten.”

“Oh, crap,” I said.

“Eight. Seven.”

Lakshmi rolled onto her back and leapt to her feet, jumping a good meter off the ground as she did so. “Abort!”

“Five.”

“Abort!” she shouted as gravity slowly pulled her down.

“Four.”

“Abort!” she shouted again.

“Three.”

“Abort!” she shouted once more as she lunged toward the window. I was back on my feet and danced out of the way to let her do so.

“Two.”

“Abort!”

“Aborted,” said Persis calmly.

Before Lakshmi could make it in through the window, I jumped over and grabbed her wrists. We struggled for a bit, but although she was strong—recent arrivals from Earth tended to be, by the standards of most Martians—I was stronger. When it ceased to be fun, I pushed her toward the dome, and said, “Keep walking.” I made sure she went three times as far as I’d thrown her—well out of Persis’s earshot, or whatever you called it when a computer was listening. “Stand there,” I said. “Don’t do anything. Just stand there.”

She did so, although now that she’d lost the upper hand, she seemed moved to modesty. She used one arm held horizontally to cover the nicest parts of her breasts and another held vertically with fingers splayed to partially conceal what I’d already seen plenty of down there.

I fetched the book from where I’d tossed it, then pulled out the switchblade and started carving through the thick back cover, separating it from the spine. When the back cover was free, I flung it as far as I could—which meant it went sailing clear out of sight.

“And now,” I said, still keeping the gun trained on her, “I’m going to leave, taking this book with me.”

“You won’t be able to make sense of it,” she said. “It’s a personal diary, full of Denny’s own private shorthand. Why do you think they needed a historian to write the authorized story?”

“Well, if it turns out that I require your help, I know where to find you. And don’t plan on any more trips out to the Alpha. Not only is it fortified, but I killed your buddy Darren Cheung, and I’ll kill you, too, if need be, to protect it. You might be able to count on police protection here under the dome—although you’d be a fool to stake your life on that—but you go out on the planitia again, and you’re mine, understand?”

She was staring at the ground, but at last she nodded. I used the barrel of my pistol to lift her chin up and said into her dark eyes, “Here’s looking at you, kid.” And then I headed on my way.