So what if the frog I’d be turned into would be a positronic robot frog. I still had to try.
At least there was one bit of hope amid all the tragedy: the records of the docking module energy sensors showed that the fugitives’ fuel reserves were almost empty, and they hadn’t had time to refill them. The two or three crystals they had left wouldn’t be enough for even one hyperspace jump. They have to go to some hideout, somewhere in our own Solar System. Probably in the asteroid belt. Makrow 34 was familiar with it and his rumored energy treasure would be waiting for him there. Somewhere. That’s where I’d have to go to find them. It would be a matter of time. A matter of combing through all the asteroids, one by one.
Simple, right? The sort of fun I enjoy on weekends. I sent out an order—low priority—to every human police frigate, telling them to let me know if they saw anything out of the ordinary. Given the fugitive’s exotic Psi capability, though, I figured they wouldn’t find so much as the shadow of his ship. And I was right about that.
Want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself. As I said, it was up to me to find the needle in the haystack.
Anybody would have thought my hunt was doomed to fail. If Makrow’s treasure was what they said it was, as soon as the outlaws reached it they’d have more than enough energy to beat it from the Solar System and take three spins around the galaxy before I could find them.
But fortunately for me, that sort of childish logic doesn’t work for space, gravity fields, and especially the bizarre geography of hyperspace.
Get near the hyperspace jump-off point, you’re automatically in the zone that the Burroughs detectors sweep. If their ship tried, they’d set off every alarm in the station. Plus a barrage or two of antimatter-headed missiles. I prayed to all the gods I don’t believe in that Makrow and his sidekicks would risk it. That would have made the endgame easier. Getting themselves disintegrated would have saved me so many hassles.
Likewise, if by some impossible means (Gaussical means, that is) they managed to escape the radar installations, well, once that monster left our jurisdiction, his adventures would be somebody else’s responsibility, you know.
In cases like this, I always ask myself what Philip Marlowe would do, but on this occasion it did me no good. After rereading the complete works of Chandler for the millionth time, I gave up. From what I could tell, there were no Gaussicals on Earth in the 1940s, no aliens, no hyperspace jump-off points in the Oort Cloud, no potential hideouts the size of an asteroid belt where a criminal could lie low.
Or rather—all those things did exist, but they didn’t count for anything in the game of hide-and-seek. As for the bad guys’ weapons, Marlowe and company had also had it pretty easy in Los Angeles compared to me. What’s a lead-filled blackjack and a couple of revolvers next to having all the laws of probability turned against you?
My buddies offered me all the help they could. It wasn’t much. They didn’t have any suggestions either. My best friend, Chester Spillane, even loaned me his collection of Mike Hammer novels and twentieth-century detective movies, in case I could find any inspiration in them.
I read and watched them all. Good thing I was so meticulous. And lucky for me, my friend had such a wide definition that his detective holotapes included a bunch of cop comedies, restored from old celluloid prints.
48 Hours. Leads: Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy. Archetypes, almost caricatures. The simple, slightly brutish but honest white policeman. The clever, sardonic black criminal (small-time criminal, of course, so viewers could identify with him: bad, but not that bad). Not much in the way of research, though pretty entertaining. The thing is, it made an idea bubble up through my germanium-foam circuits.
Why not follow the white cop’s lead? Fight fire with fire. Use a bad guy to trap another bad guy.
Homeopathy. Like seeks like.
Since the Burroughs obviously didn’t keep any Cetian smugglers, murderers, thieves, or swindlers on hand, it was logical and completely inevitable that, after a quick trip to the station’s nanoelectronic workshops, half an hour later I’d be walking into the force-field cell for my first meeting with Vasily Fernández.
Five
I had read his file. It clearly said what he was: a little guy with no relevant qualities. That’s all he was, at first sight. A high-security cell isn’t the best place for bulking up on steroids, installing a super-cyborg arm, or getting plastic surgery. He still was more skinny than stout, more short than tall, just another Slavic-Latino, ordinary face, average intelligence.
But did I say no relevant qualities? Sorry, my mistake.
A minor detail. Almost nothing. The statistical genetic lottery has also cursed him with the strongest, most uncontrollable, least comprehensible, least desirable Psi gift of them all.
You guessed it. Vasily Fernández was the only other known Gaussical. Not counting that first furious Grodo, I mean. He was also the only Gaussical born on Earth in the past 150 years. That is, since the aliens made contact with the human species. If there were others before him (I suspect that Alexander the Great and Napoleon Bonaparte may have been Gaussicals, for example, but I can’t prove it), they probably had the same experience he did at first: they had no idea what they were.
Orphaned so young he never knew his parents, after leaving the charity orphanage Vasily began to make his way as a purse-snatcher, pickpocket, small-time thief, forger, and two-bit flimflammer. And he seemed to be doing a decent job of it. His hard work earned him a nickname, El Afortunado, for his incredible luck.
But his career took a wrong turn when he finally realized that what he was getting away with couldn’t be a simple matter of good luck—or bad luck for everybody else. Having access to information supposedly off-limits to Homo sapiens (one of these days the aliens are going to have to get serious about the dark Web), he connected the dots and realized he was a living unlikelihood, a Gaussical. That made him cocky, ambitious; he figured there was no chance he’d ever get caught. He was right about that for several months. So long as he stuck to Earth, Mars, and the asteroids.
But when he tried expanding his operations to the Burroughs, for reasons he never spilled, it only took my buddies five days to detect and catch him. I admit it wasn’t easy. Vasily worked alone, he was slippery and cautious, and while his weird abilities never came close to the controlled power that Makrow 34 displayed in his escape, my buddies Ivan and Miyamoto suffered a few setbacks during the investigation that they put down to bad luck—until it occurred to them to add an anti-Psi force field to their “hunting gear.” That was the end of the strange happenings. Soon they netted their fish, and then Vasily El Afortunado’s forays came to a stop. After that, Ivan was no longer just Ivan; he became Ivan Stalin.
But even as he fell, El Afortunado somehow managed to land on his feet. His track record and psychological profile showed that he wasn’t a deviant or a sociopath. In plain words, not such a bad guy. He just didn’t know a better way to make a living than by dodging the law. He hadn’t committed any serious crimes on Earth, Mars, or the asteroids, and hadn’t caused significant damage. On our station he simply hadn’t had time to do much. So he avoided the death penalty usually meted out to wanton Psis and only got ten years in prison.