“Give it a break, machine-boy. I’m locked up here, sure, but I’m alive. You ain’t told me what’s so special about this Cetian, but he’s gotta be real, real dangerous.” If I had a genuine throat, I would have gulped. “Don’t tell me there ain’t nothing special about him, either. I ain’t so dumb as I look. Damned if I’ll jump out of the frying pan so as I land in the fire. I don’t know the strength of my own Gaussical power—I was just starting to test it when they nabbed me. In fact, I only learned what it was called right here in this cell, and that there were others like me. You know how the aliens don’t just control human access to their technology but to information, too. The illegal Web is barely a drop in the ocean compared with what they censor from us. Look here, tinman, I’m gonna ask you one question. Yes or no, that’s all. Don’t try pulling one over on me.” His green eyes stared straight into my fake pupils. “If there’s anything kept me alive out there, it was my old friend, intuition. Right now she’s whispering into my ear that this Makrow 34 guy must be more than a match for me, Gaussically speaking. ’Cause he’s gotta be a fucking Gaussical to make you come here looking for me, am I right?”
I nodded, astonished by the soundness of his reasoning. You could tell Vasily had spent a lot of the past three years educating himself. I doubt he’d have been quite so articulate when he first landed in prison. Or so logical.
Fuck it. I told him everything, with all the gory details.
“I knew it.” He half-smiled, shaking his head emphatically. “In that case, sorry, my answer’s still no. I’m no match for a freak like that. If I coulda took care of you pozzies like you say he did, I wouldn’t even be here.”
“But he had help,” I objected, trying to win him over. “I’ll be with you.”
“Oh, right. I forgot about that detail. Best reason for me to refuse. Like the Cetian’s not bad enough already, you want me to take on a Colossaur too? I never liked the things—half gorilla, half armored tank. No thanks. Plus the human, on top of it all. I don’t want to get within a thousand miles of any human crazy enough to shoot at a pozzie and to survive three seconds fighting hand-to-hand with a Colossaur. Even if it was staged.”
I looked down. The nanos were finishing up their task. Hardly any traces remained of the enormous gob of spit. My hopes of finding help were vanishing almost as quickly. I decided to play my last card.
“So they were right about you, Vasily, what they put in your file.” I tried to sound as disillusioned and as rude as possible. “You’re just a coward.”
“Better a poor coward and alive than a rich hero and a corpse,” he replied, unperturbed.
Failure. I stood up. Like Marlowe, if I was defeated, I could at least go get myself killed in style. “Live your long, miserable cowardly life, Vasily. Don’t worry. With or without your help, I’ll catch them in the end, if it takes me a thousand years. I’ll get them all. The Colossaur, whatever its name is. That monster, Makrow 34. And that human rat, Giorgio Weekman.”
Sometimes I think the gods do exist, and at that moment I’d even have sworn that they loved me in particular. Just as I was turning to leave, Vasily stopped me. I saw a touch of astonishment as well as bottomless spite in his eyes.
“Hold on a sec. Did you say Giorgio Weekman? Weekman the smuggler?”
“Yeah. We ID’d him on the video,” I said, going over both of their files in my mind. No, not a hint that the two knew each other—but recorded facts, as complete as they pretend to be, are never more than a pale reflection of reality. A map isn’t the landscape it reflects; a résumé isn’t the person it describes.
“Gimme that gizmo.” Standing up, he reached for the collar. “When do we leave?”
“Right now.” I handed it to him. Sometimes everything falls into place. Could this be the famous “detective’s intuition”? Who could say. “So you know this Weekman fellow? Have any idea where he might be?”
“Do I ever.” Vasily Fernández grabbed the collar and turned it over in his hands a couple of times. Slim hands, long fingers, more like a concert pianist’s than a criminal’s. “What’d you say your name was, pozzie?”
“Raymond,” I quickly replied, then went on: “Did you and Weekman ever work together?”
“We were supposed to, pozzie,” he answered thoughtfully. “But that pig son-of-an-alien left me holding the bag. After he stole everything out of it—all my life savings, gone. You think I’m so stupid or so green I didn’t know I’d be falling into a trap by coming to the Burroughs? I came because I didn’t have a choice, Dick Tracy. Too many of the wrong people knew me, all over the Solar System, for me to start over from scratch somewhere else.”
“So we’re in this together?” I held out my hand for him, as I’d seen the detectives in Spillane’s movie collection do when they were making a deal.
But he didn’t take it. Placing the portable anti-Psi generator around his neck, he snapped it shut without hesitation. It made a loud click. I made a mental note of his interesting ability to handle tech gear he’d never seen before. The people who wrote up his file were evidently so frightened by his Gaussical powers that they forgot human beings sometimes have (or learn) more than one skill.
“Yeah, sure. You might say we’re in it together, Raymond,” Vasily sighed, calling me by my name for the first time. He rolled his head a few times as if to get used to the new bauble around his neck. “Now I know how dogs must feel,” he muttered. “But under one condition,” he went on, looking me in the eye. “I don’t care what you do with the Cetian when we meet up with the merry trio. But Weekman, he’s mine. No discussion, or the deal’s off.”
That worried me. “You aren’t thinking of…?” His face told me clearly that he was. “But you’ve never killed anyone, Vasily,” I reminded him, a little astonished to see in living color what I’d read in so many novels: that revenge can push a man to do things no other feelings could.
“I am,” he said grimly. “There’s a first time for everything, ain’t there?” He ran his hand along the collar. “After all, if I’m never really going to be free, thanks to something I never wanted and couldn’t help having, what difference does it make if I have to live in the shadows because of something I’ve been dreaming of doing these past three years?”
I didn’t know what to tell him. I suppose, from a human point of view, he was right. So I changed the subject. “Do you have any clues about where to find Weekman?”
He laughed. “Me have clues? You forget I been stuck inside here for three years. But I got a good idea of where to start looking for clues. I’ve also had three years to think it over. We’ll go see Old Man Slovoban. What he don’t know about underworld business in the Solar System ain’t worth finding out.”
Six
Six thousand miles before approach orbit our escort changed course so as not to blow our cover. A few minutes later we saw the Estrella Rom loom ahead, right where the radar said it should be, blossoming from a blurry, flickering glow into a small ring and finally a large, not quite geometrically correct wheel. It looked so fragile and was spinning so fast on its axis I thought it was a miracle it didn’t go to pieces.