Hide and seek (29 page)

Sparta caught herself drifting and made an effort to concentrate. Less than a meter in front her, overhead spotlights focused their beams on the shining Martian plaque, which rested on a velvet cushion under a dome of laser-cut Xanthian crystal, glittering as if it had never been disturbed, never even been touched.

Sparta and Lieutenant Polanyi stood alone in the empty room. The members of the official delegation which had restored the relic to its shrine, local dignitaries all–the mayor had gotten a fast liner back from his leadership conference in order to preside–had finally drunk the last bottle of champagne and made their separate ways home.
“As soon as we get out of here we can set the alarms.”

She nodded. “Sorry for the delay, Lieutenant. In all the excitement I never stopped to look at the thing. An odd relic.”

 

“That’s true enough. Can’t scratch it, but something busted it once. Must have been quite a crunch.”

 

Sparta glanced at the young Space Board officer. “What do you know of its lore?”

“The ‘lore’ is mostly made up by the tour operators, I think.” He was as bored as he sounded; he recited the facts as if reading from a file. “No one ever found out where it came from–somewhere near the north pole; that’s all anyone knows. The man who found it hid it, told no one the circumstances of its discovery–it was found in his effects after his death. There were rumors of a hoard of alien objects, but in ten years nothing else has ever come to light. The brochures call the thing the ‘Soul of Mars.’ Poetic name for a broken plate.”

She contemplated the etched surface of the plaque. “Do you really think it came from Mars?” she asked. “Do you think it was made on Mars?”

 

“I’m no expert in these matters, Inspector.” Polanyi didn’t bother to hide his impatience.

 

“I don’t think it’s from here,” she said.

 

“Oh? What makes you think not?”

 

“Just a feeling I get,” she said. “Well, thanks for indulging me. Let’s set the alarms so you can go home.”

A scream of self-destructing synthekords on the sound system maintained the requisite noise level in the Park-Your-Pain, even as the hoarse yells of conversation fell silent around the four newcomers, who opened their faceplates and pushed into the crowd.

“Don’t worry. With me, you are safe.” Yevgeny Rostov threw a massive paw around Sparta’s shoulders and crushed her to his side. Behind him, Blake and Lydia Zeromski pressed close together in his wake.

Yevgeny glared at the other patrons as he moved toward the bar. “Not all cops are tools of capitalist imperialists,” he shouted. “This is brave woman. She brought back Martian plaque. All are comrades here.”

The people in the bar peered curiously at Sparta for long seconds; Blake too got his share of odd glances, but he was used to the place by now. Everybody gradually lost interest and resumed yelling at each other over the music.

“So, Mike, you are not fink after all? Another cop!” The four new friends reached the sanctuary of the stainless steel bar. “I buy you beer anyway.” Yevgeny released his hold on Sparta and walloped Blake on the shoulder hard enough to send him staggering.

The bartender didn’t bother to ask what anybody wanted; he poured Yevgeny’s regular for them all. Four foaming mugs of black, bitter bock appeared on the bartop.

 

“Lydia, we toast to getting these people off our planet as soon as possible.”

 

Sparta raised her mug gingerly. Blake was more enthusiastic. “Thanks, comrade,” he shouted. “To the next shuttle out of here.”

 

Four mugs collided with enough force to slop foam.

 

“But do me a favor, Yevgeny,” Blake yelled. “Don’t think of me as a cop. This is just a hobby.”

 

Sparta laughed. “You said it. Amateur night on Mars.”

 

“You blow up truck yards for a
hobby?
” Lydia shouted, loud enough to be heard above the rocket scream of the synthekords.

 

Blake’s eyes widened with innocence.
Blow up what?
he mouthed, voiceless.

 

“I forgot,” Lydia yelled at him, eyeing Sparta. “We shouldn’t talk about it where somebody might be listening.”

 

“I’ll second that!” Blake shouted back. “To local 776 of the Pipeline Workers Guild, long may it live and prosper!”

 

He was greeted with cheers from everyone within a meter’s distance–a half a dozen or so, the only ones who could hear him.

His companions grinned and shook their heads. Sparta sniffed the black beer and declined to drink. Blake stuck his face into the foam far enough to get a mustache, but he only pretended to sip. Meanwhile Yevgeny was pouring the contents of his mug down his open throat; he slammed the empty mug on the steel bartop and raised four fingers imperiously.

“No you don’t,” Blake shouted. “Not for me.” “What’s for you? When it’s your turn again, I let you know.”

 

“Yevgeny, one question before we get out of here–”

 

“What’s that, my feeble friend?”

 

“After all your years on Mars, why do you still have that awful accent? I mean, does that help your credibility with the comrades or something?”

 

Yevgeny reared back, affronted–

–and when he leaned down to push his face up to Blake’s there was fire in his eyes and his bushy brows were poised to fly right off his forehead. “Why, whatever could have motivated you to cast aspersions upon my perspicacity, Mr. Redfield?” His voice was pitched to carry no farther than Blake’s ears. “Did you suppose that I was some sneaking impersonator like yourself?”

“You old fox”–Blake broke up laughing–“You did it.”

 

“Did . . .
it?”
The eyebrows climbed higher.

 

“Told the truth. And you
still
never used an article.”

 

“Article?” Yevgeny straightened up and roared. “What is such thing as
article?”

 

Sparta and Blake hunched against the wind, pushing their way along the shuttleport’s sandy streets.

 

“Your place or mine?” he asked. “Or am I presuming?”

 

“How about your cubicle at the hive? A luxury hotel gets so boring.”

 

“Knowing you, you might mean that.”

 

“Don’t worry,” she said, “I won’t . . .” At that moment she gasped and stumbled against him, clutching herself with both arms as if she’d been struck under the heart.

Blake grabbed her. “Ellen! What’s wrong? Ellen!” She went limp in his arms and collapsed; he lowered her slowly to the sand. She stared at him through her glass faceplate, but her open mouth made no sound.

She could be the greatest of us
She resists our authority

 

The lights over the operating table were arranged in a circle, like the rolling pictureless videoplates at the Park-Your-Pain, like the spotlights that ringed the Martian plaque.

 

The rank smell of onions threatened to suffocate her. Her mind’s eye involuntarily displayed complex sulfur compounds as the circle of lights above her began to swirl in a golden spiral.

 

Blake was with her. She’d been conscious enough to insist on it before she would let them operate. They put him at her left shoulder, where he could hold her hand in both of his.

 

William, she’s a child

 

As the darkness closed in she clutched Blake’s hand harder, clinging to it to keep from falling.

 

To resist us is to resist the Knowledge

 

She was sliding under. She was falling up into the spiral.

 

She lost her grip on Blake’s hand. Around her shapes swarmed in the maelstrom.

 

The shapes were signs. The signs were the signs of the plaque. The signs had meaning.

 

The meaning sprang at her. She tried to call out, to shout a warning.

But when the blackness closed over her, only one image remained, an image of swirling clouds, red and yellow and white, boiling in an immense whirlpool, big enough to swallow a planet. She left herself then, and fell endlessly into them. . . .

The medicos didn’t let Blake see what was going on; they protected his assumed squeamishness with a curtain of fabric that screened Sparta’s body from the neck down.

 

The cut was bloodless and swift; the microtome scalpel paralyzed the edges of the wound as it sliced through skin and muscle and membrane. Sparta lay open from breast-bone to navel.

“What the
hell
is this stuff?” the young surgeon muttered angrily, his voice muffled inside his clearfilm sterile suit. He caught his assistant’s nervous glance toward Blake. He growled and said, “Biopsy. I want to know what it is before we close.”
At his terse orders they pulled her open and held her open with clamps; he went in with scalpel and scissors and tongs. He removed as much of the slippery, silvery tissue as he could reach, working with quick precision around the blood vessels and packed organs.

Sheets of the stuff lay on the tray like a beached jellyfish, trembling and iridescent.

By the time the surgeon had cleaned the last accessible speck of it from beneath the muscular canopy of Sparta’s diaphragm, the technician had returned with a laser-spectrometer analysis and a computergenerated graph: the substance was a long-chain conducting polymer of a kind neither the technician nor the surgeon had ever encountered before.

“All right, we’d better close. For now. I want this woman under intensive surveillance until we hear what the research committee makes of this.”

The healing instruments passed over the wound, reknitting the severed blood vessels and nerves, resealing the skin, salving the flesh with growth factors that would erase all signs of the scar within a few weeks.

With Blake walking beside the gurney, still holding Sparta’s unfeeling hand, they wheeled her out of the operating theater. The surgeon and his assistants tidied up and left soon after.

A man stood in the darkness of the gallery above the theater, peering down through its glass roof. Blue eyes glittered in his sun-blackened face, and his iron-gray hair was cut to within a few millimeters of his scalp. He wore the dress-blue uniform of a full commander of the Board of Space Patrol; there were not many ribbons over his breast pocket, but those he wore testified to supreme courage and deadly skill.

The commander turned to an officer who stood farther back in the shadows. “Get hold of that readout, then wipe the machine’s memory. This information is not to go to any hospital committee.” His voice was gravel, the texture of waves beating on a rocky beach.

“What of those who operated on her, sir?”

 

“Explain it to them, Sharansky.”

 

“You know what surgeons are like, sir. Especially young ones.”

 

Yes, he knew. Surgeons like that bright young guy had saved his life more than once. All they wanted in return was worship. “Try explaining first. If they don’t see the point . . .” He fell silent.

Sharansky let the silence stretch for several seconds before she said, “Understood, sir.” “Good for you. If you have to go that far, watch the dosage,” he growled. “We don’t want them to forget how to do what they’re good at.”

“Yes sir. And Inspector Troy, sir?”

 

“We’ll get her out of here tonight.”

 

“Mr. Redfield, sir?”

 

The commander sighed. “Sharansky, if I didn’t like your cousin Proboda so much, I’d bust you for that stupid stunt. Vik may be a dumb hero, but you’re just plain dumb.”

 

“Sir! Is stupid right word? Maybe miscalculation . . .”

 

“Bull. You didn’t like the guy and you don’t like the unions. You had three I.D.’s in your pocket and you gave him the one you knew would get him in trouble.”

 

She drew herself up stiffly. “I thought to create diversion, sir. Away from inspector Troy’s investigation.”

 

“The next lie will be your last in this service, Sharansky.”

 

She didn’t answer for a long time. Then she said, “Understood, sir.”

“Good.” For a moment he favored her with a freezing stare. “Humans are funny, Sharansky, they need funny things,” he said, and then abruptly turned away. “She’s definitely a human being, despite what they tried to do to her. And whatever you or I think of this guy Redfield, right now she needs him.”

Epilogue
Thus the Martian plaque was returned to Mars. Two years later . . .

On a country estate southwest of London an elegant middle-aged man in a shooting outfit stalks the autumn woods. Beside him, not far away, is his host, an older gentleman, Lord Kingman. Slender shotguns rest easily in the two men’s arms; their bag is a small but varied one–three grouse, four rabbits, and a couple of pigeons–and contrary to the dark forecasts of their colleagues, both their dogs are still alive, questing eagerly ahead through the aromatic underbrush.

Nothing about the younger man, whose closest associates call him Bill, betrays the complexity of his thoughts or the ambiguity of his feelings upon this occasion. For all the world he could be just another aristocratic English shooter out for a genteel bit of small-animal slaughtering.

As for Lord Kingman, with his leonine head of gray hair he is an even more imposing figure of mature manhood. Until the moment he sees the gray squirrel.

The squirrel sees the men at the same moment. Perhaps it knows it is marked for immediate execution as a result of the damage it has done to the trees on the estate; perhaps it has already lost close relatives to Kingman’s gun. Whatever its reasons, it wastes no time in observation, but in three leaps reaches the base of the nearest tree and vanishes behind it in a flicker of gray.

The effect on Kingman is electrifying; his gun comes up as quickly as if the dogs had flushed a pheasant. He keeps his gun aimed at that part of the trunk where he expects the squirrel to reappear and begins ever so slowly to circle the tree, step by cautious step.

The dogs must be used to this sort of thing; they immediately go off and settle among the ferns, resting their chins on their paws, where they peer up at Kingman in resignation and wait for the drama to play itself out.

For his part, the best Bill can do is keep out of Kingman’s line of fire, staying as quiet as possible while circling with him.

The squirrel’s face appears for a moment round the edge of its shield a dozen feet from the ground and Kingman instantly lets off a blast, then pumps and ejects and aims again in a swift and practiced series of motions–he is an excellent shot–but he holds his fire, for his target has vanished. Sawdust drifts from the rip in the bark where the squirrel’s head had been (rather more damage to the tree than the squirrel could have done, Bill thinks), but no small body tumbles to the ground.