He waved his long, boneless limbs.
“Hypertrophic osteopathy and muscular degeneration, its primary effects, aren’t fatal if you take good care of yourself, though they are extremely inconvenient. But every sword has two edges: the effects of the genetic venom have also extended my life long enough for me to see the day when the aliens themselves avenge me.”
My pity for this man who had never forgotten his first, last, and only defeat prompted me to reveal the one piece of information I should have kept the most secret. “It wasn’t bad luck, Old Man. Makrow 34 had Psi powers.” And I explained what a Gaussical is while Vasily wrung his hands nervously and kept glancing sidelong at me.
“Ah.” The Romani centenarian’s eyes shined brighter than ever and his toothless mouth twisted into another parody of a grin. “A Psi. A damnable probability manipulator. Interesting, I didn’t know such things existed. That explains my clumsiness, his luck, his good aim, everything.” He cough-laughed again and ran his hand distractedly over another of his suits of armor. “That explains—everything,” he repeated.
For a few long seconds an uncomfortable silence hung over us all. At last Vasily broke it, nervous. “Well. It’s been a long time since we met, and I’m really sorry, Old Man,” he said simply. “But we’re in a rush. You wouldn’t want that monster to get away, would you? Rest easy. I won’t tell anybody about this, you know? And I’ll bring you his heart—if the Cetian has one.”
“Cetians have two, in their abdomens,” I explained, and felt ridiculous for having done so.
“Better—one for you, one for me,” Slovoban joked. “Good luck to you, kid, and to your positronic friend, too. And be careful with that Makrow. I knew he was dangerous, but if he’s a Psi, you’ll have to keep all your eyes on him—and more than four eyes would be better. I’d say, more like ten. May God and a loaded maser always be with you.” With that, the hatch reopened and the interview was over.
We retraced our entire route through the tunnel and the filthy labyrinths of the Romani space station back to our shuttle in silence. It was only when we had left the Estrella Rom behind us that El Ex-Afortunado spoke again. “Thanks, Raymond.”
“For what?” His thanks had taken me by surprise. My train of thought had already moved on to the idea of asking for reinforcements to take Asteroid G 7834 XC. Two police frigates should do it, but only if they were carrying at least a couple of anti-Psi field generators. I hadn’t done any….
“For what you did,” Vasily said. “For giving Slovoban back some of his pride. And especially for not telling him I’m a Gaussical too.” He gulped. “I never dared to tell him. I know it’ll sound weird, but if I’ve ever had anything like a father, it was him, and I’d hate it if he associated me in any way with the guy who reduced him to that.”
I looked at him with curiosity, but I guessed that this was not the right time to ask for explanations. The mysteries of human nature. Sometimes I think the more I know them, the less I understand them.
Seven
After stuff happens, any idiot with enough time to waste can analyze what went right, what turned out badly, the reasons behind each mistake, and which brilliant move could have made the difference at each point, turning failure into triumph. Any elementary school student could tell Napoleon when to move his artillery, when to call for Murat’s cavalry, and how to maneuver his troops so he could thumb his nose at Wellington in Waterloo. Any halfway competent amateur could advise Lee on how to defeat Grant in Gettysburg or tell Hannibal how to bring Rome to its knees with his elephants.
But in the whirlwind of events, generals not only don’t know where their enemies have their strongest troop concentrations, often they aren’t even very clear about where their own forces are. So a battle in real time is nothing like a chessboard with all the pieces moving in the open. It’s more like a knife fight between two blindfolded opponents, each trying to stab the other, guided only by the sound of their breathing while trying to hold their own breath so the other guy won’t stab them.
All this is just a fancy but futile attempt to excuse myself for the total disaster that was our attempt to overrun asteroid G 7834 XC.
It couldn’t even remotely be called a battle. An ambush, a massacre, maybe even a firing squad. Could it have been avoided? Of course—if I had been a clairvoyant, I might have known that Makrow 34, Weekman, and the Colossaur had planned for exactly such a massive operation. Or if I’d been a brilliant strategist and tactician like Hannibal, Napoleon, Grant, or even his defeated foe Lee, I might have calmly called off the reinforcements and anti-Psi fields and instead attempted a much more low-key incursion. A standard commando action: just Vasily, me, and at most a couple human police as backup. Maybe we would have at least stood a chance.
But when the aliens designed us they forgot to include clairvoyance among our powers. And even the nearly omniscient Slovoban had no way of knowing that the diabolical Cetian and his accomplice Giorgio had invested half their fraud and smuggling profits not in energy crystals but in turning that remote asteroid, their “temporary base,” into a lethal trap.
The other thing is that, even though we were the invaders, they held the advantage of surprise. Neither the human police nor I myself really expected to find the fugitives on the forsaken chunk of rock that the Old Man had indicated. Maybe it was because I had read too many Conan Doyle-style detective stories, but it seemed most likely that I’d show up at an empty lair and have to deal with a complicated jigsaw puzzle of false trails, red herrings, and incomplete clues that would seem impossible to reconstruct at first, until with a brilliant flash of insight I discovered the meaning of some words in an exotic language or of some intriguing signs or drawings, leading me at last to the criminals after a long string of adventures.
That would have been good, maybe, but too Conan Doyle, too S. S. Van Dine. I should also have been paying attention to Chandler and Hammett. As I might easily have learned from Philip Marlowe’s literary adventures, in real life you don’t solve crimes by deciphering clues written in dead languages but, almost always, by a moment of carelessness on the bad guy’s part, a chance meeting on the street, a betrayal, a coincidence—in other words, luck.
First, the idea that we could find the bad guys’ hidden lair so easily, just by following a tip from the Methuselah of the Romani; then, the idea that they’d be dumb enough to stay there, as if they couldn’t guess the Old Man would know how Weekman was linked to Makrow 34, as if they didn’t know he ached for revenge and would tell us where they were, and I’d get help from criminals in the pen—it all seemed too foolish, too simplistic, too easy. Almost like a trick.
But life is a great trickster, because there they were. Even if they weren’t exactly waiting for us, even if it came as a bit of a surprise to them when their radar showed a fleet of police ships approaching, they didn’t lose their heads. After all, they had long since taken precautions against such an eventuality—and, as we were soon to discover, their preparations were more than adequate, almost excessive.
“I don’t like this,” Vasily whispered when the motley planetoid resolved into a bleak labyrinth of rock and ice on our screens but we could see no movement on it. “It’s too quiet. Gives me the willies.”