So I shut my mouth too, and we kept our eyes fixed on the holoscreens.
He wasn’t wearing the collar now, either. He might at least have thanked me for that. But what can you do. Well, he had the excuse that we were too busy.
Once more we were up against the needle-in-a-haystack problem. How can you tell one Colossaur from another? Without his weapons and his gear, the treacherous bounty hunter would be practically indistinguishable in our eyes from any other member of his species. A little bigger at most, but not enough to make a real difference. At night all cats are gray, and at any time all Colossaurs are huge.
As for the Cetians, being clones they’re virtually indistinguishable from each other. Anybody not from Tau Ceti would have an impossible time telling the horrific Makrow 34 not only from the harmless Makrow 33 but even from our own dear Rebbloh 21 (who isn’t really much better as a person, I suspect). The external differences between Cetians and humans aren’t very great either, morphologically speaking—though one species is born from a uterus and the other hatches from an egg. Besides, with costumes and the holocamouflage we have now, details such as their double hearts and the different range of their visual spectrum no longer seem insuperable.
Makrow 34 could be that bearded guy in Module 21 speaking what sounded like Urdu to me, or perhaps Parsi or some more exotic dialect. Or he could be one of the guys struggling with that long, heavy box on the antigrav cart. If Giorgio Weekman climbed onto his shoulders, they’d make a perfect six-member person, just a little ungainly—like that Grodo in Module 9.
The fact was, they could be anybody. When this was over, if it ever would end, I thought, they’d have to think about a system for identifying everybody who enters the station: something faster and harder to falsify than thumbprints, a retinal scan, or even DNA. Cheating their scanners with samples from someone else is child’s play even for human criminals, so it wouldn’t slow a damned Gaussical at all.
There were too many of them, too few of us, and not enough time to monitor everyone thoroughly. We put a pair of pozzies in every module, but with the continuous flow of evacuees they couldn’t check out the crowd one by one. So they picked one person out of every ten—choosing at random, or singling out anyone who seemed suspicious—but even this procedure made the evacuees protest, especially the aliens, who felt their privileges were being violated. Selecting one out of every ten at random was as good as not doing anything at all, given our guy’s ability to manipulate the odds.
I was watching several screens at once, trying to catch anything a little off. I knew subconsciously that I was missing something; there had to be at least one clue, perhaps so subtle that my conscious mind couldn’t pick up on it. Or was I just carried away by my desire for there to be something, my guilt at not finding anything? I wondered if it wouldn’t have been better, more efficient, if the aliens had made us entirely cold, mathematical reasoning machines instead of partly analogic and emotional, subjective, fallible, nearly human.
Maybe we had a slim chance, though. If Makrow lost his nerve and had to use his powers, Vasily could detect it and….
“What really pisses me off,” my theoretical fugitive detector exclaimed at last, as if to himself, “ain’t that they wouldn’t give me my freedom. Say you can’t trust me, say you can’t be sure I won’t use my powers if I’m not wearing the anti-Psi collar, say whatever, and I’ll say the same about police promises, including robot police promises: they ain’t worth an old fart, far as I ever saw. But that ain’t it. What burns my ass is this, we let that slimeball Weekman get away, knowing he’ll tell everybody in the galaxy how he pulled another one over on me. And on all you positronic flunkies, too, by the way.”
I stopped listening. Something caught my eye on one of the screens. I zoomed in. It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, but… instinct? Was I going to start trusting to instinct, too? Module 14. Another false alarm, no doubt. A guy standing behind a couple of humans, who were hauling yet another mysterious long, heavy package (this was suddenly happening all over the station; contraband weapons? Maybe. Under other circumstances I’d have them checked out, but we didn’t have time for misdemeanors just then). Hunched, white-robed, with long Rasta locks, sweating, doubling over just before he got to where my buddy Mao Castro stood controlling the line.
The suspicious detail: his skin, which to all appearances should have been black, had gone ash-gray. Why? Stomachache? Scared shitless? I dialed the sound all the way up: yep, the poor guy’s stomach was burbling like a pot of boiling water. He vomited; hesitated; tried to stand up straight, rose halfway up, hesitated again, let two or three people pass; then at last he squeezed back into line in front of a Colossaur, who snorted at the insult. Hunched, black, Rastafarian dreads, definitely human, didn’t look anything like Weekman or Makrow, though you know that all it takes is the right kind of plastiflesh makeup…. But they wouldn’t be that crazy, risking the reaction of the ornery oversized Colossaurs, would they? Still, definitely suspicious: if he wasn’t one of them, then he was definitely smuggling something. Better call it in. I grabbed the mic.
“Mao Castro: keep an eye on the Rasta in white, he might be… ” I felt Vasily’s breath on my back. “What do you think, Afortunado? Could it be Makrow?”
“No, not him.” He hesitated, but he was staring at the image. “Don’t look like Weekman, either, but you guys better watch it. Something’s off.” He leaned forward until his nose almost touched the screen, watching my buddy in his Red Guard uniform approach the suspect. “Huh. Indigestion? Raymond, ever heard of them metabolic bombs, stuff you swallow in your food? The ingredients seem harmless, one at a time, but when your stomach acid breaks them down and they combine—boom! Weekman loved fooling around with rare poisons like that, years ago. Remember what he did to the Old Man. Better tell your Chinese friend to be careful.”
“Mao, watch out for the guy in white. Could be a human bomb.”
Mao Castro ran toward the suspect and Vasily leaned in closer and closer to the holomonitor, until the inevitable happened: the wheels of his chair slipped forward and he fell clumsily onto his back. I leaned down to help Vasily, as I tried to keep from laughing.
And a thousand suns exploded on the screen.
Holovideo systems are robust and effective, ideal for capturing the three-dimensionality of a scene or a space. But they aren’t perfect. Their main disadvantage is, they’re too realistic. Or, breaking it down: you can’t use optical filters with them, and the light saturation is limitless. That is why they are only used indoors. If a holocamera outside a ship were accidentally to point directly at the sun, the image on the screen would be as blinding as the star itself.
Vasily’s Gaussical power—or his good luck—saved us once again. If his chair hadn’t had wheels instead of an antigrav suspension, he wouldn’t have slipped. If he hadn’t fallen, he would still have been watching the screen, and from that close up his retinas would have been permanently burnt. If I hadn’t leaned over to help him, the brightness would have overloaded my electro-optical systems—nothing irreversible, in my case; after ten minutes I would have been able to see again—but what if by then it was too late?