Sam Houston and one of his women colleagues approached him.
“Excuse me, Mr. Boone, but will you please come with us?”
“What’s up?” he said.
“There’s been another incident. Someone cut open one of the walkway tubes.”
“Cut open a walktube? You call that an incident? We have mirror satellites flying out of orbit, and trucks falling into moholes, and you’re calling a prank like that an incident?”
Houston glared at him, and Boone almost laughed at the man. “How do you think I can help?” he asked.
“We know you’ve been working on this for Dr. Russell. We thought you might like to be informed.”
“Oh, I see. Well, let’s go have a look then.”
And then it was a matter of going through the paces, for nearly two hours, his shoulders burning like fire the whole time. Houston and Chang and the other investigators spoke to him as if in confidence, and anxious for his input, but their gazes were coolly evaluative. John returned them with a little smile.
“Why now, I wonder?” Houston said at one point.
“Maybe someone doesn’t like you being here,” John said.
Only when the whole charade was finished did he have time to think about why he wanted to keep them from finding out about the attack. No doubt it would have drawn more investigators up, and that was bad; and certainly it would have become the top news story all over Mars and Earth, tossing him back into maximum fishbowl. And he was sick of the fishbowl.
But there was something more than that, that he couldn’t quite pin. The subconscious detective. He snorted with disgust. To distract himself from the pain he stalked around from dining hall to dining hall, hoping to catch some expression of poorly concealed surprise when he walked into each room. Back from the dead! Which one of you murdered me! And once or twice he saw someone flinch from his roving gaze. But the fact was, he thought dourly, many people flinched when he looked at them. As if avoiding the gaze of a freak, or a condemned man. He had never felt his fame in quite that way before, and it made him angry.
The painkillers were wearing off, and he returned early to his rooms. His door was open. When he rushed in he found two of the UNOMA investigators inside. “What are you doing!” he cried angrily.
“Just looking out for you,” one of them said smoothly. They glanced at each other. “Wouldn’t want someone to try something.”
“Like breaking and entering?” Boone said, standing in the doorway and leaning against it.
“Part of the job, sir. Sorry we’ve upset you.” They shuffled nervously, trapped in his room.
“Just who gave you authorization for this?” Boone said, folding his arms over his chest.
“Well.” They looked at each other again. “Mr. Houston is our superior officer—”
“Call him and get him here.”
One of them whispered into his wristpad. In a suspiciously short time Sam Houston appeared down the hallway, and as he hurried up glowering John laughed. “What were you doing, hiding around the corner?”
Houston walked right up to him and stuck his face forward, and said in a low voice, “Look, Mr. Boone, we’re in the midst of a very important investigation here, and you are obstructing it. Despite what you seem to believe you are not above the law—”
Boone jerked forward so that Houston had to flinch to avoid their bumping noses. “You aren’t the law,” he said. He unfolded his arms and poked Houston in the chest, driving him back farther down the hall. Now Houston was losing his temper, and Boone laughed at him. “What are you going to do to me, officer? Arrest me? Threaten me? Give me something good to include in my next report on Eurovid? Would you like that? Would you like me to show the world how John Boone was harassed by some tin-god tin-badge functionary who came to Mars thinking he was a sheriff in the Wild West?” He remembered his opinion that anyone who spoke of themselves in the third person was a self-declared idiot, and laughed and said, “John Boone doesn’t like that kind of thing! No he doesn’t!”
The other two had taken the opportunity to slip out of his room, and were now watching closely. Houston’s face was the color of Ascraeus Mons, and his teeth were revealed. “No one’s above the law,” he grated. “There are criminal acts occurring here, very dangerous ones, and quite a few of them happen when you’re around.”
“Like breaking and entering.”
“If we