down the triggers, and the two transfers kept vibrating, and—
And I saw Rory’s head being deformed—as if the broadband frequencies coursing through his system weren’t doing enough damage.
“For God’s sake!” I yelled.
Uno didn’t seem to know how to turn off the device, but he did twist his giant body, aiming the disk away from Berling and Rory. They both stopped jerking. Berling toppled sideways and fell off the ramp, his limbs stiff. He landed with a small thud and a big puff of dust next to me. Rory fell forward and skidded down the ramp, his partially crushed head leading the way.
“You didn’t have to do that!” I said. “You didn’t have to take out Dr. Pickover!”
Uno’s voice had an infinite calmness. “That wasn’t Dr. Pickover,” he replied. “That was nobody.” And then he stretched out his arms and began to slowly flip the disk end over end, and, as it was facing up, he said, “And I’m nobody, too—and with Actual gone, I have no reason to be.” The disk continued to flip around, and the emitter side ended up facing toward Dazzling Don Hutchison’s face. The giant body started to convulse as Uno’s fists clenched shut on the twin triggers. He kept spasming for about twenty seconds as Mac and I rushed toward him from opposite directions. And then he toppled backward, still convulsing as he went down in slo-mo, until he was lying on his back, the disk held up over him.
Mac loomed in and pulled out the off switch, and suddenly everything was very, very still.
THIRTY-FIVE
Iwalked slowly over to where Mac was standing, and we stood wordlessly for a time: two weary biologicals in surface suits amid four dead transfers lying there on the Martian sands in nothing but street clothes.
Finally, backup arrived in the form of Huxley, Kaur, and another cop, rumbling out onto the surface in a pressurized van. Mac conferred with them, and the three newcomers set about photographing the bodies and taking various scanner readings and measurements. While they were busy with that, I took Mac up into the Kathryn Denning and showed him the corpse of Willem Van Dyke.
There wasn’t much to say, and so Mac and I barely spoke. I left him inside the ship, taking readings with his scanner, and I trudged slowly down the ramp. All of this action had taken place by the south airlock. I had plenty of bottled oxygen, and so I decided to walk around the dome to the west airlock—just to clear my head a bit, and to avoid human company.
It was a little over three kilometers to that airlock, and I shuffled along, raising dust clouds as I did so, like Pig-Pen in the old Peanuts animated cartoons. After about a kilometer, I decided to try calling Reiko Takahashi again, and I was relieved when her lovely face popped up on my wrist.
“You’re okay?” I asked into my fishbowl’s headset.
Her orange-striped hair was mussed. “Exhausted,” she said. “My God, it was terrifying.”
“But you’re okay now?”
She nodded. “How’s Mr. Pickover? Have you found him yet?”
She’d had enough of an upset for one day; I’d tell her later that Rory was dead. “He’s with Detective McCrae right now.”
“Oh, good.”
“Rory said he created a diversion so you could get away.”
“He did indeed, the sweet old fellow. He started singing ‘God Save the King’ at the top of his lungs—or, well, at top volume anyway. Those two giant jerks were mortified, and I managed to run off.” She paused. “If you see him, won’t you thank him for me?”
“Of course.”
“Thanks,” she said. “Look, I’m still pretty shook up. I’m going to take something and go to bed.”
“I don’t blame you. But can you let Fernandez know you’re okay? He’s been worried, too.”
“I’ll call him now,” she said, and she shook off from her end.
I continued walking slowly. My shadow, falling to my right, walked along with me. The silence was deafening.
I had genuinely liked Rory Pickover, strange little man though he had been. He’d had something I’d seen all too rarely on Mars: selfless devotion to a cause rather than to personal gain.
The dome was on my right. I was walking about thirty meters away from it; I had no particular desire to make eye contact with anyone within. Earth was hanging above the horizon, brilliant and blue. My phone could have told me which hemisphere was facing me right now, but I didn’t ask. I liked to think it was the side with Wanda on