I could see Joshua lying face down. His vicious spasms stopped as the beam from the disruptor was no longer aimed at him.
But even though I didn’t have any voice left, Pickover did, and his shout of “Don’t!” was loud enough to be heard over the electric whine of the disruptor. Mac continued to rotate the disk a few more degrees before he realized what Pickover was referring to. He flipped the disk back around, then continued turning it until the emitter surface was facing straight down. And then he dropped it, and it fell in Martian slo-mo, at last clanking against the deck plates, a counterpoint to the now-muffled electric whine. I hauled myself to my feet and moved over to check on Joshua while Pickover and Mac hovered over the disk, presumably looking for the off switch.
There were probably more scientific ways to see if the transferee Joshua was dead, but this one felt right just then: I balanced on one foot, hauled back the other leg, and kicked the son of a bitch in the side of that gorgeous head. The impact was strong enough to spin the whole body through a quarter turn, but there was no reaction at all from Joshua.
Suddenly the keening died, and I heard a self-satisfied “There!” from Mac. I looked over at him, and he looked back at me, caught in the beam from the flashlight Pickover was holding. Mac’s bushy orange eyebrows were raised, and there was a sheepish grin on his face. “Who’d have thought the off switch had to be pulled out instead of pushed in?”
I tried to speak and found I did have a little voice now. “Thanks for coming by, Mac. I know how you hate to leave the station.”
Mac nodded in Pickover’s direction. “Yeah, well, you can thank this guy for putting in the call,” he said. He turned, and faced Pickover full-on. “Just who the hell are you, anyway?”
I saw Pickover’s mouth begin to open in his mechanical head, and a thought rushed through my mind. This Pickover was bootleg. Both the other Pickover and Joshua Wilkins had been correct: such a being shouldn’t exist and had no rights. Indeed, the legal Pickover would doubtless continue to demand that this version be destroyed; no one wanted an unauthorized copy of himself wandering around.
Mac was looking away from me and toward the duplicate of Pickover. And so I made a wide sweeping of my head, left to right, then back again. Pickover apparently saw it because he closed his mouth before sounds came out, and I spoke as loudly and clearly as I could in my current condition. “Let me do the introductions,” I said, and I waited for Mac to turn back toward me.
When he had, I pointed at Mac. “Detective Dougal McCrae,” I said, then I took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and pointed at Pickover, “I’d like you to meet Joshua Wilkins.”
Mac nodded, accepting this. “So you found your man? Congratulations, Alex.” He then looked down at the motionless female body. “Too bad about your wife, Mr. Wilkins.”
Pickover turned to face me, clearly seeking guidance. “It’s so sad,” I said quickly. “She was insane, Mac—had been threatening to kill her poor husband Joshua here for weeks. He decided to fake his own death to escape her, but she got wise to it somehow and hunted him down. I had no choice but to try to stop her.”
As if on cue, Pickover walked over to the dead artificial body and crouched beside it. “My poor dear wife,” he said, somehow managing to make his mechanical voice sound tender. He lifted his skinless face toward Mac. “This planet does that to people, you know. Makes them go crazy.” He shook his head. “So many dreams dashed.”
Mac looked at me, then at Pickover, then at the artificial body lying on the deck plating, then back at me. “All right, Alex,” he said, nodding slowly. “Good work.”
I tipped my nonexistent hat at him. “Glad to be of help.”
* * *
Three days later, I walked into the dark interior of The Bent Chisel, whistling.
Buttrick was behind the bar, as usual. “You again, Lomax?”
“The one and only,” I replied cheerfully. Diana was standing in her topless splendor next to the bar, loading up her tray. “Hey, Diana,” I said, “when you get off tonight, how ’bout you and me go out and paint the town . . .” I trailed off: the town was already red;