The thin man shrugged. “Uno and Dos are the only names they’ve got.”
Pickover brightened. “Oh, I get it! Alex, the third one wasn’t called Trace; rather it was Tres—Spanish for three; sounds the same, but spelt different. Uno, Dos, Tres.”
“Huh,” I said. “How high do the numbers go, Jeff?”
“Jump off a cliff.”
“So what the hell’s the matter with you, anyway?” I asked, not expecting an answer.
Rory was now standing beside me. “My grandfather looked the same way,” he said. “It takes a lot out of you.”
“What does?”
“Well, I suppose it could be anything, but . . .”
I waved the gun. “On the examining bed.”
Albertson glared at me, but then did as I’d commanded. He simply sat on the bed’s edge, but it was enough. The ship’s computer obviously recognized him, even if my phone hadn’t, and his medical records came up on a monitor in the room. I scanned them quickly. “‘Stage-four lymphatic cancer.’ And those numbers don’t go any higher.” I looked at him. “Tough luck. I wouldn’t want to die in jail.”
Albertson crossed his arms defiantly in front of his chest. I idly wondered if I could bring myself to rough up somebody in such bad shape, and—
“Oh, my,” said Pickover. He’d been looking at Albertson’s medical record in more detail; I imagine the scientific gobbledygook meant more to him than it would have to me. “Alex, look at this.”
He was pointing at some text on the screen. I squinted to make it out, and—
And I guess this wasn’t Albertson after all. Not only was the date of birth given, but the computer had also helpfully calculated his age and placed it in brackets after the date: “78 years.”
I turned back to him, and—
And—
God.
And he was the backup bowman. He—Christ, yes. I’d never heard of anything like this, but . . .
He looked like he was in his thirties. Biologically, he probably was in his thirties.
“You’ve been doing this forever,” I said. “For decades. You keep making trips back and forth between Earth and Mars—spending eight months or more each way in hibernation. I didn’t know it was possible to do that many stints in deep freeze, but—”
Cancer.
A man who’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer decades ago.
“You’re Albertson, all right,” I said. “But that’s not the name you were born with—was it, Willem?”
“Why don’t you—”
“Take a long walk off a short pier? The nearest one of those is back with the trees.”
Rory was staring at the man now, his eyes wide. “My . . . God,” he said. “Willem Van Dyke—I never thought I’d see you in the flesh, but . . .” He shook his head. “The disease has taken a lot out of you, but, yes, I can see it now. Well, well, well. There are a million things I’d like to ask you about the second expedition, but . . .” He drew his artificial eyebrows together, and his voice turned angry. “Christ, you almost killed me!”
Van Dyke slid off the examining bed. “I did no such thing. That incision in your torso can be sealed easily enough. And besides, you can’t be killed.”
“Not here,” said Rory. “Not now. Before. You’re the one who brought the land mines along on the B. Traven. You’re the one who booby-trapped the Alpha. Damn it, you blew half my face off! You could have killed me!”
“You can’t be killed,” Van Dyke said. “You’re not alive.”
Rory spluttered in a mechanical way. I looked at Van Dyke. “Those mines were passive protection,” I said, “and you planted them long ago. But when you learned that Denny O’Reilly’s granddaughter was coming to Mars, you decided you had to take active steps, right?”
Van Dyke said nothing. I let out a theatrical sigh. “You’re not getting how this works, Billy-boy. I ask you questions, you answer—or you die. It’s really not a difficult concept.”
Van Dyke was looking not at me but at the wall where a freeze-frame of the deepscan of Rory was still being displayed. I suppose it galled Van Dyke that Rory could have comfortably taken the scanner’s radiation forever, when it was radiation exposure that had given Van Dyke cancer. But he said nothing.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll tell you. You knew Denny O’Reilly had a mistress whose last name was Takahashi, of course. And you work for InnerSystem Lines—you get to see the passenger manifests for all their ships; you check them each time you return to Earth. When you saw there was a Reiko