Anyway. Getting back to the story.
Or the chaos. The Burroughs was buzzing like a hornet’s nest after a brat throws a rock at it.
Of course it was. An alien, dead. An alien from one of the powerful, respected races. A Grodo, no less. (His pheromonal name, translated into Standard Anglo-Hispano, would be something like Vigilante Fixer of Alien Carroña Who Is Never Taken por Sorpresa, though the events of the day proved that moniker to be… inadequate.) The entire insectoid community was in an uproar, demanding that the responsible parties pay in blood or lymph or brake fluid, they didn’t care which, so long as they paid it all, immediately.
Turns out none of the perps stuck around to let the Colossaurs tear them to shreds, or the Cetians mutilate them, or the Grodos turn them into living incubators for their cute carnivorous larvae—quaint custom, that. Makrow 34, Giorgio Weekman, and the Colossaur (we never did get an ID on him; the brass from Colossa aren’t keen on divulging data about their people) had taken off for parts unknown, leaving the challenge of tracking, locating, and neutralizing them to the pozzies, and in particular to yours truly.
The Galactic Trade Confederation called an urgent Special Summit. I didn’t get to go, of course—none of us pozzies did—but I have a pretty good idea of how it went down: the Grodos waved those six ugly appendages of theirs around and threatened everybody in sight with their ovipositor stings, blaming it all on the Colossaurs. The giant reptiles of Colossa grated their teeth and shook their tails menacingly, insisting the perpetrator was just a renegade and there was no call for blaming their whole species. The Cetians expressed dismay over the outrages committed by the flawed and wayward Cetian while considering how best to screw over the two other races. All this under a very thin veil of politeness.
Realpolitik, in a word.
Somebody had to pay the piper, so it ended in the usual shakedown, just as you’d expect. Either all the criminals got caught, or all the aliens left the Solar System. That would mean the end of human intergalactic trade, sending Homo sapiens back to the technological Middle Ages. They gave this good news to us pozzies to pass along to the humans, seeing as how we were the middlemen, so to speak.
It was a huge mess, and it dawned on us that we might be facing a much more complicated business than a simple gunfight. We all felt sorry that Zorro and Achilles were no longer among us, of course: we may be artificial, but our esprit de corps is real.
Not like it would be any skin off our backs if the humans were deprived of alien trade goods and trash, sentimental considerations aside. But with the aliens gone, there’d be no more reason to keep the Burroughs in orbit. They’d decommission it and sell it for scrap—and us along with it, no doubt.
Some pozzies profess a faith in an electronic great beyond and positronic reincarnation, but I doubt they would want to test the hypothesis.
Not within a humanly measurable time frame, I mean.
Faced with this threat, the Positronic Police Force went to Code Red. We had to nab the perps, no matter what. That didn’t mean we should all leave the station, though. Business had to keep moving, the show must go on. All it meant was, for this one time and only as an exception, somebody had to leave the safety of the Burroughs and hoof it across the Solar System, hunting down the fugitives.
As the first officer to reach the scene of the crime, my pals elected me to do the job. The top Confederation brass all agreed.
I accepted. I wasn’t particularly keen to go, but somebody had to do their dirty work, right? And if the guys with the secondnames had decided that I was the one for the job, well, maybe this would be my chance to get me a secondname of my own, after it was all over.
Not that they gave me any choice.
They granted me full authority inside the Station—for all the good that would do me. Fortunately, the aliens aren’t dumb: seeing as the fugitives must have holed up in some rocky corner of the Solar System, they made a couple calls and got my carte blanche extended over almost all the space under human control. Except Earth, naturally.
Not because the Homo sapiens police didn’t want to suck up to our omnipotent employers, but because there’s a limit to everything. Too many resentful, xenophobic fundamentalist hotheads on the old planet would give their right arms (not much of a sacrifice, considering the current state of medicine and reconstructive grafts, but take it as a metaphor) to shred one of the hated pozzies, the aliens’ guard dogs. Even if I left my usual Humphrey Bogart fedora and trench coat behind, my golden epidermis would give me away. Not even the police could protect me from a determined attacker. Or protect the attacker from my counterattacks. No point stirring things up. I’d get to see Earth some other occasion. There’d be time.
But apart from the sacred cradle of humanity, I could go wherever I wanted. And request (that is, demand) the cooperation of any human authorities, federal or local.
When the Galactic Trade Confederation informed me of the wide authorization I’d been granted, I understood just how worried they were about what Makrow 34 and his friends might do—and that if I didn’t find them in time, I’d probably envy the fate of Zorro and Achilles.
First thing I did was rewatch the holotapes, over and over. I was intrigued by what happened to Achilles. He didn’t have time to understand what he had run up against, and the first few times I watched the recording, I didn’t get it either. It seemed like just a lot of bad luck, all coming at once and at the worst possible time. First he moved too slow and aimed badly. Then more slowness, topped off by a weapon malfunction. We checked, cleaned, and adjusted our weapons every day, so a misfire was unlikely, but it wasn’t out of the question.
I started by inspecting my buddy’s maser. It was in perfect condition: he hadn’t forgotten to oil it, the energy crystals were in top shape, no dust on the prisms. So what, then? Was it the buttered toast phenomenon—always falls butter-side down? Or Murphy’s law: whatever can go wrong will go wrong, especially when it does the most harm?
In principle, I don’t believe the universe has a statistical grudge against anybody. I kept looking. But it wasn’t until I was watching the scene for the third time that I noticed the detail. If I had involuntary muscle reactions like humans do, I would have trembled when I recognized the concentration on Makrow 34’s face as Achilles approached him and opened fire.
Especially with Zorro’s whip and black sombrero levitating as though the artificial gravity had gone out over that square yard of space. They were in the background, behind him, but perfectly visible.
It could only mean one thing: probabilistic fluctuation.
In other words, our Cetian really was a Psi. Not a telepath, though. Nothing that simple. Achilles’ mind, like all our minds, wasn’t susceptible to Psi control. He wasn’t a teleporter, either, or even a telekinetic; neither of those talents would have given him the time to modify the trajectory of a beam moving at relativistic speeds, such as microwaves.
I know what two and two make. With the impossible eliminated, only the improbable remained.
Makrow 34 had to be a Gaussical.
Gaussical. The term had only entered the human vocabulary (and therefore our own) fifteen years earlier. That was when a Grodo with this unforeseen power—Psi specialists on Earth had never predicted it—thought a Cetian trader had double-crossed him. In one of the internal passageways on board the Burroughs, the guy lost the self-control Grodos always show and unleashed a chaos of physical improbabilities. Objects floated in midair. It snowed upwards. Some people even claimed they saw a galloping herd of centaurs. Two-headed centaurs.
As Sandokan Mompracem, the pozzie who’s our current expert on alien languages, explained it to me, “Gaussical” is an unhappy effort on the part of a machine translator to turn a highly complicated Grodo pheromonal term into Standard Anglo-Hispano. A more precise translation would come out more like The Desconsiderado Who Willfully Distorts the Curva de Probabilidades. Earthlings call it a probability curve, a bell curve, or a Gauss distribution. The machine offered a bunch of possible translations, as it does when it comes up against new concepts. The one that stuck was Gaussical.
I went over the other options once, purely out of curiosity. Two of the most reasonable were Bellringer-Vándalo and Inconsciente-Twister. Doesn’t surprise me Gaussical was the one they went for. At least it gives you an idea of what it’s about. And reminds you that spoken languages are sometimes woefully incapable of expressing certain concepts.
I felt great now. Oh yes. So the fugitive was one of those statistically near-impossible Psi oddballs who could alter, through some as-yet undiscovered means, the shape of the Gaussian bell curve that describes the statistical probability of any number of events. The macroscopic equivalent of Maxwell’s famous demon, according to a pozzie named Einstein who knows more about physics than Sandokan Mompracem does about alien languages and customs.
Which did nothing to clear things up for me. Then Einstein put it in clear, pedestrian terms: the guy could make it rain inside a closed room. He could generate errors in a computer processor. He could make the molecules in one body momentarily intangible to another body. Fortunately the Uncertainty Principle is universal, so even a Psi case like that couldn’t decide beforehand which of all the possible fluctuation effects would occur in any given instance. In the rare cases when a Psi might be able to concentrate hard enough to produce a more controlled, voluntary effect, the Law of the Conservation of Energy says that other completely random events would have to occur simultaneously. Like the gravity-free microzone where my poor pal Zorro’s whip and sombrero floated up in the air.
So that’s why the aliens were so worried.
The case of Makrow 34 would have given Heisenberg himself a giant headache if he’d had to explain it. Or maybe the strange power was so strong in him, he could laugh at the laws of physics.
The prisoner didn’t need to carry weapons. He was a lethal weapon himself. The Colossaur and the human did well to free him as soon as they could. Nobody in his right mind fights by hand if he can get hold of a good maser. Taking on Zorro and the Grodo was the most those two could manage, and that only because they were caught by surprise. On their own, they could never have outfought a well-armed and alert positronic robot. But when the freak started messing with the odds, it was a different story.
Achilles never had a chance. It was a mercy he died without understanding what hit him. First his maser missed, then it stopped working; it could just as easily have exploded or turned into a block of ice—an unlikely but theoretically possible thermodynamic event. Something, in any case, would have happened to keep him from hurting Makrow. The fact is, all the statistical fluctuations of Heisenbergian hell were arrayed against Achilles. He never could have truly harmed the Cetian.
When I really leaned on them, the alien merchants confirmed my suspicions. And, of course, they apologized for not giving us the information sooner. But criminal or not, Makrow 34 was one of them, so the contents of his file had been classified. Go figure.
Now, as the case officer, I had permission to review his file. If I needed to know any other details, I could count on their sincere and complete cooperation. So long as I requested them far enough ahead of time and went through the proper channels and blah blah blah.
Understood?
Yep. Totally. I understood too well. Carte blanche in the Solar System or no, I wouldn’t have anything remotely like free access to information. They’d give me all the authority I needed, but they wouldn’t tell me anything I hadn’t already found out on my own. So not only did I have to find a needle in a haystack, blindfolded, I had to grab it and pocket it—knowing that if I tried the needle might stab me, the hay might burst into flames, a roof beam might fall onto my head, I might be charged by a bull that hadn’t been there a second before, or I might be turned into a frog in the blink of an eye.
So what if the frog I’d be turned into would be a positronic robot frog. I still had to try.
At least there was one bit of hope amid all the tragedy: the records of the docking module energy sensors showed that the fugitives’ fuel reserves were almost empty, and they hadn’t had time to refill them. The two or three crystals they had left wouldn’t be enough for even one hyperspace jump. They have to go to some hideout, somewhere in our own Solar System. Probably in the asteroid belt. Makrow 34 was familiar with it and his rumored energy treasure would be waiting for him there. Somewhere. That’s where I’d have to go to find them. It would be a matter of time. A matter of combing through all the asteroids, one by one.
Simple, right? The sort of fun I enjoy on weekends. I sent out an order—low priority—to every human police frigate, telling them to let me know if they saw anything out of the ordinary. Given the fugitive’s exotic Psi capability, though, I figured they wouldn’t find so much as the shadow of his ship. And I was right about that.
Want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself. As I said, it was up to me to find the needle in the haystack.
Anybody would have thought my hunt was doomed to fail. If Makrow’s treasure was what they said it was, as soon as the outlaws reached it they’d have more than enough energy to beat it from the Solar System and take three spins around the galaxy before I could find them.
But fortunately for me, that sort of childish logic doesn’t work for space, gravity fields, and especially the bizarre geography of hyperspace.
Get near the hyperspace jump-off point, you’re automatically in the zone that the Burroughs detectors sweep. If their ship tried, they’d set off every alarm in the station. Plus a barrage or two of antimatter-headed missiles. I prayed to all the gods I don’t believe in that Makrow and his sidekicks would risk it. That would have made the endgame easier. Getting themselves disintegrated would have saved me so many hassles.
Likewise, if by some impossible means (Gaussical means, that is) they managed to escape the radar installations, well, once that monster left our jurisdiction, his adventures would be somebody else’s responsibility, you know.
In cases like this, I always ask myself what Philip Marlowe would do, but on this occasion it did me no good. After rereading the complete works of Chandler for the millionth time, I gave up. From what I could tell, there were no Gaussicals on Earth in the 1940s, no aliens, no hyperspace jump-off points in the Oort Cloud, no potential hideouts the size of an asteroid belt where a criminal could lie low.
Or rather—all those things did exist, but they didn’t count for anything in the game of hide-and-seek. As for the bad guys’ weapons, Marlowe and company had also had it pretty easy in Los Angeles compared to me. What’s a lead-filled blackjack and a couple of revolvers next to having all the laws of probability turned against you?
My buddies offered me all the help they could. It wasn’t much. They didn’t have any suggestions either. My best friend, Chester Spillane, even loaned me his collection of Mike Hammer novels and twentieth-century detective movies, in case I could find any inspiration in them.
I read and watched them all. Good thing I was so meticulous. And lucky for me, my friend had such a wide definition that his detective holotapes included a bunch of cop comedies, restored from old celluloid prints.
48 Hours. Leads: Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy. Archetypes, almost caricatures. The simple, slightly brutish but honest white policeman. The clever, sardonic black criminal (small-time criminal, of course, so viewers could identify with him: bad, but not that bad). Not much in the way of research, though pretty entertaining. The thing is, it made an idea bubble up through my germanium-foam circuits.
Why not follow the white cop’s lead? Fight fire with fire. Use a bad guy to trap another bad guy.
Homeopathy. Like seeks like.
Since the Burroughs obviously didn’t keep any Cetian smugglers, murderers, thieves, or swindlers on hand, it was logical and completely inevitable that, after a quick trip to the station’s nanoelectronic workshops, half an hour later I’d be walking into the force-field cell for my first meeting with Vasily Fernández.