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 determine that we need to check your quarters, or your records, to pursue our investigation, then we’re going to do that. We have that authority.”
“I say you don’t,” John said arrogantly, and snapped his fingers in the man’s face.
“We are going to search your rooms,” Houston said, articulating each word very carefully.
“Get away,” Boone said contemptuously, and jerked at the other two and waved them back. He laughed, lip curled with scorn: “That’s right, go! Get out of here, you incompetents— go back and read the regs on search and seizure!”
He went in his room and closed the door behind him.
He paused. It sounded like they were leaving, but either way he had to act like he didn’t care. He laughed, and went to the bathroom and took some more painkillers.
They hadn’t yet gotten to the closet, which was lucky; it would have been hard to explain the torn walker without telling the truth, and that would have been messy. Curious how tangled things got when you concealed the fact that someone had tried to kill you. That made him pause. The attempt had been pretty clumsy, after all. There must have been a hundred more effective ways to kill someone out in a walker on Mars. So if they were just trying to scare him, or were perhaps hoping that he would try to conceal the attack, so that they could find him lying, and then have something on him…
He shook his head, confused. Occam’s razor, Occam’s razor. The detective’s primary tool. If someone attacks you they mean you harm, that was the basic, the fundamental fact. It was important to find out who the attackers were. And so on. The painkillers were strong, and the omegendorph was wearing off. It was getting hard to think. It was going to be a problem disposing of the walker; the helmet in particular was a big bulky thing. But now he was into it, and there was no graceful way out. He laughed; he knew he would think of something eventually.