Just like the boss, huh, Huo?
But only if I am dead.
And not dead as Brian Thorne, but as Diego Braddock.
Was it so simple that all I had to do was send a tight-beam to my board of directors, saying I was alive and well on Mars and to slap Huo in jail?
No, he’d produce the double. It was probably a good double. When was the last time I had met with the board? Four months before the trip out—that was five months ago. A man can change a lot in five months, Huo would say, if anyone noticed the double’s slight differences. Wait, I had seen Fredrickson a week or so before I left. No, that still left two months or more, time for a lot of changes. How long had Huo been planning this? There was all that time after Madelon, all those many, many months of just not wanting to be concerned with all the businesses, all the decisions. Huo had done a fine job then. I had given him an enormous bonus, enough to retire on. But not live in the luxury he saw around me.
Envy is such a useless emotion. At least you can understand greed. Greed was responsible for most of our technology, and I suppose we deserve what we got.
Suppose I just got on a return flight and went home? Could I be certain one of the crew or one of the passengers was not an agent? Was I trapped here? I started getting mad again. No one tells Brian Thorne what to do! Some of my victor’s elation returned. I would go home on the next ship, and damn any claw-fingered zongo to stop me! I’d walk into my office and laser that son-of-a-bitch right at my own desk! He’d fall down in bloody chunks and—
I was feeling sick again.
I returned the reader after wiping the tape, then double-wiping it for any residual magnetism. I dropped the tape into a torch-labeled container on the street and checked into a Guild-operated hostel. I paid extra for a private room and I lay there a long time trying to figure it out. By now Huo knew I knew someone was trying to kill me. He wouldn’t know I suspected him, or I thought not, at any rate. Were the three I killed Osbourne and Sayles and some hired gun? Were there others?
I got up, went out, climbed back into my one-eyed sandcat, and took off for the Sunstrum mine. I climbed down off the cat tired and scratch-faced and just stood there, holding onto the door. Sven Sunstrum cycled the lock and came out to me himself. He looked at me and at the beat-up cat and at the patch I had welded over the broken lock so I could pressurize the cabin.
“Come in,” he said.
I sat down in the living room of their dome, slumped into a chair. They looked at me expectantly, waiting. “My name isn’t Diego Braddock,” I said. “It’s Brian Thorne.”
“Do you need help?” Sunstrum asked.
“Someone is trying to kill me.” I took a deep breath and let it out, slowly. “And I don’t know why. Or which why.”
Sunstrum looked at his daughter, then back at me. “Over Nova?” he said.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. Probably not. They are very professional.”
Li Wing said, “There are many types of men here. They were many things before. It attracts certain kinds of men, men who would know how to kill.” Her eyes went from me to her husband.
“Who would want to kill you?” asked Sunstrum. “As Thorne, I mean.”
I shrugged. “Many, I suppose.”
“Brian Thorne,” Nova said thoughtfully. “I thought you were much older.”
I grinned wearily at her. “Right now I am.” The exhaustion was setting in as my body ran out of adrenaline.
