The Pedestal (31 page)

“Uh, why?” I want to know.

“Let’s just say Grogan can be ... dangerous.”

“Dangerous? What does that mean?”

Cutterly shakes his head; he’s said all he’s gonna say.

“C’mon, guys,” I groan. “You can’t throw out an accusation like that and expect me to know what to do with it. What do you mean by
dangerous
? Like, irresponsible, or throw-you-under-the-bus dangerous?”

Cutterly exchanges a glance with his pal.

Rogers chews his lip, eyebrows scrunched thoughtfully. “Might as well, Cutt,” he mutters with a halfhearted shrug. “The cat’s half out of the bag, anyway.”

With a somber nod, Cutterly coughs and then addresses my question with one of his own. “Who do you think Winkley is buried next to?”

“I don’t know,” I confess. “I’m guessing not Montague, though, right? Grogan said there wasn’t anything left to bury.”

“Nope, not Montague.”

“Then who?”

Setting his fork down, Cutterly leans forward, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Winkley wasn’t our first BP victim,” he says, smiling as my eyes bug. “Didn’t know that, did you?”

I shake my head no, too stunned to speak.

He nods. “Guy named Emmers. Died in his sleep.”

“What makes you think it was the BPs?”

“Well, for one, he wasn’t even forty years old. And he was in better shape than any of us.”

My eyes narrow. “You sure it wasn’t a freak heart attack or some—”

“We did an autopsy,” Rogers pipes in.

“What? You mean you, like, cut him open?”

Rogers nods somberly. “Well,” he says in corrective drawl, motioning to Cutterly with his chin, “not
us—
Fiona did.”

God help me, I can’t help the image that fills my head: Fiona wielding a bloody scalpel, digging around in a heap of glistening organs. I shudder at the thought, feeling as though my skin is itching to crawl away from me. It dawns on me at once that these two are messing with me, that this is just a little belated hazing.
Oh, they’re good. They almost had me.

“Really,” I say with a wry, knowing smile. “And what, pray tell, did she find?”

“Poison in his blood, bits of chewed up BP2 in his stomach. Mixed in with his salad greens.”

My smile twitches. “He
ate
it?”

“Yup.”

If this is a joke, it isn’t very funny; apparently Mars warps one’s sense of humor over time. “And you think it was Grogan?”

Cutterly shakes his head and reclines in his chair, folding beefy arms across a barreled chest. “I don’t
think
, man—I
know
.”

“Okay, so how do you
know
?”

Cutterly’s face darkens; I get the feeling this guy isn’t used to others questioning his judgment. “What,” he snarls, “you saying he did it to himself?”

Realizing that I’ve inadvertently offended the man—a man who could pulverize me into a pile of Martian dust with very little effort—the fragile remnants of my smile flee. “Whoa,” I say, putting my hands up in the universal signal for conversational surrender. “I’m not saying that, I’m just trying to understand why Grogan would do something so crazy, that’s all.”

Cutterly grunts, then picks up his fork again. For now, I’m forgiven—or on probation—but my suspicion that this is a joke is fading fast. “Emmers didn’t like Grogan at all,” explains Cutterly. “He thought there was a conflict of interests with Grogan working here—you know, because of Fiona—so he filed a complaint with headquarters.” He puts away half an entrée in a single bite and begins chewing fiercely.

I can’t help but smile; Cutterly’s just confirmed my longtime suspicion that Grogan and Fiona were once an item. On the other hand, this whole Grogan thing isn’t quite adding up, which waters down my sense of satisfaction. “Seems like kind of a weak motive, don’t you think?”

Cutterly swallows his cud and snatches up a napkin, wiping his mouth with a muffled chuckle. “You kidding? Think about it: this place is his whole life, man—it’s
all
our lives; we don’t just work here—this is it for us. I can’t speak for you, but the rest of us don’t have much choice about being here. Grogan does. For whatever reason, he’s sacrificed a lot to be here. And there’s no way he’d let anything jeopardize his position.”

“Are you saying that by getting rid of Emmers, Grogan’s problems with headquarters went away?”

Rogers chuckles. “He’s still here, isn’t he?”

I shrug noncommittally. “I guess so.”

Cutterly sighs. “You think anyone on Earth gave Emmers’s complaint a second thought after he killed himself?”

“Killed himself? I thought you said—”

My objection is cut off by a dismissive wave of Cutterly’s huge hands. “I’m just telling you how Grogan spun it—convinced pretty much everyone, too. Just not us.”

“Wow.” I honestly don’t know what else to say.

Rogers clears his throat and leans forward. “Listen, Wilson, just don’t let your guard down around the guy if you can help it. That’s all we’re saying. We don’t need another grave out there.”

A thought occurs to me. “Wait a second—you don’t think he had anything to do with Winkley, do you?”

Cutterly glances at Rogers and they both shrug. “No telling,” Rogers replies. “Personally, I figure I’m better off assuming the worst with him.”

Man, these cranks are wound tight; can anyone say
paranoid
?

We stay up much later than usual, sipping hot tea—warm whiskey, in the case of Rogers—until I’m half-convinced these guys are on to my plan and have decided to keep me well within their line of sight. But then, at nearly one in the morning, Rogers passes out on the table. Cutterly is annoyed by this, because the head of his buddy plopped to the table precisely as he was delivering the punch line of a ridiculously long and circuitous joke. I suppose I may never know what happened to that robotic fish and his left-handed pharmacist.

Declining my help, Cutterly drags the limp, snoring bag of drunken flesh that is Rogers from the commons to the dorms. Heart racing, I retire to my own room, leaving the door slightly ajar. My breaths ebb and flow in ragged succession. I hear Cutterly shut Rogers’s door and then relocate to his own room. Through the crack of my own door, I can just discern a slice of lamplight against the hallway wall—Cutterly’s light. Ten minutes later, when his light finally extinguishes, my breathing finally returns to normal.

I’m as ready as I’m gonna get.

Creeping from my room, I stand in the empty corridor for a long moment, listening for any excuse to abort my mission. Nothing but the tranquil hum of forced air and a faint whisper of night wind outside. On tiptoes, I pad down the hall toward Grogan’s room. The darkness is like pitch, so thick and impenetrable that I’m forced to navigate by touch; fortunately, I have a pretty good memory for the lay of the land in here. There’s not much at this end of the hall: a few dorms—one Grogan’s, one formerly Fiona’s, the last used for storage—and a common restroom that, until now, was our unofficial women’s room. My NanoPrint begins to hum, and I know I’m close. Seconds later, as my fingers graze the latch to Grogan’s door, I suddenly wonder if I’ve gone crazy.

What am I doing here? I’m no prowler, yet here I am sneaking around like one, preparing to break into my boss’s dorm. And for what—idle curiosity? What would Stew think of me now?

I’m almost hoping the door will be locked—that’s perhaps the only scenario in which I’ll walk away with both my dignity and a clean criminal history—but alas, it opens on well-oiled hinges, beckoning me inside. I hurriedly oblige before I can change my mind, shutting the door behind me as noiselessly as I can manage. I flick on the light and look around. The space is much larger than I imagined—easily twice the size of my own dorm. The room is halved by a muted seam along all four planes, perhaps the ghostly footprint of a removed wall. On one side of the line is a tidy bed, a desk with a blank surface, and a dresser; it’s a depressing, militaryish space, devoid of any personal identity whatsoever. In its own way, the opposing side of the room is just as bizarre: it has been modified to resemble a control station of sorts, sporting monitors, gauges, meters, toggle switches, buttons—you name it. I’m betting Grogan can control every inch of the b-hive in some capacity from here.

I’m not sure what to do now; my implant is busily humming away—kind of annoying really, now that I’ve grown unaccustomed to the thing—yet I’m not at all sure how to identify what’s causing the activity. I wander toward the wall of electronics, hesitating with it just out of reach; I’m not sure why, but something inhibits me from approaching any closer, as if even the slightest movement of air against the circuitry will set off an alarm. This is probably an irrational fear, but it might also be the sound warning of my trusty gut—under the circumstances, it’s difficult to distinguish between the two.

Better to err on the side of caution.

Stepping away from Grogan’s altar of gadgetry, I steer toward his dresser. Nearing the plain chest of drawers, my implant seems to go crazy, and the feel of it—a frenzied wiggle, so tantrum-like that it could almost be a living thing—sends my blood into an excited boil.

There’s something here, no doubt about that.

I find it in his sock drawer—a little plastic container that hinges open like a miniature suitcase. Inside are two identical, rice-sized bits of loose metal. I’ve never actually seen one before, yet I innately know what I’m looking at. These are NanoPrints—though I have no idea who they belong to, much less what they’re doing here. I pick one up delicately, bringing it closer to my eye, like a jeweler examining a gemstone through a loupe. It’s too small to discern much detail, but I can just make out the tiny trademark fingerprint stenciled on one side. Between my fingers, the implant suddenly begins to vibrate in short pulses, and my own responds in similar pulses as they shake hands.

The pulses graduate until my NanoPrint is virtually dancing under my skin, hiccupping like an old combustion engine with a maladjusted carburetor. I can feel it accepting an xchange profile just as it sends out update requests to the nexus, choking on a bottleneck of unheeded threads. My daily schedule loads and attempts to fetch the availability of my favorite restaurants and retailers, and that chokes, too. Even as I’m overwhelmed by the piling of failed functionality, I sense something flicker in the background: a file has just downloaded to my MentalNotes. It’s not large, and it’s definitely not one of mine. Something has copied to my implant almost faster than I could detect.

Unrelated to the NanoPrints, a feeling of unrest begins to settle upon me, bristling the hairs in my pores as if I’m being watched. Nervously, I check the door. I quietly rejoice that it’s safely closed, yet I feel no less probed by invisible eyes.

Gaze darting about the room, it suddenly occurs to me that I’ve been terribly naive to believe I could invade Grogan’s privacy without his knowledge; not only is he an engineer, he’s an adamantly secretive person. On Earth, people like him monitor every inch of their living and working spaces, especially in their absence. Why should Grogan behave any differently here? I can easily imagine that my digital likeness has been recorded to a hard drive somewhere, waiting patiently to betray my crooked ways.

Man, I’m a crank idiot.

Afraid now, I drop the NanoPrints back into their box and return it to the drawer where I found it. I can’t wait to investigate the file in my MentalNotes, but I don’t dare linger here any longer. It’s all I can do to keep from sprinting for my room. But I’ve got to leave this place with the same cunning—or better—with which I entered it. There’s still a chance I might get away with this—not that I’ve ever been lucky—and the last thing I want is to squander that chance out of carelessness.

As I tiptoe down the hall—my fizzing stomach lurching at my esophagus—something I should have predicted happens: my NanoPrint abruptly goes still again. Repeated efforts to access it fail until the scope of my predicament gradually sinks in: if I’m going to access that file, I’ll have to do it from Grogan’s room—for reasons that I can’t fathom in the heat of the moment, my implant doesn’t seem to function away from it.