Hide and seek Read Free

she sealed her faceplate.
Chin could hear her footsteps rapping lightly down the hall and then going down the stairs to the ground floor. He stared into the dim, greenly lit hallway outside his office, trying to collect his thoughts.
    Chin’s narrow face was handsome; he had straight black hair and black eyes and a wide firm mouth, now down-turned. He was a tall man, with a naturally slender build kept slim–like Lydia’s–by twenty years of life at a third of a gee. It was a typical build for Martians because, while it was easy to carry extra mass at low gees, it was unnecessary and could even be dangerous to sling around a lot of extra fat and muscle.
    Through the glass outer wall he noticed a lantern outside in the windswept street; the yellow glow of a patroller’s hand torch wavered through the green glass like the phosphorescent organs of some benthic fish. As he watched, the light resumed its slow movement. He glanced at his watch: 20:08. Old Nutting was as regular as a cesium clock.
    He went back to his desk and sat down. He leaned back in his chair, staring up through the glass ceiling at the vast shadow of the sandstone vault that arched overhead. Beyond the edge of the natural stone roof shone ten thousand stars, unblinking–hard bright points in the Martian night.
    What was to be done about Lydia? The question had plagued him for most of the three years they’d been intimate. She was younger than he was, a passionate, demanding woman. He was a man who felt older than he looked–people age slowly on Mars, because of the low gravity, provided they stay out of the ultraviolet–but for all his apparent maturity, a man still uncertain of his wants and needs. . . .
    He mentally pinched himself. He had to put the personal stuff out of his mind tonight. He had to decide what to do with the information he’d recently acquired.
He pulled the yellow fax sheets from beneath the pile of other papers, where he’d hidden them when he’d heard Lydia’s unexpected footsteps on the stairs. The data stared up at him. The facts were bald enough, but crucial connections were missing; Chin knew enough about evidence to know what was needed in court and what was needed to make an administrative ruling, and in the communications before him he didn’t have enough of either. But there were other routes to justice.
    Shortly after he’d come to Mars, years back, Chin, like a lot of other tenderfeet, had managed to get himself cheated on a work contract. Lab City had been a smaller and rougher place then, hardly more than a construction camp–not that the same kind of thing didn’t still happen today–and a cheap shuttleport lawyer had given him some advice.
    “Don’t bother to convince me you’re in the right. I’ll grant you that without argument,” said the lawyer, “but getting a settlement, and especially collecting on it, is something else again. So how far are you willing to go?”
“What do you mean?”
     
“To make them think you’re crazy?”
     
“Crazy!”
     
“Crazy enough to beat somebody up. Burn something down. Zero some expensive equipment. Catch my drift?”
    To Dare Chin’s eventual amusement and edification, it had proved unnecessary either to sue or to carry through on his threats–so apparently he’d been willing to go far enough. As an administrator he had learned to think of this sort of paralegal strategy as the “personal approach.”
The time had come to use the personal approach on Dewdney Morland. Chin left his office and descended the stairs to the ground floor.
    Morland was standing in the middle of the floor under the dome, hunched over his instruments. His back was to Chin; work lights on tripods joined with the overhead spots to pinpoint the Martian plaque and Morland himself in a circle of brilliant white light. Dewdney Morland, Ph.D., had arrived on Mars a week ago, preceded by clearances from the Council of Worlds Cultural Commission. The past two evenings, starting when