Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 57, No. 1 & 1, January/February 2012

Pandora’s Box Kristine Kathryn Rusch

We stood in the center of the second-floor lobby, staring down at the beautiful handmade box, sitting on top of another box not nearly as fine.

“Told you,” Paladin said, her muscular arms crossed.

No one looked at her. No one dared.

There were six of us — two members of hotel security, two members of convention security, Paladin, and me. The “told you” was for me.

“I think we should call the bomb squad,” said Phil, the youngest, thinnest member of con security, so thin I had no idea how anyone could ever feel threatened by him. He was new. They were all new, even the hotel security guards, although not for the same reason.

The hotel had been finished just before the Great Recession started — maybe days, maybe weeks, maybe months before, depending on what you counted as the beginning of the recession — whether it was former Presidential candidate John McCain’s declaration that the economy was “tanking” and he needed to shore it up, or whether you counted it from the collapse of Lehman Brothers, or whether you counted it from the first signs in what I call the Canary States, the ones that don’t have the economic base that allows them to thrive in good times, let alone survive the bad.

The hotel needed business, and CrapCon was business, although not very good business, which is why I’m calling it CrapCon instead of its real name. I’m not even going to give you the name of the town where CrapCon was held because that would help you figure out which con it was. Even after a debacle as big as this one, I’m still protecting fandom and science fiction conventions and all things Geek.

Protection is part of my job, although it’s not in the job description. Not that I have an actual job description. By IRS standards, I’m no longer employed, choosing to manage my investments — which were nicked during the rundown into the Great Recession, but not really harmed, since unlike most people (including the so-called experts), I actually saw this thing coming — and I moved my millions with months to spare.

That’s right. Millions with an “m.” I’m what is still sometimes called in the Pacific Northwest a Microsoft Millionaire, being one of those early employees of Microsoft who got stock options in addition to a salary, and who divested before Microsoft became — also in Pacific Northwest parlance — the Evil Empire. I left the job with millions and unlike so many of my Microsoft Millionaire colleagues, I invested wisely, turning a small fortune into that rarity, a large fortune.

But that wasn’t the job I was doing at CrapCon. At CrapCon, I was doing what I consider my real job. I’m a SMoF — a Secret Master of Fandom, fandom being, but not limited to, Science Fiction Fandom, which in my opinion involves anyone who likes, has read, or watched sf. But true fandom, the kind I’m protecting here, involves the fen — the hardcore fans who like to socialize with their sf heroes at places like Worldcon or Comic-Con or CelebCon. I fly across the country, setting up systems at young conventions or helping conventions like CrapCon get back on track.

Although by this point, “on track” was pretty close to “not too far off the rails.” CrapCon wasn’t even twenty-four hours old and already stinking to high heaven. The organizers hadn’t even issued a programming schedule, at least not one people could read, so attendees were wandering the halls, peering into conference rooms to see if there was anyone worth listening to. The program participants got a schedule, but no one else did.

And now this.

Marvin, the other member of con security, hovered over the box. He looked like he wanted to touch it, but he knew better.

We all knew better.

The hell of it was that, that box was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. It was carved out of porcelain or resin or pottery clay or glass or something. I couldn’t get close enough to make a real examination. It had been painted blue, purple, and gold, which wasn’t as gaudy as it sounded. The handcarved figure of a beautiful woman who looked astonishingly like Paladin (only with long flowing hair and wearing a long flowing gown that I knew — without asking — Paladin wouldn’t be caught dead in) lounged on the top of the box, looking like she wanted to seduce all of us. Little boxes littered the area around her, all of them replicas of the box itself, done in miniature.

Work so fine that I hadn’t seen anything like it in a Worldcon Art Show or in a Comic-Con dealers room where they have the truly, truly, truly high-end stuff.

This box was stunning and startling, and just by its very beauty, enticed you to pick it up. Which, fortunately, none of us had.

“What do we do now, Spade?” asked Marvin.

Spade isn’t my real name, but it’s what everyone calls me. Only a few in Fandom even know my real name and that’s because they worked with me all those decades ago at Microsoft. I prefer Spade most of the time — it’s fannish recognition of my peculiar talent: I can solve crimes like the great detectives of old. Most fen think I’m like Sam Spade, but I’m not that thin or that cynical. If I resemble any of the great fictional detectives of the mid-twentieth century, it’s Nero Wolfe. I’m six six, four hundred pounds (give or give), and horribly overeducated. I just venture out of my brown-stone a heck of a lot more often than he ever did.

“I think we should call the bomb squad,” Phil repeated, his voice shaking nervously.

Paladin crouched, her slender hand reaching for the box.

“Lady, don’t,” one of the hotel security guards said with great panic.

First, I’d never call Paladin “lady.” She’s tiny and beautiful, but there the resemblance to a lady ends. She also has more muscles than all of us combined, and she has that thin Buffy-the-Vampire-Slayer kick-butt heroine thing going for her. What endears her to me, besides her toughness and her sharp tongue, are her ears, which are ever so slightly pointed, giving her an elfin look. Strap a broadsword across her back, put a knife on her hip, and add a little dirt along her chin, and she’d look like one of the good guys heading to Mordor in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Second, Paladin knows what she’s doing. She’s not someone whose work you question even if it is... questionable.

“Ma’am,” the security guard said louder. “I don’t think you should touch that.”

She leaned farther in, craning her neck so that she could see all sides of the box. “It’s not a Chinese Puzzle Box,” she said.

I could have told her that from my vantage up here, but I let her talk.

“It’s more like one of those medieval lock boxes, although it’s not really one of those either.” Her hand still hovered over the box, too close for my comfort.

“Lady,” the security guard said, panic so deep in his voice that it made my heart pound harder. “Please. Don’t.”

“I think we have to turn or depress one of those little boxes,” she said.

“Don’t!” All four security guards said in unison.

She raised her head and gave them all a withering look. “I’m the one who called this in, remember?”

“I still think we should call the cops,” Phil said, this time to Paladin, showing more toughness than I expected.

“Oh, don’t worry,” I said. “I already did.”

Sadly, it’s not that unusual to see cops at sf conventions. Ideally, the cops are off duty and carrying an armload of books. But every now and then, they’ve been called in by a member of the hotel staff or some other patron who, upon seeing a Klingon in full dress uniform, gets scared and thinks some kind of invasion is going on.

I’ve seen cops deal with unexpected deaths (usually a heart attack) or the occasional riot (overexuberant fans trying to get too close to their favorite writer or actor), but I’d never seen cops come to investigate a bomb scare.

And that’s what this was, though I didn’t tell the police that. If I had, they would have evacuated the hotel, which would have made CrapCon famous, along with that D.C. convention where two non-fans used a sprinkler head on the ceiling as part of their bondage party and managed to break the entire fire suppression system, getting the fen (and not those two people!) banned from that hotel chain for more than a decade.

I explained to the dispatch that there was a suspicious object, but this being a science fiction convention suspicious objects were relatively common, and could they bring their experts in quietly, which they promised to do.

Quietly, however, was not how the day started for me. The day had started for me on the floor of the Hospitality Suite with my cell phone vibrating against my left ear.

I had apparently passed out in the middle of a late-night discussion about Australia’s growing Geek culture, which if I remember correctly included some YouTube video of the rock group Tripod, comparing them favorably to the Barenaked Ladies. Someone had made some Blue Goo, and I had too much of it, and the room was spinning.

CrapCon’s version of the Blue Goo had neon blue dye, a lot of alcohol of varying types, and some kind of sweetening agent. I usually didn’t drink like that, especially when I couldn’t identify half the ingredients of the concoction, but after the day I’d had — hell, the week I’d had — I felt I deserved something. CrapCon wasn’t worth saving, but I’d given it the old college try and decided I’d have some fun while I went down with the ship.

That, along with Tripod’s YouTube version of “Hot Girl in The Comic Shop,” was the last thing I remembered until the phone vibrated against my ear, and I realized that I had drooled in my sleep on a heavily trampled rug that smelled vaguely of beer and vomit. Or maybe not so vaguely.

I blinked hard to open my eyes, saw party cups, two other passed-out members of the convention committee, and three random fen, all of whom looked like they too had been victims of the Blue Goo.

The Blue Goo still glowed in its gigantic punch bowl, the glow muted by half a layer of water from the melted ice. Either that or the vodka had separated from the rest of the ingredients, a thought that made my stomach churn.

The phone vibrated again, making my teeth ache. I sat up, wiped the drool off my mouth, and did not look at the caller ID before picking up the line.

“What?” I said, although it sounded a lot more like “Wha...?” even to my rather forgiving ear.

“Spade?” Paladin.

I sat up. Jeez, that woman had a talent for finding me at my worst. Of course she did. She was one of the few attractive women on the planet who actually liked spending time with me, not because she was attracted to me, but because we were in the same business, kinda.

As she liked to remind me, she actually got paid for the crimes she solved. And she didn’t solve them with finesse and brilliance and observation. She solved hers with her fists, and when that didn’t work, she fought dirty.

Mostly, Paladin rescued people. She took her business card from the old Have Gun, Will Travel television show from fifty years ago. She wasn’t Richard Boone, and she didn’t offer her services from some saloon in San Francisco, but then again, this wasn’t the Old West, either. Instead of asking folks to wire her like Boone’s card did on the show, her business card said:

She got a lot of work that way. Heartbreaking, hard work, most of it, tracking runaways and child molesters. But her fannish work wasn’t heartbreaking; it was the stuff of legends. I most admired her takedown of an art dealer selling fake limited editions, but the fen loved her rescue of a kidnapped Chihuahua, a famous one that had won a lot of costuming awards (don’t ask). Paladin hated talking about that job because she felt it had been beneath her.

Besides, she had solved it in less than an hour, and then the damn dog bit her.

“Spade?” she said again, this time sounding worried.

“Yeah,” I said and ran a hand over my face. “Yeah, it’s me.”

“It doesn’t sound like you.”

I shrugged, which she couldn’t see, and said, “Yeah, well, you woke me up.”

“I thought the Great Spade didn’t sleep at cons.”

I usually didn’t, but those were cons that I enjoyed. “Not sure if I actually fell asleep.”

“Then how could I have — oh, never mind,” she said. “I’m in Con Ops. Your chair is here, but you’re not. Nor are you in your room. So where the hell are you?”

“How do you know I’m not in my room?” I asked, still rubbing my hand over my face.

There was a long silence on the other end. She probably didn’t want to tell me how she could get into the room even though she didn’t have an official keycard, and I didn’t want to tell her how thrilling and appalling it was to think of her in my room, running her beautiful hand across the undisturbed bed while she thought of me.

That thought made me press my fingers on the furrow in my forehead. I’d learned long ago about the futility of thinking about beautiful women in connection to me. I just tended to forget while hungover on Blue Goo.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. Last I heard, she was working a case in Nevada.

“Looking for you,” she snapped. “I need your help.”

When Paladin needed my help, my heart soared. It meant I got to spend time with her. It also made me nervous and self conscious.

“Get down here,” she said. “This can’t wait.”

“It’ll have to,” I said. “I need fifteen minutes.”

I needed three days. I’d slept in my clothes and someone else had clearly slept on them. Or walked on them. Then there was the matter of the Blue-Goo sweat-stink and the drool marks. I wasn’t about to let Paladin — or anyone — see me like this.

“I’m coming up to your room, then,” she said.

“No, you’re not,” I said. “I’ll be down in fifteen minutes. Get donuts. And coffee. I’ll need coffee.”

“We don’t have time—”

I hung up on her. I’d never hung up on Paladin before, but I hung up on her now because I had less than fifteen minutes to shower and shave and find clean clothes. If I took my full fifteen minutes, she would have barged into my room, which would have created a memory I wouldn’t have been able to handle.

I hurried — and I’m not the kind of man who hurries, and wouldn’t be even if I had the build for hurrying. Fortunately, my room was only one floor up and the staircase wasn’t far.

I found an unworn and supposedly slimming black T-shirt that had EVIL GENIUS emblazoned in red across the center, and a pair of black pants that I had only worn once (I think). I showered slower than planned (damn Blue Goo hangover) and shaved so fast that I shocked myself.

I still managed to get down to Con Ops with two minutes to spare.

Paladin was sitting in my chair, munching on a Krispy Kreme. My chair is huge, formfitting, and extremely expensive. I have it — or one of its five cousins — shipped to whatever convention I’m working on that weekend, along with my Tower of Terror, the computer system that is constantly being upgraded and moved from one convention to another.

Paladin had her back to the Tower of Terror. She sat cross-legged in my chair, managing to look like a small but powerful child ruler of a small but formidable foreign country. Or she would have, if she didn’t have powdered sugar on the tip of her nose.

“What’s this emergency?” I said grumpily. Not that I was feeling grumpy (despite the remnants of the hangover). I never felt grumpy when I saw Paladin. But I’d found that grumpy was a great defense with beautiful women because that way they’d never know how pleased I was to see them. Pleased never got me anywhere. Grumpy always got me a normal conversation and a good friendship.

She eased herself up slightly and reached into her back pocket, pulling out a folded piece of paper. She handed it to me.

I took my own Krispy Kreme as I unfolded the e-mail. I munched as I read.

The subject header was “Pandora’s Box.” The body of the e-mail read:

“Good Lord,” I said. “Did you call the cops?”

“What was I supposed to say?” she asked. “I got an e-mail bomb threat? They’d think I was threatening the convention. Have you ever seen what cops do when they think you’re issuing a bomb threat?”

I hadn’t. I didn’t want to. “It sounds like you have.”

“They want to solve things easily. Ergo, the person who mentions the threat is the person who issued the threat.”

I liked the “ergo,” but I didn’t say so. I just gave her a rueful smile. “So this has happened to you before.”

“Spade!” she snapped. “Focus.”

I blinked and grabbed another Krispy Kreme. My first seemed to have disappeared. Then I took the coffee that she had brought for me and put it into the ancient microwave OPs kept near the back of the room. If anything was going to explode, it would be that old machine.

“I took the liberty of scanning security footage while I was waiting for you,” she said. “And before you ask, I arrived with the damn Krispy Kremes. I didn’t see anything.”

“In the security footage,” I said.

“Anywhere,” she said.

“And, I take it, you have no idea who sent this e-mail.”

“The URL is spoofed,” she said. “I tracked the real URL through three countries. Whoever it is, they know what they’re doing.”

“You don’t have any idea who it is?”

Usually, if someone went to the trouble of threatening me, I had an idea who they were.

“No,” she said a bit too curtly.

“I didn’t see your name on the guest list,” I said. “How did they know you’d be here?”

“I wasn’t supposed to be here,” she said.

“Then why target this hotel this weekend?”

“Probably because they knew you’d be here,” she said.

I stared at her. The question on the tip of my tongue was, why should that matter? But I couldn’t quite bring myself to ask it, in case the answer was, Jesus, Spade, it’s a science fiction convention. Fen would die. Without — of course — any mention of me.

“Well,” I said, trying to sound calm, “that narrows the possibilities to someone in fandom.”

“Or someone newly on the outs with fandom,” she said.

“Or someone with a longtime grudge against fandom,” I said.

“Or someone who hates fandom,” she said.

“Or someone with a grudge against you,” I said.

“But it doesn’t matter who,” she said. “Not if they’re serious. We have to find this thing and get it out of the hotel.”

“It might not be that simple,” I said. Bombs aren’t always carryable. “Let’s find it first, then decide what to do with it.”

She bit her lower lip and sighed. I frowned: She hadn’t moved out of my chair. Was she frightened? I’d never actually seen Paladin frightened before.

“What’s this really about?” I asked her softly.

“I don’t know.”

“But you have an idea,” I said.

“I don’t know”, she repeated in a do-not-ask-me-again voice.

“I’m going to contact hotel security and con security. We need eyes on this thing. You need to check the children’s areas now. Day care’s not open yet. If this is a real whack job and not some fan with a grudge, they’re going to go for the soft target.”

Paladin’s mouth opened slightly. Then she hustled out of the chair and launched herself across Con Ops. I’d never seen her move so fast.

That scared me.

So I called the cops.

I didn’t say we had a bomb threat. I didn’t use the word “bomb” at all. I said that we had a delicate situation, one that required finesse, that we had two thousand guests at our convention, and if they got wind of this, they’d panic. I said we needed someone who was of rather high rank in the police department, not just beat cops, but someone who could make a decision quickly, and I needed that person to get in touch with me, and me alone, when they got to the hotel.

Then I gave them my cell number, the hotel’s security line, the convention security line, and told them that I’m Spade. No one asked my real name. No one even asked for my first name.

But they did take me seriously, and promised someone would be at the hotel immediately.

That was why Paladin needed me. She was, as she once told me, a bulldozer, with no finesse at all. Sometimes I thought I was all finesse. But finesse was what we needed here to find the bomb (if there was one), catch the real culprit, and keep one of us from going to jail for instituting a bomb scare.

Not to mention the fen stampede if anyone mentioned the word “bomb” at a science fiction convention.

In the meantime, I contacted hotel security and convention security, neither of which were very secure. Hotel security was two middle-aged guys so tough that I could probably take them one-handed, and con security was two old-timers and anyone who wanted to work for a free membership.

Which was how we ended up with Phil.

Who was really starting to panic.

Paladin was still crouching over the bomb, hand extended.

For the record, she hadn’t discovered the bomb. She’d been checking the vulnerable areas — day care, kids programming, gaming — while both types of security scrounged the rest of the hotel, particularly the public areas, looking for “suspicious” items. In this, con security did better than hotel security. To hotel security, the whole damn convention looked suspicious.

But the bomb itself — well, that proved not so hard to find.

At least for me. Security — both kinds — had walked past it twice.

Seems we hadn’t told them about the Pandora’s Box label on the e-mail. It would have been helpful, since a small sign stood just behind the boxes reading... of all things... Pandora’s Box.

I noticed it immediately, on my first pass through the hotel.

“I think if I move this,” Paladin said, her hand a little closer to the box now.

“No!” we all said in unison.

“Seriously,” she said. “It’s not attached to anything. Besides, I think it’s a secrets box—”

“No!” we said again.

“You guys are wusses,” she said, then she snatched the box and sprinted for the stairs.

“Paladin!” I shouted. “Paladin!”

Stupid woman. Didn’t she know that some bombs were motion sensitive? Some could be set off by cell phones? Some could—

I gave up arguing with her in my head and ran after her. No one else did, which was either just as dumb as my move or just as smart. The lower box could have blown when she picked up the upper box. The lower box could blow seconds from now. The upper box could blow at any moment — and she had to run through the lobby — and we would all die.

She took the stairs. I heard the door bang. Smart girl, not taking the elevator.

I hadn’t run in, oh, maybe ever. I could hear my feet pounding and I was wheezing. I pulled open the door to the stairs and the only thing that kept me from pausing there to catch my breath was the thought of Paladin dying because she did something stupid, something I could have prevented.

Like grabbing a bomb out of a hotel and running to the parking lot.

When I reached the top of the stairs, I heard another door bang, and then an emergency alarm go off.

She had gone out one of the side entrances instead of going through the lobby.

I clanged down the metal steps until I reached the door with the gigantic EMERGENCY EXIT sign emblazoned across its large metal handle. Above that sign were several more, warning that alarms would go off if the door was used unnecessarily.

Apparently they went off when it was used necessarily as well.

I pushed the door open and stepped into bright sunshine, which reminded me that I was hungover, and worse, hadn’t seen daylight from the outside for nearly three days.

Paladin had moved to an empty part of the parking lot — actually, the parking lot of a nearby hotel — and had set the box down.

“Step away from it, Paladin,” I shouted.

“Spade,” she said. “I think I know how it works.”

“Step away from it!” I shouted again, louder, even though I was getting closer to her.

“Spade, seriously—”

“Step away from the goddamn box,” I shouted, swearing at her, which was something I had never ever done.

She didn’t move. Instead, she looked at me in shock. “Stay back, Spade,” she said. “If this thing goes, I don’t want it to take you out.”

I ran over to her, even though every bit of my flesh jiggled, even though my Evil Genius T-shirt was soaked, even though I was scared out of my mind.

I grabbed her arm and pulled her away, probably hurting her. I didn’t care. She dug in, and I still didn’t care. She was probably stronger than me, but I was scared and I had adrenaline on my side. Adrenaline and mass.

I won.

“Spade,” she said. “Seriously—”

“No,” I said. “I won’t hear it. You’re not going near that thing. You’re lucky it wasn’t motion sensitive. You’re lucky—”

At that moment, my cell rang. Paladin looked at me as if she expected me to answer it. I expected me to answer it. It was probably the police.

But the minute I let go of her, she would run back to that damn device, thinking she really was a hero out of some old Western television show, and I would lose her forever.

“Get the cell out of my pocket, answer it, and put it to my ear,” I said.

“I’m not your servant, Spade,” she said.

“I don’t care,” I said. “Just do it.”

She must have heard something in my voice she’d never heard before. She grabbed the phone, pressed the screen and had to stand on her tiptoes to put the phone against my ear.

“Spade,” I growled.

“Detective Harold Procalmeyer,” said an unfamiliar voice. “You mentioned an emergency and delicacy? I’m in the parking lot and—”

“Detective,” I said with more relief than I expected. “Can you come to the north side of the building. I have something you need to see.”

Paladin was watching me. Her entire body melted, just a little, as if she finally understood the risk she took. Or maybe she understood that I wasn’t going to let her go, and the cop was going to thwart everything. Or maybe she just got hit with that lethargy people felt after the adrenaline rush ended.

The cop didn’t say goodbye. He just hung up, and within minutes, he walked over — less Columbo and more modem American police detective, pressed khakis (who did that?), suit coat, military haircut — one of those manly men that I would have expected Paladin to prefer.

Instead, she stepped behind me like a scared kid, putting me between him and her.

“Detective?” I asked.

He nodded, showed me his badge, and I explained. I showed him the e-mail — now crumpled and soggy — then nodded toward the box in the middle of the empty parking lot.

I told him about the box upstairs, the fears I had, and I managed to sound like an authority.

He looked around my shoulder. “You’re Paladin?” he asked her.

She nodded, leaning against me.

“You took a hell of a risk, young lady,” he said, as if she were four. “You think I’m going to commend you, but I’m not. That bomb could have been motion sensitive. It could have been—”

“Spade gave me the lecture, thanks,” she said. “And I still think we should do something about it.”

“We’re not going to do anything,” he said. “I am.”

And he did.

CrapCon was the first con I’d ever worked where the bomb squad showed up — not that the attendees ever knew. The con went on as planned. The box upstairs, heavily guarded by hotel security and con security, turned out to be just a box, although it and the sign were taken away as evidence.

The smaller box — the artistic one? The one that Paladin ran with? — that really was a bomb.

Two guys dressed like the cast of The Hurt Locker inspected it, then covered it with some kind of blast-proof thingie, and used remote controls to detonate it.

Seems it was a secrets box, like Paladin thought. Only if you tried to get to the hidden compartment, ingredients flowed together like the ingredients were supposed to do on the failed London airplane bomb in 2007 or the failed Christmas Day bombing attempt here in the States in 2009. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, and kablooey! There would have been a hole where the second-floor lobby was, lots of damage to the first-floor lobby, and lots of injured or dead fen.

And oh, yeah, Con Ops, where I usually lived, would have been destroyed.

Paladin and I retired there to wait for the police to finish their work. We watched a lot of it on the security monitors, while we noshed on everything room service could provide, from nachos to baby shrimp to buffalo wings. Apparently sheer terror made us both nervous.

“You have to tell me,” I said after we replayed the explosion for the fifth time, “what this really was about.”

She looked at me sideways. “How come you think I know anything about this?”

“Come on, Paladin,” I said, too tired for finesse. “The e-mail came to you. The women on that lovely box all looked like you. This was about you, and I think you knew it before you even came to get me.”

Her cheeks were red. “My hair isn’t that long,” she said. “And I would never wear clothes like that.”

I waited.

“Don’t you ever get weird e-mail?” she asked, almost plaintively.

Yes, I did. But it was all from friends. Clearly she’d been dealing with this longer than today.

“I trust you brought everything he sent you,” I said.

“How do you know it’s a he?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. “But I don’t think it’s that big a guess.”

Paladin had brought her entire laptop with everything in it, from the e-mails to invoices she had sent to clients five years ago. Paladin did not throw away anything.

While I set the laptop up next to the Tower of Terror, I talked. Mostly, I didn’t want her to think I was invading her privacy, even though I was.

“Okay,” I said. “Here’s what we know. This guy is connected to fandom. He is either an artist or friends with an artist. He probably has a military background, although he could have some kind of chemistry or engineering background as well. He might be a scientist. And he thinks he knows Greek mythology.”

“Thinks?” she said, hovering next to me. Even though we’d both been running and we hadn’t had time to clean off, she still smelled faintly of soap. I smelled like a gamer at the end of a one-week tournament.

“Thinks,” I said. “ ‘Pandora’s box’ is wrong. Pandora — who was utterly beautiful, by the way, and whose name means ‘all gifts’ — arrived at Prometheus’ doorstep with a jar given to her by Zeus. The jar, which was probably as big as you, was initially used to store oil. Both Pandora and the jar were a gift to Prometheus; the jar was to be Pandora’s dowry. But Prometheus didn’t trust Zeus for some strange reason, and gave Pandora along with her dowry to his brother, who presumably opened both of them.”

“Crude,” Paladin said.

I shrugged. “Your friend did know what the mythological jar contained, however. He knew that the jar contained a cloud of evils that flew free the moment the jar was opened. Pandora clapped the lid back on the jar, trapping only hope inside. That’s the reference.”

Paladin sighed. “So maybe he knew the story after all, but just got the name wrong?”

I shook my head. “He only knew the vague details or he wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble. He made a box because he thought that Pandora’s box was right. And somehow he associates you with all the evils in the world.”

“Oh, lucky me,” she said.

“Any idea who it might be?” I asked.

She frowned. “It could be anyone,” she said. “People don’t really like me, Spade.”

“Sure they do,” I said, but I didn’t really know that. I only knew that I liked her.

“I’m tough and blunt and bossy. I insult people and I run right through them if they get in my way. I don’t have friends,” she said.

“Except me,” I said.

She looked over her shoulder at me, those luminescent eyes meeting mine, then assessing me for a very long time. I held my breath, not sure what she was doing — or what she was thinking.

“Except you,” she said. Then she went back to staring at the laptop.

I stopped staring. I dug into its guts, tracking e-mails and looking for all kinds of information people didn’t know they were sending when they sent things over the Internet.

While I dug into the laptop, I ran a search on the Tower of Terror, looking for artists, sculptors, and dealers who handled art boxes. I cross-referenced that with military experience, as well as scientific experience or degrees, particularly those who then went on to work for the government in classified areas. Then I filtered it for men who lived, worked, or had worked on the West Coast. Paladin was known in the East and South, but mostly as a rumor. She did the bulk of her work west of the Mississippi.

I ran two other concurrent searches. I looked for fen who called themselves Prometheus or who liked to play with fire. And I looked for art boxes like the one the bomb had been made of for sale on sites like eBay.

It didn’t take that long to find him.

“Dale Brewer, that son of a bitch,” she said, as she looked at the photo which appeared on my screen. The photo came from a con badge at one of the majors, done five years before.

Brewer wasn’t at all what I expected— He was neat and trim and not bad looking in a Mirror Universe Spock kinda way, with his dark hair and goatee. But he also had that shiny-eyed precision that could either be the mark of brilliance or a serial killer, or both.

“How do you know him?” I asked.

Her lips thinned. “He promised to help me find a room at my very first con,” she said. “He said a bunch of people were sharing and all I needed was a sleeping bag. Turned out he picked a woman from that bunch and honored her by letting her sleep in the bedroom of a suite. With him. Alone.”

“But you didn’t do that,” I said.

“I figured it out, told him no, and slept in my car. For years, he called me the one that got away. Then he got — I don’t know — creepier, if that was possible, and the California cons banned him.”

I checked my database. They didn’t ban him. They flagged him because several women had gotten restraining orders against him. Apparently he wasn’t allowed within two hundred yards of any con those women attended. None of the women were Paladin, at least that I could tell, not without knowing her real name.

I didn’t tell her that. I just nodded.

She pushed away from the Tower of Terror and reached for her laptop.

I caught her hand. It was tiny and warm in my huge sweaty one. “What’re you doing?” I asked.

“I’m going to let Mr. Dale Brewer know what I think of his little prank,” she said.

“First, Paladin, it wasn’t a prank. Second, he has explosives training from the U.S. Army, and then he went to work for the DoD until they asked him to leave. He made his living designing these boxes — out of resin, which can be used to transport bombs. The name on his badge at the last two conventions he was allowed to attend was The SF Unabomber. You don’t want to get near his house.”

She glared at me, then crossed those magnificent arms. “Oh, but I do.”

“He knows you pretty well, right?” I asked.

She nodded. “He’s kept his eye on me.”

“So he knows you’re a bulldozer.”

Her frown got deeper. It wasn’t so much a frown now as a suspicious look. “So?”

“So, he’s going to expect you to come after him. Physically. He’s planned for it. He’s prepared.”

When she ran with that bomb, I let her see how scared I was. I let her see it afterwards too. But I didn’t let her see it now because she’d gone all Tough Chick on me. I was afraid my fear would push her into action.

“I can put him in prison for a long time,” I said. “I can make sure he doesn’t bother anyone again. And I can do it without involving you or fandom or CrapCon.”

“How?” she asked.

I patted the Tower of Terror. “I work with the police all over the country—”

“On forensic accounting cases,” she said. She knew because she’d helped me with one.

“I have bona fides,” I said. “My evidence is good stuff. And what I have here is evidence, Paladin. The kind juries love.”

“Why won’t I have to be involved?” she asked. “He sent the e-mail to me. I took the bomb outside. The box looks like me, for heaven’s sake.”

She wouldn’t normally have admitted that and probably already regretted the words.

“We don’t need motive,” I said. “There’s more than enough physical evidence. The cops are going to eat this up. Trust me on this, Paladin.”

She did.

The cops arrested Brewer half an hour after getting my information, which I hand-delivered as a way to escape CrapCon.

When I got back, the hospitality suite was being picketed because it had run out of Blue Goo, and no one was smart enough to go to the local liquor store to get more. I dispatched the head of the con and let her make the Blue Goo when she got back.

I ignored the panels, such as they were, prevented the masquerade from turning into a food fight, and started the Renaissance Dance early. Then I took a much-needed shower and returned to Con Ops, to find a huge cup of coffee, a coupon for Krispy Kremes and a note from Paladin.

Of course I saved the note. And not in my pocket where it could get all sweaty and the ink would run. But in my wallet, where I could pull it out and stare at those xx’s and oo’s, and try to figure out if she meant them.

I spent weeks thinking about them, in fact, long after CrapCon got relegated to fannish history, long after the local SMoFs told the local fans that they would never support another CrapCon again, and this was without me telling anyone about the bomb scare.

I actually thought about those xx’s and oo’s for months. I was still thinking about them when I had to testify at Dale Brewer’s trial.

The idiot didn’t take a plea. He seemed to think he could charm a jury. He couldn’t, of course. They convicted in less than an hour, and never even learned that he had targeted a science fiction convention. Just that his bomb was placed in a hotel during a convention, and fortunately, the device hadn’t triggered. He got convicted on attempted murder, domestic terrorism, and a host of smaller charges.

I was in court for the verdict. I wanted to see the son of a bitch, as Paladin called him, get his comeuppance. In person he reminded me even more of the Mirror Universe Spock — tall, thin, with eyes that pierced.

In that short time between the callback and the jury filing in, Dale Brewer turned in his seat, his arm resting on the railing separating the gallery from the defense table. His lawyer tried to catch his attention, but she couldn’t.

He was looking for me.

His smile was cold.

“The Great Spade,” he said. “You can’t always protect her.”

“She doesn’t need protecting,” I said, knowing I shouldn’t engage.

“Really?” he said.

“Really,” I said. “She’s the most capable person I know.”

He nodded once, then turned back. And as the jury filed in, he seemed to forget about me.

I wished I could forget about him, with his back-to-back life sentences. But I couldn’t entirely.

His smile was so cold, and he called himself the SF Unabomber. And he made boxes that mixed explosives when you touched the right part.

I go into sf conventions now and troll the dealer’s room for those boxes, arty boxes, the kind that you could hide a ring in or a note. Or an explosive.

So far I haven’t found anything. But I know I will one day.

And I’m going to make sure that no one buys it.

Paladin says that Brewer did open a Pandora’s box — in my head.

She’s right, of course. He sent out a little cloud of evil, the kind that will keep me looking at boxes from now until the last convention I ever attend.

But Paladin doesn’t know one thing. A cloud of evil wasn’t all that came out of that box. There was hope too.

Which I keep in my wallet, except in those moments of weakness when I need to look at the xx’s and oo’s.