Robert Sawyer: Red Planet Blues

“And what’s that?” I said.

He stood there, trying to decide, I suppose, whether to trust me. I let him think about that, and at last Dr. Rory Pickover, who was now just a starless silhouette against a starry sky, said, in a soft, quiet voice, “I know where it is.”

“Where what is?”

“The Alpha Deposit.”

“My God. You’ll be rolling in it.”

Perhaps he shook his head; it was now too dark to tell. “No, sir,” he replied in that cultured British voice. “No, I won’t. I don’t want to sell these fossils. I want to preserve them; I want to protect them from these plunderers, these… these thieves. I want to make sure they’re collected properly, scientifically. I want them to end up in the best museums, where they can be studied. There’s so much to be learned, so much to discover!”

“Does Joshua Wilkins now know where the Alpha Deposit is?”

“No—at least, not from accessing my computer files. I didn’t record the location anywhere but up here.” Presumably he was tapping the side of his head.

“But if Wilkins could extract your passphrase from a copy of your mind, why didn’t he just directly extract the location of the Alpha from it?”

“The passphrase is straightforward—just a string of words—but the Alpha’s location, well, it’s not like it has an address, and even I don’t know the longitude and latitude by heart. Rather, I know where it is by reference to certain geological features that would be meaningless to a non-expert; it would take a lot more work to extract that, I’d warrant. And so he tried the easier method of spelunking in my computer files.”

I shook my head. “This doesn’t make any sense. I mean, how would Wilkins even know that you had discovered the Alpha Deposit?”

Suddenly Pickover’s voice was very small. “I’d gone in to NewYou—you have to go there in advance of transferring, of course, so you can tell them what you want in a new body; it takes time to custom-build one to your specifications.”

“Yes. So?”

“So I wanted a body ideally suited to paleontological work on the surface of Mars; I wanted some special modifications—the kinds of the things only the most successful prospectors could afford. Reinforced knees; extra arm strength for moving rocks; extended spectral response in the eyes so that fossils will stand out better; night vision so that I could continue digging after dark. But…”

I nodded. “But you didn’t have enough money.”

“That’s right. I could barely afford to transfer at all, even into the cheapest off-the-shelf body, and so…”

He trailed off, too angry at himself, I guess, to give voice to what was in his mind. “And so you hinted that you were about to come into some wealth,” I said, “and suggested that maybe he could give you what you needed now, and you’d make it up to him later.”

Pickover sounded sad. “That’s the trouble with being a scientist; sharing information is our natural mode.”

“Did you tell him precisely what you’d found?”

“No. No, but he must have guessed. I’m a paleontologist, I’ve been studying Weingarten and O’Reilly for years—all of that is a matter of public record. He must have figured out that I knew where their prime fossil bed was. After all, where else would a bloke like me get money?” He sighed. “I’m an idiot, aren’t I?”

“Well, Mensa isn’t going to be calling you anytime soon.”

“Please don’t rub it in, Mr. Lomax. I feel bad enough as it is.”

I nodded. “But if he suspected you’d found the Alpha, maybe he just put a tracking chip in this new body of yours. Sure, that’s against the law, but that would have been the simplest way for him to get at it.”

Pickover rallied a bit, pleased, I guess, that he’d at least thought of this angle. “No, no, he didn’t. A tracking chip has to transmit a signal to do any good; they’re easy enough to locate, and I made sure he knew I knew that before I transferred. Nonetheless, I had myself checked over after the process was completed. I’m positive I’m clean.”

“And so you think he’s found another way,” I said.

“Yes! And if he succeeds in locating the Alpha, all will be lost! The specimens will be sold off into private collections—trophies for billionaires’ estates, hidden forever from science.” He looked at me with imploring acrylic eyes and his voice cracked; I’d never heard a transfer’s do that before. “All those wondrous fossils are in jeopardy! Will you help me, Mr. Lomax? Please say you’ll help me!”

Two clients were, of course, always better than one—at least as far as the bank account was concerned. “All right,” I said. “Let’s talk about my fee.”

After Rory Pickover and I went back into the dome, I called Juan, asking him to meet us at Pickover’s little apartment at the center of town. Rory and I got there before him, and went on up; the drunk who’d been in the entryway earlier had gone.

Pickover’s apartment—an interior unit, with no windows—consisted of three small rooms. While we waited for Juan, the good doctor—trusting soul that he was—showed me three fossils he’d recovered from the Alpha, and even to my untrained eye, they were stunning. The specimens—all invertebrate exoskeletons—had been removed from the matrix, cleaned, and painstakingly prepared.

The first was something about the size of my fist, with dozens of tendrils extending from it, some ending in three-fingered pincers, some in four-fingered ones, and the two largest in five-fingered ones.

The next was the length of my forearm. It was dumbbell-shaped, with numerous smaller hemispheres embedded in each of the globes. I couldn’t make head or tail of it, but Pickover confidently assured me that globe on the left was the former and the one on the right the latter.

The final specimen he showed me was, he said, his pride and joy—the only one of its kind so far discovered: it was a stony ribbon that, had it been stretched out, would have been maybe eighty centimeters long. But it wasn’t stretched out; rather, it was joined together in a Möbius strip. Countless cilia ran along the edges of the ribbon—I was stunned to see that such fine detail had been preserved—and the strip was perforated at intervals by diamond-shaped openings with serrated edges.

I looked at Pickover, who was chuffed, to use the word he himself might have, to show off his specimens, and I half listened as he went on about their incredible scientific value. But all I could think about was how much money they must be worth—and the fact that there were countless more like them out there of this same quality.

When Juan finally buzzed from the lobby, Rory covered his specimens with cloth sheets. The elevator was out of order, but that was no problem in this gravity; Juan wasn’t breathing hard when he reached the apartment door.

“Juan Santos,” I said, as he came in, “this is Rory Pickover. Juan here is the best computer expert we’ve got in New Klondike. And Dr. Pickover is a paleontologist.”

Juan dipped his broad forehead toward Pickover. “Good to meet you.”

“Thank you,” said Pickover. “Forgive the mess, Mr. Santos. I live alone. A lifelong bachelor gets into bad habits, I’m afraid.” He’d already cleared debris off one chair for me; he now busied himself doing the same with another, this one right in front of his computer, a silver-and-blue cube about the size of a grapefruit.

“What’s up, Alex?” asked Juan, indicating Pickover with a movement of his head. “New client?”

“Yeah. Dr. Pickover’s computer files have been looked at by some unauthorized individual. We’re wondering if you could tell us where the access attempt was made from.”