Robert Sawyer - Red Planet Blues

I placed the gun on the desk and said, “Open.” The door slid aside, revealing the transfer in the—well, not the flesh. “Jesus, Rory,” I said. “What happened to you?”

There was movement on the surface of the metal forehead—little motors that would have lifted eyebrows had they still been there, I supposed. “What? Oh. Yes. I need to get this fixed.”

“Get into a bar fight?” I thought maybe the old broken-beer-bottle-in-the-kisser routine could slice through plastiskin.

“Me?” he replied, as if astonished by the notion. “No, of course not.” He extended his right hand. “It’s good to see you again, Alex.” His handshake—controlled by the artificial body’s computer—was perfect: just the right pressure and duration.

With the skin half blasted away, his face looked almost as robotic as that of the unauthorized copy of him I’d rescued from the Skookum Jim. I went back to my seat and motioned to the client chair. Pickover was carrying a boxy metal case with a thick handle attached to the lid. He placed it on my threadbare carpet then sat.

“What can I do for you?” I asked.

“I’m hoping to engage your services, old boy.”

“You want me to get whoever did that to you?” I said, making a circular motion with my outstretched hand to indicate his damaged face. “A little revenge?”

“It’s not that. Or, at least, it’s not precisely that.”

“What, then?”

Pickover rose and effortlessly picked up the metal case he’d just put down. “May I?” he said, gesturing with his free hand at my desk. I nodded, and he placed the box on the surface—and from the thud it made, the thing must have weighed fifty kilos. Memo to self: never arm-wrestle a transfer.

He unlatched the box, and I stood to survey its contents. The interior was lined with blue foam-rubber pyramids, and sitting inside was a hunk of gray rock, half a meter at its widest and shaped vaguely like Australia. Although it was mostly flat, there were five indentations in its surface. “What’s that?” I asked.

“The counter slab to two-dash-thirteen-eighty-eight.”

“Counter slab?”

“The negative to a positive; the other side. If you split rock that has a fossil within, there’s the actual fossil—a shell, say—on one side, and there’s a negative image, or mold, of the same thing on the other side. The part with the fossil is the slab; the other part is the counter slab. Collectors sometimes take the former and discard the latter, although a real paleontologist sees value in both.”

“And two-dash-whatever?”

“The prefix two denotes O’Reilly and Weingarten’s second expedition, and thirteen-eighty-eight is the catalog number of the type specimen of Noachiana oreillii —a kind of pentapod—that’s now in the Royal Ontario Museum back on Earth. This is the other part of that piece of matrix; I know the slab like—well, like the back of the hand I originally had.”

“Ah,” I said.

“I knew I’d found a rich bed of fossils—but, of course, there might be several of those; there was no reason to think that what I’d discovered actually was Weingarten and O’Reilly’s Alpha Deposit. Until I found this counter slab, that is—that’s proof that I’m actually working the Alpha.”

“Fair enough,” I replied. “But what’s that got to do with you getting your face blown off?”

Pickover reached into the box and lifted the counter slab about half a meter using both hands—I doubt it required the strength of both, but he was likely being careful with the specimen. He set it down and then removed a large square of bubble wrap. With it gone, I could see what was at the bottom of the box: a flat metal disk about forty centimeters in diameter and six centimeters thick. The device was broken open, its mechanical guts gummed up by Martian sand—but there was no mistaking what it was: a land mine.

“Holy crap,” I said.

“Exactly,” replied Pickover. “Someone booby-trapped the Alpha.”

I gestured at Pickover’s damaged face. “I take it there’s more than one land mine, then?”

“Unfortunately, yes. One of those damn things went off near me. If I’d been right on top of it, it would have blown me to—and here’s a word I’ve never had cause to use hitherto in my life—smithereens.”

That’s the difference between Pickover and me: I’d never once used “hitherto,” but “smithereens” came up often in my line of work. He went on. “As is, it took out a wonderful specimen of Shostakia I’d been working on.”

“What set the mine off?”

“I was jackhammering a few meters away to remove a piece of matrix, completely unaware of the mine buried under the sand. The vibrations from the hammer must have triggered it.”

I frowned. The New Klondike Police Department wouldn’t care about this. Keeping order—more or less—under the dome was all that mattered to them; what happened outside it interested Mac and his crew about as much as the opera did. Still, I said, “Have you spoken to the NKPD?”

If he’d had a nose left, Pickover might have wrinkled it in disgust. “I can’t involve that lot. I’d have to show them where the Alpha is, and they’re corrupt. And so I came to you.”

Process of elimination; one way to get work. “Thanks. But what’s the mystery, then? Surely it was Weingarten and O’Reilly who planted the land mines, no? After all, if they were leaving Mars for an extended period—”

“—they might want to protect their find,” Pickover said, finishing for me. “That’s what I thought at first—and certainly this thing has been in the ground for a long time.” He’d already set the counter slab on my desktop, and he now reached into the metal box and pulled out the ruined land mine. “But I searched to see who had manufactured this device.” He pointed to some incised markings on the disk’s perimeter. “Of course, it wasn’t sold as a land mine; those are illegal. It’s described as a mining explosive that just happens to have a pressure-sensitive trigger switch; it could also be detonated by remote control, by a coded radio signal. Anyway, this was made by a company in Malaysia called Brisance Industries. The particular model is the Caldera-7, and the Caldera-7 was introduced eighteen months after O’Reilly and Weingarten were killed. No way it was part of the supplies brought along on any of their expeditions here.”

“Then who booby-trapped the Alpha?”

“Ah! That’s the question, isn’t it? O’Reilly and Weingarten were killed at the end of their third voyage. They’d gone on their first voyage alone—just the two of them, two crazy adventurers thumbing their noses at all the moribund government space agencies by coming here on their own. It was on that first voyage that they’d stumbled on the Alpha. But working a dig is hard; it takes a lot of effort. And so on their second voyage, they brought an extra man with them, Willem Van Dyke. But once the second expedition got back to Earth, Weingarten and O’Reilly ripped Van Dyke off, giving him only a fraction of the proceeds from selling the fossils they’d collected.”

“What about the third expedition?”

“The relationship with Willem Van Dyke was irreparably soured. Weingarten and O’Reilly didn’t take anyone else along on the third.”

“Ah,” I said. “But obviously this Van Dyke knew where the Alpha was. You think he returned at some later point and placed land mines around the site?”

“He must have. After Weingarten and O’Reilly were killed, he was the only one left alive who knew the location of the Alpha. But the trail on him goes cold thirty-six years ago. He’s had no public presence in all that time.”