Robert Sawyer - Red Planet Blues

Since the episode with Joshua Wilkins, I’d researched ways to kill a transfer, just to be on the safe side. Sadly, except for using a broadband disruptor, there didn’t seem to be any reliable method. That made sense, of course: the bodies were designed to cheat death—they were highly durable, with vital components encased in protective armor. I’d tried to find a way, but it seemed kryptonite was hard to come by on Mars.

Even so, Pickover made me leave my gun in a locker at the western airlock station—I guess he was afraid I might try to do him in once he’d shown me where the riches were located. He didn’t know I’d acquired a switchblade from Dirk, though, and he was too naïve to give me a pat-down before we headed out, so I kept that in my pocket.

My detective’s brain was hard at work trying to figure out precisely where he was taking me. First clue: we’d exited through the western airlock, and this was the one bit of information that couldn’t be misdirection for my sake, since it was where he’d parked his privately owned Mars buggy when he’d last returned from the Alpha.

Thank God Pickover had bought the buggy prior to transferring, because it was the expensive kind that had its own life-support system. If he’d been buying one today, he’d doubtless have opted for the cheaper—and more reliable—ones that simply provided transportation.

Pickover rented me a surface suit. He paid for it directly, since he would have ended up being expensed for it, anyway—but I didn’t have to wear it for the long drive, although he did make me put the fishbowl over my head. On Earth, that would have been uncomfortable—normally, the suit’s collar bore the weight of the helmet—but the thing wasn’t heavy enough here to be bothersome. Pickover did make it opaque, though, before we started tooling along.

A planitia is a low plain, and just like their counterparts on Earth, they tended to be nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles. We chatted a bit at first, but having to listen to Rory’s voice echo in the fishbowl was unpleasant, and after a time we both fell silent. I confess I wiled away the hours thinking about Diana, Lacie, and Lakshmi, separately and in various permutations.

I possibly did doze on the trip—tough guy like me doesn’t often think about his childhood, but when my mom wanted me to sleep and I wouldn’t, she used to take me for a drive. Pickover had also made me leave my tablet computer and phone behind; I had no tools that might help me calculate our location. But by the time we got to where we were going, the sun was rising in the east. I’d been hoping it would be coming up over jagged peaks or broken crater walls that I could match to topographical maps, but the illuminated part of the horizon—and, as I saw as the sun climbed higher, the horizon all the way around—was just more smooth ground, with one exception: to the west, there was the crumbling wall of a small crater.

I used the buggy’s toilet then got into the rented surface suit—this one was kind of a drab olive green—and exited the vehicle. The buggy had springy wheels almost a meter across, and a boxy clear passenger cabin; the Martian atmosphere was tenuous enough that streamlining didn’t matter for surface vehicles.

Pickover went to the buggy’s trunk and pulled out a device that looked a bit like an upright vacuum cleaner with no bag attached.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“A metal detector. I just got it yesterday.”

“I’d have thought those would be useless on Mars,” I said, “because of all the iron oxide in the soil.”

“Oh, it’s easy to tune metal detectors to ignore iron. But I did have a devil of a time finding one to rent. They’re of no help in fossil hunting, of course, and the standard uses for such things—beachcombing, searching for archeological artifacts, and so on—simply don’t apply here.”

He handed it to me.

I raised my eyebrows. “You want me to do the minesweeping?”

“I can’t,” Rory said. “I tried—but the metal in my body interferes too much with the detector. You, on the other hand…”

The guy was more clever than I’d given him credit for. He hadn’t brought me out here because I wanted to see the Alpha; he’d brought me out here because he needed the help of a biological.

He went back to the trunk and brought out another device: a tank of compressed gas with a flexible hose attached. “For blowing sand,” Rory said, evidently anticipating my question.

“Okay,” I said. “Show me where you found the first land mine.”

“This way. Follow in my footsteps precisely. I’ve used this path numerous times; it’s either free of land mines or they’ve all corroded like that one I brought to your office.”

He led, dust rising from his footfalls. I still found it bizarre to see a person in street clothes walking unprotected on Mars. Pickover was wearing what I imagined paleontologists wore back on Earth: brown work boots, heavy khaki pants, and a flannel work shirt. He’d also put on a baseball cap with the logo of the Toronto Blue Jays; I guess transfers needed something to keep the sun out of their eyes, too.

We headed out about fifty meters—I counted the paces—and came to an area that had been marked off into a grid of meter-wide squares by monofilament. The strands were almost exactly the same color as the red dust, and I mentioned that they were hard to see. “Not in the infrared,” Pickover replied. “I’m running a small current through them from that excimer pack, there. To me, they’re bright white, but the average prospector won’t notice them at all unless he trips over them.”

He stepped over one of the strands, and I gingerly did the same. We did this five more times and then stopped. “We’re still a ways from where the land mine went off,” he said crouching, “but let me show you this. It’s the spot where I found the counter slab for two-dash-thirteen-eighty-eight.”

“The fossils are lying right out on the surface?”

“Occasionally,” said Pickover, “but they’re usually a short distance down—but only a short distance. See, on Earth, sedimentary rocks have been forming for billions of years. But on Mars, sedimentation came to an end over three and a half billion years ago, when the open bodies of water dried up. So, instead of ancient sediments being deeply buried, they’re right on the surface—or just about. The water ice close to the surface here at the Alpha long ago either dissociated or sublimated, leaving eight or ten centimeters of loose, dry sand overtop of the ancient matrix. At the Alpha, that matrix is made out of areslithia—Mars stone. It’s really just sand and silt fused with water ice; the ground here is as much as sixty percent water ice by weight. Do you see what that means, Alex?”

I didn’t. “What?”

“Well, on Earth, most fossils are permineralized: the spaces in the original organic material have been filled in by minerals percolating through the ground; that new material replaces the original biological specimen, which ultimately disappears. But here at the Alpha, the fossils are the original material, simply embedded in the matrix. You can often get an Alpha fossil out of the matrix just by bringing the areslithia up to room temperature and letting the ice melt. That’s why the fossils from here at the Alpha are so good—they’re the actual ancient exoskeletons, unaltered, preserved in a dense slurry that’s been frozen solid for over three billion years.”

“Not completely, I bet. That land mine you brought in was corroded.”

Pickover nodded. “Yes, true. Something—maybe a micrometeoroid impact a couple of decades ago—heated a patch of the soil enough that there was a small pocket of running groundwater, and that’s what rusted out that mine. But most of the rest of this whole field”—he gestured expansively—“has been completely frozen since the Noachian.”