Robert Sawyer - Red Planet Blues

There wasn’t much to say, and so Mac and I barely spoke. I left him inside the ship, taking readings with his scanner, and I trudged slowly down the ramp. All of this action had taken place by the south airlock. I had plenty of bottled oxygen, and so I decided to walk around the dome to the west airlock—just to clear my head a bit, and to avoid human company.

It was a little over three kilometers to that airlock, and I shuffled along, raising dust clouds as I did so, like Pig-Pen in the old Peanuts animated cartoons. After about a kilometer, I decided to try calling Reiko Takahashi again, and I was relieved when her lovely face popped up on my wrist.

“You’re okay?” I asked into my fishbowl’s headset.

Her orange-striped hair was mussed. “Exhausted,” she said. “My God, it was terrifying.”

“But you’re okay now?”

She nodded. “How’s Mr. Pickover? Have you found him yet?”

She’d had enough of an upset for one day; I’d tell her later that Rory was dead. “He’s with Detective McCrae right now.”

“Oh, good.”

“Rory said he created a diversion so you could get away.”

“He did indeed, the sweet old fellow. He started singing ‘God Save the King’ at the top of his lungs—or, well, at top volume anyway. Those two giant jerks were mortified, and I managed to run off.” She paused. “If you see him, won’t you thank him for me?”

“Of course.”

“Thanks,” she said. “Look, I’m still pretty shook up. I’m going to take something and go to bed.”

“I don’t blame you. But can you let Fernandez know you’re okay? He’s been worried, too.”

“I’ll call him now,” she said, and she shook off from her end.

I continued walking slowly. My shadow, falling to my right, walked along with me. The silence was deafening.

I had genuinely liked Rory Pickover, strange little man though he had been. He’d had something I’d seen all too rarely on Mars: selfless devotion to a cause rather than to personal gain.

The dome was on my right. I was walking about thirty meters away from it; I had no particular desire to make eye contact with anyone within. Earth was hanging above the horizon, brilliant and blue. My phone could have told me which hemisphere was facing me right now, but I didn’t ask. I liked to think it was the side with Wanda on it. And although I couldn’t tell what phase it was in, I wanted it to be a crescent Earth, with the part Wanda was on in nighttime, too. I wanted her to be looking up, looking across all those millions of kilometers, at the red planet in her sky. I wanted her to be thinking of me.

I continued slowly along. For the first time ever, in all the mears I’d lived here, I felt heavy.

When a man’s client is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your client and you’re supposed to do something about it. And it happens I’m in the detective business. Well, when someone who’s hired you gets killed, it’s bad business to let the killer get away with it, bad all around, bad for every detective everywhere.

Of course, the killer hadn’t gotten away with it. Uno was dead. Still, Pickover had come to me for protection, and I’d failed him.

I’d never get paid for the work I’d done on this case, but that didn’t matter. And there was no one to bill for any further work. But Rory had wanted to track down the fossils Weingarten and O’Reilly—and no doubt Van Dyke—had sold on Earth, not for gain, not for profit, not to line his own pockets, but so they could be described for science, for posterity, for all time, for all humanity.

And there were surely other paleontologists who could do that work, if I could locate those fossils. Maybe there’d even be a previously unknown genus amongst the specimens. And maybe whoever described that new form in the scientific literature might be persuaded to name it Pickoveria.

I arrived at the western airlock and left the police-department surface suit there. My office was near here, and I walked over to it. I went up to the second floor and made my way down the corridor. Once inside my office, I used the sink at the wet bar to wash my face and hands, and then I collapsed into my chair.

I sat for a few moments, thinking, then called Juan Santos on my desktop monitor. Juan’s wide forehead and receding chin appeared on the screen. “You put a lot of kilometers on my buggy,” he said.

I tried to rally some of my usual spirit. “A shakedown. Good for it. Keep it running smoothly.”

“You could have at least filled the gas tank.”

“It doesn’t have a gas tank.”

“That’s beside the point.”

“Hey,” I said, “at least I brought it back in perfect condition.”

“You mean I just haven’t found the damage yet. Not surprising, considering how much mud it was covered in.”

“You wound me, Juan.”

“Not yet. But if I can find a baseball bat…”

This could go on for hours—but I wasn’t in the mood. “Look,” I said, “I’ve become acquainted with a computer that’s almost forty years old. Problem is, files on it are locked to someone long dead. Can you help me out?”

“Do you know the make or model?”

“No, but it was installed in a Mars lander.”

“That long ago?”

He was going to find out soon enough, anyway: “It was installed in Weingarten and O’Reilly’s third lander.”

“And you’ve found the computer?”

“More than that.”

“You’ve found the ship?”

“Uh-huh. The descent stage.”

“Where is it?”

“I had it brought to the shipyard. I was hoping you could meet me there.”

“All right.”

“In about half an hour?”

“Um, yeah. Yeah, okay.”

“Thanks,” I said and broke the connection. I got a spare gun from the office safe and brought it and my usual piece with me as I headed over to the hovertram stop. I had a sinking feeling that we hadn’t seen the last of the day’s excitement, and if Juan was going to be my backup, I wanted him armed.

A tram pulled up, and I hopped on. I changed trams at the transfer point outside the Amsterdam, a classy gym that appealed to nicer people than those I liked to hang out with, and took another tram to the stop closest to the shipyard. I got off and hustled over to the yardmaster’s shack, but Bertha wasn’t there. Still, it was easy enough to spot the descent stage, sitting vertically on its stubby trio of legs, with the airlock on the side and the access hatch on top, and the whole thing streaked with mud. I headed over to it.

One of the landing legs was aligned with the airlock door, and had ladder rungs built into it. I climbed up and cycled through the airlock.

“Welcome back,” Mudge said, as soon as I was in. “Can I be of assistance?”

“You defeated the overrides before so that both the inner and outer airlock doors could be kept open simultaneously,” I said. “Do that again, please.”

“Done.”

I heard a faint calling of my first name. I headed back into the airlock chamber and saw Juan Santos wandering among the hulks. “Over here!” I shouted through the open door and waved.

He caught sight of me, jogged over with the typical Martian lope, and climbed the ladder. I made room for him, and he stepped inside, put his hands on his hips, and looked around the circular chamber. “Like a page out of history,” he said.

“Or a cage with a mystery.”

“You should leave the poetry to the lovely Diana,” Juan said. His face took on a wistful look as he contemplated his favorite waitress, but after a moment, he narrowed his eyes. “The computer is still active?”

“I am,” said Mudge. “Can I be of assistance?”