Red Planet Blues

by Robert J. Sawyer

  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.”

  “But that counter slab you brought to my office was solid, even at room temperature.”

  “Only because I’d infused it with a stabilizer, replacing the water content with thermoplastic.”

  “Ah.”

  He rose and continued walking. After about forty meters we came to a spot where there was a big divot out of the ground. “That’s where the mine that blew up was,” he said pointing. “And over there’s where I recovered that one that was rusted through.” He indicated a much smaller defect in the surface.

  I began a slow minesweep of all 6,000 square meters of what Pickover had identified as the Alpha Deposit; he walked behind me.

  While we walked along, I tried to commit landmarks to memory; this was my first time here at the Alpha, but I suspected it wouldn’t be my last, and knowing the terrain is halfway to winning a battle. Going right back to the first Viking landers, people had been giving whimsical names to various Martian boulders. Off to my left was a big one that looked like the kind of car I’d seen in 1950s movies—it even had a couple of fin-like projections; I mentally dubbed it “Plymouth.” And to my right was a head-shaped rock with craggy good looks; the old-movie buff in me felt “Hudson” was the perfect name for it.

  It turned out the Alpha wasn’t surrounded by land mines—which, after all, would have required a lot of them. But there was an extant line of twelve, each about eight meters from the next, along the eastern perimeter of the Alpha; the one that had exploded, and the one that had rusted out, would have been two additional points along that line. I guess that meant New Klondike was indeed east of here, and Willem Van Dyke had assumed anyone out looking for the Alpha would come from that direction.

  If this were an old battlefield, we’d just lob rocks at the remaining land mines and blow each of them up in turn. But that might damage precious fossils, and so instead we set about carefully clearing them. The mines were mostly buried under a couple of centimeters of dry sand. Rory used his blower at a shallow angle to remove the sand from on top of one of the mines, and sure enough, the deactivation hole was visible right in the middle of the disk. The hole was actually plugged with sand, which is something neither of us had anticipated but we both probably should have. But after a moment, a thought occurred to me. I had transferred the knife to the equipment pouch on my surface suit. I pulled it out.

  “What’s that?”

  “A switchblade, I said.

  He frowned, clearly unhappy that I’d brought a weapon along. But I handed it to him, and showed him the button that caused the blade to spring out. He had better balance than me, better reflexes, and had already proven he could survive a land-mine explosion. And so he stood over the mine, one leg on either side of it, and he bent over, positioned the closed switchblade above the deactivation hole, and pressed the button.

  The blade shot out, nicely slicing through the sand, and its tip must indeed have hit the button down below because a little mechanical flag on the top of the mine, near the center, flipped over from red to green—just as the material I’d read said it would.

  Rory couldn’t let out a sigh of relief, but I could, and did. He then pried the mine up; it s
eemed stuck a bit in the permafrost beneath it, but it finally came free. We repeated the process eight meters farther along, deactivating and liberating another Caldera-7.

  We could have continued on, deactivating all the other mines, but by this point I needed something to eat. And so we each picked up one of the deactivated mines and headed back toward the buggy; I’d bought some sandwiches from the little shop at the airlock station but needed to go inside the pressurized cabin so I could take off my fishbowl to eat them.

  Before we did that, though, Pickover opened the buggy’s trunk again, and we put the deactivated mines inside; on the way back home, we’d find someplace to dispose of them. There were brown fabric sacks in the trunk; part of a paleontologist’s kit, I guessed. Pickover used some of them to make nests to carefully cushion the mines, just in case.

  While he was doing that, I looked out at the area, which, to my eye, seemed no different from anywhere else on this part of Mars: endless orange plains under a yellow-brown sky, and—

  Oh, Christ.

  “Rory,” I said, over my helmet radio, “do you have telescopic vision?”

  He closed the trunk, straightened, and faced me. “Sort of. I’ve got a twenty-to-one zoom built-in. It helps when working on fossils. Why?”

  I pointed toward the horizon. “Is that what I think it is?”

  I watched as he turned his gaze. Nothing happened on his face, making me wonder what mental command he used to access the zoom function. “Who could that be?” he asked.

  Damn. So it was another Mars buggy, sitting out on the planitia. We’d been tailed through the dark, all the way here from New Klondike. Normally, I’d have spotted a tail almost at once, but I’d had this stupid polarized fishbowl over my noggin for the whole ride out.

  And Pickover had made me leave my gun behind.

  EIGHTEEN

  Ithink we should get out of here,” I said into my headset microphone.

  “We can’t leave the Alpha exposed to looters,” Pickover replied.

  “Rory, we’re defenseless.”

  “The fossils are defenseless.”

  “Damn it!” I intended the curse for him, but as I said it, the distant Mars buggy started moving in, kicking up a plume of dust as it did so, and Pickover took the words as a response to that.

  “Yeah,” he said. “They’re barreling directly toward us.”

  The radio we were using was supposed to be encrypted, but whoever was coming at us now might have bribed the guy I rented my suit from to reveal the encryption code. The person or persons in that Mars buggy might well be listening in on everything I said to Pickover, and so now knew that they’d been spotted.

  When two biologicals didn’t want to use radio on the surface, they touched their helmets together and let the sound pass between them. Pickover wasn’t wearing a helmet. I wondered if he’d opted for super hearing as well as super vision—although I couldn’t imagine what use the former would be for a fossil hunter. I turned off my radio and shouted, “They might be listening in on our communications.”

  The Martian atmosphere was only about one percent as thick as Earth’s; it conducted sound, but not very well. Pickover was looking at me but it was clear that he hadn’t heard what I’d said. I walked over to him and motioned for him to stand still. I then leaned my helmet against his artificial head.

  “I say!” he exclaimed as I did so.

  I spoke only slightly louder than normal. “They may have been listening to our radio. Turn yours off.” I pulled my head away, and he nodded but didn’t do anything else, again making me wonder how that worked for a transfer—what did he do inside his mind that deactivated the transmitter? But although I could make noise—my helmet was pressurized—his jaw was flapping in the tenuous Martian air and wasn’t making any sound I could hear. I was good at reading lips—a marketable skill for a detective—but the restrained movements of his were different enough from those of a biological that I wasn’t able to make out what he was saying.

  I touched my helmet to his forehead—the only time in recent memory that I’d done something similar was head-butting a drunk at The Bent Chisel. “I can’t hear you,” I said loudly. “Let’s separate. They can only come after one of us in that vehicle. You stay here. I’ll see if I can draw them away from the Alpha, okay?”

  He nodded his head; it slid against the helmet. It was fortunate that his hair was synthetic; the last thing I needed was a smear of oil obscuring my vision through the fishbowl. Having finished quarterbacking our next play, I snapped, “Break!” and started running in a direction perpendicular to the incoming buggy.

  I could run like the wind inside the dome—but the surface suit and air tanks added fifty kilos to my normal ninety, and the layer of dust on the plain made it hard to get good footing. Still, I put everything I had into it, hoping the intruder would go after me: it was the nature of all predators, human or otherwise, to chase after someone who was trying to escape. Looking to my right, it did seem the buggy—still some distance off—was veering toward me.

  Of course, I had no idea what I’d do if whoever it was did intercept me. Even if they didn’t have a gun, anything that would smash my helmet would do to finish me off out here.

  My heart was pounding, and I was sweating inside the suit—which was not a good thing: I was fogging up the fishbowl. The suit did have dehumidifier controls, but I’d have to stop running to fiddle with them, and I didn’t want to do that. And since the fog was on the inside of the helmet, I couldn’t wipe it away with my hands, either, and—

  And damn! The surface of Mars was littered with rocks, and my boot caught on one, and I went flying. At least I came back down in slo-mo; I had plenty of time to brace myself for the impact. I looked toward the buggy and could make it out in more detail now. It was yellow—not an uncommon color for such things—and it had a pressurized habitat, meaning whoever was chasing me was more likely biological than not.

  I scrambled to my feet and started running again. There was no doubt now that the buggy was coming at me, rather than Pickover. I’d expected it to rush right up to me, but it skidded to a stop about seventy meters away, spinning through a half turn. Ah, it had come to the periphery of the Alpha, and the driver had slammed on the brakes; either they knew about the land mines, or they didn’t want to risk damaging any exposed fossils by driving over them.

  The buggy’s boxy habitat swung backward on hinges, and I saw the white cloud of condensation that occurs when breathable air is vented into the Martian atmosphere. Coming through the cloud were two figures in surface suits. The helmets were polarized, so I couldn’t see who was inside, but the person on my left, wearing a red suit, was a curvy female, and the one on my right, in a blue suit, had the bulk of a man. The woman was carrying what might have been a pump-action shotgun, although where someone would get such a thing on Mars, I had no idea; it’s not like they were needed to kill varmints here.

  They started running toward me, and I now weaved left and right as I ran. I wasn’t sure what I was running for—there was no shelter, although I thought hills were starting to peek over the horizon, which suggested we might be near Syrtis Major.

  I looked to my left, trying to spot Pickover, but couldn’t make him out. I looked back to my right and saw the woman in red fire the shotgun. There was almost no report from the blast in this thin air, but I saw the lick of flame. She didn’t come anywhere near to hitting me—suggesting she wasn’t experienced with a gun.

  When they weren’t weighed down by surface suits, you could see at a glance if a runner was new to Mars or not; it took a while to get the hang of sailing so far with each stride. But I couldn’t tell about this woman. The man, though, was an old hand; he was close enough now that I could make out details of the suit he was wearing. It had an old-fashioned helmet that was glass only at the front. No one rented suits like that anymore, so this guy probably owned his—and had for at least ten mears.

  Another blast from the shotgun. If they hit me in th
e suit, it probably wouldn’t kill me; the pressure-webbing in the fabric would double nicely as a reasonably bulletproof lining. But although the helmet was impact resistant, it wasn’t shatterproof; alloquartz did a great job of screening out UV, and wouldn’t break if you dropped it—especially in Mars’s gravity—but the warranties specifically disclaimed micrometeorite damage, and I imagined lead shot coming in at high speed was a good approximation of such impacts.

  I decided to reactivate my radio. I did that by hitting a control in the suit collar with my chin; it was just to the left of the tube that snaked around from behind, bringing air into the fishbowl. “Pickover,” I said, “remember, they may be listening in. Don’t tell me where you are—but I’m heading west, and they’ve opened fire on me.”

  The cultured English accent: “Roger.”

  Another male voice on the same circuit, half out of breath from running. “Professor Pickover, is that you?”

  Pickover, surprised: “Yes. Who is this?”

  “Professor, my name’s Darren Cheung. I’m with the United States Geological Survey. We thought you were someone looting the fossil beds.”

  “It’s a trick, Pickover!” I shouted.

  But the little paleontologist wasn’t as naïve as I feared. “The girls can flirt and other queer things can do,” he said. If it was a code for me, I didn’t know it. He added, “What’s that mean?”

  “Professor,” said the same male voice, “we’re wasting time.”