Red Planet Blues

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “I have no idea. But I got the diary from her.”

  He held out his hand, and I gave it to him. “Sorry about the back cover,” I added.

  Pickover flipped it open to the first page and began reading. After a few moments, he looked up. “That’s O’Reilly’s voice, all right—his tone.”

  “I’m going to have to work my way through it,” I said.

  “I want to read it, too,” Pickover replied. We considered for a moment. I couldn’t recall the last time the fact that I wanted to read something prevented somebody else from simultaneously reading it, too. I suppose somewhere in New Klondike there might be a paper scanner, but I had no idea where.

  “All right,” I said. “It’ll probably make more sense to you than me, anyway—you go first. Just, for God’s sake, keep your door locked, and don’t let Lakshmi Chatterjee anywhere near it.”

  “She drove stakes into my heart like I was a vampire,” Pickover said. “She’s the last person I’d allow in here.”

  “Good. Start reading. How long do you think it’ll take you?”

  He riffled the pages, gauging the density of content. “Two or three hours, I suppose.”

  “Did you get yourself checked for tracking chips?”

  “Yes. I’m clean. I’m sure Fernandez wanted to put one in, but I didn’t give him an opportunity.”

  “Okay. I’ll be back.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To get some dinner. You may not have to eat, Rory, but I do.”

  * * *

  And I did precisely that, going over to The Bent Chisel. Buttrick was his usual nasty self. I headed back and waited for Diana to come and offer me service. Truth to tell, what I wanted wasn’t on the menu, but she wasn’t off for several more hours, so that would have to wait. I ordered a drink, plus steak and green beans; the former would be vat-grown, the latter, synthesized.

  Diana returned with my Scotch on the rocks, and I made short work of it. There weren’t many other customers this time of day, so she motioned for me to scooch over a bit, and she placed her shapely bottom next to mine. “Whose husband whacked you on the forehead this time?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” I said.

  “Riiiiight,” she replied and she squeezed my thigh.

  “Seriously,” I said. “Hey, you’re a cultured gal. Do you know anything about the writer-in-residence here?”

  “Lakshmi Chatterjee? Sure.”

  “Is she any good?” It was the first time in my life, I think, I’d asked that about a woman and didn’t mean for the words “in the sack” to be understood.

  “She’s great. I read her book about Lunaport when I heard she was coming here. She’s like the Shelby Foote of that war.”

  “Ah,” I said. I’d never heard of him, but I imagine with a name like that he got beat up a lot as a kid. “Seems like a sweet deal, getting an all-expenses-paid trip to Mars.”

  “Well, she has to work for it,” Diana said.

  “Oh, yeah. She’s writing a book on the B. Traven.” Or maybe she’s doing an authorized biography of Denny O’Reilly. Or something.

  “Not just that,” said Diana. “She has to meet with beginning writers in the community and critique their manuscripts.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. That’s how these things go: most of the time is the writer’s own, but some of it has to be spent working with newbies.”

  “How does that work?”

  “You make an appointment, send in a manuscript in advance, and she meets with you for an hour to go over it.”

  “At Shopatsky House?”

  “I guess.”

  “You write poetry,” I said.

  She winced. “I write bad poetry.”

  There are some things even I couldn’t dispute with a straight face, so I let that pass and simply said, “You could make an appointment to see her.”

  “Oh, God, no. I couldn’t show my poetry to her. She’s excellent.”

  “That’s what she’s there for. To help beginners.”

  “I can’t, Alex.”

  “Please, baby. I need you to get into that house.”

  “Why don’t you go yourself?”

  “I’ve been there.” I pointed to my forehead. “That’s where I got the goose egg.”

  Diana was suddenly huffy. She started to get up.

  “It’s not like that, babe,” I said. I lowered my voice—not because anyone could listen in on us in the back, but so Diana, in her topless splendor, would have to lean in to hear me. “I, ah, let myself into her place. She had a, um, document that I needed to access.”

  “Let yourself in?” Diana said coldly. “So her locks were programmed to recognize you?”

  “No, sweetheart—honest. I removed the back window and snuck in. We fought, but I got away with the document. But prior to that, she attacked me and Pickover out on the surface—tried to kill us both.”

  Diana frowned. “Pickover is a transfer.”

  “Didn’t stop her from shooting spikes into his chest—or coming at me with a shotgun.”

  “God!” A beat. “But what’s this all about?”

  “She thinks we know where the Alpha Deposit is.”

  “And do you?”

  This time, my poker face didn’t fail me. “Of course not.”

  “But she tried to kill you.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And you want to send me off to be alone with her?”

  “Well, um, she doesn’t have anything against you.”

  “Why do you need to get me into her house?”

  “So you can plant a bug there, so I can listen in on her conversations. She’s got at least one more accomplice—someone helped her out today, I don’t know who, but I need to find out.”

  “Why? What difference does that make?”

  The difference was that at least one more person apparently knew the location of the Alpha Deposit—the person who had come to Lakshmi’s rescue there. Also, a bug in Lakshmi’s place might let me know if she was ignoring my warning and planning another trip to the Alpha. But I simply said, “Please, baby. I need you to do this.”

  Diana sat back down but a little farther on the bench from me than before.

  “Well?” I said, after she’d been quiet for a bit.

  “Okay,” she replied. “But you’ve got to take me out.”

  “I’d be happy—”

  “To Bleaney’s.”

  I frowned. Bleaney’s was the pricey nightclub where prospectors who had struck it rich went to celebrate. “Deal,” I said, leaning over and kissing her on the cheek.

  I’d just put it on the expense claim I was going to give Pickover.

  * * *

  After leaving Diana at The Bent Chisel, I actually went most of the way back to Shopatsky House, since the Windermere Clinic was near there. Old Doc Windermere—a walrusy-looking biological with a handlebar mustache—would dig out a bullet or patch up a knife wound without feeling a need to involve those pesky folks at the NKPD; taking care of the bruise on my forehead was nothing by comparison, but I figured I might as well give him this bit of business, too. Gloria, his receptionist/nurse—a breathy little pink-haired bundle of energy—was always glad to see me, and, frankly, I rather liked seeing her, too. I think the doc watered his anesthetic down the same way Buttrick watered down his booze, but a gander at Gloria was usually enough to take the pain away, at least for a few minutes.

  It was a slow night for fights, I guess; I didn’t have to wait to get in. Doc Windermere played a couple of healing beams over my forehead, and, as I could see in the cracked mirror opposite me, the swelling went down, and the purple color faded away.

  I thanked the doc, paid Gloria in cash, and then headed over to Pickover’s place, figuring he should be finished reading Denny’s journal by now.

  “Well?” I said after he let me into his apartment. “Anything exciting in the diary?”

  “Yes, indeed,” he replied, taking a seat; I did th
e same. “Weingarten and O’Reilly contacted several people back on Earth, trying to arrange the sale of fossils in advance; the diary includes descriptions of some of the fossils—and it’s got the name of the collector they’d previously sold the decapod to!”

  “The what?”

  “The decapod! There’s only one known specimen—they brought it back on their second mission.” He held the diary up triumphantly. “My guess is that they were ancestral to the pentapods that came to dominate later—and now I know whose collection it’s in! I tell you, Alex, we may not even need to track down Willem Van Dyke!”

  That sounded like my fees were about to dry up, so I quickly protested. “There are still some leads for him I’d like to follow up on.”

  Rory was in an expansive mood. “Oh, of course, my boy, of course! Your field and mine, we both say the same thing: leave no stone unturned!”

  “Good,” I said. “Now what?”

  “Now, we should head out to the Alpha again. We can’t leave those wrecked buggies there; someone’s bound to spot them sooner or later. And we need to finish clearing out the land mines. Are you up for another road trip, old boy?”

  Driving to the Alpha took a lot of hours, and that meant a lot of solars for me. “Why not?” I said. “But we’ll need another buggy to get there.”

  “Do we rent or borrow one?”

  “Borrow,” I said. “I don’t know how Lakshmi and that Darren Cheung fellow managed to tail us in the dark the last time, but it’s possible our rental had a tracking device in it.”

  “That’s illegal,” Rory said. I made no reply, and finally he nodded. “Okay,” he said. “So who do you know who has a clean buggy we could borrow?”

  There were only two reasons to own a buggy: you spent a lot of time prospecting far from the dome, or you liked to race. Isidis Planitia is a plain, after all—it was great for racing. And my buddy Juan Santos liked machines of all types, not just computers. I called him. “Juan,” I said to the little version of his face that appeared on my left wrist, “can I borrow your buggy?”

  “Wow, Alex,” he replied. “We must have a bad connection. It sounded like you said, ‘Can I borrow your buggy?’”

  “I know I dented it last time, but—”

  “Dented? You call that a dent?”

  “I had it fixed.”

  “We should have you fixed—make sure those defective genes of yours don’t get passed on.”

  “How ’bout if you loan it to me, but I don’t do the driving?”

  “Who’s going to drive it?”

  “Dr. Pickover.”

  “That little mouse?”

  “Standing right here,” said Rory.

  “Oh!” said Juan. “Um, sorry. I mean—um, yeah, sure, I guess you guys can borrow my buggy. But, God’s sake, be careful this time, would you?”

  * * *

  Juan’s buggy was white with jade green pinstriping. As I’d promised, Rory Pickover did the driving as we made the trip out to the Alpha Deposit again in the dark. This time he didn’t ask me to polarize my helmet, and he let me bring my gun, tab, and phone along. There are only so many times you can have a man save your life before you have to start trusting him, and I guess Rory finally trusted me. It was nice that at least one of us had faith in my good intentions.

  I watched through the canopy as first Venus and then Earth set. The sky was breathtaking. Even on the highest mountaintop on Earth, the atmosphere is still much denser than it is here on Mars, and Mars’s two tiny captured-asteroid moons never reflected much light. On a clear night like tonight, the Milky Way was dazzling as it arched overhead.

  “There’s one other thing,” Rory said, “that the diary revealed.”

  I looked at him, a dark form illuminated only by the stars and the blue dashboard indicators. “Oh?”

  “Yes. O’Reilly said he’d left a large paper map of the Alpha in the lander’s descent stage—with the precise locations of where they’d found the fossils they’d excavated marked on it. That sort of information is crucial scientifically.”

  “Why’d they leave the map behind, then?” I asked.

  “They were planning to return. The diary said they were going to pick up excavating where they’d left off.” He looked briefly at me. “I’ve got to have that map, Alex.”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “But Ernie Gargalian told me nobody knows what became of the third lander.”

  Rory’s voice was soft. “I do.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I didn’t want to tell you back at New Klondike. You never know who’s listening, or where there’s a microphone. But, yes, I’m pretty sure of where it is.”

  We hit a bump that was enough to lift me from my seat a bit. I cinched the shoulder belt tighter. “How’d you find it?”

  “Satellite photos.”

  I frowned. “Lots of people must have looked for it that way.”

  “Yes, I’m sure they did. But they didn’t know what to look for or where to start. I knew it had to be near the Alpha Deposit—and I had the advantage of knowing where that was.”

  “Ernie thinks they might have moved it,” I said.

  “Like the second lander? No. If they had crashed it somewhere else, somebody would have found the wreckage.”

  “Then what?”

  “They buried it, right where they’d touched down.”

  “The Martian permafrost is rock-hard,” I said. “It’d take forever to dig a hole big enough for a spaceship.”

  Pickover took on the lilting tone I imagined he normally reserved for talking to students. “And why do we call it permafrost, Alex?”

  “Because it’s permanently frozen.”

  “What’s permanently frozen?”

  “The soil.”

  “You can’t freeze something that’s already a solid.”

  “Oh, right, okay. Well, the water in the soil, then.”

  “Exactly. Isidis Planitia is a giant, shallow impact basin. Billions of years ago, it was filled with water. That water didn’t disappear; most of it is now locked into the soil. As I told you, core samples show the ground around the Alpha is as much as sixty percent water.”

  “So they melted it?

  “I think so, yes. Weingarten and O’Reilly had to have had a plan to hide their descent stage. I think they had the onboard computer fire its big landing engine until the frozen water melted, turning the soil into mud. The down blast would have blown the mud aside, creating a pit. The descent stage would have settled down into that, and, after the engine was cut, the mud would have flowed back in, burying it.”

  “Neat. But what would that look like from orbit?”

  “Well, any surface rocks would have sunk into the mud. So, what you’d see is a circular area free of such things, maybe forty or fifty meters across. To the untrained eye, it’d look pretty much like a crater. Even at a one-meter orbital survey, it would be hard to tell from one; you’d have to look at multiple lighting angles to notice that it was a circle that didn’t have any concavity.”

  “And you’ve found such a thing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because you had the Alpha as a starting point,” I said. But then I shook my head. “No, no—it’s the other way around, isn’t it? You found this circular thingamajig first—and that led you to the Alpha.”

  “You are a good detective, Alex. That’s right. I knew there was no way to just stumble upon the Alpha, not in all the vastness of Isidis Planitia. And I knew that the prospectors here mostly lacked the geological training to interpret orbital-survey images. I’d suspected they’d buried the descent stage—the one they took on the third mission would have made a great part of a permanent habitat. And so I started looking at satellite photos. There aren’t that many that have been made in the last forty years; most of the Mars photo-survey maps are much older than that, and nobody has bothered to update them, because, after all, Mars is a dead world. But there was a Croatian satellite survey about fifteen years ago, and I acces
sed those images. Took me months of poring over photographs, but I finally found it.”

  “Nice work,” I said.

  “Beats hiking around endlessly, looking for the Alpha.”

  “Did you ever meet Dougal McCrae?” I asked. The bootleg Pickover had, of course, but I didn’t recall this one ever having the pleasure.

  “No.”

  “You’d like him. Chief detective at the NKPD. He doesn’t like to have to get up from his desk to investigate, either.”

  “I’ve logged over five thousand field hours on Earth and Mars,” Pickover said, sounding slightly miffed with me.

  “Sorry.” I turned to look through the canopy at the darkness. On long car trips, I sometimes felt a duty to help keep the driver alert. But Pickover was in no danger of falling asleep, although I supposed he might get bored with no one to talk to. “Do you mind if I nod off?”

  “It’s fine,” he replied. “I’m listening to music.”

  * * *

  When I woke, the sun was coming up and we were pulling in near where we’d been before: the ruins of Lakshmi’s buggy and the one we’d rented were about thirty meters to our right. I got into the surface suit I’d rented—it was brown this time—and Pickover swung the blockish canopy back. We headed outside.

  “First things first,” Rory said. “Let’s see if we can find that map.” He paused. “How meta! Looking for a map without a map!”

  “Where do we start?” I asked.

  Pickover pointed past the crater he’d tussled with Lakshmi in. “About five hundred meters that way. I don’t want to drive in again—tire tracks take too long to disappear.”

  We started walking. It felt good to stretch my legs. “Oh, say,” I said, “there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you about. You said something odd to that guy, Darren Cheung—something about flirty girls?”

  Rory rattled it off: “‘The girls can flirt and other queer things can do.’”

  “Yeah. What’s that mean?”

  “It’s an old mnemonic for Mohs scale of mineral hardness. If he’d really been with the US Geological Survey, he’d have known it.”

  We continued on. Soon enough, Pickover gestured at the terrain in front of us. “Voilà!”