Red Planet Blues Page 5

  We signed the security logs and then let the technician cycle us through the airlock.

  Overhead, the sky was growing dark. Nearby, there were two large craters and a cluster of smaller ones. There were few footprints in the rusty sand; the recent storm had obliterated the thousands that had doubtless been there earlier. We walked out about five hundred meters. I turned around briefly to look back at the transparent dome and the ramshackle buildings within.

  “Sorry for dragging you out here, old boy,” said Pickover. “I don’t want any witnesses.” There was a short-distance radio microphone inside that mechanical throat for speaking outside the dome, and I had a transceiver inside my fishbowl.

  “Ah,” I said, by way of reply.

  “I know you aren’t just in from Earth,” said Pickover, continuing to walk. “And I know you don’t work for NewYou.”

  We were casting long shadows. The sun, so much tinier than it appeared from Earth, was sitting on the horizon now. The sky was already purpling, and Earth itself was visible, a bright blue-white evening star. It was much easier to see it out here than through the dome, and, as always, I thought for a moment of Wanda as I looked up at it. But then I lowered my gaze to Pickover. “Who do you think I am?”

  His answer surprised me, although I didn’t let it show. “You’re the private-detective chap.”

  It didn’t seem to make any sense to deny it. “Yeah. How’d you know?”

  “I’ve been checking you out over the last few days,” said Pickover. “I’d been thinking of, ah, engaging your services.”

  We continued to walk along, little clouds of dust rising each time our feet touched the ground. “What for?”

  “You first, if you don’t mind,” Pickover replied. “Why did you really come to see me?”

  He already knew who I was, and I had a very good idea who he was. I had my phone on the outside of my suit’s left wrist, and it was connected to the headset in my helmet. “Call Dougal McCrae.”

  “What are you doing?” Pickover asked.

  “Hey, Alex,” said Mac from the little screen on my wrist; I heard his voice over the fishbowl’s headset.

  “Mac, listen, I’m about half a klick straight out from the west airlock. I’m going to need backup.

  “Lomax, what are you doing?” asked Pickover.

  “Kaur is already outside the dome,” said Mac, looking offscreen. “She can be there in two minutes.” He switched voice channels for a moment, presumably speaking to Sergeant Kaur. Then he turned back to me. “She’s north of you; she’s got you on her infrared scanner.

  Pickover looked over his shoulder, and perhaps saw the incoming cop with his own infrared vision. But then he turned back to me and spread his arms in the darkness. “Lomax, for God’s sake, what’s going on?”

  I shook my phone, breaking the connection with Mac, and pulled out my revolver. It really wouldn’t be much use against an artificial body, but until quite recently Joshua Wilkins had been biological; I hoped he was still intimidated by guns. “That’s quite a lovely wife you have.”

  Pickover’s artificial face looked perplexed. “Wife?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I don’t have a wife.”

  “Sure you do. You’re Joshua Wilkins, and your wife’s name is Cassandra.”

  “What? No, I’m Rory Pickover. You know that. You called me.”

  “Come off it, Wilkins. The jig is up. You transferred your consciousness into the body intended for the real Rory Pickover, and then you took off.”

  “I—oh. Oh, Christ.”

  “So, you see, I know. And—ah, here’s Sergeant Kaur now. Too bad, Wilkins. You’ll hang—or whatever the hell they do with transfers—for murdering Pickover.”

  “No.” He said it softly.

  “Yes,” I replied. Kaur was a sleek form about a hundred meters behind Pickover. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “Back under the dome, to the police station. I’ll have Cassandra meet us there, just to confirm your identity.”

  The sun had slipped below the horizon now. He spread his arms, a supplicant against the backdrop of the gathering night. “Okay, sure, if you like. Call up this Cassandra, by all means. Let her talk to me. She’ll tell you after questioning me for two seconds that I’m not her husband. But—Christ, damn, Christ.”

  “What?”

  “I want to find him, too.”

  “Who? Joshua Wilkins?”

  He nodded, then, perhaps thinking I couldn’t see his nod in the growing darkness, said, “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  He tipped his head up as if thinking. I followed his gaze. Phobos was visible, a dark form overhead. At last, he spoke again. “Because I’m the reason he’s disappeared.”

  “What? Why?”

  “That’s why I was thinking of hiring you myself. I didn’t know where else to turn.”

  “Turn for what?”

  Pickover looked at me. “I did go to NewYou, Mr. Lomax. I knew I was going to have an enormous amount of work to do out here on the surface now, and I wanted to be able to spend weeks—months!—in the field without worrying about running out of air or water or food.”

  I frowned. “But you’ve been here on Mars for six mears; I read that in your file. What’s changed?”

  “Everything, Mr. Lomax.” He looked off in the distance. “Everything!” But he didn’t elaborate on that. Instead, he said, “I certainly know this Wilkins chap you’re looking for. I went to his shop and had him transfer my consciousness from my old biological body into this one. But he also kept a copy of my mind—I’m sure of that.”

  “That’s . . .” I shook my head. “I’ve never heard of that being done.”

  “Nor had I,” said Pickover. “I mean, I understood from their sales materials that your consciousness sort of, um, hops into the artificial body. Because of that, I didn’t think duplicates were possible at the time I did it, or I never would have undergone the process.”

  Kaur was now about thirty meters away, and she had a big rifle aimed at Pickover’s back. I held up a hand, palm out, to get the cop to stand her ground.

  “Prove it to me,” I said. “Prove to me you are who you say you are. Tell me something Joshua Wilkins couldn’t know, but a paleontologist would.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s—”

  “Tell me!”

  “Fine, fine. The most-recent fossils here on Mars date from what’s called the Noachian efflorescence, a time of morphological diversification similar to Earth’s Cambrian explosion. So far, twenty-seven distinct genera from then have been identified—well, it was originally twenty-nine but I successfully showed that both Weinbaumia and Gallunia are junior synonyms of Bradburia. Within Bradburia there are six distinct species, the most common of which is B. breviceps, known for its bifurcated pygidia and—”

  “Okay!” I said. “Enough.” I held up fingers to show Kaur which radio frequency I was using and watched her tap it into her wrist keypad. “Sorry, Sergeant,” I said. “False alarm.”

  The woman nodded. “You owe me one, Lomax.” She lowered her rifle and headed past us toward the airlock.

  I didn’t want Kaur listening in, so I changed frequencies again and indicated with hand signs to Pickover which one I’d selected. He didn’t do anything obvious, but I soon heard his voice. “As I said, I think Wilkins made a copy of my mind.”

  It was certainly illegal to do that, probably unethical, and perhaps not even technically possible; I’d have to ask Juan. “Why do you think that?”

  “It’s the only explanation for how my computer accounts have become compromised. There’s no way anyone but me can get in; I’m the only one who knows the passphrase. But someone has been inside, looking around; I use quantum encryption, so you can tell whenever someone has even looked at a file.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how he did it—there must be some technique I’m unaware of—but somehow Wilkins has been extracting information from a copy of my mind. That’s the
only way I can think of that anyone might have learned my passphrase.”

  “You think Wilkins did all that to access your bank accounts? Is there really enough money in them to make it worthwhile? It’s gotten too dark to see your clothes but, if I recall correctly, they looked a bit . . . shabby.”

  “You’re right. I’m just a poor scientist. But there’s something I know that could make the wrong people rich beyond their wildest dreams.”

  “And what’s that?” I said.

  He stood there, trying to decide, I suppose, whether to trust me. I let him think about that, and at last Dr. Rory Pickover, who was now just a starless silhouette against a starry sky, said, in a soft, quiet voice, “I know where it is.”

  “Where what is?”

  “The Alpha Deposit.”

  “My God. You’ll be rolling in it.”

  Perhaps he shook his head; it was now too dark to tell. “No, sir,” he replied in that cultured British voice. “No, I won’t. I don’t want to sell these fossils. I want to preserve them; I want to protect them from these plunderers, these . . . these thieves. I want to make sure they’re collected properly, scientifically. I want them to end up in the best museums, where they can be studied. There’s so much to be learned, so much to discover!”

  “Does Joshua Wilkins now know where the Alpha Deposit is?”

  “No—at least, not from accessing my computer files. I didn’t record the location anywhere but up here.” Presumably he was tapping the side of his head.

  “But if Wilkins could extract your passphrase from a copy of your mind, why didn’t he just directly extract the location of the Alpha from it?”

  “The passphrase is straightforward—just a string of words—but the Alpha’s location, well, it’s not like it has an address, and even I don’t know the longitude and latitude by heart. Rather, I know where it is by reference to certain geological features that would be meaningless to a non-expert; it would take a lot more work to extract that, I’d warrant. And so he tried the easier method of spelunking in my computer files.”

  I shook my head. “This doesn’t make any sense. I mean, how would Wilkins even know that you had discovered the Alpha Deposit?”

  Suddenly Pickover’s voice was very small. “I’d gone in to NewYou—you have to go there in advance of transferring, of course, so you can tell them what you want in a new body; it takes time to custom-build one to your specifications.”

  “Yes. So?”

  “So I wanted a body ideally suited to paleontological work on the surface of Mars; I wanted some special modifications—the kinds of the things only the most successful prospectors could afford. Reinforced knees; extra arm strength for moving rocks; extended spectral response in the eyes so that fossils will stand out better; night vision so that I could continue digging after dark. But . . .”

  I nodded. “But you didn’t have enough money.”

  “That’s right. I could barely afford to transfer at all, even into the cheapest off-the-shelf body, and so . . .”

  He trailed off, too angry at himself, I guess, to give voice to what was in his mind. “And so you hinted that you were about to come into some wealth,” I said, “and suggested that maybe he could give you what you needed now, and you’d make it up to him later.”

  Pickover sounded sad. “That’s the trouble with being a scientist; sharing information is our natural mode.”

  “Did you tell him precisely what you’d found?”

  “No. No, but he must have guessed. I’m a paleontologist, I’ve been studying Weingarten and O’Reilly for years—all of that is a matter of public record. He must have figured out that I knew where their prime fossil bed was. After all, where else would a bloke like me get money?” He sighed. “I’m an idiot, aren’t I?”

  “Well, Mensa isn’t going to be calling you anytime soon.”

  “Please don’t rub it in, Mr. Lomax. I feel bad enough as it is.”

  I nodded. “But if he suspected you’d found the Alpha, maybe he just put a tracking chip in this new body of yours. Sure, that’s against the law, but that would have been the simplest way for him to get at it.”

  Pickover rallied a bit, pleased, I guess, that he’d at least thought of this angle. “No, no, he didn’t. A tracking chip has to transmit a signal to do any good; they’re easy enough to locate, and I made sure he knew I knew that before I transferred. Nonetheless, I had myself checked over after the process was completed. I’m positive I’m clean.”

  “And so you think he’s found another way,” I said.

  “Yes! And if he succeeds in locating the Alpha, all will be lost! The specimens will be sold off into private collections—trophies for billionaires’ estates, hidden forever from science.” He looked at me with imploring acrylic eyes and his voice cracked; I’d never heard a transfer’s do that before. “All those wondrous fossils are in jeopardy! Will you help me, Mr. Lomax? Please say you’ll help me!”

  Two clients were, of course, always better than one—at least as far as the bank account was concerned. “All right,” I said. “Let’s talk about my fee.”

  SEVEN

  After Rory Pickover and I went back into the dome, I called Juan, asking him to meet us at Pickover’s little apartment at the center of town. Rory and I got there before him, and went on up; the drunk who’d been in the entryway earlier had gone.

  Pickover’s apartment—an interior unit, with no windows—consisted of three small rooms. While we waited for Juan, the good doctor—trusting soul that he was—showed me three fossils he’d recovered from the Alpha, and even to my untrained eye, they were stunning. The specimens—all invertebrate exoskeletons—had been removed from the matrix, cleaned, and painstakingly prepared.

  The first was something about the size of my fist, with dozens of tendrils extending from it, some ending in three-fingered pincers, some in four-fingered ones, and the two largest in five-fingered ones.

  The next was the length of my forearm. It was dumbbell-shaped, with numerous smaller hemispheres embedded in each of the globes. I couldn’t make head or tail of it, but Pickover confidently assured me that globe on the left was the former and the one on the right the latter.

  The final specimen he showed me was, he said, his pride and joy—the only one of its kind so far discovered: it was a stony ribbon that, had it been stretched out, would have been maybe eighty centimeters long. But it wasn’t stretched out; rather, it was joined together in a Möbius strip. Countless cilia ran along the edges of the ribbon—I was stunned to see that such fine detail had been preserved—and the strip was perforated at intervals by diamond-shaped openings with serrated edges.

  I looked at Pickover, who was chuffed, to use the word he himself might have, to show off his specimens, and I half listened as he went on about their incredible scientific value. But all I could think about was how much money they must be worth—and the fact that there were countless more like them out there of this same quality.

  When Juan finally buzzed from the lobby, Rory covered his specimens with cloth sheets. The elevator was out of order, but that was no problem in this gravity; Juan wasn’t breathing hard when he reached the apartment door.

  “Juan Santos,” I said, as he came in, “this is Rory Pickover. Juan here is the best computer expert we’ve got in New Klondike. And Dr. Pickover is a paleontologist.”

  Juan dipped his broad forehead toward Pickover. “Good to meet you.”

  “Thank you,” said Pickover. “Forgive the mess, Mr. Santos. I live alone. A lifelong bachelor gets into bad habits, I’m afraid.” He’d already cleared debris off one chair for me; he now busied himself doing the same with another, this one right in front of his computer, a silver-and-blue cube about the size of a grapefruit.

  “What’s up, Alex?” asked Juan, indicating Pickover with a movement of his head. “New client?”

  “Yeah. Dr. Pickover’s computer files have been looked at by some unauthorized individual. We’re wondering if you could tell us where t
he access attempt was made from.”

  “You’ll owe me a nice round of drinks at The Bent Chisel,” said Juan.

  “No problem,” I said. “I’ll put it on my tab.”

  Juan smiled and stretched his arms out in front of him, fingers interlocked, and cracked his knuckles, like a safecracker preparing to get down to work. Then he took the now-clean seat in front of Pickover’s computer cube, tilted the nearby monitor up a bit, pulled a keyboard into place, and began to type. “How do you lock your files?” he asked, without taking his eyes off the monitor.

  “A verbal passphrase,” said Pickover.

  “Anybody besides you know it?”

  “No.”

  “And it’s not written down anywhere?”

  “No, well . . . not as such.”

  Juan turned his head, looking up at Pickover. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a line from a book. If I ever forget the exact wording, I can always look it up.”

  Juan shook his head in disgust. “You should always use random passphrases.” He typed keys.

  “Oh, I’m sure it’s totally secure,” said Pickover. “No one would guess—”

  Juan interrupted. “—that your passphrase is ‘Those privileged to be present—’”

  I saw Pickover’s artificial jaw drop. “My God. How did you know that?”

  Juan pointed to some data on the screen. “It’s the first thing that was inputted by the only outside access your system has had in weeks.”

  “I thought passphrases were hidden from view when entered,” said Pickover.

  “Sure they are,” said Juan. “But the comm program has a buffer; it’s in there. Look.”

  Juan shifted in the chair so that Pickover could see the screen clearly over his shoulder. “That’s . . . well, that’s very strange,” Pickover said.

  “What?”

  “Well, sure, that’s my passphrase, but it’s not quite right.”

  I loomed in to have a peek at the screen, too. “How do you mean?”

  “Well,” said Pickover, “see, my passphrase is ‘Those privileged to be present at a family festival of the Forsytes’—it’s from the opening of The Man of Property, the first book of the Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy. I love that phrase because of the alliteration—‘privileged to be present,’ ‘family festival of the Forsytes.’ Makes it easy to remember.”