Red Planet Blues

TWELVE





After Dr. Pickover left my office, I settled in for some research. I started by confirming what he’d told me. He was right about the land-mine model, and that it had been made in Malaysia. I’d been to a lot of places on good old Mother Earth before I—ahem—had to leave, but that wasn’t one of them.

I found a useful site that gave instructions for disarming Caldera-7 mines, and I took note of the procedure. In the exact center of each circular disk, there was a hole three centimeters in diameter. Pushing a probe into that would depress the disarm switch; pressure anywhere else on the surface would blow the mine up.

I had been hoping to somehow gain access to Brisance’s customer database; I thought maybe Juan Santos could hack into it for me. One could access Earth computer networks from Mars, but the time lag varied from three minutes to twenty-two when we had line of sight to Earth, and was even longer at conjunction, when the signal had to be relayed behind the sun. Hacking that way would have driven Juan crazy, so he’d have probably farmed the work out to some Earthside black hat. But Brisance had gone out of business eleven years ago, and, given the kind of equipment it had made, I suspected all its customer records had been wiped back then.

And, anyway, they might not have sold direct to consumer. Indeed, the land mines might have been purchased here on Mars. Judging by the dilapidated condition of the mine Rory had brought to my office, it’d been in the ground a long time. So many Martian businesses had gone bankrupt, though, that I didn’t hold out much hope for finding out who might have bought anything decades ago. But it was the best lead I had, and so I headed into the center of the dome and dropped in on New Klondike’s Finest to see if they had any records of busting someone for selling land mines here.

Sergeant Huxley was behind his long red counter when I came in, and I did the tip-of-the-hat thing in his general direction. “Well, well, well, Hux, fancy meeting you here!”

“Ain’t my lucky day,” Hux said. “Seeing you.”

“No sirree,” I replied. “Your lucky day would be one on which flabby came back into style.”

“And yours,” said Hux, for once rising to the occasion, “would be one on which people decided that beady eyes look good on anything other than a weasel.”

“Hey,” I said, “my eyes are private. Says so right on my business card.”

“You’re a dick,” Huxley said.

“In the nonvulgar sense. But you’re one in the other sense.”

I’d literally seen gears move in Pickover’s head earlier today; here, I only got to figuratively watch them as Huxley tried to process this. Finally, he came back with, “Gumshoe.”

“Flatfoot.”

“Shamus.”

“Pig.”

“Gunsel.”

I was surprised he knew that one—and I wondered if he knew both its meanings. If he did, my next jab would have to be even harsher. While I was phrasing my reply, Mac came in the front door of the station. I turned to him. “Why, Mac! You actually went outside?”

He smiled. “Well, no. I’m arriving at work for the first time today. My daughter had an appointment with the pediatrician.”

“P.D. attrition?” I said, raising my eyebrows. “You mean the police department might actually lose old Huxley here at some point?” This one played better in my head than spoken aloud, and they both just looked at me. Crickets were one of the few Earth bugs that hadn’t made it to Mars, which was probably the only reason I didn’t hear any chirping just then. I cleared my throat. “Anyway, Mac, can I talk with you?”

“Surrrre,” he said, his brogue rolling the R. He nodded at Hux, and the sergeant pushed the button that slid the black inner door open. Mac and I walked down the narrow corridor to his office, and we took chairs on opposite sides of his desk; the desktop looked like polished wood, but was fake, of course—either that, or Mac was even more corrupt than Pickover thought.

“What can I do for you, Alex?”

I fished out my tab and showed him a picture I’d taken of the Caldera-7 Pickover had brought in. “A client of mine came across one of these on the claim he was working. It’s a land mine.”

Mac squinted at the image. “Looks more like it was a land mine. How old is that thing?”

“Might date right back to near the beginning of the Great Martian Fossil Rush. Anybody ever sell devices like this here on Mars? It was officially marketed as a mining explosive.”

“Well, not openly, that’s for sure. But let me check.” He spoke to his computer, asking it to display all records in the police database about land mines or mining explosives. “Bunch of accident reports involving explosives,” he said, reading from his monitor, “but nothing of—no, wait a sec. This one’s sorta interesting. Copy to wall.” The wall opposite the door, which had been showing the green Scottish countryside, changed to a blowup of the report Mac had on his own monitor.

“Thirty years ago, just after the dome went up,” said Mac. “Ship arrived here bringing a load of stampeders in hibernation, plus their supplies. Cargo was being offloaded, but one of the carrying cases had become damaged in transit—wasn’t anchored properly in the hold, I guess. The worker who’d been unloading the ship could see inside, and recognized the objects within as land mines.” Mac pointed at the wall, and a portion of an image expanded, showing a flat disk like the one Pickover had brought to my office, but in pristine condition. “Same kind of device, right?”

I nodded.

“It was in one of the last cases offloaded from the ship,” Mac said. “All of the other cargo had been collected by that point. Could well have been more of the same kind of mines in other cases, but no way to tell—and no record of who collected them. And, of course, no one ever claimed the three mines that had been found.”

I nodded. “What’s the status of that ship?”

He made motions in the air, and the wall changed to show the answer. “The B. Traven,” he said. “Decommissioned in—no, check that. It’s still in service, but under a new name, the Kathryn Denning. Owned and operated by InnerSystem Lines, a division of Slapcoff Interplanetary.”

The ship’s original name rang a faint bell, but I couldn’t place it. “Can I get a list of who was on it when it arrived with the land mines?”

I expected Mac to want his palm greased, but he was in a generous mood; I guess his daughter’s appointment had gone well. “Sure.” He gestured at the wall some more, and a passenger manifest appeared.

I scanned the names, checking under V and D, and even W, for a Willem Van Dyke, but none was listed. Well, this clown hardly would have been the first person to come to Mars under an alias. “How many names are there?” I asked.

“One hundred and thirty-two,” Mac’s computer said helpfully; it always amused me that it had a brogue as thick as Mac’s own.

“How many males?”

“Seventy-one.”

“Can you download the full list into my tab—males and females?” I said to Mac.

He spoke a command to his computer, and it was done.

A gender change was possible, of course, but Rory himself would doubtless tell me that the simplest hypothesis was preferable, so I’d start by assuming there were only seventy-one suspects—if one could apply the word “only” to so many. I had my work cut out for me.