“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 accessed 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?”