it. And although I couldn’t tell what phase it was in, I wanted it to be a crescent Earth, with the part Wanda was on in nighttime, too. I wanted her to be looking up, looking across all those millions of kilometers, at the red planet in her sky. I wanted her to be thinking of me.
I continued slowly along. For the first time ever, in all the mears I’d lived here, I felt heavy.
When a man’s client is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your client and you’re supposed to do something about it. And it happens I’m in the detective business. Well, when someone who’s hired you gets killed, it’s bad business to let the killer get away with it, bad all around, bad for every detective everywhere.
Of course, the killer hadn’t gotten away with it. Uno was dead. Still, Pickover had come to me for protection, and I’d failed him.
I’d never get paid for the work I’d done on this case, but that didn’t matter. And there was no one to bill for any further work. But Rory had wanted to track down the fossils Weingarten and O’Reilly—and no doubt Van Dyke—had sold on Earth, not for gain, not for profit, not to line his own pockets, but so they could be described for science, for posterity, for all time, for all humanity.
And there were surely other paleontologists who could do that work, if I could locate those fossils. Maybe there’d even be a previously unknown genus amongst the specimens. And maybe whoever described that new form in the scientific literature might be persuaded to name it Pickoveria.
I arrived at the western airlock and left the police-department surface suit there. My office was near here, and I walked over to it. I went up to the second floor and made my way down the corridor. Once inside my office, I used the sink at the wet bar to wash my face and hands, and then I collapsed into my chair.
I sat for a few moments, thinking, then called Juan Santos on my desktop monitor. Juan’s wide forehead and receding chin appeared on the screen. “You put a lot of kilometers on my buggy,” he said.
I tried to rally some of my usual spirit. “A shakedown. Good for it. Keep it running smoothly.”
“You could have at least filled the gas tank.”
“It doesn’t have a gas tank.”
“That’s beside the point.”
“Hey,” I said, “at least I brought it back in perfect condition.”
“You mean I just haven’t found the damage yet. Not surprising, considering how much mud it was covered in.”
“You wound me, Juan.”
“Not yet. But if I can find a baseball bat . . .”
This could go on for hours—but I wasn’t in the mood. “Look,” I said, “I’ve become acquainted with a computer that’s almost forty years old. Problem is, files on it are locked to someone long dead. Can you help me out?”
“Do you know the make or model?”
“No, but it was installed in a Mars lander.”
“That long ago?”
He was going to find out soon enough, anyway: “It was installed in Weingarten and O’Reilly’s third lander.”
“And you’ve found the computer?”
“More than that.”
“You’ve found the ship?”
“Uh-huh. The descent stage.”
“Where is it?”
“I had it brought to the shipyard. I was hoping you could meet me there.”
“All right.”
“In about half an hour?”
“Um, yeah. Yeah, okay.”
“Thanks,” I said and broke the connection. I got a spare gun from the office safe and brought it and my usual piece with me as I headed over to the hovertram stop. I had a sinking feeling that we hadn’t seen the last of the day’s excitement, and if Juan was going to be my backup, I wanted him armed.
A tram pulled up, and I hopped on. I changed trams at the transfer point outside the Amsterdam, a classy gym that appealed to nicer people than those I liked to hang out with, and took another tram to the stop closest to the shipyard. I got off and hustled over to the yardmaster’s shack, but Bertha wasn’t there. Still, it was easy enough to spot the descent stage, sitting vertically on its stubby trio of legs, with the airlock on the side and the access hatch on top, and the whole thing streaked with mud. I headed over to it.
One of the landing legs was aligned with the airlock door, and had ladder rungs built into it. I climbed up and cycled