No spaceships had left Mars in the last twenty days, so he couldn’t be off-planet. There was a giant airlock in the south through which large spaceships could be brought inside for dry-dock work, but it hadn’t been cracked open in weeks. And, although a transfer could exist freely on the Martian surface, there were only four airlock stations leading out of the dome, and they all had security guards. I visited each of those and checked, just to be sure, but the only people who had gone out in the past three days were the usual crowds of hapless fossil hunters, and every one of them had returned when the dust storm began.
I’d read about the early days of this town: “The Great Martian Fossil Rush,” they called it. Weingarten and O’Reilly, the two private explorers who had come here at their own expense, had found the first fossils on Mars and had made a fortune selling them back on Earth. They were more valuable than any precious metal and rarer than anything else in the solar system—actual evidence of extraterrestrial life! Good fist-sized specimens went for tens of thousands; excellent football-sized ones for millions. In a world in which almost anything, including diamonds and gold, could be synthesized, there was no greater status symbol than to own the genuine petrified remains of a Martian pentapod or rhizomorph.
Weingarten and O’Reilly never said precisely where they’d found their specimens, but it had been easy enough to prove that their first spaceship had landed here, in the Isidis Planitia basin. Other treasure hunters started coming, and Howard Slapcoff—the billionaire founder of the company that pioneered the process by which minds could be scanned and uploaded—had used a hunk of his fortune to create our domed city. Many of those who’d found good specimens in the early days had bought property in New Klondike from him. It had been a wonderful investment for Slapcoff: the land sales brought him more than triple what he’d spent erecting the dome, and he’d been collecting a life-support tax from residents ever since. Well, from the biological residents, at least, but Slappy got a fat royalty from NewYou each time his transfer process was used, so he lined his pockets either way.
Native life was never widely dispersed on Mars; the single ecosystem that had existed here seemed to have been confined to this basin. Some of the other prospectors—excuse me, fossil hunters—who came shortly after W&O’s first expedition found a few excellent specimens, although most of the finds had been in poor shape.
Somewhere, though, was the mother lode: a bed known as the “Alpha Deposit” that produced fossils more finely preserved than even those from Earth’s Burgess Shale. Weingarten and O’Reilly had known where it was—they’d stumbled on it by pure dumb luck, apparently. But they’d both been killed when their heat shield separated from their ship upon re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere after their third expedition—and, in the twenty mears since, no one had yet rediscovered it. But people were still looking.
There’d always been a market for transferring consciousness; the potentially infinite lifespan was hugely appealing. But here on Mars, the demand was particularly brisk, since artificial bodies could spend weeks or even months on the surface, searching for paleontological gold.
Anyway, Joshua-never-Josh Wilkins was clearly not outside the habitat and he hadn’t taken off in a spaceship. Wherever he was hiding, it was somewhere under the New Klondike dome. I can’t say he was breathing the same air I was, because he wasn’t breathing at all. But he was here, somewhere. All I had to do was find him.
I didn’t want to duplicate the efforts of the police, although “efforts” was usually too generous a term to apply to the work of the local constabulary; “cursory attempts” probably was closer to the truth, if I knew Mac.
New Klondike had twelve radial roadways, cutting across the nine concentric rings of buildings under the dome. The rings were evenly spaced, except for the giant gap between the seventh and eighth, which accommodated agricultural fields, the shipyard, warehouses, water-treatment and air-processing facilities, and more. My office was at dome’s edge, on the outside of the Ninth Circle; I could have taken a hovertram into the center but I preferred to walk. A good detective knew what was happening on the streets, and the hovertrams, dilapidated though they were, sped by too fast for that.
When I’d first come here, I’d quipped that New Klondike wasn’t a hellhole—it wasn’t far enough