recognized that cultured British accent at once. “Good afternoon, Mr. Lomax. I wonder if I might have a word?”
I placed the gun on the desk and said, “Open.” The door slid aside, revealing the transfer in the—well, not the flesh. “Jesus, Rory,” I said. “What happened to you?”
There was movement on the surface of the metal forehead—little motors that would have lifted eyebrows had they still been there, I supposed. “What? Oh. Yes. I need to get this fixed.”
“Get into a bar fight?” I thought maybe the old broken-beer-bottle-in-the-kisser routine could slice through plastiskin.
“Me?” he replied, as if astonished by the notion. “No, of course not.” He extended his right hand. “It’s good to see you again, Alex.” His handshake—controlled by the artificial body’s computer—was perfect: just the right pressure and duration.
With the skin half blasted away, his face looked almost as robotic as that of the unauthorized copy of him I’d rescued from the Skookum Jim. I went back to my seat and motioned to the client chair. Pickover was carrying a boxy metal case with a thick handle attached to the lid. He placed it on my threadbare carpet then sat.
“What can I do for you?” I asked.
“I’m hoping to engage your services, old boy.”
“You want me to get whoever did that to you?” I said, making a circular motion with my outstretched hand to indicate his damaged face. “A little revenge?”
“It’s not that. Or, at least, it’s not precisely that.”
“What, then?”
Pickover rose and effortlessly picked up the metal case he’d just put down. “May I?” he said, gesturing with his free hand at my desk. I nodded, and he placed the box on the surface—and from the thud it made, the thing must have weighed fifty kilos. Memo to self: never arm-wrestle a transfer.
He unlatched the box, and I stood to survey its contents. The interior was lined with blue foam-rubber pyramids, and sitting inside was a hunk of gray rock, half a meter at its widest and shaped vaguely like Australia. Although it was mostly flat, there were five indentations in its surface. “What’s that?” I asked.
“The counter slab to two-dash-thirteen-eighty-eight.”
“Counter slab?”
“The negative to a positive; the other side. If you split rock that has a fossil within, there’s the actual fossil—a shell, say—on one side, and there’s a negative image, or mold, of the same thing on the other side. The part with the fossil is the slab; the other part is the counter slab. Collectors sometimes take the former and discard the latter, although a real paleontologist sees value in both.”
“And two-dash-whatever?”
“The prefix two denotes O’Reilly and Weingarten’s second expedition, and thirteen-eighty-eight is the catalog number of the type specimen of Noachiana oreillii—a kind of pentapod—that’s now in the Royal Ontario Museum back on Earth. This is the other part of that piece of matrix; I know the slab like—well, like the back of the hand I originally had.”
“Ah,” I said.
“I knew I’d found a rich bed of fossils—but, of course, there might be several of those; there was no reason to think that what I’d discovered actually was Weingarten and O’Reilly’s Alpha Deposit. Until I found this counter slab, that is—that’s proof that I’m actually working the Alpha.”
“Fair enough,” I replied. “But what’s that got to do with you getting your face blown off?”
Pickover reached into the box and lifted the counter slab about half a meter using both hands—I doubt it required the strength of both, but he was likely being careful with the specimen. He set it down and then removed a large square of bubble wrap. With it gone, I could see what was at the bottom of the box: a flat metal disk about forty centimeters in diameter and six centimeters thick. The device was broken open, its mechanical guts gummed up by Martian sand—but there was no mistaking what it was: a land mine.
“Holy crap,” I said.
“Exactly,” replied Pickover. “Someone booby-trapped the Alpha.”
I gestured at Pickover’s damaged face. “I take it there’s more than one land mine, then?”
“Unfortunately, yes. One of those damn things went off near me. If I’d been right on top of it, it would have blown me to—and here’s a word I’ve never had cause to use hitherto in my life—smithereens.”
That’s the difference between Pickover and me: I’d never once used “hitherto,” but “smithereens” came up often in my line of work. He went on. “As is, it took out a wonderful specimen of Shostakia I’d been working on.”