jackhammering a few meters away to remove a piece of matrix, completely unaware of the mine buried under the sand. The vibrations from the hammer must have triggered it.”
I frowned. The New Klondike Police Department wouldn’t care about this. Keeping order—more or less—under the dome was all that mattered to them; what happened outside it interested Mac and his crew about as much as the opera did. Still, I said, “Have you spoken to the NKPD?”
If he’d had a nose left, Pickover might have wrinkled it in disgust. “I can’t involve that lot. I’d have to show them where the Alpha is, and they’re corrupt. And so I came to you.”
Process of elimination; one way to get work. “Thanks. But what’s the mystery, then? Surely it was Weingarten and O’Reilly who planted the land mines, no? After all, if they were leaving Mars for an extended period—”
“—they might want to protect their find,” Pickover said, finishing for me. “That’s what I thought at first—and certainly this thing has been in the ground for a long time.” He’d already set the counter slab on my desktop, and he now reached into the metal box and pulled out the ruined land mine. “But I searched to see who had manufactured this device.” He pointed to some incised markings on the disk’s perimeter. “Of course, it wasn’t sold as a land mine; those are illegal. It’s described as a mining explosive that just happens to have a pressure-sensitive trigger switch; it could also be detonated by remote control, by a coded radio signal. Anyway, this was made by a company in Malaysia called Brisance Industries. The particular model is the Caldera-7, and the Caldera-7 was introduced eighteen months after O’Reilly and Weingarten were killed. No way it was part of the supplies brought along on any of their expeditions here.”
“Then who booby-trapped the Alpha?”
“Ah! That’s the question, isn’t it? O’Reilly and Weingarten were killed at the end of their third voyage. They’d gone on their first voyage alone—just the two of them, two crazy adventurers thumbing their noses at all the moribund government space agencies by coming here on their own. It was on that first voyage that they’d stumbled on the Alpha. But working a dig is hard; it takes a lot of effort. And so on their second voyage, they brought an extra man with them, Willem Van Dyke. But once the second expedition got back to Earth, Weingarten and O’Reilly ripped Van Dyke off, giving him only a fraction of the proceeds from selling the fossils they’d collected.”
“What about the third expedition?”
“The relationship with Willem Van Dyke was irreparably soured. Weingarten and O’Reilly didn’t take anyone else along on the third.”
“Ah,” I said. “But obviously this Van Dyke knew where the Alpha was. You think he returned at some later point and placed land mines around the site?”
“He must have. After Weingarten and O’Reilly were killed, he was the only one left alive who knew the location of the Alpha. But the trail on him goes cold thirty-six years ago. He’s had no public presence in all that time.”
I went to fix myself a drink at the small wet bar on the wall opposite my tiny window. I didn’t bother to offer Pickover one, although if I’d had an oil can, I might have told him to help himself to a squirt. “And so you want me to find Willem Van Dyke?”
“Exactly. Van Dyke may well know what happened to the specimens from the second expedition—which private collectors they were sold to. And when he later came back to Mars on his own, he might have worked the Alpha Deposit, at least some, and shipped more specimens back to collectors on Earth. I want to find those collectors and convince them to let me properly describe their specimens in the scientific literature. I’ll never get the fossils from them; I understand that. They belong in public museums, but I know that’s a lost cause. But perhaps I can at least do science on them, if I can find whoever the fossils were sold to. And the path to them begins with Willem Van Dyke.”
“But you say he dropped out of sight thirty-six years ago? Hard to pick up the scent at this late date.”
“True,” said Pickover. “But the land mines provide a new clue, no?” He looked at me: two very human eyes set in that ravaged face. “Still, I guess it is what people in your profession call a