The glabella is missing. And on this one, there are only three intact limbs—not much of a pentapod!”
They went back and forth like that a while longer, but she eventually agreed to the price he was offering. He gave her a receipt, and she left, muttering to herself.
Since Berling hadn’t yet shown up, I took the opportunity to ask Ernie a question. “So,” I said, doing my best to sound nonchalant, “do you think anyone will ever rediscover the Alpha Deposit?”
Ernie’s eyes, already mostly lost in his fleshy face, narrowed even further. “Why do you ask?”
“Just idle curiosity.”
“You, Mr. Double-X, are curious about women. You are curious about liquor. You are curious about sports. You are not curious about fossils.”
“But I am intrigued by money.”
“True. And, to answer your question, I doubt it’ll happen anytime soon. In an unguarded moment many years ago, after perhaps one too many glasses of port, Denny O’Reilly said to me that the Alpha was only the size of a football field—an Earth one, that is.”
“But why hasn’t anyone else found it yet? I mean, it has been twenty mears.”
“All we know is that it’s somewhere here in Isidis Planitia—and Isidis Planitia is the flat bottom of the remains of a giant impact crater fifteen hundred kilometers in diameter. It’s as big as Hudson Bay on Earth; you could fit over three hundred million football fields in it. Even with all the stampeders who’ve come here, there are still huge tracts of the plain that no one has ever set foot upon, my boy. Hell, no one’s even found Beagle 2, and that presumably isn’t even buried.”
“Beagle 2?” I said.
“A British Mars probe. It was supposed to touch down on Isidis Planitia in 2003, but no signal was ever picked up from it.”
“Is it worth something?”
“Sure, to a space buff, assuming it’s not smashed to bits. I’d be glad to find a buyer for the wreckage, if someone brought it in.”
“Maybe I should look for it. I was never any good at spotting fossils, but wreckage—that’s something I understand.”
“By Gad, you might make a decent sideline of it, at that,” said Ernie. “There’s even bigger salvage out there.”
“Oh?”
“Tons of it. Denny and Simon landed on Mars in two-stage ships, like the old Apollo lunar modules, but much bigger. Each had a lower descent stage and an upper ascent stage. Unlike the old lunar modules, though, both stages were habitable. Anyway, the ascent stages are gone, of course—they all flew back to Earth. Two of them did indeed sell to collectors—the first crewed ships that had gone to Mars, after all! The third burned up on re-entry, as I’m sure you know.”
“Yeah. What happened to the descent stages?”
“Two of three have been accounted for. You may have seen the original one. It’s still out there on the planitia, where they first landed—although it’s just a skeleton now; looters have taken all the good parts. The fact that it’s here in Isidis is how we know the Alpha must be somewhere around here—Denny and Simon, of course, never said where it was. But it could be—and probably is—many hundreds of kilometers from that original landing site. They had Mars buggies on that mission that had a thousand-kilometer range.”
“And the descent stage from the second expedition?” I asked.
“They crashed it in Aeolis Mensae.”
“That’s a long way from here.”
“Exactly. See, Denny and Simon used in situ fuel production; they made their rocket propellant here from local material. Not only did they fill the ascent stage’s fuel tanks here, but they reloaded the descent stage’s tanks, at least in part, as well. After the ascent stage took off to bring them home—it had been perched atop the descent stage—they had the computer in the descent stage fire its engine and fly horizontally as far as the fuel would take it, just to disguise the location of where it had originally touched down. As I said, the first lander didn’t necessarily touch down near where the Alpha was located. But the second lander had presumably been set down right by the Alpha, to serve as a base station while they mined it.”
I nodded. “So they had to move it.”
“Precisely.”
“And the descent stage from the third mission?”
“God only knows what they did with it. But if it’s intact, it would definitely be worth something.”
Just then, Stuart Berling entered the shop. He had a memorable face now, but I guess I didn’t, at least to him, because although his wife had recognized me