to fifteen September on Earth, about two A . M . UT.”
The display case was open, its crystal hemisphere tilted back to expose in the crossed beams of overhead spotlights the blank cushion where for almost ten years the renowned Martian plaque had rested. Around the case stood several tripods, some with additional lights, others carrying instruments whose snouts peered at the empty cushion.
Nearby, on the floor, was an overturned chair–and a body.
“Dewdney Morland,” said Polanyi.
Sparta walked forward. The whole virtual building responded to her movements; she came closer to the body of the man on the floor until it was at their feet.
“Twenty-two caliber, high-velocity uranium slug entered at the base of the skull, exited upper forehead,” said Polanyi’s disembodied voice. “Clean entry and exit wounds, powder burns indicating shot was fired from less than a meter away. An execution.”
“Why a uranium slug?”
“Couldn’t say, but it’s a common load on Mars. The patrollers claim the extra mass gives stopping power at a distance in low gees. Local folklore.”
“You haven’t found the bullet.”
“No, nor the one that killed Chin. Nor the pistol.”
“The killer must have located them with a counter and picked them up,” Sparta said. Uranium slugs were made from spent reactor fuel; they carried slight residual radioactivity.
She bent her attention to the victim, peering at the holographic body on the floor. Morland was a thirtyfive-year-old xenoarchaeologist who had been studying the Martian plaque under high visual magnification and in various other wavelengths. He was overweight, with a scruffy blond beard that climbed his cheeks in patches and hair that hung in tangles past his collar. His clothes were expensive organics, baggy tweeds which had apparently not been recently cleaned. A pouch of tobacco had spilled on the floor by his side, and his right hand gripped a pipe.
“Rotate, please,” she said.
The invisible Polanyi invisibly fingered the holo projector’s controls. The projection turned slowly, the building seeming to sway with it, so that the body could be viewed from every angle. The apparently solid masses of the display pedestal and instruments slid through Sparta without tactile impression.
“Underneath too, please.”
The scene tilted strangely away, and Sparta was looking up from beneath the floor at Morland’s body where it lay face down.
“Not completely relaxed, but no sign of fear,” she said. “The pose suggests he had no suspicion of what was about to happen.”
“What do you make of that?” Polanyi’s voice was distant and hollow.
“I don’t know what to make of it. Maybe he was tense because of what he was seeing through his instruments.” She paused. “How much do we really know about Morland?”
Sparta rarely asked rhetorical questions, but she hoped Polanyi would start thinking in less conventional directions than he’d taken so far.
What Sparta herself knew about Morland, while detailed, lacked focus. The man’s archaeological reputation, a minor one, had been based on only three papers–although he’d published dozens–which attempted to deduce the nature of prehistoric tools from the marks they’d left on the artifacts they’d been used to shape. Morland had written about calendar lines scratched by Cro-Magnons on reindeer bones, about scraped ears of maize found in Anasazi garbage pits, and about masons’ marks on Syrian neolithic shrines. No precise examples of the tools and methods he had posited had been found, but his arguments were persuasive and no one had disputed them. Journeyman scholarship.
Mars had been new territory for him, a leap from the study of primitive technologies on Earth to the study of an alien technology so advanced it was not understood. Although the elemental composition of the Martian plaque was known–titanium, molybdenum, aluminum, carbon, hydrogen, traces of other
The display case was open, its crystal hemisphere tilted back to expose in the crossed beams of overhead spotlights the blank cushion where for almost ten years the renowned Martian plaque had rested. Around the case stood several tripods, some with additional lights, others carrying instruments whose snouts peered at the empty cushion.
Nearby, on the floor, was an overturned chair–and a body.
“Dewdney Morland,” said Polanyi.
Sparta walked forward. The whole virtual building responded to her movements; she came closer to the body of the man on the floor until it was at their feet.
“Twenty-two caliber, high-velocity uranium slug entered at the base of the skull, exited upper forehead,” said Polanyi’s disembodied voice. “Clean entry and exit wounds, powder burns indicating shot was fired from less than a meter away. An execution.”
“Why a uranium slug?”
“Couldn’t say, but it’s a common load on Mars. The patrollers claim the extra mass gives stopping power at a distance in low gees. Local folklore.”
“You haven’t found the bullet.”
“No, nor the one that killed Chin. Nor the pistol.”
“The killer must have located them with a counter and picked them up,” Sparta said. Uranium slugs were made from spent reactor fuel; they carried slight residual radioactivity.
She bent her attention to the victim, peering at the holographic body on the floor. Morland was a thirtyfive-year-old xenoarchaeologist who had been studying the Martian plaque under high visual magnification and in various other wavelengths. He was overweight, with a scruffy blond beard that climbed his cheeks in patches and hair that hung in tangles past his collar. His clothes were expensive organics, baggy tweeds which had apparently not been recently cleaned. A pouch of tobacco had spilled on the floor by his side, and his right hand gripped a pipe.
“Rotate, please,” she said.
The invisible Polanyi invisibly fingered the holo projector’s controls. The projection turned slowly, the building seeming to sway with it, so that the body could be viewed from every angle. The apparently solid masses of the display pedestal and instruments slid through Sparta without tactile impression.
“Underneath too, please.”
The scene tilted strangely away, and Sparta was looking up from beneath the floor at Morland’s body where it lay face down.
“Not completely relaxed, but no sign of fear,” she said. “The pose suggests he had no suspicion of what was about to happen.”
“What do you make of that?” Polanyi’s voice was distant and hollow.
“I don’t know what to make of it. Maybe he was tense because of what he was seeing through his instruments.” She paused. “How much do we really know about Morland?”
Sparta rarely asked rhetorical questions, but she hoped Polanyi would start thinking in less conventional directions than he’d taken so far.
What Sparta herself knew about Morland, while detailed, lacked focus. The man’s archaeological reputation, a minor one, had been based on only three papers–although he’d published dozens–which attempted to deduce the nature of prehistoric tools from the marks they’d left on the artifacts they’d been used to shape. Morland had written about calendar lines scratched by Cro-Magnons on reindeer bones, about scraped ears of maize found in Anasazi garbage pits, and about masons’ marks on Syrian neolithic shrines. No precise examples of the tools and methods he had posited had been found, but his arguments were persuasive and no one had disputed them. Journeyman scholarship.
Mars had been new territory for him, a leap from the study of primitive technologies on Earth to the study of an alien technology so advanced it was not understood. Although the elemental composition of the Martian plaque was known–titanium, molybdenum, aluminum, carbon, hydrogen, traces of other
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