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able to spend days — weeks! — in the field, without worrying about running out of air, or water, or food.”
    I frowned. “But you’ve been here on Mars for six mears; I read that in your file. What’s changed?”
    “Everything, Mr. Lomax.” He looked off in the distance. “Everything!” But he didn’t elaborate on that.
    Instead, he said. “I certainly know this Wilkins chap you’re looking for; I went to his store, and had him transfer my consciousness from my old biological body into this one. But he also kept a copy of my mind — I’m sure of that.”
    I raised my eyebrows. “How do you know?”
    “Because my computer accounts have been compromised. There’s no way anyone but me can get in; I’m the only one who knows the passphrase. But someone has been inside, looking around; I use quantum encryption, so you can tell whenever someone has even looked at a file.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how he did it — there must be some technique I’m unaware of — but somehow Wilkins has been extracting information from the copy of my mind. That’s the only way I can think of that anyone might have learned my passphrase.”
    “You think Wilkins did all this to access your bank accounts? Is there really enough money in them to make it worth starting a new life in somebody else’s body? It’s too dark to see your clothes right now, but, if I recall correctly, they looked a bit… shabby.”
    “You’re right. I’m just a poor scientist. But there’s something I know that could make the wrong people rich beyond their wildest dreams.”
    “And what’s that?” I said.
    He continued to walk along, trying to decide, I suppose, whether to trust me. I let him think about that, and at last, Dr. Rory Pickover, who was now just a starless silhouette against a starry sky, said, in a soft, quiet voice, “I know where it is.”
    “Where what is?”
    “The alpha deposit.”
    “The what?”
    “Sorry,” he said. “Paleontologist’s jargon. What I mean is, I’ve found it: I’ve found the mother lode. I’ve found the place where Weingarten and O’Reilly had been excavating. I’ve found the source of the best preserved, most-complete Martian fossils.”
    “My God,” I said. “You’ll be rolling in it.”
    Perhaps he shook his head; it was now too dark to tell. “No, sir,” he said, in that cultured English voice. “No, I won’t. I don’t want to sell these fossils. I want to preserve them; I want to protect them from these plunderers, these… these thieves . I want to make sure they’re collected properly, scientifically. I want to make sure they end up in the best museums, where they can be studied. There’s so much to be learned, so much to discover!”
    “Does Wilkins know now where this… what did you call it? This alpha deposit is?”
    “No — at least, not from accessing my computer files. I didn’t record the location anywhere but up here.”
    Presumably he was tapping the side of his head.
    “But you think Wilkins extracted the passphrase from a copy of your mind?”
    “He must have.”
    “And now he’s presumably trying to extract the location of the alpha deposit from that copy of your mind.”
    “Yes, yes! And if he succeeds, all will be lost! The best specimens will be sold off into private collections — trophies for some trillionaire’s estate, hidden forever from science.”
    I shook my head. “But this doesn’t make any sense. I mean, how would Wilkins even know that you had discovered the alpha deposit?”
    Suddenly Pickover’s voice was very small. “I’d gone in to NewYou — you have to go in weeks in advance of transferring, of course, so you can tell them what you want in a new body; it takes time to custom-build one to your specifications.”
    “Yes. So?”
    “So, I wanted a body ideally suited to paleontological work on the surface of Mars; I wanted some special modifications — the kinds of the things only the most successful