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By Root 1902 0

a metallogenic province, banding the planet like the stitching on a baseball. It was another odd fact to add to the great north-south mystery, and a fact that was, of course, getting more than its share of attention. Excavations accompanied by intensive areological studies were being conducted by scientists working for UNOMA and, John discovered as he checked new arrivals’ employment records, the transnationals— all trying to find clues that would enable them to locate more deposits. But even on Earth the geology of mineral formation was not well understood, which was why prospecting still had large elements of chance in it; and on Mars, it was more mysterious yet. The recent finds on the Great Escarpment had been mostly an accident, and only now was the region becoming the main focus for prospecting.

The discovery of the Bradbury Point complex had accelerated this hunt, as it was turning out to be as big as the largest Terran complexes, perhaps the equal of the Bushveldt Complex of Azania. So, a gold rush in Nilosyrtis. And Helmut Bronski had visited the scene.

Which turned out to be small and utilitarian, a mere beginning; a Rickover and some refineries, next to a mesa hollowed out and filled by a habitat. The mines were scattered in the lowlands between mesas. Boone drove up to the habitat, coupled to the garage, then ducked through the locks. Inside a welcoming committee greeted him, and took him up to a window-walled conference room to talk.

There were, they said, about 300 people in Bradbury, all employees of UNOMA, and trained by the transnational Shellalco. When they took John on a brief tour, he found they were a mix of ex-South Africans, Australians, and Americans, all happy to shake his hand; about three-quarters men, pale and clean, looking more like lab techs than the blackened trolls John envisioned when he heard the word miner. Most of them were working on two-year contracts, they told him, and keeping track of the time they had left, by the week or even by the day. They ran the mines mostly by teleoperation, and looked shocked when Boone asked to go down into a mine for a look around. “It’s just a hole,” one said. Boone stared at them innocently, and after another moment’s hesitation, they scrambled to gather an escort team to take him out.

It took them two hours to get into walkers and out a lock. They drove to the rim of a mine, and then down a ramp road into a terraced oval pit some two kilometers long. There they got out, and followed John as he walked around. Surrounded by big robotic dozers and dump trucks and earthmovers, his four escorts’ faceplates were all eyes— on the alert for a behemoth on the loose, John guessed. He stared at them, amazed at their timidity; it made him realize, all of a sudden, that Mars could be just another version of the hardship assignment, a hellish combination of Siberia, the interior of Saudi Arabia, the South Pole in winter, and Novy Mir.

Or else they just thought he was a dangerous man to be around. Which gave him a start. Everyone had no doubt heard of the falling dump truck; maybe it was just that. But could it be something more? Might these people be aware of something that he wasn’t? Reflecting on this for a while, John found his own eyes beginning to press glass. He had been thinking of the falling truck as an accident, or at least something that could only happen once. But his movements were easy to trace, everyone knew where he was. And every time you went outdoors you were only a walker away, as they said. And in a pit mine there were a lot of behemoths about. . . .

But they got back in without incident. And that night they had the usual dinner and party in his honor, a hard-drinking party, with a lot of omegendorph consumption and loud raucous talk: a bunch of young tough engineers, pleased to find that John Boone was actually a fun guy to party with. A fairly common reaction among newcomers, especially younger men. John chatted them up, and had a good time, and slipped his inquiries into the flow pretty unnoticeably, he thought. They had not heard of