by S. T. Joshi
Erin’s laptop chimed. She jerked forward and shook her right arm, which had gone numb. The office had gone dark but for the radiant blueness of television and computer screens.
On the laptop display was an email notification informing her that Sylvie had accepted her friend request.
Only after Erin read the post did the background chatter from the television filter into her consciousness. The local evening news was on: something about a shooting. Murder-suicide, an apparent robbery gone wrong. Erin swiveled toward the TV, saw a correspondent standing in front of what looked like Aram’s warehouse. Then the anchorwoman threw it over to the weatherman, who predicted sunny skies and highs in the 80s for the following day.
* * *
As Erin had hoped, Sylvie was enough of a science geek that she couldn’t resist the opportunity to see a scrap of outer space. She currently taught chemistry at a community college in the Valley while working on her doctoral dissertation, so she arranged to drop by Erin’s condo after that evening’s classes.
Erin tried to take a much-needed nap while she was waiting, yet she hardly slept. The whole thing about Aram weirded her out, but she convinced herself it was just another freak coincidence, like all those others she’d read about in the history of the Object. Erin had known that goon Vaughn was bad news the first time she’d laid eyes on him, and he’d probably been planning to bump off Aram for months. The incident didn’t signify any more than the spurious curse of King Tut’s tomb, and now was no time to get superstitious. Still, the thought of it kept her awake every time she lay down, so she applied extra foundation around her eyes to hide the bags and dark circles before Sylvie arrived.
Motherhood had plumped her former roommate, who was shorter and squatter than Erin, but Sylvie’s black hair and creamy copper complexion remained the same as when they’d been freshmen. She wore a green flannel hoodie with her school’s mascot, a smiling cricket, on the front, and carried a large canvas book bag on her shoulder. They exchanged the clumsy hug of friends who have become strangers, and Erin led her to the living room coffee table.
As Erin switched on the desk lamp, Sylvie squatted beside the Object for a closer look. “Cool! How much you think it’s worth?”
“Depends on what you can tell me.” Erin wasn’t about to let on that she’d plunked down five hundred grand for it. “Is there a way to make sure it’s a real meteorite and not some kid’s metal-shop project?”
“Say no more! I came prepared.” Sylvie slipped the bag off her shoulder and took out a rubber glove, a white rag, and a plastic bottle of yellowish fluid.
When Sylvie put on the protective glove and doused the cloth with the liquid, Erin got nervous. “Whoa! You’re not gonna wreck it, are you?”
“Not unless cleaning will ruin it. This is just a weak nitric acid solution.” Sylvie indicated a relatively smooth inside lip of the Object’s cavity. “It looks like someone sawed the thing open, so we may get a decent cross-section here.”
She rubbed the damp rag along the flat edge, and black tarnish dissolved to reveal a dense, silvery network of intersecting diagonal lines that reminded Erin of the integrated circuits on a silicon chip.
Sylvie grinned. “Et voilà! They call this a Widmanstätten pattern. Nickel-iron crystals like this only form in zero gee and can’t be replicated in the laboratory. Congratulations: you got a real space rock.”
Erin’s tension should have eased, yet her apprehension only sharpened. At least the outer crust was genuine. But what if some enterprising hoaxer had obtained an actual meteorite, hollowed it out, and placed a phony figurine inside to inflate its value?
“You said it looked as if someone cut it open,” she mused. “Can you tell if that thing inside was part of the original specimen?”
Sylvie screwed her mouth to one side in doubt. “I don’t know. I mean, I’ve heard of so-called ‘zoomorphic’ meteorites that are vaguely shaped like a bird’s head or whatever, but nothing like this.”
Erin flinched as Sylvie traced the chiseled details of the creature’s jointed limbs with her fingertip.
Sylvie shook her head and moistened the rag with acid again. “Worth a try.”
She burnished the figure’s eye, but the acid had no effect except, perhaps, to make the orb appear even more lustrous.
“Well, it’s not a meteorite,” Sylvie concluded. “Hard to tell what it’s made of.”
Erin sank onto the sofa and pressed her palms into the hollows of her eyes, smearing her meticulous makeup. So the “Object” was nothing but a fake after all. Unless . . .
“Wait, wait.” She lifted her head. “Isn’t there some way to tell if that bug-thing came from somewhere other than Earth? The way they did with those rocks from the moon and Mars.”
Sylvie smiled. “Oh, yeah! Chemical composition—it’s like a planet’s fingerprint. If the relative quantities of the elements in a sample are different from those naturally occurring in rocks on Earth, you know it’s not from around here.”
Erin stood, rising along with her hope. “Can you do that?”
Sylvie sucked on a strand of her hair, as she used to when doing her calculus homework. “I suppose I could do a spectroscopic analysis in the school’s lab. I’d need a sample to take with me, though.”
Erin’s gaze flicked to the Object, fretful. “I don’t want to wreck it.”
“I only need a tiny piece. You’ll never even know it’s gone.” Sylvie dug into her bag again and took out some fearsome-looking power tools. “I brought these along in case I needed to cut a cross-section for the acid etching.”
She plugged an extension cord into a wall socket and knelt beside the meteorite with a small, diamond-edged rotary saw that resembled a demonic dental instrument. Erin cringed as the saw blade whined, then slurred to a halt as Sylvie lowered it onto an inconspicuous ridge of the figurine’s carapace.
“Damn it!” Sylvie switched off the tool and examined the blade. About the circumference of a fifty-cent piece, the steel circle was bent and had an ugly gouge in its rim.
The figurine didn’t have a nick on it.
Sylvie ruined two more saw blades before giving up on that approach. Finally, she took a pair of needle-nosed pliers and, through brute force, managed to snap a pinhead-sized chip off the creature’s shell.
Erin inspected the speck dubiously. “Is that enough?”
“Yeah. When heated, it should give me a decent emission spectrum. I’ll take it to work with me tomorrow.” Sylvie placed the chip in an empty compartment of her contact lens case for safekeeping.
Erin clung to the possibility, however slim, that the figurine might still be genuine. “I so appreciate this, Syl,” she said, giving her former roomie a more sincere hug. “Maybe I’ll get a decent night’s sleep tonight.”
But she didn’t.
* * *
Erin found herself on a craggy promontory beneath a cavernous night sky. At least, it seemed to be night, for the sky was blacker than she’d ever seen it, as if there were no atmosphere to soften the void. The stars were out—too many stars that were too large and too close together. She could find no Big Dipper, no Orion, nor any other semblance of order in the celestial blizzard. The orbs blazed blue rather than white, filling the heavens with a light unbearable to look upon and scorching the cracked soil of the plain beneath Erin with azure incandescence.
The intensity of the glare seared her, and she wanted to avert her eyes. But her eyes had no lids to shut, and she feared casting her gaze downward. Her body felt wrong—she couldn’t feel her arms—or she felt too many arms. She didn’t want to see herself.
And the noise: a chorus of static hisses that fused into a single cosmic shriek, as if Erin’s head had become a radio telescope array attuned to each of those billions of stars. The universe funneled into her until she thought her mind would either collapse or explode—black hole or supernova.
Erin gagged, unable to cry out in the airless vacuum that surrounded her. The starlight brightened until the sky blur
red into a single, intolerable glare of bright blue. Then the scene before her refocused, and she found herself peering out the windshield of a moving car traveling down a two-lane highway on a cloudless, sunny Southern California afternoon.
Because her lidless eyes never blinked, Erin assumed this dislocating transition was part of the same bizarre nightmare. Only when she veered into the left-hand lane and heard the frantic honking of the oncoming pickup truck did she accept that she had somehow dropped into a reality that was already in progress.
Erin blinked—she had eyelids again—and discovered that her own hands were on the steering wheel, that her own foot was on the accelerator. Panicked, she spun the wheel to the right and slammed on the brake so abruptly that her Lexus fishtailed and nearly spun out.
The pickup swerved around her car’s rear end, horn sneering. Erin skidded to halt on the brush-covered shoulder and killed the engine. She hunched over the steering wheel, gasping, then sagged back in the driver’s seat and shut her eyes.
She instantly thought better of it and snapped bolt upright, opening her eyes wide to make sure she didn’t doze off. It was bad enough that she’d nearly had a head-on collision. What really freaked her out was that she had no idea how she got here.
She glanced down at the black tank top and strategically torn jeans she wore. Not as shocking as seeing extra arms on her body, but also not the teddy she’d worn to bed last night. To her knowledge, she had never sleepwalked before and had never blacked out even in her wildest party-girl drinking days. Yet she had no memory of rising from her bed, changing clothes, getting in her car, or driving to . . . where the hell was she?
The low hills of a ravine flanked the road on either side, with higher peaks visible in the distance, all covered in scrub brush and shrub growth browned by years of drought. It looked like any number of undeveloped areas in the Valley, but it was not one she recognized.
Her cell phone bleated, and Erin jumped. She looked at the passenger seat and saw that, despite somnambulating, she’d had enough presence of mind to bring her purse. She grabbed the phone and thumbed its screen. “Yeah?”
“Oh. I’m sorry.” Sylvie, sounding abashed. “Is this a bad time?”
“Yeah, kinda.” Considering that she might have early-onset Alzheimer’s, Erin thought the Object was the least of her worries right now. “What’s up?” she asked.
“Didn’t mean to bother you, but I so couldn’t resist!” Sylvie’s voice burst with geek enthusiasm. “I had a chance to test that sample I took and . . . I’m sorry, but you’ve gotta see this! Any chance you can drop by the college soon?”
“Sure. I’m in the area anyway,” Erin replied, although she still had no idea what area she was in. “I could use some good news.”
“Oh, man—just wait! You’re gonna die!”
I hope not, Erin thought as Sylvie hung up.
* * *
By consulting her GPS, Erin located herself as being in the hills outside Glendale, so she really wasn’t that far from Sylvie’s school. She cranked up the radio and mumbled along with the songs as she drove to keep herself conscious and connected with the waking world during the forty-minute drive to the community college.
The state-funded campus was a meager facility; Sylvie’s “lab” looked more like a high-school home-ec classroom with black granite countertops and ceramic basins. In addition to beakers and Bunsen burners, however, it did have some sophisticated equipment for chemical analysis, including a spectrometer.
“Glad you could make it.” This time, Sylvie hugged her as if they really were best friends. “Thank you so much for thinking of me to test your meteorite. Can’t wait to show you!”
She wore a white lab coat “for looks,” but shed it as she led Erin into her tiny office. “It’s what the kids expect,” she explained. “Hey . . . you okay?”
Sylvie gave her a concerned look. Though Erin had touched up her makeup, she evidently hadn’t applied enough foundation to erase the worry in her expression.
She gave a tired smile. “Yeah. Too much caffeine. So . . . don’t keep me in suspense!”
“Oh. Right!” Sylvie beamed and jiggled the mouse of the computer on her desk until her Doctor Who screensaver disappeared. The computer monitor displayed two horizontal rainbow-hued strips: the top one shaded, uninterrupted, from violet to red; the bottom one looked as if someone had snipped the top band into scores of thin, glowing, varicolored lines separated by black gaps.
“This, of course, is the spectrum of so-called ‘white light’ that’s our baseline for comparison,” Sylvie said, indicating the continuous band of color. “The one below it is the emission spectrum generated by the light given off by the meteorite sample when I heated it.
“Each chemical element emits photons of certain frequencies. They produce a unique pattern of Fraunhofer lines.” She pointed to the vertical slivers of color. “By seeing what pattern of lines a composite material produces, we can tell which elements it contains.”
Erin squinted at the alternating slits of dark and light; they reminded her of the dots and dashes of Morse code—a communiqué to decipher. “And you found something unusual?”
“Well, since it came from a meteorite, I eliminated all the usual suspects—iron, nickel, oxygen, hydrogen, yada, yada, yada. And I was left with this.” Sylvie clicked a mouse button. More than half the Fraunhofer lines vanished, but dozens still remained. She grinned in triumph.
Erin didn’t get it. “What’s that?”
“Something that doesn’t exist in our solar system. Element 120, also known as unbinilium. It’s the first of the heavy elements in the hypothetical ‘island of stability’ on the periodic table— big atoms that won’t just fall apart through radioactive decay.” Sylvie mistook Erin’s dumbstruck silence for incomprehension. “An undiscovered element! How frickin’ cool is that? We’re talking Nobel Prize here!”
“This stuff . . . where did it come from?” Erin asked.
“Gosh, I don’t know.” Sylvie contemplated the spectrum onscreen. “They think the heavier elements form in the cores of collapsing stars, but nothing like this exists in Nature anywhere near us. We can’t even create it with a supercollider, and it would take a star way bigger than the sun to have enough mass to crush together enough protons and neutrons to make this big a nucleus—maybe even a quasar.”
“Quasar?”
“Quasi-stellar radio source. Not technically a star, but a huge, incredibly bright celestial object. But the only quasars we can see are billions of light-years away, which means they probably haven’t existed since the universe was young.”
Erin sank into a plastic-seated chair adjacent to Sylvie’s desk. When the universe was young, and the stars were new and blue and thick as flakes in a snowstorm, before red-shifted repulsion threw them apart into an ever-expanding void . . .
Erin grabbed her head, which seemed to buzz with interstellar interference.
She should have been ecstatic. If these results were confirmed, the Object would easily be worth a thousand times what she paid for it.
Instead, it felt as if she’d failed to wake from her latest nightmare after all—or, rather, that her nightmare was bleeding out of her brain to infect the real world.
A hideous suspicion ignited within her. “Syl, could that figure—the one inside the meteorite—be some kind of probe sent here to study our planet?”
Sylvie actually laughed at that. “Not unless whoever sent it wanted to wait forever to find out about us. You can’t send a radio signal faster than the speed of light. It takes about thirteen minutes for a transmission just to reach our probes on Mars. Can you imagine how long it would take to get across the whole universe?”
Erin ran her hands through her hair as if to comb the tangles from her thoughts. “I know, I know! But there must be some way of communicating instantaneously. Remember, we’re talking about a super-advanced civilization here.”
“Well . . .” Sylvie sucked on a strand of her hair for
a moment. “Okay, if you want to get really Star Trek about it, there might be a way to communicate instantaneously, but—”
“How?”
Sylvie sighed. “There’s a thing in quantum physics called ‘spooky action at a distance.’ In certain cases, two subatomic particles that come in contact with each other continue to affect each other’s movement no matter how far apart they subsequently become.” She touched the fingertips of both hands together, then swept her right hand out as if casting a quark into space. “Theoretically, if you had a communicator with one of those two particles and I had one with the other, we could stand at opposite ends of the universe and still send a binary signal back-and-forth instantly simply by moving the particles.
“Even assuming that was possible, though, who would sit around billions of years waiting for the phone to ring?”
“I don’t know.” Erin hung her head. “I really don’t.”
* * *
Crazy talk, she thought as she drove home that evening. You keep saying that stuff, they’ll lock you up. Just like Bennington.
Maybe she was going nuts. Sylvie had certainly given her a strange look, although she had to admit the Object’s figurine certainly appeared to have been crafted by some alien intelligence. When she asked why Erin thought it might be a probe, though, Erin couldn’t tell her about the dreams or about the awful hypothesis she was now forming. It sounded certifiably insane even to her.
Except it made perfect sense. Countless little advance scouts, scattered to the intergalactic wastes like dandelion seeds, seeking new worlds on which to plant themselves. Rather than sending out slow, cumbersome spaceships to transport the clumsy bulk of corporeal bodies across the void, how much more efficient it was to send a small receiver capable of transmitting one’s mind immediately to its impossibly distant destination.
And what of the race that was capable of such ingenuity? If they still existed—if they were still out there monitoring all their little probes—how much more had they evolved and advanced in the eons since the universe was young?