The Orion Protocol

by Gary Tigerman

  “Scientifically,” Eklund was saying, “NASA doesn’t seem to want to really look at these sorts of things, like the Face or these pyramid-shaped mounds . . .”

  “Who is this guy?” Winston wondered out loud.

  “But if you take the time to look and see, you find that in terms of alignments with the sun, the cardinal points, or the equator, the more we compare the Face and these faceted mounds on Mars with structures on Earth like the Mayan pyramids or the Sphinx in Egypt, the more the data suggest intelligence was involved. Not just in their geometries, but in their placement.”

  “Unbelievable.” Winston picked up the phone and then put it back.

  “So, ancient pyramids on Mars, or tricks of light and shadow?”

  Angela turned to her other guests for their reactions.

  “Dr. Winnick, Professor?”

  Winnick, the charismatic Nobelist, was the first to weigh in, and Winston saw her taking Eklund’s measure: she could outpoint him in her sleep.

  This will be interesting. He turned up the sound.

  “Well, first I’d like to say that having a creative imagination is a fine thing, certainly,” Winnick began. “But as evocative as these images might be, considering the thousands of big rocks on Mars, what are the odds that one might look a little like a human face, or a pyramid, or any number of things?”

  “Richard? That’s a fair question,” Angela said. “What about the issue of ‘projection’? Like seeing faces in the clouds . . .”

  “Or finding a pumpkin that looks like your uncle Harry?” Eklund almost sneered.

  “What a flaming idiot,” Winston mumbled to himself, amused.

  Eklund’s case of attitude was coming off as arrogant, even insulting to his host, which was bad form, not to mention stupid.

  “Well, you must allow that this is something we humans do,” Winnick said, smoothly riding to Angela’s rescue. “We look for patterns, we anthropomorphize. It’s part of our nature, don’t you know. But leaving that aside, what about Nature? Natural forces create lines of katabatic sand dunes and monumental shapes everywhere on Earth. Look at the magnificent buttes in the Southwest, cathedrals of rock thrust up by tectonic shifting, eroded and sculpted by water and wind over eons of time.”

  “Buttes and sand dunes.” Eklund waved a hand at the video display. “Sand dunes on Earth do not show this kind of symmetry. Natural geography is fractal! Nature doesn’t do straight lines and geometric shapes!”

  Dr. Paula Winnick looked at him over her bifocals. But any impression of grandmotherliness was mistaken.

  “I should think,” she said, without raising her voice, “you’d find all kinds of symmetries and geometries in nature’s crystal structures.”

  Professor Weintraub entering the fray was almost like piling on.

  “Angela? May I say something about methodology?”

  “Of course.”

  Weintraub took a moment to polish his glasses and perhaps his argument.

  “Dr. Eklund, you mentioned Egypt and the Mayans. And correct me if I’m wrong—you knew what kind of shapes and alignments you were looking for, almost like a template. And knowing what you hope to find builds in bias, which is bad science, frankly . . .”

  Winston stopped the tape. Eklund had been effectively marginalized, but still, the man was a loose cannon. Why NASA tolerated somebody like this on its payroll was baffling.

  “Christ.” He finished his martini and again picked up the phone.

  Fortunately, this was but a small irritation at the end of a very good day. The analysis of the data set from the full-scale test of Project Orion by Defense Intelligence, NASA, and their partners in the Ukraine had been positive across-the-board. They had finally done it, made the first giant step toward realizing the promise of Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars vision, the Strategic Defense Initiative. It was a major achievement he would enjoy reporting directly to the President, though not with that particular spin on it.

  He punched some numbers on the secured landline and waited.

  There was still a lot to do besides leading the reluctant Occupant of the White House to water. On the Hill, there were armed-services chairs to convince, and key people at State. And there was still the Sokoff problem, the President’s mush-mouthed fixer and whatever he thought he was doing, sniffing around. But it was late, and Winston didn’t want to get the wheels started on that.

  He could take care of one item, however, without losing any sleep.

  Wiping his mouth with a sharply creased linen napkin, Winston knew he was probably getting NASA Administrator Vernon Pierce out of bed. But he didn’t really give a shit.

  “Vern, you awake?”

  18

  PBS Offices/Washington, D.C.

  With her Beanie Bullwinkle presiding, Angela sat next to Miriam and watched Dr. Stephen Weintraub set down his glass of Chardonnay from the green-room buffet and give his attention to the TOLAS photo of Mars on Angela’s computer.

  “Well,” he said, noncommittally. “And there was no note, nothing?”

  In buoyant spirits at the wrap party, the professor had been happy to do them a favor. Dr. Winnick had been charming and generous to him about his work at NASA and Cornell, and Angela made him feel quite at home. Weintraub hoped some of his colleagues at the university would tune in, though he’d be sure to get his share of jealous ribbing if they did.

  “What you see is what we got,” Angela said, observing the professor as he scrolled down the high-res image with Holmesian thoroughness.

  “And you’re not going to tell me anything more about it?”

  “Nope.”

  Angela and Miriam had agreed in advance that they should say as little as possible. And certainly nothing about Mars Observer.

  “The guys at Goddard thought it looked pretty good,” Miriam offered.

  “Oh, it’s better than good.” Weintraub nodded. “It basically looks like imaging data from the Mars Global Surveyor mapping program. Formatting is correct for Mars Orbital Camera, resolution, pixel count . . .”

  “What about the pyramids?”

  “Oh, I can’t confirm CGI without being in the lab. I imagine somebody’s having some fun. Whoever it is, he doesn’t seem to have gone beyond the limits of the instrumentation, which is smart. The MOC specs on Surveyor are identical to what we had on Mars Observer. I could probably order this frame from Malin Scientific for you, then use the original to compare . . .”

  Weintraub scrolled to the right-hand bottom edge bearing the mission code and promptly froze.

  Angela and Miriam waited out his initial reaction with small pangs of guilt that showed a nice spirit. Weintraub shot them a look.

  “You saw this at Goddard?” His voice sounded strained and he cleared his throat. “Stupid question. I’m guessing this is what you really wanted me to see.”

  “The mission code.” Angela could see he was upset, but forged ahead. “Eklund and a planetary geologist, John Fisher, put it up on the mainframe and enlarged it until it fell apart. Seemed like they were pretty thorough.”

  “And their position is what, exactly?” Weintraub sounded a bit sour about it. Angela gave him the facts.

  “They could find no obvious tampering. No hard edges suggesting inserts or pasting, no evidence of erasure or blurring behind the numbers, which I understand you’d expect if they were superimposed. They could not prove it was a fake.”

  Weintraub fell silent. Miriam put the unspoken question to him.

  “Professor, is it possible that Mars Observer was not lost?”

  “No, I was there. It was lost. We lost it . . .”

  The scientist’s expression darkened as he turned back to the TOLAS image, seemingly too involved with his own emotions to invite further questions.

  It wasn’t possible that he could have been this grossly deceived. How could NASA have lied, not just to him and everyone involved with the Observer mission, but to the world? But if this capture was real, the evidence spoke for itself. T
he Mars Observer imaging had represented the fulfillment of his life’s work. How dare they just take it away? What gave them the right?

  Weintraub was not naive. He knew NASA, the institution, had always played for its survival in a larger game: a lopsided tug-of-war for preeminence in space with the Department of Defense. This had been true from day one of NASA’s inception as a civilian agency. So there were institutional reasons to suspect the Pentagon, in concert with the NASA, of asserting primacy in the name of national security. Weintraub began to suspect that a “sacrifice” had been demanded and NASA had been obliged to give up Mars Observer.

  Control. It’s all about control.

  He wanted to take this Mars Observer image and go wave it like a bloody shirt in front of Vern Pierce, the NASA Administrator, just to see the look on his face. But he knew he would never do any such thing.

  He had too much to lose, even at this point in his career. Didn’t he?

  Angela tried to pull Weintraub back from his thoughts.

  “Professor, during the Gulf War the Pentagon secretly commandeered four NASA satellites and redeployed them over Iraq, isn’t that true?”

  Miriam glanced at her partner, wondering where she’d dug up this cogent bit of info, or if she was just winging it. Weintraub nodded.

  “For military surveillance, yes.”

  “And the Pentagon instructed NASA to lie about it to the media, so they told CNN and the New York Times that the satellites had been “lost,” which was how it was reported to the public.”

  “For reasons of national security. Point being?”

  But the Professor seemed unwilling or unable to continue.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, getting to his feet. “I think I should go.”

  “Please.” Angela stood with him. “I know this is your work and it has to be upsetting, but hypothetically: Could the government remotely take over a NASA satellite and continue to run it ‘in the dark’ for its own purposes?”

  Miriam got up on her feet, too. Weintraub winced as if his stomach had cramped.

  “Could it? You mean is it technically feasible? Sure. Sure they could. Easy as changing a phone number. But would they? I can’t tell you. Go ask DOD. Ask the NSA. That’s one reason I went back to teaching. It’s all about the militarization of space now. There is so little pure space science being done. It’s not about space science. It’s about control.”

  The professor looked for a moment like he was about to say more, then turned for the door as if he’d already said too much.

  “Wait. Stephen, please,” Miriam said, touching his sleeve. “It was an honor to have you on the show and we can only imagine what your feelings might be, but if someone of your stature would be willing to offer an expert opinion . . .”

  “We’re not asking you to get involved in the politics,” Angela added, knowing instantly it wasn’t true.

  Weintraub laughed out loud. It was a bitter worldly little bark, full of scorn: authenticating this image could be the most political thing he’d ever do.

  “Please,” he said. “Take it to the office of the NASA Administrator, walk it in to Vernon Pierce, lay it on his desk, and then walk away. In your business I’m sure it’s very valuable to have powerful friends who owe you a favor.”

  It wasn’t until the angry slap of Weintraub’s wing-tipped shoes down the corridor had completely faded that either one of them could speak.

  “Well,” Miriam said, breaking the silence. “I think that went rather well, don’t you?”

  But Angela seemed momentarily immune to smart remarks.

  “I think we just got our authentication, Miriam.”

  “Is that what that was?”

  All Miriam could see was that they had alienated a very important member of the nation’s science community and had nothing to show for it.

  “You saw it.” Angela gestured at the door Weintraub had disappeared through. “How much more confirmation do you need? The man is freaked.”

  “I’m a little freaked myself,” Miriam said. “Because our key satellite imaging expert will probably not even be returning our phone calls, much less going on record with his expert opinion. Which puts us at something less than square one, kid.”

  “Not necessarily.” Moving back over to the computer, Angela went on-line and began searching through the hundreds of TOLAS bulletin-board comments.

  “We needed to know if this was a hoax, right?”

  “Right. And?”

  Miriam looked at the clock, feeling suddenly dead tired as Angela scanned for signs of Deep Cosmo in the postings. Nothing. She turned to her partner.

  “Look, Miriam, this is huge. I mean Watergate huge.” Angela’s face was a study in quiet, clear determination. “We didn’t get exactly what we hoped for from Stephen. But we got something incredibly important. We got a big, dark yes. Confirmation, for you and me personally, that we are not wasting our time, we are onto the science story of a lifetime.”

  Miriam nodded. Part of her was still being dragged kicking and screaming to that same conclusion. But the preponderance of evidence was becoming hard to deny, even if she saw herself as playing Scully to Angela’s Mulder.

  “Was that true about the satellites and the Gulf War?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Jesus.”

  Miriam knew what her partner wanted from her. This was a moment de vérité in another way, too. Angela was outgrowing Science Horizon. The two of them would either go forward together on this career-making story, one hundred percent, and become prime-time players, or probably not last much longer as partners. Miriam sensed this, whether Angela did or not.

  Accomplished and diligent, Miriam occasionally felt a bit jealous of Angela’s passion about all this, even as it blew past all apparent stop signs. But as she affirmed her own commitment to go the distance on this story, part of her was hoping some of Angela’s enviable, sometimes naive fearlessness might rub off.

  “Watergate huge,” Miriam repeated the phrase. “Which one would that make me, Woodward or Bernstein?”

  Angela furrowed her forehead, remembering All the President’s Men.

  “Did Redford play Carl Bernstein?”

  “No. Dustin Hoffman.”

  “Then I’m obviously Bob Woodward.”

  “You just won’t kiss my ass for a second, will you?” Miriam said, doing a nice slow burn. Angela laughed, gave her a hug, and grabbed the Beanie Bullwinkle.

  “Want to see me pull a rabbit out of a hat?”

  She then looked her producing partner in the eye, as an ally and a battle-tested friend, and paraphrased Bobby McFerrin and JFK, back-to-back.

  “Don’t worry, be happy. We will do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

  “But first we have a sit-down with the suits.” Miriam nodded. Angela was very glad to see Miriam was in with both feet and already thinking several moves ahead. Not like someone afraid to move without a panoply of lawyers nodding yes. More like a woman scheduling a nail appointment before going into corporate battle.

  PART

  III

  We often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.

  —President Ronald Reagan

  United Nations General Assembly

  September 1987

  19

  1973/Sinus Medii/the Moon

  Setting up the last of the seismic sensors, they were unprepared for that first moment when the Earth rose up into view above the cratered lunar surface, achingly blue and gibbous in the pitch-black sky. Commander Jake Deaver dropped the hammer he’d been using and stared.

  “Good God Almighty . . .”

  The installed sensors registered the tool’s impact like a mini-moonquake.

  “Commander? Uh, we failed to copy. Over.”

 
But Jake had stopped hearing the mission director at Johnson Space herding them through the choreography of their science schedule, stopped doing anything at all beyond just standing there, bearing witness to Earthrise.

  He could feel his heart beating in his throat and hear the sound of his lungs inhaling and expelling the monitored mix of breathable bottled air. His eyes welled up, but he couldn’t wipe them clear.

  “Commander?”

  Blinking rapidly, Deaver decided he needed to see the world just as it was and lifted the gold visor on his helmet.

  “Houston, we have Earthrise . . .”

  “Copy that. Commander? Check your visor. Over.”

  “Augie?” Jake pointed a pressurized glove.

  “I got it.” Augie focused a hand-wound eight-millimeter Kodak camera on the rolling lunar horizon just as it completed the full revelation of their home world.

  “Commander? We show your visor in the up position. Over?”

  Jake purposely ignored the transmission and allowed himself a good look around: unfiltered, the colors on the lunar surface were intense. What had only been dark shadows inside several surrounding craters were now plainly seen as pools of deep violet, and as he looked around he noticed a faint dusting, like indigo snow, on the worn-down lunar hills.

  “Uh, Houston? Repeat the question. Over.”

  “Commander? Check your visor. Do you copy? Over.”

  Looking down, Deaver noticed how his own shadow was not black, as it would have been on Earth, but a curious rainbow of color, eerie and magical. The shifting spectrum of shades reflecting and refracting all around him made the moonscape intoxicating and surreal.

  “Jake?”

  “Visor check, copy that.”

  Whatever happens, it was worth it, Deaver thought, pulling the gold faceplate back into position, thrill-drunk as the Dog Star, Sirius, winked up over the horizon, trailing Mother Earth on a short leash.

  “This is amazing . . . awesome . . .”

  Something caught Jake’s eye and he plunged his gloved hand down into a mound of what looked like lavender beach glass heaped at his feet and extracted a blade-shaped indigo shard. He called over to his partner.