The Rock

by Robert Doherty

  "The earliest studies of the crater initially speculated that it was formed by either a volcano or an underground steam explosion. However, the discovery of some iron fragments lying very close to the surface soon challenged that theory. In November 1891 two members of the U.S. Coast and Geological Survey examined the area intensely. They speculated that because the crater is round, a meteorite must have struck at a nearly perpendicular angle.

  "They did a careful magnetic survey of the crater floor and discovered little evidence of buried metal. Using what I could best describe as the myopic-eyeball estimating technique, one of the men postulated that the amount of material on the rim would fill the crater completely." A snort indicated what the old woman thought of that. "Later, other more scientific studies clearly showed that the rim material is not sufficient to fill the crater.

  "In 1895 at the symposium of the Geological Society of Washington, the geologist Grove Karl Gilbert made a presentation on Coon Butte. He presented the various hypotheses and the evidence supporting each one, ranging from volcanic origin, to steam explosion, to meteor impact. His conclusion was that one could make no definitive conclusion based on the evidence, but that the crater most likely had been formed by a steam explosion."

  She was interrupted for the first time by a stocky figure sporting an Indiana Jones hat and a full beard. "Note how carefully Dr. Pencak describes Gilbert's presentation to the Geological Society. You will be required to read Gilbert's presentation before our next class meeting. It is a masterpiece of scientific inquiry."

  Dr. Susan Pencak continued without missing a beat. "Your professor is quite correct about the substance of Gilbert's address. Let us hope you read it more carefully than it was received in 1895. The common feeling by those listening to Gilbert was that he was definitively stating the crater was formed by a steam explosion. For over a quarter of a century the theory that Coon Butte was formed by a steam explosion stood with no challenge-blindly accepted by all."

  She turned and pointed behind her at the large boulders lying haphazardly on the rim. "It was not until many years later that the pattern of rock fragments scattered around the rim itself was examined. Large boulders, some weighing as much as five thousand tons, are found as far away as a mile from where I am standing. No steam explosion could have created that much force.

  "Massive amounts of pulverized rock known as silica are found both in the rim and in the crater. It takes tremendous pressure and heat to make silica out of solid rock. Additionally, fused quartz sandstone found in the crater indicates that a temperature at least as high as three thousand nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit occurred here at one time."

  Dr. Pencak paused and peered at the students, some of whom were diligently taking notes, others of whom seemed quite bored. She focused her single eye on a young man whose attention was wandering to the distant plain. "You there. Yes, you. Given all the evidence I have just presented and that which is laid out before your eyes, what do you think of the steam explosion theory?"

  The student blinked and spoke slowly as he tried sorting out the data, desperately wishing he had done the required reading for this road trip. "Well, Doctor, I suppose that might be an adequate theory, but I don't think a steam explosion could have fused quartz sandstone. Some sort of thermal effect or explosion had to have occurred to produce temperatures that high-much higher than could be caused by steam."

  "Ah!" she exclaimed. "A thermal explosion. Very good. Someone tell me what could cause such an explosion and leave a hole such as we have here."

  A few students tentatively raised their hands. Pencak pointed her hand at one to reply.

  "A meteorite would have a sufficient amount of kinetic energy that could be transformed into thermal energy upon impact." The student flipped a page in her textbook. "Gifford's table of energy in calories per gram of weight indicate that a meteor moving at ten miles per second would have almost thirty thousand calories of energy per gram."

  Pencak's face lopsidedly twitched in what might have been a smile or a grimace. "True. Very true. And someone tell me the latest theory. How fast was the meteorite traveling that is supposed to have formed this crater?"

  "Uh, twelve miles per second?"

  "Are you answering me or asking me?" Pencak didn't wait. ''Yes. Twelve miles per second, or seven hundred twenty miles per hour. And some number cruncher figured out that the meteor must have been about forty-one meters in diameter at strike and weighed some three hundred thousand tons. The blast would have been the equivalent of five hundred thousand tons of TNT. Quite impressive."

  She paused and surveyed the group. They were scribbling the numbers in their notebooks as if her word were law. "So, if a meteor actually had hit, what else should we find here besides a big hole, fused and pulverized rock, and big boulders thrown miles away?"

  There was a long pause and then a hand went up. "Yes?"

  "There should be some fragments of the meteor."

  "Correct." She waved her hand around the crater. "And have they been found?"

  "Not in any substantial amount," was the reply.

  "So what happened to the material that made up the meteor? What happened to that three hundred thousand tons of nickel and iron? Where is it?"

  Her questions were met with silence. The professor was fidgeting, uncomfortable with her questioning of the class. They were here for information, not intellectual challenge. These young minds were in pursuit of a grade, not knowledge.

  She changed her angle of attack, trying to dredge up some sense of creative thought from the gray mass in front of her. "Can someone tell me what else could have caused this crater? Something that could make such a hole in the earth; fuse quartz sandstone; pulverize solid rock into powder; and not leave a trace fifty thousand years later?"

  A quiet voice ventured something unheard at the back of the group.

  "What was that?" Pencak tried to peer through the gathering dusk at the source of the voice.

  A young man with a scraggly beard stepped forward. "I said a nuclear explosion."

  "Yes. On the order of magnitude of five hundred megatons. Shoemaker in 1963 did something very interesting. I knew him then. Quite a man. He had this marvelous capacity to approach problems in reverse and oftentimes he came up with quite startling results. He studied a crater formed in Yucca Flat, Nevada, by a nuclear explosion and compared it to this crater here. Interestingly enough, he found numerous points of similarity. In fact, they were practically identical, although, of course, they were different in size because of the lower yield of the weapon used in Nevada."

  "But as you said, this was formed approximately fifty thousand years ago," a confident voice from the front of the small crowd noted.

  "Yes, I did," Pencak concurred.

  The speaker grew bolder. "Then it could not have been a nuclear explosion."

  "Why not?"

  The speaker laughed. "Because nuclear weapons weren't invented until 1945."

  "If you mean by man, you are quite correct." Doctor Pencak was about to continue when the professor quickly stepped forward.

  "Thank you very much for a most fascinating day touring the crater, Dr. Pencak. I regret to say that we must be going now in order to make it back to the university on time." With a few muttered thanks from the students the group was gone, trudging over the rim where their bus waited, ready to whisk them back to the academic world where answers were as pat as those that were printed on the pages of the textbook.

  Susan Pencak watched the taillights of the bus disappear into the growing darkness. The sun was almost completely down and the temperature had taken the quick dive it always does on a winter desert night. She could hear the noises of the night creatures coming alive out in the flatlands.

  They always cut her off when she started challenging their reality. She found it quite discouraging. She was widely recognized among her colleagues as the foremost expert on the geological aspects of Meteor Crater, yet she infuriated them by not toeing the party line and bl
indly accepting that the crater had been formed as its name indicated.

  She reached up with both arms toward the stars that were beginning to appear overhead. The five fingers on her good hand reached higher and higher, as if she were trying to touch the stars. Her withered hand was inches below, forced down by the ruined shoulder. Slowly, she lowered her arms and turned her eye back to earth. With a slight limp she headed for the Jeep parked just off the rim road. Off in the distance she could hear the discordant thump of a helicopter headed in her direction and she paused and waited.

  VOYAGER

  The Edge of the Solar System

  21 DECEMBER 1995, 0100 ZULU

  Outside the orbit of the farthest planet in the solar system, the effects of the sun are still present. A continuous stream of charged particles from the sun's magnetic field is swept by the solar wind and creates a huge bubble-like structure known as the heliosphere. From mankind's perspective it serves a most useful function by keeping the solar system relatively free of interstellar matter and slowing the entry of cosmic rays.

  Voyager 2, intrepid visitor of four planets and fifty-seven moons during the past eighteen years, was only a third of the way to the edge of the heliosphere but well beyond the orbit of Pluto-a vast, empty hinterland where there is little for the probe's scanners to search out and examine. Indeed, most of the equipment on board the Voyager was turned off shortly after the probe passed Neptune in August of 1989. Since that time only the spectrometer-a device that detects ultraviolet radiation-has been kept active.

  With its large dish oriented back into the plane of the planets and the high-gain antenna in the center centered on Earth, Voyager heads for the edge of the heliosphere, projected to reach it by the year 2000. The plutonium power on the probe is expected to run out in 2020. After that, it is estimated that it will take Voyager millions of years before it comes close to another star.

  When Voyager was launched in 1977, there were people who believed shooting out into space what was essentially a guidebook back to Earth might not have been the most prudent idea. Those worries were overruled. After all, the scientists argued, the radio and television rays from Earth were much farther out already than Voyager would ever reach intact. Those rays not only pinpointed Earth's stellar location but also depicted life-and not a very flattering one, as a survey of the channels indicates-on Earth.

  At precisely 0100, Greenwich mean time, the transmitter secreted away in the guts of the probe powered up and began pulsing out a binary code representing the readings from the spectrometer for the past twenty-four hours. The radio waves began their four-hour, ten-minute, twenty-three-second trip back to Earth to be gathered in at the deep-space communications center near Alice Springs, Australia, where a giant dish would grudgingly turn from higher priority missions to gather in Voyager's data during its fifteen minute daily allocation of dish time.

  Seven minutes later-four and a half billion miles into its seventeen-year journey and midway through the transmission-Voyager 2's journey ended abruptly.

  DSCC 14, Australia

  21 DECEMBER 1995, 1440 LOCAL

  21 DECEMBER 1995, 0510 ZULU

  Hawkins felt the pounding of a massive headache behind his eyes. For the past several hours they had learned quite a bit about meteor-burst transmitting, Ayers Rock, digital encoding, and various other information, but it had added little to their understanding of the situation.

  Mentally tuning out the headache, Hawkins slapped the end of his pointer on the surface of the easel. "All right, I know this seems rather simplistic, but bear with me. Basically we've got four items here."

  NUCLEAR BLAST VREDEFORT DOME

  VOYAGER INFORMATION

  MESSAGE TO Five SITES (Including Vredefort Dome)

  OUR NAMES

  "I don't think you should have those arrows. None of those items necessarily follows from the previous one." Levy's quiet voice filled the room. "I would admit that the Voyager information was the step prior to the message, since that information was used in making up the message. But how did our names come up?"

  Hawkins shrugged. "We'll get to that later. I'm more concerned about the connection with the bombing. There's one more of those nuclear weapons out there missing. If whoever is behind these messages is involved with the bombs, we need to find that out."

  Hawkins didn't think they should talk about the touchstone theory in front of Lamb. Levy's point had been valid, but if it was true, there wasn't too much they could do about it. Besides, there were still several other factors that didn't quite fit into that theory-at least not that he could see. It was those other factors that they were examining now.

  "Look at those reception sites and add in the Rock." Levy was holding up a world map with the six red circles. "What does the spatial layout make you think?"

  "One for each inhabited continent," Hawkins noted. Something had been bugging him for a while. "What if the others were diversions?"

  "What?" Fran looked puzzled.

  "What if the only true message was sent to South Africa, but the other ones were sent to throw us off track?" Hawkins warmed to the theme. It was something he might have done. "We're sitting here looking at where those beams terminated, but that doesn't necessarily mean there has to be anything there. We have no record of transmissions from those sites."

  "Or there might have been something there once upon a time and it no longer exists," Levy commented. "But getting back to the layout of the six sites: Let's stop being egocentric and turn our gaze outward. Note that three are in the northern hemisphere and three are in the southern. Note that each set of three is laid out in a pattern that splits the world into three roughly equal parts."

  Lamb had entered while Hawkins was showing the diagram, and he now spoke for the first time. "If you wanted to set up monitors to cover the whole world you might space them out like that. Maybe the Russians put together some sort of monitoring system in the past and the explosion at Vredefort damaged it?"

  Levy was shaking her head thoughtfully. "No. That's not what I'm talking about. Think about where we're sitting right now. Why is this tracking station here in Australia?"

  "So we can always have contact with our satellites and probes when they're on the far side of the globe from the United States," Fran answered.

  "Right," Levy said, and waited.

  Fran was the first to catch on. "Wait a minute! Are you saying that these six sites are the same thing? Monitoring or relay sites to space? But there's nothing there at the other sites!"

  "There was nothing in Ayers Rock that we knew of until it sent out the message," Hawkins noted.

  Levy pointed back at Hawkins's diagram. "We all seem to be ignoring the fact that the message relayed the data off Voyager 2 with the addition of our names. Yet Voyager is almost out of the solar system. How could someone have gotten that information?"

  "They don't necessarily have to have gotten it off the satellite itself," Batson replied. "That information is available in data bases here on Earth."

  "So someone could have just used that Voyager information as a diversion," Lamb said.

  Hawkins turned to Lamb. "When this crater woman gets here, we need to pump her for everything about Meteor Crater. I'm sure they've done sonar and electromagnetic resonance soundings in the crater. If not, we need to get some people out there. Maybe there's something in that area similar to what's in the Rock."

  "Maybe." Lamb seemed bothered by Levy's quick dismissal of the Russian angle. "The Russians would have wanted to do something like that-set up sites around the world like we have. They could get access to the Voyager plate information-it's public information. Hell, maybe this thing in the Rock dates back to Sputnik"

  "What exactly do you think you have in the Rock?" Batson asked. He thumped a folder down on the table in front of him. "I've been going through the data picked up so far and it seems to me that all you know for sure is that there is an anomaly on your sonar and electromagnetic resonance mapping. Nothing on sound. Noth
ing on radio waves since the one broadcast. All your sonar and EMR tells you is that there is something other than solid rock down about five hundred feet. And the latest data indicate that it is approximately forty feet in diameter and fifteen in depth."

  "True," Lamb acknowledged. "That is all we have."

  Batson shook his head. "But for all we know that could have been in there forever. No one ever thought of doing any of those tests on the Rock prior to the messages. There is no sign of entryway or exit."

  "We've got troops going over the exterior of the Rock and the surrounding area double-checking for that." Lamb replied. "We think it's possible the entry tunnel might be on the northwest side, which has been off limits for years to all but the Aborigines for religious purposes. Something might have been dug on that side and hidden."

  "If you find no tunnel, how did it get in there?" Fran asked.

  The question went unanswered.

  "It gets back to the question of what 'it' is," Batson said. "It also has to be able to transmit through all that rock out into space with sufficient power to override your normal SATCOM traffic. I'm no expert on it, but I'd say we'd have a hell of a time rigging a transmitter to go through five hundred feet of solid rock."

  "It's possible," Lamb answered. "We ran that problem through the computer. No one ever thought of doing it through rock before-no reason to-but if it was necessary, and you have a very strong power source, then you could transmit through rock on certain microwave frequencies."

  "But where's the power source, then?" Fran asked. "There are too many problems without answers here. She liked working with hard data-here there was no data, just pieces of a puzzle. Except the entire puzzle seemed to be a solid sheet of blackness that they were fumbling with in the dark, trying to connect each piece at a time to another one simply by feel.