METEOR STORM

by David Capps

  METEOR STORM

  A NOVEL

  By D. F. Capps

  Copyright 2014 All Rights Reserved

  ISBN 978-0-9774198-4-5

  Clearwater Valley Press LLC

  104 Jefferson Dr.

  Kamiah, ID 83536

  Under license

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  As much as a writer might like to think this is the work of the writer alone, nothing could be further from the truth. Each book that you read is the combined effort of a number of people who have all contributed to the end product. First I would like to thank my wife, Miriam for her endless patience and suggestions. Next is my wonderful editor, Katie Reed and my talented publicist, Rebecca Berus. A special thanks to artist Natasha Brown for her cover design.

  I would also like to thank Denise Keith and many others who contributed their opinions and suggestions to the story.

  DEAR READER

  On Apollo 17, the last manned moon mission, Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt visited and photographed Shorty Crater on their second EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity). In one of the photographs an object appears the size and shape of a human skull. In their book, “DARK MISSION – The Secret History of NASA” (Feral House, ISBN: 978-1-932595-48-2, 2009), Richard C. Hoagland and Mike Bara examine that photograph and speculate on the images and implications of what is clearly there (pgs. 558-561). They also speculate that Cernan and Schmitt could have brought the skull-shaped object back with them. That speculation forms the basic premise for this novel. Some of the dialogue between the astronauts in this novel is fashioned after the transcript of Cernan and Schmitt at 145 hours, 26 minutes and 25-54 seconds into their mission. Most of the description of Shorty Crater comes from Hoagland’s and Bara’s analysis of the NASA photographs.

  The planet Mars is also discussed in the novel. Much of the description of conditions on Mars also comes from Hoagland’s and Bara’s analysis of NASA photographs and data sent back from the Mars Rovers and the Mars Observer. Mike Bara’s book, “Ancient Aliens on Mars” (Adventures Unlimited Press, ISBN: 978-1-935487-89-0, 2013), was also used as an information source for this novel.

  Later in the story two advanced technologies are highlighted; the Magnetic Effect Generator, (Chapter 28), originally developed by British engineer John Searl in the early 1950’s, and a resonant motor design (Chapter 30) based on the personal engineering experience of the author. These are very promising electrical technologies for highly efficient and inexpensive energy production for our future.

  METEOR STORM is a mixture of fact and fiction. I hope you enjoy reading the story.

  D. F. Capps

  METEOR STORM

  PROLOGUE

  Shorty Crater

  Taurus-Littrow Valley floor

  The Moon

  December, 1972

  Commander Scott Nancer and his teammate, Smitty, would be the last two men to walk on the moon. This was their second Extra Vehicular Activity, and as exciting as it was to walk on the moon, this excursion was about to turn shockingly unbelievable.

  “Whoo! Look at this!” Smitty called out. “It’s orange, really orange!”

  “Wait until I get there,” Nancer replied. With all the gray dust and rocks, something orange was exciting. Nancer put his gold-plated sun visor up as he approached the edge of the crater. “Hey, it’s orange all right!”

  Smitty kicked at the orange soil. “There’s a lot of it here!”

  Nancer peered over the edge of the crater and signaled Smitty to go to channel two, the secure channel for classified communications. Orange soil meant highly oxidized titanium, which would be critical for recovering metals and oxygen that would be needed to colonize the moon. “Houston, we have a vein of what appears to be bright orange soil, one meter deep and approximately three meters wide. Taking a sample for analysis now.”

  “Roger that, Nancer,” Houston Control Center replied.

  As Nancer placed the sample into a storage bag he noticed Smitty was staring into the crater, not moving or making a sound. Smitty slowly reached over and grabbed Nancer’s arm, and pointed into the crater. Totally stunned at what he saw, Nancer felt frozen in place.

  The meteor impact that formed the hundred meter diameter depression called Shorty Crater had uncovered not only the vein of orange soil, but hundreds of pieces of broken machinery and shattered pieces of glass. There was nothing natural about the contents of the crater. Everything inside had been crafted and manufactured. One piece looked like a pump housing with tubes inside a glass-like case and connectors for various applications. Beams with round holes to reduce weight were scattered throughout the debris, broken at odd angles. Pieces of what appeared to be sheet metal stuck out in jagged points. At the deepest point of the crater was a tunnel leading back into the rock, dark and foreboding. The sharp points and edges of the debris made access into the tunnel impossible in their space suits. One snag or cut would mean certain death within minutes in the vacuum on the moon’s surface. Near the shallow end of Shorty Crater, the object that held their complete attention was the size and shape of a human skull.

  “Is the video tape still running?” Nancer asked.

  “Yeah,” Smitty replied slowly, “but the camera’s aimed at the Rover.”

  Nancer turned and evaluated the angle of the video camera. The skull shaped object would be at the edge of the camera’s field of view.

  “Turn it off,” Nancer said, “I’m going after it.”

  Nancer worked his way around the perimeter of the crater to a shallow spot and cautiously started down the gentle slope. The ground was soft and shifted unevenly under his feet. As Nancer approached the skull shaped object, he saw that it had two eye-sockets, brow ridges, a forehead, a nose with nostrils, obvious cheek bones and an upper jaw. The edge of the upper jaw was marked with a red and white striped band running horizontally along the edge. The skull itself was metallic gray in color.

  Nancer gently picked the skull up and examined it. The skull wasn’t human but appeared to be a part of a robot of some kind. The eye-sockets contained convex lenses, now cracked and partially covered in dust. One hole on each side of the skull took the place of ears, also filled with dust. Dozens of fine wires extended from the neck, obviously snapped by whatever force tore the head from the body of the robot. There were connection points for a lower jaw, but the jaw itself was missing. Nancer looked around to see if there were any other parts of the robot nearby. There weren’t. He gradually made his way back up out of the crater and stowed the robot’s head in the rover.

  * * *

  After their return to Earth, NASA scientists examined the robot’s head and determined that it was very old and non-functional. The head was placed in a wooden box, sealed, given the Inventory Control Number of 42919, and sent to the Clark Street Storage Facility where they believed it would never be seen again. Not wanting to be too explicit with the description in the inventory log, the skull was simply labeled as “artifact.”

  CHAPTER 1

  PRESENT TIME

  I swiped my NASA ID card through the card reader at the Clark Street Storage Facility and opened the door. The uniformed guard who sat behind the small desk watched me as I entered the lobby. He looked Irish to me, with pale skin and freckles. He was very tall and thin with short, slightly graying hair. His uniform was clean and crisply pressed which gave the impression of a past member of the Marines. He looked oversized for the desk they had given him.

  “ID?” he asked, as he held his hand out.

  I handed him my ID card and waited. He scrutinized my card and glanced over, checking to see that I looked like the photo on the ID card.

  “So, Carl Palminteri, what’d you do to piss off Woolser?” he asked.

  My heart sank. “What’d they do
, put it on the evening news?” I asked. The screaming match I had with my boss, Sheldon Woolser, PhD, the day before was still grating on my nerves. The guy’s a buffoon, stuffed with knowledge and not a lick of understanding or common sense.

  The guard chuckled. “No. I got a memo from him telling me to keep a close eye on you. He wants you gone but he doesn’t want his hands dirty from firing you. This is the last step out the door. Woolser sends people here to do inventory because it’s the dullest, most mind numbing job he can think of. He wants you to quit.”

  “And you know this because?” I asked.

  He smiled. “Because of the eight other engineers he sent here before you.”

  “How long before they get out of inventory duty and back to the main office?”

  “They don’t,” he replied. “Most only last a month or two before they quit. One guy lasted for six months. That was a record, but the end result was the same. He finally quit.”

  I closed my eyes and breathed out heavily. I couldn’t believe it had come to this. NASA was the dream job for top graduates from MIT. The reality was that the pay was a fraction of the amount paid in the private sector and with the internal politics at NASA; it was more of a nightmare for me. I didn’t want or apply for the job; I was assigned to it. And even inventory work was considerably better than the alternative.

  “So,” the guard asked, “You want to quit now or later?”

  I thought about it for a moment. “Six months, huh?”

  “Yep, that’s the standing record.”

  “Okay,” I said, “a new record might be worth it.”

  The guard smiled and offered his hand. “Welcome aboard Mr. Palminteri.”

  “Carl is fine,” I said shaking his hand.

  “Mike Burton,” he replied. “Woolser wants you here no later than nine and leaving no earlier than five. Anything beyond that is casual overtime.”

  “Casual overtime?” I asked.

  “You only get paid for the eight hours. No overtime authorized.”

  Pasadena California wasn’t on the lower end of the cost of living scale. I was just getting by with the overtime pay. This was going to hurt. “So I get punished financially too?”

  “That’s the deal,” Mike said. “Still game?”

  I gritted my teeth and ran a quick inventory of some of the things I would have to do without. As bad as the situation was, I was going to have to live with it. I now deeply regretted the argument with Woolser. I should have kept my mouth shut. It’s just that the truth should mean something. I still think people need to know that we aren’t alone in the universe and Woolser was sitting on the evidence. I had argued that people were ready for that level of knowledge, that they wouldn’t panic, but I wasn’t the person that was going to make that decision. Woolser was, and he wasn’t going to let the world’s power structure be shaken, even for an instant. I didn’t have a choice; I had to stick it out. “Game on,” I replied trying to look and sound a lot braver than I felt.

  “Okay, let me show you around.”

  The Clark Street Storage Facility was a massive warehouse, two hundred acres under one metal roof. Endless aisles lined with metal racks stacked twelve feet high, all loaded with wooden boxes stenciled with Inventory Control Numbers.

  “The entire inventory from 1984 to the present is on the computer, but everything before that is on inventory ledgers,” Mike said. “Verifying the item on the ledger and entering it into the computer is your new job. Here’s your office.”

  It wasn’t much. A small office nestled next to a larger room with a locked metal door. A simple desk with an outdated computer and some shelves filled with ledgers completed the room’s modest decor. It was a far cry from the main office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where I worked as a programmer of the Mars Rovers for the last three years. I was going to miss the top of the line computer, the twin screens and soft padded chair as well as the view out the south windows that overlooked the Hahamongna Watershed Park. This office was extremely primitive by comparison.

  “What’s behind the door?” I asked.

  “The Moon Room,” Mike said. He must have seen the puzzled look on my face. “Stuff they brought back from the moon.”

  “Have you seen what’s in there?” I had heard rumors about some of the strange stuff that was brought back from the moon. This might turn out to be interesting after all.

  “Once,” Mike said. “Mostly just rocks and soil samples. Nothing exciting. The key’s around here somewhere. Anyway, Woolser wants an e-mail at five every day with the number of inventory items you logged into the computer. He has access to the inventory files and likes to check up on people, so make sure everything jibes.”

  “Got it,” I replied.

  “Oh, there’s a couple of places that deliver for lunch, so if you want anything just let me know by eleven so I can call it in.”

  “Thanks, will do.” As things stood I probably wasn’t going to be ordering anything anyway.

  “Well, good luck,” Mike said as he returned to his desk in the front lobby.

  Yeah, I thought. It’s going to take more than good luck to get through this. A lot more, because quitting just wasn’t a viable option for me.

  * * *

  Each Inventory Control Number, or ICN, in the ledger is tagged with a location, specifying the aisle, rack number and shelf level where the item is stored. The system was simple enough in concept, except for the fact that it could take twenty minutes of walking to get to a location in the warehouse. Items are sorted by size, not the ICN’s, so I spent most of my time walking from one place to the next. The last victim of Woolser’s massive ego had finished with ICN 42526, so I began with ICN 42527. It was a broken hose coupling that had failed during a rocket test. The metallurgical analysis was inside the box and included the engineer’s recommendation for re-design to eliminate future part failures. Good ol’ NASA; always improving on failure.

  * * *

  After I finished my first day doing inventory I looked at my Gold Chevy Malibu as I left the front door to the storage facility. I’d had it for only 5 months and now I would have to put it up for sale. I wasn’t going to be able to make the payments to the credit union. I’d have to trade down to something old, small, and cheap to run. On the way home I wondered why I seem to screw up every good thing that happens to me. My choices seem to be the right thing to do at the time but it always turns to crap before it’s done. Why can’t something work out right, just once?

  I tossed my keys onto the small table by the front door of my apartment and closed the door. It’s not like I had a lot of expensive stuff to sort through. The prints of French Impressionist art by Monet and Renoir were paid for, so there was no sense in selling those right now. I had one more payment on the Sony 55” flat screen Bravia TV with the Bose surround sound system, so that could stay. The deluxe sports package in my cable plan would have to go. I was going to miss that, but at least it was baseball season. Maybe I could work something out to get it back in time for football. Missing the San Diego Chargers was really going to hurt. Most of the guys at the JPL followed the Rams, but I grew up in San Diego and was still a Chargers fan.

  It’s not like I have a lot of company over, either. The only people who have seen the inside of my apartment are Mrs. Hernandez and her 8 year old son, Javier. I realized there might not be enough money to pay Mrs. Hernandez who came in once a week to clean the apartment. I hate cleaning, but more importantly I felt responsible for helping Mrs. Hernandez support her family. Her kid, Javier, was a real kick. He loved playing video games on the big screen while she cleaned. Maybe I could find a way to keep from disappointing both of them.

  I had spent most of my money eating out with Sunday afternoon and evening spent at the local sports bar. That was going to have to end, too. I opened the fridge to see what I could make for dinner. The main shelf held a half empty six-pack of Mike’s Hard Limeade. I took one out, twisted the cap off and took a long swig. There was some ketchup,
barbeque sauce and mustard in the door shelves along with two dozen packets of egg roll sauce. There were two eggs left, but I didn’t have the remotest idea as to how long they had been there. A white plastic take out box grabbed my attention from the bottom shelf. I opened it only to find green and gray mold growing on whatever used to be inside. I tossed that into the trash and moved on to the cupboards. There was a can of pork and beans next to a jar of crunchy peanut butter. I could make a peanut butter sandwich for dinner, but there was nothing to spread it on. A quick check of the freezer revealed a bag of broccoli that had probably been there for the last two years, maybe longer. The freezer needed defrosting, too. I was either going shopping or out to eat. I opted for both.

  * * *

  Over the next two weeks I settled into the routine of doing the inventory. I was learning some interesting things from what had been stored in the warehouse. There were the remains of secret projects that had either failed or been buried and not pursued. I found a model of a set of domes that would have been constructed on the moon had NASA continued the moon program. There were three different models for early versions of the Space Shuttle Program, one outfitted with what looked like an Ion Drive engine.

  When I got my first paycheck it was larger than I had anticipated. The lack of overtime dropped me into a much lower tax bracket which substantially reduced the deductions for federal and state income taxes. I could at least order lunch instead of bringing my own sandwiches, and if I was careful, I could keep Mrs. Hernandez and Javier going. That was cause for celebration. I stopped on my way home and picked up another six-pack of Mike’s Hard Limeade. In the back of my mind was the Moon Room. What was really in there? What else were they hiding?

  CHAPTER 2