Spears of God

by Howard V. Hendrix

  He stopped gathering and shuffling papers. Abruptly.

  “You did bring a sample of the meteorite back with you?”

  Michael and Susan looked at one another. Susan remembered Michael standing surrounded by the bodies of the dead tepuians as he carved off a slab of their sacred stone with a small diamond-impregnated saw blade. Had she not also believed so strongly in the importance of obtaining a scientific specimen, she might have seen what Michael was doing as an act of desecration.

  “Yes, I did,” Michael said. “It’s bagged. I haven’t begun working on it yet.”

  COLUMBUS OF THE BIOCOSMOS

  Darla Pittman pushed her chair back and stared at the screen. She had been using every technique she knew of to make the tepui meteorite divulge its secrets. She’d called in a lot of favors to make it happen.

  She’d had no choice—this anomalous skystone wasn’t quite fitting into any of the established categories.

  She’d carefully run dozens of tests on her own, and had even more carefully farmed out to selected colleagues a large number of samples for an even larger number of tests. Variously sized pieces of the meteorite had been physically polished and etched, heated to 900° C, to 1000°, to 1200°, proton irradiated, acid isolated, neutron activated, ionized, demagnetized, hysteresized, microprobed, spectroscoped, epifluoresced, and chromatographed until the rock should have retained no mystery whatsoever.

  The work was finally beginning to yield useful data. The meteorite’s absorption of cosmic rays while in space had produced a wide variety of nuclides both stable and very slightly radioactive. Of course, ‘highly radioactive meteorites’ were a pop-astronomy urban legend—never actually discovered anywhere in reality, despite being so necessary to the creation of mutants in comic books, zombies in B-movies, and terrorist dirty bombs in adventure potboilers.

  The actual radioactivity of meteorites was so slight that both the sample and the detector had to be put inside a thick lead container to shield them from terrestrial background radiation, including the uranium and potassium in the cinder blocks and cement of the laboratory’s walls. From such faint cosmogenic radionuclide counts, however, Darla had a good sense of the meteorite’s crystallization age, its terrestrial history, and the “flight time” between its initial formation and when it crashed to Earth.

  Yet despite all she had learned, the rock still retained a not inconsiderable amount of mystery.

  Interrogating the stone with all those tests had not been cheap, and they’d taken time—time enough to make Retticker check up on her work and question both time and expense.

  “Why so many tests?” he asked, bluntly—the same bluntness, charismatic confidence, and laserlike focus on his mission that she had found alternately charming and exasperating.

  “Because the facts are always subject to interpretation,” she explained, realizing she was walking a fine line. “There are skystones with no chondrules that are nonetheless classified as chondrites, and there are stones with chondrules that are nonetheless classified as achondrites, on the basis of more subtle mineralogical and chemical descriptors. The classification system is not so cut-and-dried as we might like it to be, especially in this case.”

  “But what’s all that supposed to mean to the project, Doctor?”

  “It means we’ve learned a lot and we’re on track to learn a good deal more. We’ve just got some puzzle pieces that don’t fit as of yet. But it’s precisely in those places where the puzzle pieces don’t fit that we’re most likely to find something truly new—and perhaps militarily useful.”

  After that, Retticker backed off and left her to her work. Darla was still unable to fully classify the tepui stone, but she had become intimately familiar with it. She knew much more about the retention composition of its noble gases, the cosmic enrichments of its light rare earths, its volatiles and its refractories, its shock features of twinning, mosaicism, and impact melt pocketing. All of that told her not only that the puzzle pieces were more oddly shaped than she thought, but also that the puzzle itself was bigger and more important than she’d imagined.

  Looking at the soft sky-blue fluorescence of a meteorite sample now, her mind drifted for a moment. She thought of another intimacy, on the blue-ice fields of Antarctica.

  The South Polar continent had been a treasure trove for meteorite recovery since the 1970s. Meteors didn’t become meteorites any more often over Antarctica than over any other continent, but as Antarctica’s continental ice sheet moved slowly from the high plateau near the continent’s center, downward and outward toward the coastline, it functioned as a long-distance, slow-motion conveyor belt, gathering meteorites over thousands of years and thousands of square miles.

  Parts of the ice sheet came to a premature stop at surfaces where the ice backed up against a barrier, usually a ridge of mountains. Unable to continue its journey, the ice in these cul-de-sacs eroded faster than the meteorites the ice carried, thus depositing concentrations of them in meteorite-stranding surfaces.

  These surfaces were usually found on and near fields of blue ice swept mostly clear of snow by persistent strong winds.

  Accelerated climate change had removed vast tonnages of ice, leaving still more meteorites exposed, so that nearly as many meteorites had been discovered in Antarctica in the last forty years as in the entire history of humanity up to that point—one of the few silver linings to the dark cloud of global warming.

  The expedition she and Michael Miskulin had been part of had snowmobiled and powersledged for seven hours straight, over innumerable windsculpted ice dunes called sastrugi. When the expedition at last reached the particular blue-ice field it had been headed for, Darla and Michael were almost too tired to begin the search for meteorites.

  Almost. Between the two of them, they still managed to find and positively identify no fewer than seven meteorites before they quit for the night—“night” being something of a fiction, given the twenty-four-hour sunshine of the Antarctic summer.

  They retired together to a hexagonal army tent with opaque walls. The blackout walls assured that inside the tent it was quite dark. Because the square groundcloth didn’t quite fit the hexagonal tent, there were areas of bare snow on two sides. By lantern light, amid the real snow and the artificial dark, they ate a dinner punctuated with too many cups of reconstituted wine.

  “Shooting stars are the trickster gods in an orderly heaven!” Michael had said, regaling her tipsily with some of his wilder ideas. “They’re the Coyotes, the Anansis, the Lokis—the sublunary Dionysuses to the sidereal Apollos!”

  They had laughed together at his trying to say “sublunary Dionysuses.” After dinner, the two of them began to snuggle, but the lantern light was too bright for romantic ambience.

  “Let me try something,” Michael said, taking up some hot water left over from dinner. “Okay. Turn off the lantern.”

  Darla heard something sizzling and melting, and abruptly a beam of soft blue light shot upward, dimly illuminating the tent’s interior.

  “It’s beautiful,” Darla said. “What is it?”

  “A physicist I met back at McMurdo calls it the Funaki-Yanai effect—after the people who discovered it, I guess.”

  “How does it work?”

  “Look into it.”

  “Research it, you mean?”

  “No, look into the melt-hole, in the snow. Over here.”

  Darla did so. As her eyes adjusted she saw that the snow was only about a foot deep, but it stood over ice many yards thick. The hot water had melted away the snow, exposing the surface of the ice below.

  “The sunlight outside shines into the ice, which is really clear here in Antarctica,” Michael said.

  “But sunlight’s got all the colors of the rainbow in it,” Darla said, puzzled.

  “The long path through the ice scatters and absorbs the other colors of the spectrum, leaving the light mostly blue by the time it comes out here.”

  The two of them set about heating more water a
nd making more small, blue spotlights by melting holes in the snow. After half a dozen holes, they relaxed to enjoy the soft glow. One thing led to another, and they made love in a pavilion of soft blue light.

  Darla snapped back to the present when Barry, her prematurely bald and excessively bearded postdoc, switched on the light. The blue glow on the meteorite faded away.

  “Sorry to interrupt, Professor, but I think you need to see this.” He gestured excitedly with the printout materials he held in his hand.

  “If it’s so important,” Darla said, frowning slightly, “then let’s take a look in my office.”

  “I just printed out these reports we got back from Lonsdale’s and Chen’s labs, via e-mail,” Barry said, pointing out graphs and tables as he handed the documents to Darla. “The numbers of deuterium-enriched amino acids are the highest I’ve ever heard of. Over three hundred different species of amino acids—sixty more than even the Murchison meteorite! Hell, life on earth only uses twenty as fundamental building blocks!”

  “I’m familiar with the established numbers,” she said, preoccupied with the pages of readouts. Among the examinations of chirality and racemization and enantiomeric excesses, however, she found something Barry had apparently overlooked: two DNA-sequencing autoradiographs, accompanied by crystallographic images.

  The gaps in the autoradiographs were puzzling. One suggested a six-nucleotide sequence, and the other a nine-nucleotide sequence. The restriction fragment length data were also strange, seemingly not the triplets of most gene units but rather sextuplets and nonuplets.

  The crystallographic images appeared to confirm all of it.

  No naturally occurring cell on earth made use of such sequences. Some synthetic biologists and artificial-life researchers had created such sequences, mainly for the sake of creating genetic molecules more stable and less prone to mutation than ordinary DNA. This had allowed them to reprogram cells to function as parts of the synbios’ prototype “living machines”—when such prototypes managed to function at all.

  There was just no record of the sort of sequences she was looking at, at least not anywhere on earth.

  Perhaps the images were artifacts, errors introduced in the process of making the autoradiographs.

  Maybe the restriction length figures were wrong, too.

  Or maybe the general and his people had purposely contaminated the meteorite with synbiological molecules, to test her.

  Turning to Chen’s epifluorescence microscopy results, however, she got another surprise. Images of spheres, cylinders, rods, only fifty to a hundred nanometers on their longest axes. Chen’s notes suggested they might be inverted micelles of organic material containing meteoritic components, or silica nanoparticles with organic components, but to Darla they looked like something else.

  They looked like life.

  Like nanobacterial or nanoarchaean spores, but also like tiny nonspore-forming gram positive bacteria.

  Microfossils? Or viable even now? And their size: so tiny!

  Her heart beat faster. If the general and his people were testing her, they had gone to an awful lot of trouble. But that was precisely what claims of something extraterrestrial yet alive on a meteorite usually turned out to be: a lot of trouble. And the stuff of tabloids, pulp magazines, weird TV. Of H. P.

  Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” and John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?” Of The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone and The X-Files.

  Proof that we are not alone. That there is other life out there. So many people wanted to believe in that.

  Wanted it so much that it, too, often became a matter of faith rather than science. Still others felt just as passionately the need to debunk any and all such evidence of life beyond Earth.

  She did not want this tepui stone to end up like the Tunisian Tatahouine stone, or the Australian Murchison stone, or the French Orgueil stone—each a lightning rod for scientific debate and disagreement that generated far more heat than light. Most of all, she did not want it to turn out like the Antarctic ALH84001 Mars stone, with learned NASA panelists endlessly and inconclusively arguing about microfossils versus terrestrial contamination and experimental artifacts.

  Finding supposed microfossils would never settle such controversies. The only thing that would shut up all the debate would be to find something in the meteorites still capable of cell division. Grow ‘em, scope ‘em, and genome ‘em!

  But it was very difficult to create culture media to grow something truly unknown. It would be a shot in the dark, the medium as likely to kill the sample as grow it. As far as genoming nanoscale entities, well, if they were truly alien, she couldn’t be sure even basic procedures like ribosomal RNA or DNA sequencing would actually work.

  Up until now, all claims of extraterrestrial life had proven to be red herrings. Bacteria that had been recovered by astronauts on the moon had turned out to be Earth bacteria that had hitched a ride on a robotic lander. Yet those bacteria had survived on the moon for more than two years. Deinococcus radiodurans and Micrococcus radiophilus bacteria had been found living in the high atmosphere at the edge of space and growing in the hard-radiation environments of nuclear reactor cooling water.

  Was the idea of something otherworldly and alive on meteorites just an old dream, or a far older memory? Long before Columbus “discovered” the New World, there had been mariners’ tales from Norway to China telling of an undiscovered country beyond the sea. So, too, Darla felt sure, there had to be some truth behind all the old stories of skystones changing the fates of human beings.

  Darla would give anything to know the truth of it. To be the Columbus of the biocosmos. To prove that “Life is endemic to Earth alone” and “The Earth is flat” belonged in the same dustbin of history!

  And if she would give anything to know, she was sure the people she worked for—and others—would probably do anything to exploit such findings, if they could. Opening up a new world might also mean opening up a new world of problems.

  Barry, however, was still rattling on about the amino acids.

  “We should contact Miskulin with these results! We may have smoking-gun proof of exogenous delivery of genetic material here! The seeding of Earth, just like he’s been arguing for years! We need to present at least our preliminary results at the big exobio conference in February—”

  “We’ll do nothing of the kind,” Darla said, snatching the documents from Barry’s hands. “At least not yet.”

  Miskulin, indeed! Embarrassing to think Barry should bring up his name, after interrupting her reminiscences of their time together. A relationship that would never have worked out, anyway. Not really her type, especially in the long days since they became competitors. If anyone would be eager to snatch the title of the new Columbus from her, it would be Michael Miskulin.

  “But we’re already presenting a paper at the conference! We’ll be there anyway—”

  “No buts. This meteorite came from a military source, for a military project. If all this pans out, do you want to be responsible for terrorists running around making some new kind of bioweapon based on what we’ve found? No. This has to be reported to—and cleared by—General Retticker and his people first.”

  Barry Levitch subsided, but she could tell he wasn’t happy. So be it. She had more important things to worry about.

  BRAIN STATES

  Retticker looked at the back of Doctor Jeremy Michelson’s head and its red halo of hair as Michelson led him down the chrome-and-white hallway of the Fort Mead Telemorphy Unit. Michelson, a biophysicist with NSA’s W Group (Global Issues and Weapons Systems, in the Directorate of Technology and Systems), was on loan to the Combat Personnel Enhancement Program.

  To Retticker, the owlishness of Michelson’s looks—already suggested by the biophysicist’s beaked nose and high forehead under his thinning, feathery red hair—was further exaggerated by his round oversized AR glasses and throat-mike combo, which he insisted on calling “ARGUS blinks.” The fact that Michel
son also compensated for his gawky height by stooping and bobbing his head slightly forward as he walked only made him look the Junior Birdman part all the more. Retticker, had had time to get used to the man’s odd looks and ways when they had worked together during the Kwok-Cho episode, but his eccentricities still caught the general off-guard from time to time.

  “It’s peculiarly appropriate the Telemorphy Unit should be here at Fort Mead,” Michelson said. “The army once housed its remote viewing program here, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t know that,” Retticker said, suspecting Michelson had programmed his blinks with Fort Mead’s history and background and was now reading that material from his augments.

  “Back during the cold war,” Michelson said with a nod. “People who worked here went on to work with all the psi-spy stuff, at one time or another. Mental espionage. Clairvoyance, clairsentience. Precognition, postcognition. ESP, telepathy. Out-of-body and near-death experience—‘oobies and endies,’ as the researchers used to call them. Psychokinesis, micro-PK, all types of spooky action-at-adistance.”

  Michelson opened a lab door and they walked inside.

  “Of course, these days the work is much less focused on pseudoscience than on subtle science,” Michelson continued.

  “I see,” said Retticker. “Wasn’t it Hawking who said progress in science consists in replacing a theory that is wrong with one that is more subtly wrong?”

  Michelson’s face flushed pink.

  “Yes, but a theory that’s more subtly wrong is also more subtly right. What we’re doing in these rooms is solid science—traceable all the way back to the work of Miguel Nicolelis and his colleagues at Duke University Medical Center.”

  “Perhaps,” Retticker said drily, “but today I’m here to see your most recent work.”

  “Gladly. If you’ll follow me…”