by Mark Alpert
He woke up again and saw a long thin tentacle on the rock slab. It was shiny and black, made of the same metallic stuff as the satellite. It stretched across the slab, one end rising out of the muddy ground and climbing over the edge of the rock, the other end tapering to a needlelike tip just a couple of feet from Joe. As he watched in horror the tentacle pulled away from him, its tip retreating until it slid over the edge of the rock slab and disappeared into the mud.
Joe sat up, panting. The pain in his chest was already ebbing and his right arm was coming back to life, but his terror grew stronger. He raised his left hand to the side of his neck, to the place where the snake had bitten him.
He felt blood on his fingers. And a tiny puncture wound.
SEVEN
Sarah was frustrated.
She sat in the kitchen of the restaurant the Air Force was using as its command post. She’d found a relatively quiet spot, far from the dining room where the colonels and captains were working, and propped her MacBook on a stainless-steel counter. For the past four hours she’d plotted interplanetary trajectories using a NASA program on her laptop. She was trying to figure out how the Ikon, the huge Russian spacecraft launched three years ago, could have accelerated to 80,000 miles per hour while putting itself on a collision course with Earth. Unfortunately, she hadn’t made much progress.
A dot at the center of her laptop’s screen represented the sun. The orbits of the planets were concentric circles around it. The trajectory of the Ikon was a red arc that started from Earth and ended at the spacecraft’s last reported position, on the other side of the sun. That’s where the craft was when the Russians said they lost contact with it. Last but not least, a blue line represented the final approach of 2016X, the mystery object that had fired the probe at New York. Sarah had tried to connect the red trajectory with the blue one, but all her attempts had failed. The Ikon simply hadn’t had enough time to make the necessary maneuvers across the solar system.
She looked at her watch: 1:32 A.M. Aside from a brief nap she’d taken during the flight to New York, she’d been going nonstop for almost twenty-four hours, and she was dead tired. She wondered if she should join the Air Force officers in the dining room and give General Hanson a progress report. He might find it useful to know that the underlying assumption of their search effort—that Object 2016X was a Russian military spacecraft—seemed highly unlikely.
In the end, though, Sarah decided to stay put. She continued staring at her laptop’s screen and thinking. So far, Hanson’s search teams had found no trace of 2016X. Neither the soldiers on the riverbanks nor the specialists in the Coast Guard boats had detected any suspicious debris. Of course, the search was only nine hours old and there was a lot of territory to cover. But Sarah also wondered if the Air Force radar experts had drawn the wrong boundaries for the impact zone. All their estimates were based on the assumption that 2016X had been a conventional spacecraft. And Sarah was starting to question this assumption.
She wanted to try something else. She scrolled through the software on her laptop until she found Earth View, another NASA program. Sarah hesitated for a moment before opening it. To be honest, she was afraid to go down this road. She’d done it before, twenty years ago, and it had ended in disaster. She’d promised herself that she’d never do anything that stupid again. But how could she ignore her suspicions? How could she call herself a scientist if she automatically rejected this hypothesis?
She overcame her fear and clicked on the Earth View icon. A moment later an image of the globe appeared on the laptop’s screen. It was a composite image pieced together from the most recent satellite photos of the Earth. Sarah adjusted the settings so that the program showed what North America had looked like from space as 2016X approached it at 4:00 A.M. eastern daylight time. The oceans and the deserts were dark, but the eastern United States was a constellation of glowing cities, with the brightest clusters along the coast. If you were approaching the planet’s night side and looking for the most interesting destination, New York City would certainly qualify.
Sarah shut her laptop and left it on the counter. Her heart was racing. She needed to go outside. As she rushed out of the kitchen she pulled a crumpled pack of Marlboros from the back pocket of her jeans. It was her secret vice, but now she didn’t care who saw it. She showed the pack to the soldier who guarded the restaurant’s front door and after a few seconds of hesitation he let her pass. “Just stay within twenty yards of this post, ma’am,” he warned. “Don’t go near the perimeter.”
She realized what he meant as soon as she stepped outside. A hundred feet away a line of soldiers stood shoulder to shoulder, blocking the western end of Dyckman Street. Their obvious purpose was to stop any civilians from approaching the restaurant and marina. Just in case they needed help, at least thirty New York police officers stood on the other side of the line. Beyond the police were half a dozen news vans from the local television stations.
Because this was a classified operation, General Hanson had tried to disguise his unit’s activities by making up a cover story. He’d told the news media that the soldiers were “conducting a routine training exercise related to national-security readiness.” But the story hadn’t fooled anyone. Despite the late hour, the TV people were doing live reports and pointing their cameras at the soldiers. The Air Force had brought in searchlights to illuminate the area, making it almost as bright as day, and the noise from the crowd gave the place a carnival atmosphere.
The temperature had dropped a few degrees since sunset, but the air still felt like warm cotton. Sarah ventured around the corner of the restaurant and headed for the marina. She walked down the pier and stopped at a railing that overlooked the Hudson River. Her hands were trembling but she managed to shake a cigarette out of the Marlboro pack and pull her Zippo from her pocket. It was a customized lighter with her name engraved on the brushed chrome. She flicked it open, lit her cigarette, and took a long drag.
To the west, the Coast Guard patrol boats cruised up and down the dark river, aiming their sonar at the Hudson’s muddy bottom. To the east, the wooded heights of Inwood Hill Park loomed over the city. The soldiers hadn’t cordoned off that section of the park because it wasn’t part of the impact zone drawn by General Hanson and his staff. But Sarah didn’t trust their judgment. Their mission was to prepare for a specific threat—a surprise attack from Russia or China or North Korea—so they naturally saw everything in those terms. Back in graduate school, Sarah had learned the name for this tendency: confirmation bias. The soldiers saw 2016X as a Russian weapon because that’s what they expected to see.
She took another drag on her cigarette and gazed at Inwood Hill. She couldn’t trust her own judgment either, because she also suffered from confirmation bias. That’s what got her into trouble twenty years ago, a fervent belief that had swayed her thinking and muddied her scientific objectivity. And despite all the damage it had caused, she still clung to this belief. She hadn’t learned a damn thing from her mistakes.
* * *
Sarah had been a different person back then: more outgoing and fun-loving, less wary and introspective. After getting her Ph.D. from Cornell at the precocious age of twenty-six, she landed a plum job at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Better still, she returned to Texas with the man she loved, a fellow researcher she’d met at Cornell. He’d also landed a job at NASA, and they got engaged a month after they started working there.
It was 1996 and NASA was laying the groundwork for the planetary rovers it would send to Mars over the next fifteen years—Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity. To determine which scientific instruments to put on the rovers, the agency assigned Sarah to study the best evidence of Martian geology it had: meteorites that had traveled from the Red Planet to Earth. Every million years or so, an asteroid hits Mars with such force that the explosive impact blasts rocks off the Martian surface and hurls them into space. After orbiting the sun for eons, some of the rocks get sucked in by Earth’s grav
ity and land intact on the surface. Sarah’s boss gave her one of these meteorites to study, a rock that had been ejected from Mars fifteen million years ago. Her task was to slice the meteorite into sections and use a powerful microscope to observe its crystalline structure.
At first the observations baffled her. The rock had crystallized from Martian lava during an era when the Red Planet was covered with oceans. In the cracks and pores of the meteorite Sarah found tiny globules of carbonate minerals that had most likely formed after water seeped into the rock. And within those globules she found even tinier structures that looked like rice grains and segmented tubes. She showed the microscope images to some of her colleagues and friends, hoping one of them might know what could have created the odd features. The answer came from another NASA researcher, Tom Gilbert, who had expertise in astrobiology and also happened to be Sarah’s fiancé. He said he’d seen similar structures inside rocks found on Earth. They were the fossilized remains of ancient bacteria.
The next month was a frenzy of activity. Sarah gathered her evidence and showed it to her bosses. She spent months writing the research paper, carefully choosing her words. She couldn’t say whether life still existed on Mars. Even if those tiny tubes were indeed fossils of microorganisms, the primitive creatures had probably gone extinct after the planet became drier and colder. But it was a momentous discovery nonetheless. It showed that Earth wasn’t unique. Life could develop on many worlds across the galaxy.
NASA scheduled a press conference to announce the results. Unfortunately, someone leaked the news beforehand, and dozens of reporters flocked to Johnson Space Center. Sarah was delighted by all the attention, but when she came to the podium to answer the journalists’ questions she spoke a bit too impetuously. She said the evidence for past life on Mars was clear and convincing. “We now have proof that we’re not alone,” she declared. “Extraterrestrial life is probably so abundant that we’re bound to see more of it soon.”
The reaction was swift. When a twenty-six-year-old researcher makes such sweeping statements and receives so much attention from the media, it can irritate people who’ve spent decades investigating the topic. Several scientists argued that the minuscule tubes inside the Martian meteorite weren’t all that similar to the microfossils of Earth bacteria. Other researchers noted that ordinary geological heating and cooling could’ve created the microscopic structures. Within a few days it became clear she hadn’t convinced the scientific community. The turnabout embarrassed NASA officials, and one of them asked Sarah to retract her claims about Martian life. At first she refused, but after several weeks of tension she gave in.
But that wasn’t the worst blow. It was the end of her engagement that triggered her breakdown. When the criticism of Sarah’s research started pouring in from all sides, her fiancé got nervous. Tom Gilbert was angling for a promotion to an administrative position at Johnson Space Center, and he knew he wouldn’t get it unless he distanced himself from Sarah. So he reversed his earlier opinion, saying he’d been too hasty when he’d declared that the meteorite structures resembled microfossils. After studying the structures more carefully, he concluded there was little resemblance. He participated in a second NASA press conference at which researchers dismissed Sarah’s findings.
She was horrified by his betrayal. Enraged, she sneaked into his office late at night and smashed his computer. She couldn’t help it—her impetuosity got the best of her again. Then she broke into Tom’s apartment, filled several suitcases with his clothing, and drove to a bridge that spanned the San Jacinto River, a few miles east of Houston. Stopping her car on the bridge, she hurled the suitcases into the river, along with her engagement ring and wedding dress. She almost threw herself into the river too, but instead she got back in her car and headed for New Mexico. The next morning, she checked into the mental-health treatment center in Santa Fe.
She never spoke to Tom again—he continued to move up the ladder at NASA and eventually became a science adviser at the White House—but she kept the Zippo lighter he’d given her. The name engraved on it was the one she would’ve had if they’d gotten married: Sarah Pooley Gilbert. She held on to the lighter to remind herself that the truth could be slippery. The truth about the meteorite changed when Tom realized it threatened his career at NASA. The truth about their relationship changed when Sarah realized her fiancé was an asshole. During her stay in the mental-health center, the truth changed every hour, every minute: she was sick, she was healthy, she was abnormal, she was normal. The smartest strategy was to get accustomed to the changes, to go with the flow, and this approach helped Sarah recover her sanity. Twenty years later, though, she still believed her research on the meteorite had been correct. She remained the discoverer of life on Mars, even if no other scientists agreed with her.
Now she took one last puff on her cigarette and threw the stub into a trash can. The truth about Object 2016X was also slippery. Unless someone retrieved a piece of the object they might never know where it had come from. Sarah looked again at the western slope of Inwood Hill. Although the Air Force wasn’t interested in that section of the park, she’d included it in the broader impact zone she’d calculated for 2016X. She wondered if she could climb the wooded hillside and take a look around.
She eyed the soldiers in front of the restaurant. She knew she was supposed to respect the chain of command and tell General Hanson what she planned to do, but she didn’t like the idea of asking for permission. And besides, the soldiers were so busy stopping people from entering the cordoned area that they might not even notice if someone tried to leave. Sarah edged away from the searchlights and sidled toward the baseball fields. She was looking for an unguarded path through the woods.
Then someone shouted at her. “Dr. Pooley?”
Startled, she spun around. It was the soldier who’d allowed her to leave the restaurant. He’d probably been watching her ever since. He frowned as he stepped toward her. “Ma’am, didn’t I tell you to stay away from the perimeter?”
Sarah frowned too. “Sorry, I got lost.”
“Then it’s a good thing I found you. Come this way, please.”
The soldier escorted her back to the restaurant. As she reentered the place she cursed herself for signing that damn contract with the Air Force. She headed straight for the dining room, intending to have a long talk with General Hanson. But one of his junior officers intercepted her and said the general was in a meeting with his staff. The officer instructed her to sit at a table next to the restaurant’s bar until Hanson was free.
Another officer already sat at the table, a white-haired colonel in his late fifties or early sixties, with ruddy cheeks and bloodshot eyes. As Sarah approached he stood up and gave her a big smile. “Good evening, ma’am,” he boomed. “You must be Sarah Pooley? The adviser from NASA that everyone’s talking about?” He held out his right hand.
She hesitated, wondering how many Air Force officers knew about her assignment. Then she shook hands with the colonel. “Yes, that’s me.”
“My name’s Raymond Gunter. I’m General Hanson’s liaison officer. That means I do all the scut work the general doesn’t have time for.” His smile grew even bigger as he pumped Sarah’s hand. “It’s a real pleasure to meet you, ma’am. Everyone I’ve talked to says you’re smarter than God.”
She pulled her hand out of his grip. She was too tired to respond to Colonel Gunter’s enthusiasm. Her mind was getting foggy, and she didn’t like the way he was looking at her. He stared at her chest as she took a seat on the other side of the table.
“So you’re waiting on the general too?” The man’s voice had a country-and-western twang. “Got some business to discuss?”
She nodded, then reached into her pocket for her iPhone. In her opinion, the phone’s best feature was its ability to deflect unwanted conversations. All you had to do was stare at the screen. Most people took the hint.
“Yep, the general’s a busy man tonight,” Gunter persisted. “I’ve been sitting
here almost an hour, just waiting for him to get a free moment. And I got all sorts of urgent requests to pass along. From the mayor’s office, the police department. Even the damn power company, Consolidated Edison of New York.”
Sarah kept her eyes on the iPhone and tapped the screen a few times. From the corner of her eye she could tell that Gunter was still staring at her chest.
“You wouldn’t believe it, ma’am. Here we are, in the middle of a genuine national-security crisis, and I have to deal with complaints from Con Edison. They say our operation is straining the resources of the local electric grid. They’re blaming the Air Force for power interruptions all over the neighborhood.” He let out a chuckle. “They claim we’re using thirty megawatts. You’re a scientist, ma’am, so I’m sure you must know how ridiculous that is.”
This got Sarah’s attention. Thirty megawatts was a lot of electricity. Overruling her better instincts, she looked up from her iPhone. “How much power are you actually using?”
Gunter was delighted that she’d answered him. His bloodshot eyes twinkled. “Well, we got five searchlights plugged into the restaurant’s line, but each of those is just a one kilowatt job. You’d have to run ’em for ten years to drain as much power as they say we’ve done.”
“So what’s causing the power drain?”
The colonel raised both hands over his head in exasperation. “Ma’am, I have no idea! But if I had to guess, I’d say it’s probably all the air conditioners in the neighborhood. It’s hot as hell out there tonight, pardon my French.”
She felt a jolt of adrenaline, strong enough to dispel her mental fog. She did a few quick calculations in her head. “You’d need forty thousand air conditioners to use that much power.”
He nodded vigorously, bobbing his head. “You’re absolutely right, ma’am. But this is a hell of a big town. I’m from Tupelo, Mississippi, and I bet you can fit a hundred Tupelos in New York City.”