by Bryan Dunn
Shit.
“Great, just great.” Nick rose to his feet, the bag still clamped in his hands. He began to blink his eyes, trying to adjust to the darkness. Using a hand, he started to feel his way toward the exit. One step, two steps…and on the third step, he was suddenly hit by a jolt of anxiety. It was like a dam bursting as fear flooded into his stomach and rose in his chest.
He felt an icy line of sweat run down the length of his spine. His heart began to pound. He couldn’t breathe. And as he fell against a shelf, he thought, This can’t be happening. Not now. Not after all this time.
But it was happening.
He was having a five alarm panic attack. The official term for what Nick was experiencing was claustrophobia. A posttraumatic reaction to almost drowning in a lake when he had been in high school. The first time it had happened, he’d thought he was going to die—no, he’d thought he was dying.
Jesus Christ, it can’t be. He thought he was over it—thought the anxiety attacks were a thing of the past. That they were gone. The last attack had been…hell, he couldn’t even remember, it had been so long ago.
And the next thing he thought was, I can’t breathe! Then he heard his brain screaming: Get out! Now!
He gripped his chest, righted himself, and, still clutching the plastic bag, groped his way along the shelves, each step feeling like the last of his life.
After what seemed an eternity, he reached the top of the stairs and stumbled into a brightly lit laboratory filled with new equipment and shiny stainless steel work stations. He then forced himself to cross the room into his office where he lunged for a window, hauled it open, and gulped in the air.
Chapter 4
Nick’s pulse had returned to normal, but he still looked white as a sheet. He sat at his desk, staring at the gray baseball-sized rock he’d just removed from the plastic bag.
Impact melt.
That’s what kept looping through his mind as he studied the rock.
With the exception of a few trace minerals, the surface was almost totally melted. Dollars to donuts it had come from the very center of an impact crater.
He rotated the rock 180 degrees, and as he went to pick it up, he noticed an official-looking tag stuck to the bottom. He removed the slip of paper and read it. “APOLLO 15 – SPUR CRATER – LS 426.”
What the hell? Impossible. He’d just unwrapped an Apollo mission moon rock. There’s no way it should have been there. Or that Walt could have been in legal possession of it.
No way.
Apollo moon rocks weren’t for sale. They belonged to the American people. Illegal possession of a moon rock was a felony.
Nick moved to his computer and was about to access the SSPL database to see if lunar sample number 426 had been reported missing, when twenty-nine-year-old lab tech Ray Turner entered the office, dressed in skinny jeans and his trademark black t-shirt. A schoolboy mop of hair draped his forehead, and geeky-looking black-rimmed glasses completed the disassociated artist look.
“Hey, Chief,” Ray said, holding up a photograph. “This just came in from—” He stopped when he noticed Nick’s ghostly-white complexion. “Whoa, dude. You don’t look so good.”
“Yeah, yeah…I’m fine, Ray,” Nick said, discounting the comment with a wave of his hand. “Just something I ate.” Then thought to himself, Yeah, right, like twenty years ago at the bottom of a lake.
“It’s just breakfast repeating on me,” Nick said, then pointed to the photograph. “What have you got there?”
“An old Magellan image.” He handed Nick the photo. “They—Leland thinks he’s found some sand dunes. At least, that’s the scuttlebutt.” Ray pointed to a place at the top of the image. “There. Below that mountain ridge.”
“Did Leland mention the case of Napa cab he owes me?”
“Nope.”
Nick shook his head. “Right.”
Nick spun in his chair, positioned the photo under a light, and bent down to study it. After a quick moment, a little smile formed at the corners of his mouth. “Leland’s getting careless. For sand, you need erosion—a hell of a lot of erosion—and that means water. All the data I’ve seen on Venus suggests it has very little of either.”
Nick handed the photograph to Ray, then added, “If surface water was ever present, it’s long gone by now.”
Ray studied the image. “So, no dunes?”
“Nope. No way.” Nick rocked back in his chair and smiled at Ray. “Tell Leland when that’s confirmed that it’s two cases of Napa red.”
“Will do,” Ray said, impressed by the quick analysis. Then he asked, “Okay…so, what are they?”
“I don’t know.” Nick said after a long pause, then glanced at the moon rock sitting on his desk. “I’m still trying to figure out where the moon came from.”
Nick pushed back from his desk, stood, went to the window and stared out at a salt flat that surrounded a dry lake bed that ran all the way to the horizon and finally disappeared beneath a purple line of haze.
Staring at the broad expanse of salt always filled him with a sense of peace and timelessness. He let his eyes drift to a chain link fence that cut horizontally across the salt like a line drawn on a canvas, then dead ended next to a series of industrial looking buildings.
“Maybe it’s salt,” Nick said, turning back from the window, but Ray had already gone.
Chapter 5
The buildings that Nick had been staring at were all that remained of the Clayton Salt Mine.
The compound consisted of three large corrugated metal buildings surrounded by rusted machinery and a conveyor belt that chattered its way from the mine entrance to the top of a conical shaped mound, feeding it with freshly mined rock salt.
Scattered around in all directions were similar mounds—which looked like giant white Hershey’s Kisses—and every inch of the compound was covered in a layer of chalky dust. Heat waves from the hundred-plus degree day made the buildings appear to shiver and quake in the bright morning light.
Two hundred yards to the right of the Clayton mine was a guard kiosk with a sign that read: “STRATEGIC PETROLEUM RESERVE – GATE 3.”
Tall fences topped with razor wire ran out from each side of the kiosk. Beyond that, massive oil storage tanks, pipes, and Department of Energy workers in yellow hardhats moved around valves and gauges, checking to make sure that the 250 million barrels of crude oil stored in the salt below were safe.
A short distance up the road from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve directly on the other side of the Clayton mine was a humble-looking building with a sign that said, “WELCOME TO SALT SPRINGS CAVERN STATE PERSERVE.” And below that: “Tours by Appointment Only.”
* * * *
Inside the Clayton Salt Mine, a thousand feet below the surface, artificial light illuminated the alabaster walls of a vast, open chamber. Big as a football field, the only things breaking up the cavern were a series of large pillars that had been created by miners to support the ceiling.
Two middle-aged men dressed in coveralls and hardhats—Lucas Redmond, a six-foot-two, 200 pound black man from San Antonio and veteran sandhog who had spent the last fifteen years building the Los Angeles underground Metro Rail system, and Willie Clayton, the son of the mine’s owner—positioned a heavy electro hydraulic drill against a section of salt and buried the bit clean to the chuck in one fluid movement.
Despite the mine’s comfortable sixty-eight degree temperature, sweat streamed down their faces and the taste of salt bloomed in their mouths as they backed the drill out of the wall.
Working together, they pulled the drill free of the salt and placed it in the back of their Kawasaki Mule, an ATV runabout they used to haul their tools around.
“I’m getting too old for this shit,” Lucas said, smearing the salt that caked his face as he wiped his cheek with the back of his hand.
Lucas and Willie were all that was left of the Clayton Salt Mine. The operation had been reduced to two men hand drilling holes in the salt,
filling them with dynamite, and blasting off a few tons of salt. The salt would then be scooped into ore carts that ran on a rail to the crusher, where it would be ground up and then deposited on a conveyor belt.
The Clayton Salt Mine was a strictly old school, no frills operation. There was no multimillion dollar cutting tool sliding through tunnels effortlessly removing hundreds of tons of salt with each pass.
Long ago, most of the Clayton’s mineral holdings had been sold to the Morton Salt Company. The section that Lucas and Willie were working was soon to be condemned by the government, effectively ending the Claytons’ involvement in the rock salt business.
Lucas filled the holes they’d just drilled with Emulex, a type of dynamite suited for work in mines, then gathered up the detonation wires and ran them over to a crank box, a detonation device with a handle on top, attached the wires, and then called to Willie.
“Clear?”
“Clear.” Willie said, signaling with a thumbs up before ducking behind one of the support pillars for cover.
“Fire in the hole!” Lucas cranked the handle, there was a frozen silence, and then six sticks of dynamite exploded, sending an avalanche of salt onto the mine’s floor, filling the chamber with thick clouds of smoke and dust.
Five minutes later, after the air had cleared, Willie moved in to inspect the blast site. Navigating around car-sized chunks of salt, he assessed the take, calculating how many tons would need loading, and suddenly stopped when a flat rock about the size of his hand caught his eye.
Willie crouched, dug the rock out of the salt, and blew across the top, exposing a perfect likeness of some ancient predatory fish—a fossil. Well, half a fossil, anyway; the blast had broken it in two. Willie studied the sea creature’s needle sharp teeth, row after deadly row, then let out a soft whistle.
“Hey, look,” Willie said, excitedly walking over to Luke, who was adding diesel to a Bobcat loader. “Another one of them fossils.”
“Let’s have a look,” Lucas said, replacing the loader’s fuel cap.
“Some scary-looking fish thing,” Willie said, holding it out for Lucas to see. “Doc Walker’s gonna love it.”
Chapter 6
Nick shook the bottle and two aspirin dropped into his palm. He shook the bottle again, adding a third pill, then popped them in his mouth and chased them down with a slug of cold coffee. His color had returned. He was feeling mostly back to normal. But the morning’s flashback about almost having had drowned left him with a stabbing headache that had settled in behind his eyes.
Pressing on his temples to ease the throbbing, Nick stared at the moon rock sitting on his desk and shook his head. He couldn’t get over how ironic it was that it was here, in his office. His department had just spent the better part of a year modernizing the lab—positive pressure clean room, new slicing equipment, mass spectrometer, sterile glove boxes—all so that they could get certified to do analysis on lunar rocks from the Apollo missions.
He studied it a bit longer, then slipped the moon rock into its plastic bag. He was about to walk it over to their shiny new clean room for safekeeping when Ray leaned into the office and said, “Slade wants to see you in his office.”
Nick looked at Ray, and after a quick pause said, “Now?”
“Yep. He made it sound like it was important. Like he wanted to talk to you right away.”
“Great.” A lousy day made worse, Nick thought to himself, then let out a frustrated breath. “Okay, thanks. I’ll go see him.”
Ray stared at Nick a moment longer and said, “Good luck.”
Nick slipped the moon rock into a desk drawer; the nitrogen chamber would have to wait. He took another belt of stale coffee, then stepped out of his office, closing the door behind him.
He crossed a section of government issue vinyl flooring, his shoes clicking across the shiny surface, and entered a long hallway that ran to a corner office. His boss’s office.
Nick wasn’t exactly sure why Slade wanted to see him, but he figured it had to be bad news. If it were anything else, the peacock bastard would’ve called a meeting and made a big announcement to the staff, which, as of today, consisted of only four or five souls: Ray, himself; another lab tech who was in Houston for two weeks, Slade, a security guy, and Max, a German Shepherd guard dog. NASA had been dragging its feet about staffing up the lab. He had a bad feeling that that was what Slade wanted to see him about.
Nick stepped up to a set of double doors. He took a breath and knocked on the faux wood laminate. A quick beat, and then he heard Slade’s voice calling for him to come in. Nick mashed his lips into a line, pushed through the door, and stepped inside.
The office was large and spacious and lit with soft afternoon light. Apollo moon mission memorabilia filled the room. Mini Atlas rocket boosters. Apollo Command Modules. A detailed model of Armstrong’s Lunar Landing Module, Eagle. And covering the walls were framed photographs of astronauts bounding across the lunar surface under a g-force six times less than that on Earth.
If someone had just happened by and poked their head into the office, they would’ve thought the occupant had been single-handedly responsible for America’s moon missions.
Project Director Mark Slade, forty-five, blew out a cloud of water vapor and then tapped the e-cigarette as if to remove some phantom bit of ash from its plastic tip, then rocked forward, exposing a photograph of himself and Apollo 15 astronaut David Scott shaking hands, and motioned for Nick to have a seat.
“Have a seat, Walker,” Slade said, flashing a mouthful of fluorescent white domino-sized teeth.
Nick acknowledged with a nod, dropped into a chair across the desk from Slade, and thought to himself, Everything about this guy is fake—even the cigarette smoke.
Slade, dressed in a powder blue sport coat, NASA logo tie, and with mousse-slicked hair, looked more like a political spinmeister than the director of a NASA geology lab.
“You wanted to see me?” Nick said, glancing at a model of Lunar Rover 1 climbing out of a plastic impact crater that sat on a corner of Slade’s desk.
“I’m afraid it’s bad news, Walker. Your department didn’t make it.”
Nick straightened in his chair. “What are you talking about?”
“The geology department. It’s being embalmed. Collapsed. Funding for the lab dries up effective June 30th. That’s forty days from now.”
Nick gave Slade a stunned look, then after a long pause, said, “Why?”
“Budgetary reasons,” Slade said, slotting the e-cigarette between his fingers.
“That’s crazy—”
“No, Walker, it’s not. It’s called fiscal responsibility.”
“But I’m operating at a fraction of what NASA spends on most projects. ‘Frugal’ doesn’t begin to describe how we operate around here.”
“Listen, Walker, this isn’t a proposed cut—it’s a done deal.” Slade said, rocking back in his oxblood leather chair. “And if it makes you feel any better, I’m as disappointed as you are. I’ve got a dog in this fight, too.”
What a crock, Nick thought. From the minute Slade had gotten there, he’d been counting the days until he could get back to Houston—the cocktail circuit, the golf—and the chance to charm his way into another promotion.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Nick said, shaking his head. “We just spent a year modernizing the lab, and we’re doing valuable work in data analysis.”
“‘Redundant’—that’s the word the head honchos are using. Houston’s had a change of heart. Your geology department is going to be collapsed back to the Johnson Space Center.”
“Houston? Hell, by those standards, all of NASA is redundant. It’s a space program with no mission. And even if they had one, how the hell are they going to get into space? We don’t have a launch platform anymore. We’re down to begging rides on Russian rockets.”
“Well, whatever the thinking is, they’re obviously through spending millions so you and your team can slice and dice worthless bits of
silica.”
“Bullshit. That’s bullshit, Slade. This isn’t about the science; it’s about a top-heavy bureaucracy that’s mismanaged itself out of funds.”
“Listen, Walker…Nick. Like I said, I don’t like it any more than you do.”
“Oh, come on. Don’t start with the ‘how much this job means to me’ crap. You’ve been angling to get back to Houston from the moment you were appointed director. You drag around this place like it’s Siberia.”
“There is no Houston,” Slade said, a grim expression forming on his face. “At least, not for me. And yeah, I did put in a request for a transfer. It was denied. I even offered to take a demotion. All I heard were crickets.”
Slade rolled the e-cigarette in his fingers. He raised it to his lips, then stopped and added, “Things are bad.”
Nick held up a hand and ran his index finger back and forth across his thumb. “ You know what this is?”
“Yeah, yeah…I know. The world’s smallest violin playing; my heart bleeds for you. Very funny, Walker.” Slade rocked back, took a drag on the e-cig, and blew out a stream of vapor. “I’m going to ignore that. In fact, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I’m working on a way to keep the lights on here. I’ll be calling in a few favors, and, with your help, we just might be able to get re-tasked. I’m talking about a new mission. Three, maybe four people max. You, me, and a couple of technicians.”
Nick gave Slade a skeptical look. Then, in a dubious voice, he said, “A new mission?”
“Right. If all goes as planned, a new antenna will be installed, and after it’s calibrated and the electronics are in place, we go online as a downrange tracking station for JPL. You’ll be in charge of maintaining equipment and doing data analysis. And I’ll be handling all the administrative duties. I should be able to confirm this in two, three weeks tops.”