Ford looked at her steadily for a long time. Finally he spoke. “May I ask what a girl with your brains is doing waitressing in Damariscotta, Maine?”
“I dropped out of college.”
“What college?”
“Princeton.”
“Princeton? Isn’t that somewhere in Jersey?”
“Very funny.”
“What’d you major in?”
“I was supposedly pre-med but I took a lot of physics and astronomy courses. Too many. I flunked organic chem, lost my financial aid.”
Ford thought for a while. What the hell. “It just so happens a hundred thousand dropped in my lap the other day which I don’t really need. It’s yours—to buy a new boat. But it comes with conditions. You’re working for me, now. You’ll be absolutely quiet, tell nothing to no one, not even your friend. And the first thing we’re going to do in this new boat is visit the crater. Agreed?”
The girl surprised Ford by the sheer wattage of her smile. She stuck out her hand. “Agreed.”
42
Mark Corso tossed the mail on a table and threw himself into an armchair in his friend’s basement apartment on the Upper West Side. His head dropped back against the cushion and he closed his eyes. He felt logy, an incipient hangover creeping up behind his eyeballs. For the last three nights he had worked double shifts at Moto’s, one to one, and to get through them he’d been nursing screwdrivers under the bar. Even with the long hours he still wasn’t making enough to pay his overdue share of the rent. He needed that severance check from NPF and he needed it fast. In what little free time he had, he’d been job hunting and obsessively going over the images on the hard drive, refining and polishing them. He’d hardly slept. And on top of it, he missed Marjory Leung awfully, fantasized about her long, nude, springy body day and night. He’d talked to her a half a dozen times but it was clear the relationship wasn’t going to continue—although they remained good buddies.
Fighting the urge to sleep, he roused himself and eyed the mail. Depressingly slim responses to his job queries and applications. With an effort of will he scooped up the pile, tore open the first letter, and read the first line. Crumpling it into a ball he dropped it, opened the second, the third, the fourth.
The pile of paper at his feet grew.
The sixth and last letter stopped him dead. It was from the personnel office at CalTech, which administered NPF. At first he thought it might be his severance check, but when he opened it all he found was a letter. He scanned it in disbelief, his eye fixing on the first paragraph.
“After reviewing your employment records and the notice of termination for cause from your former supervisor at NPF, we have determined that you do not qualify for the severance package or unused leave compensation as outlined in your employment contract. We refer you to regulations 4.5.1 through 6 in the Handbook for Employees . . .”
He read it twice and tossed it on the table. This wasn’t happening to him. They owed him two weeks’ severance and two weeks’ unused vacation: over eight grand. After six years of graduate school and eighty thousand dollars in student loans, here he was, crashing in a friend’s basement apartment with less than five hundred dollars in his bank account, no job, no prospects, and a brick of maxed-out credit cards so thick he couldn’t fit them all in his wallet. And now he couldn’t even pay the back rent.
Slowly, inexorably, his anger built. Those bastards at NPF would pay. They owed him eight thousand dollars and he would get his money, one way or another. There had to be a way to get back at them.
The door opened and his roommate stood in the doorway. “Hey, Mark, I hate to be a jerk about that back rent, but I need the money. Like now.”
Mark Corso arrived on the doorstep of his mother’s old brownstone in Greenpoint, suitcases in hand, and rang the bell. The hangover was now full-blown, his eyeballs throbbed and he had a mouthful of paste. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to call ahead. Inside, he could hear the shuffling of feet, the sound of locks being turned, and then his mother’s quavering, uncertain voice.
“Who is it?”
“Me. Mark.”
The final lock was turned and there was his mother—short, plump, iron-gray hair—her face lighting up. “Mark!” The arms went around him in a suffocating embrace, once, twice. She smelled of fresh pasta and her arms were patched with flour. “What have you got here, suitcases? Are you moving back in? Don’t stand outside in the cold, come in! Are you here to stay or just a visit? You look so tired!” Another embrace, this one with a hint of tears.
She led her son, unresisting, into the parlor, and sat him down on the sofa.
“I’ll make you your favorite, a Fluffernutter, you just stay right there and relax. You’re so thin!”
“I’m fine, Mom.”
Corso kicked off his shoes, stretched out on the sofa, clasped his hands behind his head, and stared up at the swirls of brushed stucco on the ceiling of his childhood home, thinking about the money NPF owed him. They couldn’t deny him two weeks’ severance just like that, without due process. And vacation time? He’d earned that. This was not right. He wondered if Derkweiler wasn’t actively interfering with his efforts to find a new job—he hadn’t even had a nibble. Incredible: here he was, sitting on the scientific discovery of a lifetime, unable to do anything with it, and being treated like shit by the establishment.
He had an ace in the hole: the hard drive. He wondered when they would miss it. An idea began to form. Years back, he recalled, a classified hard drive was misplaced at Los Alamos National Labs. It made the front page of The New York Times and led to the canning of the director and a bunch of scientists. Maybe the NPF drive needed to show up in some FBI office. The very fact it was outside the fence would cause a scandal. And who would get blamed? The mission director.
He sat up. That was it. Chaudry’s career would be ruined if it became known someone in his unit had walked out with a classified hard drive. And Derkweiler would also be toast. He had them both by the short hairs. But there was no point in taking them down just for revenge. No . . . The threat of going to the FBI would only be his leverage. The stick, so to speak. The carrot was that he had a discovery that would make both of them famous, as well as himself—if they had the wisdom to reinstate him.
Now this was a plan. A quick phone call, nothing in writing. He would ask for nothing more than he deserved, something that Chaudry could do for him with the mere stroke of a pen—rehire him. With his discovery, all would be forgiven. He felt a mounting excitement. If Chaudry rejected his overture and reported the stolen drive, the man’s career would be ruined. He’d never work with classified material again. Chaudry was smart, he was cool-headed, and above all he was ambitious. He would see the lay of the land.
Corso looked at his watch. Ten A.M. in New York, seven A.M. in California; Chaudry would still be at home. Perfect.
It was a matter of thirty seconds to get the home phone number off the Internet. Corso dialed it with slow deliberation, his heart hammering in his chest, while rehearsing his message. I have a classified NPF hard drive which contains all the high-res pictures of the planet. Freeman sent it to me before he was murdered. And on this drive is an image of an alien artifact. A machine. Trust me, you won’t find it. But I did.
So here’s the deal. Rehire me, you get the hard drive back, no one will know about the security breach—and we’ll share credit for the greatest scientific discovery of all time. Refuse and I mail this drive to the FBI anonymously and your career is over. Finished. Nada. Remember what happened at Los Alamos?
The choice is yours. Think it over before doing anything stupid.
The phone began to ring. “Hello?” came Chaudry’s cool voice.
43
Ford stepped out of the dinghy onto the rocks of Shark Island and breathed deeply of the salt air. He was glad to be on solid ground—the boat ride off shore, even in a calm ocean, had left him queasy. He was not, it must be admitted, a sailor. The brilliant summer day bathed
the island in warm sunlight and the ocean lay shimmering from mainland to sea horizon. Seagulls cried and wheeled about above their heads, irritated at being disturbed from their habitual resting places on the shore rocks.
“Don’t soil your Guccis,” Abbey said.
He followed her to the top of the island, picking his way among rocks and bayberry bushes, and in a moment found himself at the edge of a small crater. The recent rains had washed clean the fractured bedrock at the bottom of the crater. In the middle of the bedrock, surrounded by cracks, Ford could see a perfect hole, about three inches in diameter.
He took a deep breath. What could have made an entry hole of three inches, pass through eight thousand miles of planet, and exit, making a hole ten feet across?
“We went to find a meteorite,” said Abbey, “and that’s what we found: a hole.” She laughed ruefully.
Ford slipped a handheld radiation meter out of his gear bag. It registered normal background radiation only, about 0.05 millirem per hour. He took some pictures and got a GPS fix on the hole. Then he crouched and took a reading inside the hole itself, passing the RadMeter back and forth. It finally registered a slight uptick, to 0.1 millirem/hr.
“Am I going to have two-headed children?”
“Hardly.”
He slipped into the crater and knelt, reaching inside the hole with his fingers and feeling around. The walls were smooth and glassy, just like the walls of the bigger hole in Cambodia. The extraterrestrial object—whatever it was—had bored a round cylinder in the rock as perfect as if it had been drilled. Cracks radiated outward, but there was little sign of violence and almost none of the usual explosive contact that occurs on impact—the hole was amazingly clean, the ground hardly disturbed. It was as if some unusual force had absorbed or canceled out the energy of the impact. The same thing must have happened at the far side of the Earth, in Cambodia. The exit hole should have been enormous, like that made by a bullet passing through a pumpkin, the shock wave alone blowing debris out the far end and leaving an active volcano or eruption of magma. But no. Both holes had somehow sealed themselves up at both ends. No magma, no eruption, just residual radiation. It made no sense. Anything large and fast enough to vaporize a hole in rock and actually drill through the Earth would have blown the island to smithereens.
Ford peered down the hole with a flashlight; it went straight down as far as the beam could reach. He shivered. Something about this business frightened him; he wasn’t sure why. He measured the hole, recorded the entry angle on it, took some pictures. Getting his rock hammer out of his pack, he chipped a few fragments from the lip of the hole, some displaying the glassy inner wall, and sealed them in ziplock bags. He also took samples of dirt and plants.
“How the heck,” said Abbey, “could a meteor big enough to light up the Maine coast only leave a tiny hole like that?”
“A damn good question.” Ford rose to his feet, brushed the dirt off his knees.
“How deep do you think it went before it finally stopped?”
Ford cleared his throat and looked at her. “It didn’t stop.”
“What do you mean?”
“It went all the way through the Earth.”
She stared at him. “You’re kidding me, right?”
“No joke. It came out in northwestern Cambodia. Only it was a lot bigger when it exited—the hole wasn’t three inches in diameter, it was ten feet.”
“Holy shit.”
“It blew out of the ground with such force that it flattened a square mile of jungle.”
“Any idea what it was?”
Ford began packing up his gear and samples. “Not a clue.”
“Sounds like a miniature black hole to me. Goes all the way through the Earth, getting bigger as it goes, leaves behind traces of radiation.”
“That’s an intriguing hypothesis.”
“Have you figured out where it came from?”
Ford hefted the bag. “No.”
“Why not?”
Ford sighed. “And how would one do that?”
“You’ve got a photograph of it coming in, you’ve got the entry point and angle, exact time of impact, exit point and angle—heck, with that information I’m pretty sure you could extrapolate its orbital trajectory backward. They do it all the time with ECOs.”
“ECOs?”
“Earth Crossing Objects. It’s a classic problem of orbital dynamics.”
Ford stared at her. “Could you do it?”
“Gimme an hour and a MacBook running Mathematica.”
44
Corso let himself into the brownstone, moving slowly, trying not to wake his mother. He stumbled over the rug in the front hall, cursed, and went into the parlor, shutting the pocket door to keep down the noise. He had just finished up the shift at Moto’s, although he had stayed on to have a drink or two of his own. It was now two A.M. Eleven P.M. in California.
Eleven. He sank down on the sofa, feeling flushed. He had talked to Marjory earlier that day, a very unsatisfying call, cut short because she was at work. They’d only been going out a week when he left; what they had together was wild and erotic but it wasn’t going to work long-distance.
God, it was awful. He’d never had so much fun with a girl. And he desperately needed to talk to someone else, get a second opinion from someone who knew the players, knew the place.
He picked up the phone, dialed the number. It rang four times before her voice answered, small and far away.
“Mark?”
“Yeah, hi, it’s me.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, no problem. Listen, I have to talk to you about something . . . something at work. Really important.”
A silence. “What about work?” Her voice sounded wary. She’d made it pretty clear she didn’t want to get involved in his travails or endanger her own career because of him.
“I’ve got a hard drive from NPF. One of the classified ones. It’s got all the high-res imagery on it.”
“Oh, shit, Mark, don’t tell me this. I don’t want to hear it.”
“You’ve got to hear me. I found something on it. Something incredible.”
“I really don’t want to hear any more. I’m hanging up now.”
“No, wait! I found an image of an alien . . . machine or artifact on . . .” He paused. Don’t tell her the real location. “On Mars.”
A silence. “Wait a minute. What’d you just say?”
“I found an image. A very, very clear image of a very, very old construction on the surface of Mars. Unmistakable.”
“You’ve been drinking.”
“Yes, but I made these discoveries when I was sober. Marjory, you know I’m not an idiot, you know I graduated first in my class at MIT, and you know I was the youngest technician in the entire Mars mission. You know that when I tell you this is real, it’s real. I think this machine is the source of the gamma rays.”
He could hear her breathing on the other end of the phone. “A lot of geological formations can look artificial.”
“This is no formation. It’s about six meters in diameter, consisting of a perfectly cylindrical tube with a rim projecting from the surface about two meters in diameter, surrounded by five perfectly spherical projections, the entire thing mounted on a pentagonal platform, partially drifted over with regolith.”
“How do you know it’s old?”
“The regolith. And you can see pitting and erosion from micrometeoroids. It’s got to be many millions of years old.”
Another silence. “Where on Mars is it? I want to see the images.”
“Sorry, I’m not going to tell you that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I found it, I’m getting the credit. Surely you understand.”
“I do. But . . . What are you going to do about this? How are you going to get credit?”
“I called Chaudry.”
“Jesus. You told him you stole a classified drive?”
“I didn’t actu
ally steal it, but yes, I told him. I said if he rehired me, I’d come back with the drive, all would be forgotten, and we’d share in the discovery. If not, I’d send the hard drive to the FBI and his career would be fucked.”
“Oh my God. And?”
“The asshole didn’t believe me about the alien machine. He said I was a psychopathic liar. He didn’t even believe I had a classified hard drive. So I e-mailed him a detail from a high-res image—to prove it. Not a picture of the machine, of course, because he’d then find it using the data file. But I did send him a super-high-res of another image. The fucker called me back so fast.”
“You’re crazy.”
“This is a high-stakes game.”
“And?”
“It sort of backfired. He said he wouldn’t do shit for me. And now I couldn’t do shit to him. Because if I mailed the drive anonymously to the FBI, and he got nailed, he’d point the finger at me. ‘I go down, you go down,’ he said. It’s a Mexican standoff.”
A long pause. “He’s right, you know.”
“I realize that now. The fucker stalemated me.”
“Now what?”
“This isn’t over by a long shot. I’m thinking of taking the drive to the Times. I swear to God I’m getting the credit for this if it’s the last thing I do.” He hesitated. “I need a second opinion. I need to hear what you think. I’ve been thinking about this so much I’m about to explode.”
He could hear the long-distance hiss on the line for a long time, the faint sound of music in the background. “Don’t do anything right away,” Leung said slowly. “I’m not sure going to the Times is the best idea. Give me a few days to think about it, okay? Just sit tight and don’t do anything.”
“Hurry up. I’m a desperate man.”
45
Abbey hadn’t been able to figure out what to say to her father at dinner, and now, at six A.M., as she lugged her suitcase down the stairs, she still had no idea how she was going to break the news.
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