Assumed Identity

3

HOUSTON, TEXAS

The space shuttle Atlantis was on the second day of its current mission-a no-problem launch, an all-systems-go performance so far-and Albert Delaney felt bored. He wished that something would happen, anything to break his tedious routine. Not that he wanted excitement exactly, because he associated that word with a crisis. The last thing NASA needed was more foul-ups and bad publicity, and at all costs, another Challenger disaster had to be avoided. One more like that and NASA would probably be out of business, which meant that Albert Delaney would be out of a job, and Albert Delaney preferred boredom any day to being unemployed. Still, if anybody had told him when he’d been accepted by NASA that his enthusiasm for what he assumed would be a glamorous career would all too quickly change to tedium, he’d have been incredulous. The trouble was that NASA prechecked the details of a mission so often, testing and retesting, going over every variable, trying to anticipate every contingency, that by the time the mission occurred, it was anticlimactic. No, Albert Delaney didn’t want excitement, but he certainly wouldn’t have minded an occasional positive surprise.

A man of medium height and weight, with average features, in that cusp of life where he’d stopped being young but wasn’t yet middle-aged, he’d noticed that more and more he’d been feeling dissatisfied, unfulfilled. His existence was ordinary. Predictable. He hadn’t yet reached the stage of his syndrome where he was tempted to cheat on his wife. Nonetheless, he was afraid that what Thoreau had called “quiet desperation” might drive him to do something stupid and he’d get more excitement than he’d bargained for by ruining his marriage. Still, if he didn’t find some purpose, something to interest him, he didn’t know if he could rely on his common sense.

Part of his problem, Albert Delaney decided, was that his office was at the periphery of NASA headquarters. Away from the mission-control center, he didn’t have the sense of accomplishment and nervous energy that he imagined everyone felt there. Plus, even he had to admit that being an expert in cartography, geography, and meteorology (maps, land, and weather, as he sometimes put it bluntly) seemed awfully dull compared to space exploration. It wasn’t as if he got the chance to examine photographs of newly discovered rings around Saturn or moons near Jupiter or active volcanoes on Venus. No, what he got to do was look at photographs of areas on earth, sections that he’d looked at dozens of times before.

It didn’t help that the conclusions of the research he was doing had already been determined. Did photographs from space show that the alarming haze around the earth was becoming worse? Did high-altitude images indicate that the South American rain forest continued to dwindle due to slash-and-burn farming practices? Were the oceans becoming so polluted that evidence of the damage could be seen from three hundred miles up? Yes. Yes. Yes. You didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to come up with those conclusions. But NASA wanted more than conclusions. It wanted specifics, and even though the photographs that Albert Delaney examined would eventually be sent to other government agencies, it was his job to make the preliminary examination, just in case there was something unique in them, so that NASA could get the publicity.

The shuttle’s current mission was to deploy a weather satellite over the Caribbean Sea and perform various weather-related observations and experiments, as well as transmit photographs. The photograph currently in front of Delaney showed a portion of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. For several years, a blight had been attacking the palm trees in that area, and one of Delaney’s jobs was to determine how far the blight had spread, something that could easily be seen in the photographs since the sick, denuded trees created a distinct bleak pattern. The theory was that substantial loss of vegetation in the Yucatan would disturb the oxygen/carbon-dioxide ratio in the area and affect weather patterns just as the disappearance of Brazil’s rain forest did. By measuring the area of blight and factoring that information with temperature and wind variations in the Caribbean, it might be possible to predict the creation of tropical storms and the direction of hurricanes.

The blight had definitely spread much farther than photographs of the Yucatan taken last year indicated. Delaney placed a transparent scale-model map over the photograph, aligned topographical features, recorded measurements, and continued to another photograph. Perhaps it was his need for a break in his routine. Perhaps it was his need to be surprised. For whatever reason, he found that he was examining the photographs far more diligently than usual, paying attention to matters that weren’t related to the palm-tree blight.

Abruptly something troubled him, a subconsciously noticed detail, a sense that something was out of place. He set down the photograph he was examining and went back to the one he’d just completed. Frowning, he concentrated. Yes, he thought. There. At once he felt a stimulating flow of adrenaline, a warming in his stomach. That small area in the bottom left corner of the photograph. Those shadows among the denuded palm trees. What were those shadows doing there?

The shadows formed almost perfect triangles and squares. But triangles and squares did not exist in nature. More, those shadows could be made only by sunlight that struck and was blocked by objects above the ground. Large objects. Tall objects. Normally, shadows didn’t pose a mystery. Hills made them all the time. But these shadows were in the Yucatan’s northern lowlands. The descriptive name said it all: lowlands. There weren’t any hills in that region. Even if there were, the shadows they cast would have been amorphous. But these were symmetrical. And they occupied a comparatively wide area. Delaney made quick calculations. Thirty square kilometers? In the middle of an otherwise dramatically flat section of the Yucatan rain forest? What the hell was going on?