Dark Winter

CHAPTER FOUR

Nine-tenths of the universe is missing, Lewis. My job is to find it."

Michael M. "Mickey" Moss leaned back in his desk chair in the astronomy building and waited to be asked for clarification, his hands making a tent in front of an expression both regal and watchful. Despite a Disney nickname that had dogged him from grade school- or perhaps because of it, in compensation- Moss looked nothing like a cartoon. He instead maintained an Aristotelian aura with his mane of white hair and beard, raw pink skin, and eyes both bright with intelligence and as dark as obsidian marbles. Lewis was sure the look had been cultivated: Moss was the kind of scientist who could command the lectern of an academic gathering on appearance alone.

"I wasn't aware we'd misplaced the universe," Lewis said on cue, playing straight man to the lecture. Moss would get to the point of this visit in his own good time.

"Exactly! Exactly the problem!" The scientist bounded out of his seat and theatrically pointed toward the ceiling. "People marvel at the sky. All those stars! And yet those trillions of suns represent only a tiny fraction of the matter that has to be out there, judging from the rotational speed and placement of galaxies. There should be ten times as much stuff. A hundred times, maybe. So- what else? Dim stars? Dark planets? Or something we don't even suspect? That's what we're looking for." He pointed at the floor. "Down there." He smiled as if posing a riddle.

"Sparco told me you're building a telescope in the ice."

Moss looked mildly disappointed at this shortcut in his lecture. "You're familiar with neutrinos?"

"Never seen one."

The astrophysicist nodded wryly. "Precisely. Far smaller than an atom. So small that billions are passing through our bodies right at this moment without effect. So small that a neutrino can pass through the entire planet without hitting anything. The most inconsequential objects imaginable. Chargeless. Massless. Yet what if they do have mass, however slight? There are so many of them they could represent a substantial fraction of our missing universe. If we could find and count them and tell where they come from, it would bring us a lot of information. It's the finding that's the problem."

"Which you've done."

"Which we're in the process of doing. Statistically, a very few neutrinos do collide with the particles of an atom as they streak through the earth. When this happens there's a tiny explosion of sorts, a spark, a kind of radiation- a point of light, if you will. We can't see these flashes in rock. But sensitive instruments can see them in transparent mediums such as tanks of water. Or, ice."

"Ta-da," Lewis said.

"Drill holes deep enough and the ice becomes so compressed that all the bubbles and color are squeezed out of it. Ice becomes clearer than glass. Clear as diamond. Instruments can detect these flashes for a thousand feet in all directions. We've drilled holes a mile deep to spot neutrino light. It's the best place in the world, really. If it works. If it works."

"There's been problems."

"No! Not problems. Scientific realities. Impatience by funding agencies. Because they have no idea of the conditions down here. No idea! I'm staying this winter to try to keep things on schedule. Because we might find something so unexpected that it changes all our understanding of gravity, matter, energy…"

"You did find something unexpected."

"Yes." Again, Moss resented the prompting. "As a by-product of a lifelong search. A search here, at the harshest place on earth."

"The Pole is pretty awesome."

"You're privileged to be here. Men have been trying to decipher the heavens since Babylonian priests climbed their ziggurats. Like pilgrims and holy men, they've gone to the mountaintops. Now they've come to the farthest mountaintop, the South Pole. The farthest place! After this, the next ziggurat is space!"

"And you have something from space." Lewis was trying to be polite but he was growing impatient to see what he'd been sent for.

"Yes." Moss gave up on his preamble. "You have some expertise?"

"A little from college. I'm not kidding myself about why Jim Sparco picked me. I wasn't the best, I was convenient and unemployed. I was interested in his research. And he thought I was principled, which meant he thought I could keep my mouth shut."

"Yes, I'm interested in your principles." Moss studied him. "You've signed on to look for global warming, correct?"

"As part of the weather readings."

"And yet you're a petroleum geologist, right?"

"I was."

"Which contributes to global warming."

"Maybe."

"No maybe about it."

"Oil also keeps us alive down here. So you can find the universe."

"Conceded."

"Besides which, I quit."

"Yes, that intrigues me. Sparco told me the story when I e-mailed him about my rock. I'm sure Big Oil paid well. So you've made an interesting choice, haven't you? Everyone comes to the Pole for something."

"I came to help out. I came to work for the good guys. If I make some small contribution toward your discovery, I'm excited."

Moss nodded. "Fair enough. Fair enough." The idea of a fingie wanting a piece of Michael Moss's reflected glory obviously pleased him. Made sense to him. "I admire your dedication. Someday your help may be credited. In the meantime, however, the need for discretion, as you said, is paramount. No one knows of this discovery. No one will know, until I choose to tell them. Agreed?"

Lewis nodded. It's what Sparco had told him to expect.

"I haven't decided what to do with it," Moss explained.

He nodded again.

Slowly, the scientist stood up, moved to a file cabinet, and opened a drawer. "It's interesting how compelling a rock becomes in a place that doesn't have any. I've touched this thing a thousand times. Wondered where it came from. What might be inside." He lifted his arm, hefting a dull brown rock the size and shape of a large, lumpy baking potato. "It's remarkably ugly."

Lewis took the stone, dense and heavy. Eight, ten pounds. The rock was burnt and glassy on one side. My God. "How many people know about this?" he asked.

"No one, really. I confided in Sparco because we've spent so much time down here together. He persuaded me this might represent a life-changing opportunity. But I couldn't risk even transmitting a picture of it on the Internet. It was he who suggested finding someone like you to make an initial judgment. I think he'd already met you, at Toolik Lake. Fortuitous, no?"

"And you found it…"

"A few months ago, when drilling Hole 18-b. Just happened to strike it. Dumb luck, I admit. About a thousand years down as measured in layers of snowfall."

"And thought it might be a meteorite…"

"Because why else is there a rock in the ice cap? If there's a stone at the Pole, it has to have come from the sky."

Lewis nodded, looking at the tarlike crust. Evidence of heat from a fall through the atmosphere. Which meant…

He looked at Moss.

The astronomer was watching him expectantly. "Well?"

"Superficially, at least, it fits." Lewis set it carefully on some papers on a desk.

"Then you think it's from space?"

"Probably." He paused, considering what to say. "As you said, the fact that there's thousands of feet of ice between this and bedrock suggests it fell from the sky. That's why Antarctica has become a prime hunting ground for meteorites of all kinds. They stick out like a sore thumb. But all the others have been found on the surface around the Trans-Antarctic Range, where flowing ice hits the mountain barrier and breaks upward to carry buried meteorites to the surface. The wind blows the last snow away. To strike a buried one with your drilling is pretty lucky. Amazingly lucky."

"It could have been salted by some joker, I suppose," Moss conceded. "Dropped down the hole when I wasn't looking. But why? No one has confessed and it looked like the real thing to me. We use hot water to melt holes in the ice, drilling downward with what amounts to a big shower head. A camera showed something was sticking into one side of our tube. I gave the crew a break, paused to melt a bulb of water to free it, and then hauled it up."

"And kept quiet about your find."

"I wanted to be sure."

"You understand I'm no expert?"

"You're as close as we could find, at short notice, to come down here like this."

"Yes. And, as Sparco suspected, I don't think this is your average meteorite. Have you noticed it's basaltic?"

"I've noticed it's plain."

"Exactly," said Lewis, now the lecturer. In geology he wasn't the fingie. "Compared to many of the metallic meteorites, this looks boring to us. Ordinary. That's because it's a common kind of rock found on earth but a rare kind to come from space. Most meteorites have more iron and nickel. They date from the dawn of the solar system. This one came later in history, after the place of its origin had experienced some kind of heating and melting and igneous rock had formed, like the earth's crust."

Moss was nodding. He was eager for confirmation.

"That suggests it didn't come from the usual source like asteroids or comets," Lewis went on. "It probably came from the moon. Or Mars. Blasted into space eons ago after a bigger meteorite, maybe a mile across, slammed into the red planet. Ejected and captured by earth's gravity like the one they found in the Allan Hills, the famous one they thought might have fossil evidence of Martian microbes."

Moss allowed himself a hint of eagerness. "Could this one have fossils inside?"

"There's been no agreement they exist in the other one. But this kind of meteorite is rare and even the remotest possibility makes it pretty valuable. We can't be sure what this is at all, of course- not with me. I don't have the instruments and I don't have the expertise. The way they confirmed things in Houston was by analyzing ancient gas trapped in the meteorite and finding it matched the Martian atmosphere."

"It may not be Martian at all," Moss allowed. He wanted more hope.

"No. Only sixteen have been found worldwide. But… it looks possible to me," Lewis gave him. "An achondrite, the kind of meteorite that would come from a planet or the moon. Sparco says you have a spectroscope down here and I brought some stuff to reduce a sample for a gas-spectrum analysis. I can also slice a small cross section and look at its composition under the microscope. I'll test for oxygen and oxidized iron isotopes. Check its magnetism, which indicates how much ferric iron. If it's a simple plagioclasepyroxene basalt, or maybe olivine, it will be promising. Radioactive dating of a young age will persuade even more. We'll need some photos and a statement to authenticate its place of origin. And then you take it to Houston, or wherever."

Moss nodded, watching him. "Yes. Wherever." He hesitated. "Jim told me I could trust another question to you."

Lewis had been waiting for this. "Its commercial value?" This opinion was Sparco's price for his being allowed to come down here. He was to assess, and then keep his mouth shut. He'd wanted purpose, and this was his ticket.

"As another measure of its importance."

"Private collection of scientific artifacts is booming," Lewis said. "Having a living-room museum has become cool among the ultrarich. The mere possibility this could be from Mars will be enough for some buyers. The chance it could hold evidence of extraterrestrial life trumps all. That rock could be worth a lot of money."

"How much money?"

Lewis had researched this. "Pieces of Mars have sold for twenty-five hundred dollars a gram."

"Which makes this rock worth…"

"Several million dollars."

Moss nodded solemnly.

"Pieces of the moon are even rarer and have fetched ten times that. The Apollo rocks turned out to be from a concentrated region of unusually high radioactivity, so lunar meteorites tell us more about the moon than what the astronauts brought back. They've fetched twenty-five hundred times the price of gold."

"Astonishing," Moss said. He didn't seem very astonished.

"But everything here is the property of the American government, right?"

"If they know about it," the scientist said, looking evenly at Lewis.

"It's an American base. American taxpayer dollars." No one was allowed to hunt for souvenirs in Antarctica, Lewis knew. They told you that up front.

"Is it?" Moss asked. "To you, just stepping off the plane, looking at that ragged flag, I suppose it is. But to me…" The scientist pointed to the wall above his desk. It was papered with pictures of himself with a stream of celebrities: visiting congressmen, presidential science advisors, adventurers, network anchors, movie stars, foreign dignitaries. Mickey Moss as polar landlord. "It's not American land. Not American ice. It's nobody's ice, except the people willing to come down here and pioneer it."

"And you pioneered it."

"Exactly."

"But at government expense, right?"

"At personal sacrifice!" Moss took a breath. "Listen, young man, I know I look like an old egghead to you, sitting here in my warm office, surrounded by vinyl and plastic. But I was doing science down here when you were sucking at your mother's tit. I was doing science when we slept in plywood barracks and ate out of tin cans and didn't get a letter or a radio call for months at a time. I did science until I was frostbitten so bad that when I came back inside it felt like my face was being held to a hot iron."

"I understand."

"No, you don't. You can't. No one can who didn't do it. And I gave the testimony that helped build this building. I dragged the Washington bureaucrats down here kicking and screaming and got them to see that this place-this godforsaken place- was the best place for certain kinds of science in the entire world. The Pole was the ringside seat when that comet plowed into Jupiter in 1994. It's going to help us remap the universe, decipher our magnetic field, understand our atmosphere. We've got telescopes out in the snow that can see in half a dozen ways the human eye is blind to. Because for half the year the sun never sets and for the other half we have a constant dark sky. Because I, Mickey Moss, showed them the way."

"I think everyone respects that."

"Do they?"

"Sure."

"I used to think respect was enough." He sat down, looking at the rock.

"They'll probably name something for you."

"When I'm dead." He picked up the meteorite. "They scoff at me now, you know. Geezer Mouse. Don't think I don't know."

"They're jealous. Academic rivalry."

"They don't understand my project has to have priority. Priority! To justify the Pole. To justify the new South Pole station."

Lewis waited.

"I'm just saying that I've paid my dues."

"I'm not arguing, Doctor Moss."

The scientist turned the meteorite over in his hands. "I've made no decisions," he said softly. "It's just that I'm getting old. I had to fudge my medical exam to get down here last time. I don't have endless time anymore. I haven't put a lot away. My family…" He glanced up. "Are you surprised to find me human, Lewis?"

"No." Lewis shifted uncomfortably. He was surprised, actually. It didn't fit his stereotype of a grand old man of science. "It's just that Jim Sparco wanted a rough evaluation. He didn't talk about keeping it."

"Nor have I! Nor have I." He looked at Lewis warily. "Don't jump to conclusions. Don't start rumors that aren't true. I've got a reputation, and in the end a reputation is all a scientist has. Thirty years in this place, and that's all I have. And then at the end a missive from space, a stroke of luck… Why?"

Lewis couldn't answer.

"Well. The first step was to get your opinion, correct? Now we've got some thinking to do. What's best? What's right? What's fair? That's always the question, isn't it?"

"The unanswerable one, sometimes."

"Yet you must choose an answer." Moss stood and put the rock back in his filing cabinet. "The funny thing is, there're almost no locks on this base. That's why you can't breathe a word of this to anyone."

"Don't you want to kick this around with the other scientists?"

"No." He looked depressed. "Word would leak, misinterpretations would be made. They're jealous, like you said. They'd use this against me."

"I could be wrong about the meteorite, you know."

"I understand that."

"It really needs some tests."

"Of course. But in the meantime I'm going to put this where others won't find it." He looked intently at the young geologist. "And then decide the right thing to do."