Impact

12

"He looks like Squealer, the Beanie Baby pig," said Mark Corso. "You ever see that pig? Big, soft, fat, and pink."

Marjory Leung leaned back on the stool and laughed, her long black hair swaying, then lifted the martini to her pursed lips. Corso watched her abdomen stretching, her apple-shaped breasts sliding under the thin stretchy cotton of her top. They were in one of those California theme bars, done up in bamboo and teak, with corrugated tin roofing and colored floor lights, tarted up like some watering hole on the beach in Jamaica. Reggae music throbbed in the background. Why was it in California that everything had to look like somewhere else? He remembered what Gertrude Stein had said about California. There is no there there. How true it was.

"Freeman warned me about him," he added. "How the hell did a guy like that get to be second in command?"

Leung set the drink down and leaned toward him, conspiratorially, her thin, athletic body like a bent spring. "You know why he keeps his door shut?"

"I've often wondered about that."

"He's surfing for porn."

"You think so?"

"The other day I knocked on the door and I heard this sudden movement inside, like he was startled. And then when I came in he was hastily tucking in his shirt and his computer screen was blank."

"Putting away his schlong, I bet. The very thought makes me want to puke."

Leung issued a bell-like laugh, twisting on her stool, her hair swinging again, her knee touching Corso's. Her drink was almost empty.

He polished off his own drink and waved his hand for another round. The knee remained in contact with his. Leung worked at the Mars mission down the hall as a Mars meteorology specialist. She was funny and irreverent, a refreshing change from the nerds who swarmed that end of the building. And she was smart. First-generation Chinese, she'd grown up in the back of a Chinese laundry run by her parents. They didn't speak English and she went to Harvard. Corso liked that kind of story. She was like his own grandfather, running away from home in Sicily and getting to America, all by himself, at the age of fourteen. Corso felt a kind of kinship with her.

"You read that report on Freeman?" he asked her.

"Yeah." The bartender slid the drinks over and she took hers. "So creepy. We used to come here for drinks once in a while."

Corso had heard about something brief between Leung and Freeman. He hoped it wasn't true.

"It's just awful, him getting murdered like that." She shook her head, sending ripples through that hair.

Corso took a chance, pressing his knee against the side of hers with a little more pressure. There was an answering pressure. He could feel the flush of the martinis traveling through his capillaries.

"You must have taken it hard," she said.

"I did. He was a really good guy. A little crazy."

"You know why he got fired?" she asked.

"Not specifically. Other than a sort of general deterioration. He might have had a run-in with Derkweiler over data issues."

"Data issues?"

"Gamma ray data." Corso realized he was approaching a security compartment line, talking about data outside of the building with a person in another section. He sipped his drink; fuck the rules.

"Oh yeah," she said. "He was talking about that but I didn't really get it. What about gamma rays?"

"Seems to be a gamma ray source somewhere on Mars. A point source. At least, that's what I get when I subtract the overall background noise--a faint periodicity."

She leaned forward. "Wait a minute. You're kidding."

She got it right away, thought Corso. "No, no kidding. The period is somewhere around twenty-five to thirty hours. Which is pretty close to the Martian day."

"What the heck in the solar system could be producing gamma rays? Not even the sun has enough energy."

"Cosmic rays."

"Yeah, but cosmic rays produce a weak, diffuse glow from every body in the solar system. You say this signal has periodicity. That implies a point source on the planet's surface."

Corso was even more taken aback by how fast she was figuring it out.

"Right. Problem is, the Compton detector on MMO isn't directional--no way to tell where the gamma rays are coming from. It could be anywhere on the planet's surface."

"You have any ideas what it might be?" Leung asked.

"At first I thought it might be from a nuclear reactor that crashed on the planet's surface--maybe from a secret government project. But I ran the calculations and it would have to be, like, a reactor the size of a mountain."

"What else?"

Corso took another swig. He could feel his heart pounding from the pressure of his knee, now on her inner thigh. She was returning the pressure. "I've been wracking my brains. I mean, high energy gamma rays are usually only produced by big-time astrophysical processes--supernovae, black holes, neutron stars--stuff like that. Or in a nuclear reactor or atomic bomb."

"This is incredible. You're on to something big."

He turned to her. "I think it could be a miniature black hole, or a very small neutron body, somehow caught on the surface of Mars or orbiting around it."

"You're shitting me."

He gazed steadily into her lively, black eyes. "No. I'm not. When you've eliminated the impossible . . ."

". . .whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." She finished the familiar aphorism for him, punctuating it with a bright smile on her red lips.

He lowered his voice. "If this is a miniature black hole or tiny neutron star, it could grow, eat Mars--and sterilize the Earth with killing gamma rays--or even explode. This isn't some academic exercise. This is real."

Leung breathed out. "Jesus."

He put his hand on her leg, gave it a squeeze. "Yes. It is real."

She leaned forward, her face closer to his. He could smell her shampoo. "What are you going to do about it?"

"It's going to be the subject of my presentation." He slid his hand just a bit under her skirt, which was riding up on her thigh as she sat on the stool. After a moment she flexed her hips forward, causing the hand to slide up farther. He could feel the hotness of her thighs.

She leaned closer to him and said, "Mmmmm," into his ear, her peppermint breath tickling his face.

"Another drink?" he asked.

She adjusted herself on the stool, sliding her hips even farther forward so that his fingers came in contact with the hot curve of her panties. She pressed her thighs together on his hand. "Do you want to come back to my place?" she whispered, her lips brushing his ear.

"Yes," he said. "Yes, I do."