Impact

34

Mark Corso slammed and locked the door to his apartment, dropped the box on the kitchen table, and rummaged frantically under the sink for a screwdriver. The baby was crying again, the air-conditioner still groaned, and sirens wailed on the boulevards, but it was all background noise to Corso, who was intent on the task at hand. Shoving the screwdriver in his back pocket, he picked up a kitchen chair and moved it into the center of the living room, climbed up, and unscrewed the light fixture in the ceiling. He pulled it down and reached up into the hole, retrieving the hard drive.

In a moment he had his desktop booted up and plugged into the drive. With a feverish intensity he typed in the password, getting it wrong three times in a row before he calmed himself. He quickly looked up Deimos's actual orbital period--which was 30.4 hours, as compared to 24.7 hours in the Martian day. Then he called up the gamma ray data and examined the periodicity: 30.4 hours.

He had spent hundreds of hours looking at high-res pictures of the Martian surface, looking for something different, something odd, something that might be a gamma ray source. But the orbiter had taken pictures of four hundred thousand square kilometers of the Martian surface at the highest resolution, and looking through the images was like looking for a needle in a haystack in a field of haystacks. Deimos was different. Deimos was tiny--a potato-shaped rock only fifteen by twelve kilometers. Whatever was generating gamma rays on Deimos would be easily found.

Hardly able to breathe, he searched the folders and files on the 160-terabyte drive and located the small one labeled DEIMOS. About three or four months before, he now recalled, the MMO had made a close pass of Deimos, hitting it with ground-penetrating radar and taking extremely high-resolution pictures. It was the first time Deimos had been imaged since Viking I in 1977.

He opened the file and saw that there were only thirty visible-light images and twelve radar images of Deimos.

Calling up the first image, he enlarged it to the highest resolution, laid a grid over it, and visually inspected each square, one at a time, for anything that looked funny. Deimos had a largely smooth, featureless surface, mostly covered with a thick gray blanket of dust, only lightly held in place by the moon's feeble gravity. There were half a dozen craters, of which only two had been named, Swift and Voltaire.

Trying to slow himself down, to be methodical, he eyeballed each grid in turn. The resolution was good enough to show individual boulders on the surface, some as small as three feet across.

Finishing up with that photograph, he went on to the next, and the next. An hour passed, and then two, and finally Corso was finished. He had found nothing: just a few large, deep craters, rocks, fragments of ejecta, and endless fields and drifts of regolith.

He rose, suddenly feeling utterly exhausted and deflated. It occurred to him he might have been pursuing a will-o'-the-wisp: perhaps all he was seeing was the cosmic-ray-induced glow from the entire moon, which was so small as to appear to be a point source in the data.

With this discouraging thought in mind, he put on a pot of coffee. While it was percolating, he thought about his own situation. It was a disaster. He was fucked financially. He had already broken the lease on this apartment, losing his deposit and last month's rent; he'd put down first, last, and a deposit on a more expensive apartment that he now couldn't afford. He didn't have enough money left to move his shit from one apartment to the next, let alone move back to Brooklyn. And yet that's what he'd have to do. He couldn't afford to stay here while looking for a new job, keeping up with his student loans, and paying off his maxed-out credit cards. He didn't want to stay in Southern California anyway; he loathed everything about the place--except Marjory. Marjory. They'd given him such a bum's rush out of NPF that he hadn't even had time to say good-bye to her, to explain, to be cheered up by her wisecracks and off-color comments.

The only thing that would save him at all was the eight thousand dollars he had coming in severance and vacation pay.

He poured a cup of coffee, dumped in an excess of cream and sugar, and sipped it. He still had the radar images of Deimos to look at but he doubted they would reveal anything, since the radar resolution was thirty meters, as opposed to one meter for the photographs. At least there were fewer images to look through.

Reluctantly, he went back to the hard drive and called up the radar images. They had been computer processed into long vertical slices through Deimos's surface, the radar penetrating as much as a hundred meters deep. The images came up as long, black strips, like ribbons, with the surface and subsurface features outlined in red and orange.

Almost immediately, he saw something odd. Under Voltaire crater, a dense, symmetrical knot of material reflected back a bright orange. He squinted, trying to make it out. Then he leaned back: of course, it was merely the meteoritic body which had gouged the crater in the first place. No mystery there. NPF scientists had probably already examined it and come to the same conclusion.

Nevertheless, he called up the visual image of Voltaire crater and examined it again. It was the deepest and freshest crater on Deimos, so deep that part of the crater bottom was in shadow.

He leaned forward, squinting. There was something in that shadow.

Using the proprietary image enhancement software loaded on the drive, Corso worked on pulling the image out of the darkness. He increased contrast, painted it in false colors, sharpened edge transitions, and manipulated almost every pixel to extract the maximum visual information from the faintest and most ambiguous data. Corso had been doing this very thing for almost a year and he knew exactly how to tease the image into life--if it was a real image and not a glitch. It was a difficult and subtle process which took almost an hour. With each pass, his surprise turned to astonishment, amazement, and finally stupefaction. Because what he saw, deep in the shadows of Voltaire crater, was not a natural object. There could be no doubt. It was not a glitch, a software artifact.

It was a construction, an artificial object, a machine.

Breathing hard, he stood up and went to the window, leaning on the sill and sticking his head into the feeble stream of cool air coming from the AC, sucking it in, trying to get his breathing under control. The sun was setting over the intersection, casting a brownish light over the waste-scape of cars, traffic lights, power lines, and tawdry businesses, all dotted about with limp palm trees.

A machine. An alien machine.

Mark Corso suddenly felt calm. Amazingly calm. This was far bigger than his petty personal problems. He reminded himself why he had gone into science to begin with. This was why.

Now that he was out of work, he had time to think things through and decide what to do. The data was classified and his possession of it a felony, so he couldn't just announce his discovery. If he reported it back to NPF, they would surely find a way to deprive him of credit and perhaps even send him to prison. For that reason, he had to move carefully, think things through, not do anything rash. He needed space and time and calm to make the right decisions. Because what he did next would not only determine his future, but it might well affect the future of the planet.

He took another deep breath, rose, and began to pack up his apartment for his move back to Brooklyn.