Impact

46

As Ford entered the glass-and-chrome lobby of the Watergate Hotel, the assistant manager, who must have been lying in wait, came whisking around from behind his desk, hands clasped in front. He was a small man dressed in hotel black with a pinched, obsequious expression on his face. "Mr. Ford?"

"Yes?"

"Please excuse my concern, but it's about the girl in the room you booked."

Ford detected a note of disapproval in the man's anxious voice. Perhaps it had been a mistake to book her at the Watergate. There were plenty of quieter and cheaper hotels in Washington. He raised his eyebrows. "What's the problem?"

"She hasn't left the room in two days, she won't let the staff in to clean or stock the minibar, she's been getting food deliveries at all hours of the night, and she won't answer the room phone." A literal wringing of the hands. "And, well, an hour ago there were complaints of noise."

"Noise?"

"Yelling. Whooping. It sounded like some sort of . . . party."

Ford tried to maintain the serious expression on his face. "I'll look into it."

"We're concerned. We just renovated the hotel. Guests are responsible for any damage to rooms . . ." The disapproving voice trailed off into a significant silence.

Ford dipped into his pocket and pressed a twenty into the man's hand. "Trust me, everything's going to be fine."

The man gave the bill a disdainful look as he pocketed it, retreating back to his station. Ford moved toward the elevators, considering that this was turning out to be a more expensive proposition than he had imagined.

He knocked and Abbey opened the door. The room was a mess, dirty dishes, pizza boxes, and empty Chinese food cartons piled up in the entryway, emitting a smell of stale food. The trash can was overflowing with Diet Coke cans, papers were scattered about the floor, and the bed was wrecked.

She saw him looking around.

"What?"

"They have a quaint custom in large hotels like this called maid service. Ever heard of it?"

"I can't concentrate when someone's cleaning around me."

"You said this would take an hour."

"So I was wrong."

"You? Wrong?"

"Hey, maybe you better sit down and take a look at what I found."

He looked at her closely; she was haggard, her hair knotty and in disarray, eyes bloodshot, clothes with a slept-in look. But the expression on her face was one of pure triumph. "Don't tell me you solved the problem?"

"Does a toilet seat get ass?"

He winced. "You should publish a dictionary of your expressions."

Reaching into the minifridge, she pulled out a Diet Coke. "Want one?"

He shuddered. "No thanks."

She settled into the chair in front of the computer and he took the one beside it. "The problem was a little more difficult than I thought." She took a long pull on the Coke, stretching out the moment. "Any object in the solar system traces out a curve--either an ellipse or a hyperbola. A hyperbolic orbit means it came from outside the solar system and is going back out again--moving at faster than escape velocity. But our Object X was moving in an elliptical orbit."

"Object X?"

"Gotta call it something."

Ford leaned forward. "So you're saying it originated inside the solar system?"

"Exactly. I had the angle of entry into the Earth and a picture of Object X coming in. But what I didn't have was its velocity. Turns out the University of Maine at Orono has a meteoroid tracking station. They didn't get a picture of X but they got the acoustical signature on tape--the sonic booms--and got a precise velocity of twenty-point-nine kilometers per second. A lot slower than the hundred thousand miles an hour first reported in the papers."

Ford nodded. "Following you so far."

"So it was in an elliptical orbit. The apogee, the farthest point from the sun, is where it probably started its journey."

"I see."

She hit a few keys, and a schematic of the solar system came into view. She typed in a command and an ellipsis appeared. "Here's the orbit of Object X. Please note: the apogee is right at the orbit of Mars. And here's the kicker: if you extrapolate backward, you find that Mars itself was right at that point in its orbit when X began its journey toward Earth."

She sat back. "Object X," she said, "came from Mars."

A long silence enveloped the hotel room. Ford stared at the screen. It seemed incredible. "You're sure about this?"

"Triple-checked it."

Ford rubbed his chin and sat back. "Looks like we need to go where they know about Mars."

"And where's that?"

Ford thought for a moment. "Right now they're mapping Mars. Over at NPF, the National Propulsion Facility in Pasadena, California. We should head over there, poke around, see if they've found anything unusual."

Abbey cocked her head and looked at him. "You know, Wyman, there's one thing I don't get. Why are you doing this? What's in it for you? Nobody's paying you, right?"

"I'm deeply concerned. I'm not sure why, but my internal alarms are going off like crazy and I can't rest until I figure this out."

"Concerned about what, exactly?"

"If that was a mini-black hole, the planet was just kissed by the Grim Reaper. We came this close to extinction. What if there are more where that came from?"