Diablo Mesa(27)

Nora helped herself to a cup of coffee and a sandwich as everyone sat down, tired and dusty. Nobody said much. They had now uncovered the beginning of the long groove in the sand, and she was curious to follow that to its endpoint, which went too deep for GPR or the magnetometer to reach. There might still be something there, she thought; fragments or pieces of whatever had plowed into the ground.

Just as she was finishing her sandwich and starting to dread going back out—she could hear the wind buffeting the Quonset hut roof—Greg Banks came into the room. He had been absent at lunch. He paused and held up his hands, a broad smile on his face. “Everybody,” he said, “I have a little surprise.”

He tried to sound casual, but his voice was tense with excitement.

“What is it?” Tappan asked.

Banks smiled mysteriously. “You shall see. Please follow me.”

Everyone followed Banks into the next hut, where Skip was already waiting. There, the few artifacts they had recovered that morning lay spread out on a large table, each one tagged and labeled. Nora had seen most of it already, except for the stuff recovered in the screening, and it was a pretty miserable collection of midcentury garbage: old cigarette butts, bottle caps, some pieces of glass, a broken whiskey pint flask, a withered pencil stub, a frozen penknife, several buttons, and a rivet from a pair of jeans. They had also found several pennies, a nickel, and a quarter—all dating to 1947 or prior—and a couple of prehistoric Indian flint chips, along with the base of a broken arrowhead. All very terrestrial. At the far end of the table lay a row of Banks’s glass dishes full of dirt, next to a stereo zoom microscope.

“Now, there’s an impressive collection of alien artifacts!” Tappan said with a laugh, scanning the table.

“If so, then aliens are as prone to littering as human beings,” Banks said. “But that’s not what I brought you to see.” He led them to the stereo microscope. “I’ve spread some grains of dirt on the glass slide that’s currently on the stage plate. I want you each to take a look, saying nothing. And then we will go around the group and you’ll each tell me what you saw.”

For a seemingly quiet guy, Banks had a flair for drama. Nora’s curiosity was aroused.

They each looked through the binocular eyepieces, examining the grains under high magnification. Nobody said anything, and it was soon Nora’s turn. At first, all she could see were the giant grains of sand, bits of fluffy dirt, and fragments of plants and roots. But mingled among them were some round spheres of a greenish, transparent glassy material.

Nora stepped back. She wasn’t entirely sure what it meant, exactly—but the implications were not lost on her.

“All right,” said Banks. “What did you see? Let’s start with you, boss.”

“Well, I saw a lot of dirt and sand.” Tappan laughed. “I’m not sure I know what to look for, frankly. Some of that sand came in interesting shapes, like crystals.”

At this, Banks’s eyebrows went up. He exchanged glances with Skip, who seemed to be in the know. “Anyone else see anything?” He went around the room, but nobody had noted anything unusual beyond the crystals in the sand, some of which, when magnified, looked rather like diamonds.

Banks began to grow impatient. “Crystals! My friends, all sand under magnification looks like crystals. It’s mostly silicon dioxide, after all. Forget the bloody crystals! What about the microspheres?”

A silence settled.

“How did those grains become perfectly spherical?” He paused, looking around.

“Because they’re molten droplets?” Nora asked.

“Finally!” Banks broke into a grin. “They’re molten droplets that cooled in the air. Perhaps some of you also noted the greenish color? That’s a typical color of sand that’s been melted or vaporized. If you look closely, you’ll see faint swirling lines on some of the droplets. Those are called Schlieren flow lines. They’re typical of sand that’s been vaporized and then condenses in the atmosphere and falls back to Earth while cooling from a molten state.”

Tappan raised his head. “What does it mean?”

“Such droplets have a name: microtektites. Up until now, they have only been associated with powerful meteorite strikes. Yet I’ve found microtektites in every sample of dirt we’ve looked at so far. They’re everywhere—millions of them.” He looked around, the drama building. “So I wondered: Is there any evidence of a meteorite strike in this vicinity? I looked into that, and the answer is no.”

Another dramatic pause.

“The conclusion is inescapable: something struck the ground here with such violence that it vaporized a mass of sand. Such an impact could not come from a terrestrial crash of any kind—a missile or plane. There’s not enough energy in such situations to melt sand. It therefore had to have come from outer space. Something that entered Earth’s atmosphere at very high speed and struck the ground here.”

“Could it have been a satellite?” asked Nora.

“Yes, a satellite falling out of high orbit would be fast enough to melt sand on impact. The problem, Nora, is that in 1947, which is evidently when this impact occurred—judging by these artifacts you’ve found—there were no satellites. Sputnik wasn’t launched until 1957.”

A silence filled the room as the implications sank in.