Diablo Mesa(31)

19



NORA PEEKED IN the lab door of Quonset 1. It was seven in the evening, the sun was setting, and the lab was dim and quiet. Everyone had gone back to their quarters to get ready for their dinner shift—except for one. She could see Tappan in the back of the lab, in a pool of light, bending over one of the tables.

When he heard her enter, he straightened up. “Nora!” His voice echoed in the empty space. “Thanks for agreeing to see me at this late hour. Lock the door, please.”

Nora shut the door and turned the bolt. She was curious what he wanted to show her. He’d been closeted in the lab with Greg Banks most of the afternoon, and when Banks emerged, the man had been completely silent and gone straight off to his trailer.

“Come around the table, I want to show you something.” He was dressed in a black collarless shirt, open-necked, and jeans, and she was immediately struck by the suppressed energy radiating from him.

She walked around the table, on which a number of charts were spread out.

“You’ve seen these before, right, Nora?”

“Of course. They’re mass spectrometry charts.”

“Good. I’ve got a little problem for you.” He pulled a sheet from the top of the pile and slid it in front of her. “Take a look at this one.”

Nora examined the vertical bar graph. It showed the “fingerprint” of some chemical compound she didn’t recognize, quite complicated, displaying dozens of vertical bars of different heights across various elemental masses.

“See anything unusual?”

She looked closer and then noticed that to the far right of the graph was a vertical bar way out on the atomic scale.

“You’ve got an error here,” she said, pointing to the bar.

“An error?”

“Well, it shows an atomic mass that’s impossibly high.”

“Impossible? What if I told you that Banks ran these mass spectra no less than five times with five different samples…and got the same reading every time?”

Nora shook her head. “I’m not a chemist, so maybe I’m missing something, but that mass is too high for any known element.”

“Known element. Greg Banks thinks it’s a superheavy element that no one has seen before.”

She looked at him quizzically.

“I spent the afternoon with Greg trying to figure out the molecular structure from these spectra. He tells me they appear to be similar to an oxide of the rare metals yttrium and palladium, with hydrogen cations. Except that the palladium has been replaced by this unknown superheavy element.”

“I’m afraid my physics is a little rusty,” Nora said.

He swiped his hand through his hair and went on. “The atomic number of uranium is ninety-two. That means it has ninety-two protons in its nucleus. Hydrogen has one, helium has two, and so forth. But every element beyond uranium can only be created in the lab—not in nature. As you go up the scale of atomic numbers beyond uranium, the elements get heavier and heavier, and they become increasingly unstable and short-lived. The atoms just fly apart. They have names like americium, berkelium, einsteinium, moscovium, all the way up to number 118, oganesson. That element was only confirmed in 2002, and it lasts for just one five-hundredth of a second before decaying into something else.”

As he spoke, Tappan began pacing, his long legs taking big strides, then pivoting and walking, and pivoting again.

“But here’s the weird thing: physicists believe that a little farther up the periodic table, around element 120 or so, there’s an ‘island of stability’—a cluster of elements that don’t decay right away. They last a long time, possibly millions of years.”

He stopped in front of Nora, and she could feel his excitement. “That bar you thought was an error? It’s not. It’s a superheavy element. It’s element 126, in fact, because it has 126 protons in its nucleus. It also has 184 neutrons. Both of those numbers, 184 neutrons and 126 protons, are called ‘magic numbers’ by physicists because they exactly fill electron shells. That is what gives this element 126 its remarkable stability.”

Nora listened, becoming increasingly spellbound.

“The bottom line is this: Even though we know element 126 can theoretically exist, we can’t make it. It’s too difficult. We don’t have an accelerator with enough energy, and we don’t have the right ingredients. It is technologically beyond human science.”

He paused. “But here it is. It looks like someone was able to make it. My question to you, Nora, is: Who?”

Nora hesitated. “Aliens,” she said, half-jokingly.

He gazed at her a long time, and then smiled, his dimples appearing. “You said it, not me.”

Nora tried to absorb this. In combination with the microtektites they’d discovered, this appeared to leave little room for doubt: this was indeed the crash site of an advanced, extraterrestrial ship.

She found herself breathing hard, her heart accelerating. Little room for doubt—and yet she realized she was clinging to that doubt with something like desperation. A part of her, she now understood, was simply not ready to accept a conclusion—however obvious—that would alter her perception of the world so significantly.

Her storm of confusion wasn’t due to this discovery alone: it was, in part, because of the closeness of Tappan’s physical presence. The intensification of her heartbeat, the tingling feeling in her limbs, the scent of his excitement—these were things she hadn’t felt in a long time.