Diablo Mesa(32)

But Tappan seemed oblivious—he was too intoxicated with the discovery, it seemed, to think of anything else.

She took a deep breath and stepped back.

“And there’s something else,” Tappan said. “Even more important. That yttrium-palladium-hydron compound I mentioned earlier? It’s almost a room-temperature superconductor.”

“That’s not possible.”

“Then you know what I’m getting at! Something that conducts electricity at room temperature without resistance: we’ve been trying to make such a material for fifty years. It would revolutionize everything from computing to energy transmission. But in this compound, element 126 is substituted for palladium, and it appears to be a room-temperature superconductor: the holy grail of materials science.”

He stepped forward and gripped her shoulders. “Nora, this nails it. This is the proof we’ve been looking for. This is an alloy that could only have been engineered by a technology far more advanced than ours. Alien technology.”

As his hands gently held her, she tried to keep focus. Extraordinary conclusions, she tried to tell herself, required extraordinary evidence—and there was always a danger when people wanted very badly to believe something.

He embraced her shoulders for a while as silence fell. Then he dropped his hands. “Nora, you’re not saying anything. What do you think?”

“I’m…” She halted.

His glowing face and shining gray eyes, so close to hers, were becoming increasingly distracting. “I’m impressed,” she finally said weakly.

He laughed. “Impressed? That’s all?”

“Give me a chance to process it.”

“Of course, of course! God, I must sound like a fanatic.” He waved it all away with a sweep of his hand. “But you do realize what this means, right?”

She fell silent.

“You’re a natural skeptic. I get it. But as I said, we ran five independent tests on five samples. All came up with that same superheavy elemental line, way out there alone on the m/z axis.”

“Which layers did the samples come from?” Nora finally asked.

“The beginning of the trench, where the object first struck the ground at high velocity. Whatever plowed into the sand shed that substance.”

A silence fell as Tappan began gathering up the charts. “I’m going to lock these in my safe. I’d like to keep this under wraps for now.”

“Wait. You’re not going to tell the group?” Nora asked.

His smile went away. “Not yet.”

“Why?”

Now the smile returned. “Because, Nora, I hope to win you over first! You’re the skeptic I want to convert.” Suddenly, he looked at his watch. “Good God, it’s long past my martini hour. Would you care to join me? This calls for a celebration.”

Nora felt herself blush at the invitation—even if it was harmless—because the thoughts that unexpectedly came into her own head were not quite so innocent. She hoped it wasn’t obvious. “No thanks, it’s been a long day.”

“Of course, of course. A ‘maybe’ is fine for now. But I’m going to get you to yes before long—I promise.”





20



SKIP, IN THE process of giving Mitty his evening walk, watched Nora go off to Quonset 1. As he turned to take the dog back to the trailer, he was approached by Bitan. Twilight gathered over the immense landscape and the first star had appeared in the west—actually, Skip thought, not a star but a planet: Venus, setting just behind the sun.

“Got a minute?” Bitan said. His voice was hushed, confidential.

“Sure.”

“Let’s take a walk.”

Bitan led Skip away from the encampment, walking quickly on his short, stubby legs. A fragrant spring breeze swept across the mesa, carrying with it the scent of dust and some mysterious blooming desert flower. Mitty followed them eagerly.

They walked perhaps a quarter of a mile; then Bitan abruptly stopped and turned back toward the encampment, nodding in its direction. “What do you see?”

Skip wondered if this was a trick question. “Nothing, really, just some lights.”

“Precisely,” Bitan said. “We’ve been walking for just five minutes, and covered—what, maybe several hundred meters? But already that dig is little more than a few gleams against the horizon.”

Skip nodded.

“People are funny creatures,” Bitan said. “Even the most intelligent of them—of us—are so easily swayed by self-deception. Here we are, talking about the Fermi paradox, the billions of planets teeming with potential life. But do you know something? This kind of talk is done mostly to reassure ourselves.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” Skip replied.

“We’ve walked such a short way, yet we can’t see the dig site. How many molecules of earth lie between it and us, do you think? Even this landscape, on a scale we basically understand, is staggeringly large. Can we truly comprehend the vastness of the cosmos? No. So scientists talk about parsecs and astronomical units and light-years because labels and measurements are comforting. We invent labels because, when we use them, it makes us believe we understand what’s really out there.”

“I see what you mean,” Skip said. “That’s what humans do. We label, categorize, measure, and dissect because it gives us the illusion of control.”