Moss looked mildly disappointed at this shortcut in his lecture. 'You're familiar with neutrinos?'
'Never seen one.'
The astrophysicist nodded wryly. 'Precisely. Far smaller than an atom. So small that billions are passing through our bodies right at this moment without effect. So small that a neutrino can pass through the entire planet without hitting anything. The most inconsequential objects imaginable. Chargeless. Massless. Yet what if they do have mass, however slight? There are so many of them they could represent a substantial fraction of our missing universe. If we could find and count them and tell where they come from, it would bring us a lot of information. It's the finding that's the problem.'
'Which you've done.'
'Which we're in the process of doing. Statistically, a very few neutrinos do collide with the particles of an atom as they streak through the earth. When this happens there's a tiny explosion of sorts, a spark, a kind of radiation- a point of light, if you will. We can't see these flashes in rock. But sensitive instruments can see them in transparent mediums such as tanks of water. Or, ice.'
'Ta-da,' Lewis said.
'Drill holes deep enough and the ice becomes so compressed that all the bubbles and color are squeezed out of it. Ice becomes clearer than glass. Clear as diamond. Instruments can detect these flashes for a thousand feet in all directions. We've drilled holes a mile deep to spot neutrino light. It's the best place in the world, really. If it works. If it works.'
'There's been problems.'
'No! Not problems. Scientific realities. Impatience by funding agencies. Because they have no idea of the conditions down here. No idea! I'm staying this winter to try to keep things on schedule. Because we might find something so unexpected that it changes all our understanding of gravity, matter, energy…'
'You did find something unexpected.'
'Yes.' Again, Moss resented the prompting. 'As a by-product of a lifelong search. A search here, at the harshest place on earth.'
'The Pole is pretty awesome.'
'You're privileged to be here. Men have been trying to decipher the heavens since Babylonian priests climbed their ziggurats. Like pilgrims and holy men, they've gone to the mountaintops. Now they've come to the farthest mountaintop, the South Pole. The farthest place! After this, the next ziggurat is space!'
'And you have something from space.' Lewis was trying to be polite but he was growing impatient to see what he'd been sent for.
'Yes.' Moss gave up on his preamble. 'You have some expertise?'
'A little from college. I'm not kidding myself about why Jim Sparco picked me. I wasn't the best, I was convenient and unemployed. I was interested in his research. And he thought I was principled, which meant he thought I could keep my mouth shut.'
'Yes, I'm interested in your principles.' Moss studied him. 'You've signed on to look for global warming, correct?'
'As part of the weather readings.'
'And yet you're a petroleum geologist, right?'
'I was.'
'Which contributes to global warming.'
'Maybe.'
'No maybe about it.'
'Oil also keeps us alive down here. So you can find the universe.'
'Conceded.'
'Besides which, I quit.'
'Yes, that intrigues me. Sparco told me the story when I e-mailed him about my rock. I'm sure Big Oil paid well. So you've made an interesting choice, haven't you? Everyone comes to the Pole for something.'
'I came to help out. I came to work for the good guys. If I make some small contribution toward your discovery, I'm excited.'
Moss nodded. 'Fair enough. Fair enough.' The idea of a fingie wanting a piece of Michael Moss's reflected glory obviously pleased him. Made sense to him. 'I admire your dedication. Someday your help may be credited. In the meantime, however, the need for discretion, as you said, is paramount. No one knows of this discovery. No one will know, until I choose to tell them. Agreed?'
Lewis nodded. It's what Sparco had told him to expect.
'I haven't decided what to do with it,' Moss explained.
He nodded again.
Slowly, the scientist stood up, moved to a file cabinet, and opened a drawer. 'It's interesting how compelling a rock becomes in a place that doesn't have any. I've touched this thing a thousand times. Wondered where it came from. What might be inside.' He lifted his arm, hefting a dull brown rock the size and shape of a large, lumpy baking potato. 'It's remarkably ugly.'
Lewis took the stone, dense and heavy. Eight, ten pounds. The rock was burnt and glassy on one side. My God. 'How many people know about this?' he asked.
'No one, really. I confided in Sparco because we've spent so much time down here together. He persuaded me this might represent a life-changing opportunity. But I couldn't risk even transmitting a picture of it on the Internet. It was he who suggested finding someone like you to make an initial judgment. I think he'd already met you, at Toolik Lake. Fortuitous, no?'
'And you found it…'
'A few months ago, when drilling Hole 18-b. Just happened to strike it. Dumb luck, I admit. About a thousand years down as measured in layers of snowfall.'
'And thought it might be a meteorite…'
'Because why else is there a rock in the ice cap? If there's a stone at the Pole, it has to have come from the sky.'
Lewis nodded, looking at the tarlike crust. Evidence of heat from a fall through the atmosphere. Which meant…
He looked at Moss.
The astronomer was watching him expectantly. 'Well?'
'Superficially, at least, it fits.' Lewis set it carefully on some papers on a desk.
'Then you think it's from space?'
'Probably.' He paused, considering what to say. 'As you said, the fact that there's thousands of feet of ice between this and bedrock suggests it fell from the sky. That's why Antarctica has become a prime hunting ground for meteorites of all kinds. They stick out like a sore thumb. But all the others have been found on the surface around the Trans-Antarctic Range, where flowing ice hits the mountain barrier and breaks upward to carry buried meteorites to the surface. The wind blows the last snow away. To strike a buried one with your drilling is pretty lucky. Amazingly lucky.'
'It could have been salted by some joker, I suppose,' Moss conceded. 'Dropped down the hole when I wasn't looking. But why? No one has confessed and it looked like the real thing to me. We use hot water to melt holes in the ice, drilling downward with what amounts to a big shower head. A camera showed something was sticking into one side of our tube. I gave the crew a break, paused to melt a bulb of water to free it, and then hauled it up.'
'And kept quiet about your find.'
'I wanted to be sure.'
'You understand I'm no expert?'
'You're as close as we could find, at short notice, to come down here like this.'
'Yes. And, as Sparco suspected, I don't think this is your average meteorite. Have you noticed it's basaltic?'
'I've noticed it's plain.'
'Exactly,' said Lewis, now the lecturer. In geology he wasn't the fingie. 'Compared to many of the metallic meteorites, this looks boring to us. Ordinary. That's because it's a common kind of rock found on earth but a rare kind to come from space. Most meteorites have more iron and nickel. They date from the dawn of the solar system.
