Collins stopped off on Level 7 to see if Director Compton had any last-minute orders before they lifted off from Nellis Air Force base a mile and half above the complex. Jack nodded at the assistants as he strolled through the outer office. From the way the three men and one woman were hunched over their computer terminals, it looked like Niles had them dealing with a heavier than normal workload. Jack knocked on the door, sparing the ten- foot-by-six-foot portrait of Abraham Lincoln a brief glance after being told to come in.
“Niles, we’re getting ready to shove off,” he said as he saw Compton switching his interest from a file in his hands to the large center screen monitor.
“Jack, good, you may want to see this before you go,” Niles said, offering the colonel a seat in front of his desk. He handed Collins a copy of the report he was reading. “I had these typed up from memory and a brief conversation with the senator just an hour ago. Also, take along some of these photos of what was found in the debris of the crater. It looks like paperwork and pictures of star fields. They’re made of the most unusual material; they look like paper, but seem to have a property like glass or dense plastic. I’ve passed them along to Virginia and Pete Golding to get their take on it. The public has no knowledge of these… at least for the moment.”
Jack took the typed report and downloaded photos from Shackleton, glancing over them as they were printed out. The written report was basically everything they had covered at the late lunch meeting with Lee and Alice at their home. The photos sent by the probes from the Moon, however, were a different story. Some showed the Moon from different angles, some showed Earth in heavy cloud cover. One showed the star field deeper into the solar system. Some of them Jack didn’t recognize. After he perused the report and the strange photos, he turned and watched the center screen. It was the grainy telemetry signal from Shackleton Crater. One of the rovers looked as if it had a small stone in its Canadian-built steel grips. It was rolling it over in its “fingers” as though examining it. Then Jack watched as the rover swung its arm around and deposited the stone in a pile that was at least two feet in height.
“With everything inside that crater, I would think JPL and NASA would be concentrating their efforts somewhere else instead of rock collecting.”
“That’s the thing I wanted you to see. Remember when the senator said that inside the crate that fell over there were skeletal remains and some strange-looking rocks?”
Jack looked at the report again. Then he found the spot where Niles’s memory had recorded the senator’s exact words. “I didn’t until you just mentioned it.” Collins looked at the video feed again. “Is this live?”
“Yes, they’re running a special on CNN about the collections going on in the crater, that’s why the picture is so grainy,” Niles said. “It’s streaming right to us before JPL’s had a chance to clean it up. The point is, look at those rocks. I’ve seen Moon rocks before. Hell, I’ve probably held at least two hundred of them. They’ve always fascinated me.” He stood and moved closer to the large screen. “I have to say this, and I think someone else also has noticed this at NASA and JPL. Those are not rocks indigenous to the lunar surface.”
Jack stood. He tried to focus on the grainy picture. The rocks resembled lava. They looked porous. But he had seen Moon rocks that looked the same way.
“How can you be sure?” Collins asked.
“Look here,” Niles said, pointing at the uppermost layers of rocks that the robot had piled in the center of the crater. “That silverish material looks like mercury, or possibly even lead. That’s not a Moon rock.”
“Maybe small asteroids or meteors then. That would go a long way to explaining the devastation inside the crater.”
“I don’t know, but point taken, Jack,” Niles said, watching the robot pick up the rock it had just placed on the pile. “Maybe we’ll find out something in a moment. It looks like they’re going to try and get a spectrograph report.”
Stan Nathan had just agreed with Hugh Evans in Houston that they should run a spectrograph analysis on one of the stones. Stan was hesitant at first. Hugh had just sanctioned the use of a limited supply of bottled air and water to clean off the surface of the rock before running the analysis. The Beatles all had a very limited supply of air and water, and Stan hated the idea of expending the supply of George for the test. But as Hugh had pointed out, they had supplies from three other Beatles if they needed water or air.
“Okay, REMCOM, get the order out to George to start the centrifugal force rotation of its hands.”
“Roger, Flight, commencing spin.”
A full minute later they all watched as the two-handed George started to spin the rock in its three-fingered grip. They saw dust fly off the stone as the centrifugal force became too great for the small particulate matter to adhere to the porous surface. It spun for fifteen seconds and then came to a halt. By that time, the command to wash and blow off the small rock had been sent and received.
As the world watched live, a third arm located beside the small drilling derrick extended and came within two inches of the rock. The finger grips started spinning once more as a stream of heated water shot from a small nozzle embedded in the arm. The water struck the stone. Frozen particles of ice were thrown free as the centrifugal force forced them from the porous stone. A fourth arm extended. A burst of air hit the spinning stone. More particulate matter blasted away from the rock and then as quickly as it had started, the spinning and washing ceased.
“That went well,” Stan said with relief as he reached over his console and patted one of the programmers on the back. “Pretty flawless, now we need to connect the spectrograph and see-”
“Flight, we have a glitch in the power readings for George. The stored battery charge has risen by thirteen percent.”
“What?” Nathan moved rapidly to his console and looked at the telemetry streaming in from Shackleton.
“I’m also showing a rise from the stored battery power of Ringo, Flight.”
“That’s impossible. Where can they be picking up power? Ringo ’s not even in sunlight.”
“I don’t know, Flight, but George is now back up to fifty-two percent power and rising.”
As they watched, the grainy picture from Shackleton cleared and became crystalline in clarity.
“Flight, we have a one hundred percent surge in communications from John on the upper rim of the crater. Whatever is going on is affecting the remote from almost a half a mile up.”
Stunned, Nathan looked at the programmers and technicians.
“Look!” someone said, louder than necessary.
On the main screen, the rock that was being held by George was glowing with a soft luminescence. The illumination was silverish in color and seemed to act as a halo around the stone.
“Pasadena, this is Houston,” Hugh Evans called on the VOX system. “Stan, this reaction started happening when oxygen and water was added to that rock. For the time being have George drop the rock and get the hell away before we lose him.”
“Right,” Nathan answered as he nodded for REMCOM to pass along the order.
Technicians started to furiously type commands from their stations. They were ordering all three of the Beatles to get as far back from the stone as they could without climbing out of the crater. The rock on the screen was glowing brighter.
“Come on, come on!” Nathan said out loud.
“The batteries can’t take this. The voltage regulators onboard are not shutting down the charge. We are at one hundred and twelve percent and rising on all three Beatles. John on the rim is at eighty-five percent recharge and rising.”
Finally, on the television screens and in front of most of the world, George dropped the rock and immediately started backing away.
“Leave John in place on the rim, I want to get as many readings from the crater floor as we can,” Nathan said. He wished the Beatles would move faster.
“We have no effect. Power readings are off the scale. We may have to-”
“Jesus, look at that!” another technician said. Nathan was glad that their reactions were kept in-house. CNN had left it up to JPL’s science advisor for descriptions of what was happening. He wished he could hear how he would explain this.
The pile of strange rocks began to glow, apparently reacting to the air- and water-contaminated rock. They were much brighter than the first stone.
