Impact

'No. I'm not going to just walk away.'

'What can we do?'

'Blow the mine up.'

21

Mark Corso clutched the CD-ROM in his hand, feeling the sweat from his fingers sticking to the plastic case. It was his first time in the MMO conference room, the sanctum sanctorum of the Mars mission. It was disappointing. The stale air smelled of coffee, carpeting, and Pledge. The walls were done up in fake paneling, some of which had buckled. Plastic tables against the walls were loaded with flat-screen computer monitors, oscilloscopes, consoles, and other random electronic equipment. A screen lowered from the ceiling covered one end of the room, and the ugliest conference table he had ever seen, in brown Formica with stamped aluminum edges and metal legs, dominated the center.

Corso took his seat in front of a little plastic sign sporting his name. He slipped his laptop out, plugged it into a dock, jacked it in, and booted up. Meanwhile the other technicians were trickling in, chatting, joking, and tanking up on weak California coffee from an ancient Sunbeam in the corner.

Marjory Leung sat down beside him, plugged her own computer in. A fragrance of jasmine drifted over him. She was unexpectedly well dressed in a sleek black suit and Corso was glad he had donned his best jacket that morning with one of his most expensive silk ties. The white lab coats were nowhere to be seen.

'Nervous?' she asked.

'A little.' It was Corso's first senior staff meeting, and he was third in line out of ten presenters, each with five minutes and questions.

'Pretty soon it'll seem routine.'

The room fell silent as the MMO mission director, Charles Chaudry, rose from his seat at the far end of the table. Corso liked Chaudry--he was young, hip, with premature gray hair pulled back into a tight ponytail, utterly brilliant and yet down to earth. Everyone knew his story: born in Kashmir, India, he came to the U.S. as a baby in the wave of refugees fleeing the Second Kashmir War of 1965. He'd worked his way up from nothing, a classic immigrant success story, to earn a Ph.D. in planetary geology from Berkeley, his dissertation winning the Stockton Award. As if to make up for his foreign birth, Chaudry was quintessentially American--Californian even--a rock- climber, mountain biker, and avid surfer who tackled the winter waves at Mavericks, said to be the most dangerous break in the world. There were rumors he came from a rich Brahmin family of obscure nobility and sported a title back in the home country, a pasha or nabob, or so the jokes went, but nobody really knew. He was somewhat vain but that was a fault common among NPF staff.

'Welcome,' he said, in an offhand way, flashing a white smile at the group. 'The mission's making great progress.' He ran through some of their recent successes, noted a glowing article in the science section of The New York Times, quoted another piece in the British publication New Scientist, mentioned with a certain schadenfreude suspected problems with the Chinese Hu Jintao orbiter, and cracked a few jokes.

'Now,' he said, 'let's get to the data presentations.' He glanced at a piece of paper. 'Five minutes for each, followed by questions. We'll start with the weather report. Marjory?'

Leung rose and launched into her talk, a PowerPoint presentation on Mars weather, showing infrared images of equatorial ice clouds recently photographed by the MMO. Corso tried to concentrate, but he was too distracted. His moment was fast approaching--five minutes to make his first impression as a senior technician. He was about to make a high-risk move, uncharacteristic of him, but he felt secure with it. He'd gone over it a hundred times. It might be unorthodox but it would blow them away. How could it be otherwise? Here was a stunning mystery, apparently uncovered by Dr. Freeman shortly before his death which he hadn't had the time to analyze. Corso had carried the torch. It was, he felt, a way to honor his professor's memory while at the same time advancing his own career.

He slid his eyes toward the far end of the conference table and took in Derkweiler, sitting at the foot, fat leather portfolio in front of him. Derkweiler would come around when he saw which way the wind was blowing.

Corso listened to the first reports but hardly heard them. He felt a flurry in his gut as the presentation before his drew to a close.

'Mark?' said Chaudry, glancing over at him. 'You're up.' He smiled encouragingly.

Corso slid the CD into the computer drive. It took a moment to load, and then the first image in the PowerPoint presentation popped up on the project.

The MMO Compton Gamma Ray Scintillator:

An Analysis of Anomalous High-Energy

Gamma Ray Emission Data

Mark Corso, Senior Data Analysis Technician

'Thank you, Dr. Chaudry,' said Corso. 'I have a bit of a surprise for you all--a discovery that I believe has some significance.'

Derkweiler's face darkened. Corso tried not to look at it. He didn't want to be thrown off his game.

'Instead of the SHARAD data, I would like to focus on the data gathered by the MMO's Compton Gamma Ray Scintillator.'

The room had fallen very, very silent. He risked a glance at Chaudry. The man looked interested.

He went to the next image, showing Mars with many orbital trajectories drawn around it. 'This is the trajectory of the Mars Orbiter over the past month, collecting data in an almost polar orbit . . .' He rushed through familiar information, punching through several screens in quick succession until he got to the money shot. It showed a graph with periodic spikes. 'If there were a gamma ray source on Mars, this is the theoretical signature as seen from the Mars Orbiter.'

Nods, murmurs, exchanged glances.

He went to the next image, two graphs, one on top of the other, with the spikes almost coinciding.

'And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the actual gamma ray data from the orbiter, laid over the theoretical graph.' He waited for the reaction.

Silence.

'I would call your attention to what appears to be a fairly significant match,' he said, trying to maintain a modest, neutral tone.

Chaudry squinted, leaning forward. The others just stared.

'I know the error bars are somewhat large,' said Corso, 'and I'm well aware that the background noise is high. And, of course, the scintillator is nondirectional. It can't focus on the exact source. But I've run a statistical analysis and determined that there's only one chance out of four that this match is a coincidence.'

More silence. A kind of nervous shuffling in the room.

'Your conclusion, Dr. Corso?' came Chaudry's question, in a studiously neutral tone of voice.

'That there is a gamma ray source on Mars. A point source.'

A shocked silence. 'And what might this gamma ray source be?' asked Chaudry.

'That is the very question that needs to be answered. I believe the next step is to examine the visual and radar images and try to find a corresponding artifact.'