Impact

'For a hundred thousand dollars, I could find the crater five times over.'

'Trust me, Mr. Ford, you could search that bay a hundred years and not find it--unless you knew exactly where to look. It's small and unrecognizable from the air.'

Ford leaned back, sipped his coffee. 'Perhaps you might tell me how you made this discovery and why it cost you a hundred thousand dollars.'

The girl took a long sip of her coffee. 'I will. Back on April fourteenth, I had just bought a telescope and I was taking a time exposure of the constellation Orion. Wide field. The meteor passed through and I got the streak on film. Or rather digitally.'

'You photographed it?' Ford could hardly believe his luck.

'Then I had an idea--I checked the GoMOOS weather buoy data on the Internet. No waves. I figured it must have hit an island instead of the water. So, by angulating from the photograph, I was able to identify a line along which it must have fallen. I borrowed my father's lobster boat, took a friend, and went out looking for it.'

'Why so interested in meteorites?'

'Meteorites are worth a lot of money.'

'You're quite the entrepreneur.'

'To cover our tracks we circulated a phony story about looking for a pirate treasure.'

'I'm beginning to see the real story,' said Ford.

'Yeah. Our meth-addicted stalker was addled enough to believe it and attacked us, sinking my father's lobster boat. The insurance company wouldn't pay.'

'I'm sorry.'

'My father's making payments on a boat that doesn't exist. We might lose our house. So you see why I need money--to get him a new boat.'

Emotion welled up in her eyes. Ford pretended not to notice. 'You found the crater,' Ford said easily. 'So what did the meteorite look like?'

'Did I say I found a meteorite?'

Ford felt his heart quicken. He knew instinctively the girl was telling the truth. 'You didn't find a meteorite in the crater?'

'Now we're getting into the information that's going to cost you.'

Ford looked at her steadily for a long time. Finally he spoke. 'May I ask what a girl with your brains is doing waitressing in Damariscotta, Maine?'

'I dropped out of college.'

'What college?'

'Princeton.'

'Princeton? Isn't that somewhere in Jersey?'

'Very funny.'

'What'd you major in?'

'I was supposedly pre-med but I took a lot of physics and astronomy courses. Too many. I flunked organic chem, lost my financial aid.'

Ford thought for a while. What the hell. 'It just so happens a hundred thousand dropped in my lap the other day which I don't really need. It's yours--to buy a new boat. But it comes with conditions. You're working for me, now. You'll be absolutely quiet, tell nothing to no one, not even your friend. And the first thing we're going to do in this new boat is visit the crater. Agreed?'

The girl surprised Ford by the sheer wattage of her smile. She stuck out her hand. 'Agreed.'

42

Mark Corso tossed the mail on a table and threw himself into an armchair in his friend's basement apartment on the Upper West Side. His head dropped back against the cushion and he closed his eyes. He felt logy, an incipient hangover creeping up behind his eyeballs. For the last three nights he had worked double shifts at Moto's, one to one, and to get through them he'd been nursing screwdrivers under the bar. Even with the long hours he still wasn't making enough to pay his overdue share of the rent. He needed that severance check from NPF and he needed it fast. In what little free time he had, he'd been job hunting and obsessively going over the images on the hard drive, refining and polishing them. He'd hardly slept. And on top of it, he missed Marjory Leung awfully, fantasized about her long, nude, springy body day and night. He'd talked to her a half a dozen times but it was clear the relationship wasn't going to continue--although they remained good buddies.

Fighting the urge to sleep, he roused himself and eyed the mail. Depressingly slim responses to his job queries and applications. With an effort of will he scooped up the pile, tore open the first letter, and read the first line. Crumpling it into a ball he dropped it, opened the second, the third, the fourth.

The pile of paper at his feet grew.

The sixth and last letter stopped him dead. It was from the personnel office at CalTech, which administered NPF. At first he thought it might be his severance check, but when he opened it all he found was a letter. He scanned it in disbelief, his eye fixing on the first paragraph.

'After reviewing your employment records and the notice of termination for cause from your former supervisor at NPF, we have determined that you do not qualify for the severance package or unused leave compensation as outlined in your employment contract. We refer you to regulations 4.5.1 through 6 in the Handbook for Employees . . .'

He read it twice and tossed it on the table. This wasn't happening to him. They owed him two weeks' severance and two weeks' unused vacation: over eight grand. After six years of graduate school and eighty thousand dollars in student loans, here he was, crashing in a friend's basement apartment with less than five hundred dollars in his bank account, no job, no prospects, and a brick of maxed-out credit cards so thick he couldn't fit them all in his wallet. And now he couldn't even pay the back rent.

Slowly, inexorably, his anger built. Those bastards at NPF would pay. They owed him eight thousand dollars and he would get his money, one way or another. There had to be a way to get back at them.

The door opened and his roommate stood in the doorway. 'Hey, Mark, I hate to be a jerk about that back rent, but I need the money. Like now.'

Mark Corso arrived on the doorstep of his mother's old brownstone in Greenpoint, suitcases in hand, and rang the bell. The hangover was now full-blown, his eyeballs throbbed and he had a mouthful of paste. He hadn't been able to bring himself to call ahead. Inside, he could hear the shuffling of feet, the sound of locks being turned, and then his mother's quavering, uncertain voice.

'Who is it?'

'Me. Mark.'

The final lock was turned and there was his mother--short, plump, iron-gray hair--her face lighting up. 'Mark!' The arms went around him in a suffocating embrace, once, twice. She smelled of fresh pasta and her arms were patched with flour. 'What have you got here, suitcases? Are you moving back in? Don't stand outside in the cold, come in! Are you here to stay or just a visit? You look so tired!' Another embrace, this one with a hint of tears.

She led her son, unresisting, into the parlor, and sat him down on the sofa.

'I'll make you your favorite, a Fluffernutter, you just stay right there and relax. You're so thin!'

'I'm fine, Mom.'

Corso kicked off his shoes, stretched out on the sofa, clasped his hands behind his head, and stared up at the swirls of brushed stucco on the ceiling of his childhood home, thinking about the money NPF owed him. They couldn't deny him two weeks' severance just like that, without due process. And vacation time? He'd earned that.