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  When the final section of pipe had cleared the hole, the crew wrestled it to the sample tray, and inserted a plunger into the top end to push out the core sample. As expected from Matthews’ observation, the lowest section of the core appeared to be compacted common dirt.

  What came next made Reynolds’ brow knit. Above the dirt, the core sample was a uniform dark gray. It looked less like granite than marble, and even at a glance appeared extremely dense.

  But the real surprise came when the end of the sample emerged. The last core samples they’d brought up before hitting the hard material and switching to the diamond bit had been what they’d expected: hundreds of feet of ice over several feet of dirt and organic material, so there was nothing but a small amount of debris in the core sample above the hard material. As the top of the sample came free from the pipe, it was immediately apparent that, aside from the scratches resulting from the drilling process, the top of the hard material was completely flat.

  Moving to the bottom of the dark section of the sample, Reynolds inspected the boundary with the dirt section. It was irregular.

  “Damn,” he half muttered. Sinclair was on the other side of the sample tray. “Second that,” he said.

  Matthews had been watching the two of them from over Reynolds’ shoulder. “So what’s the deal?” he asked.

  Reynolds and Sinclair looked up from the sample at each other, and then back down at the sample. Finally, Reynolds spoke. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say this was concrete poured over dirt.”

  Matthews frowned.

  “But it can’t be concrete,” Reynolds continued, “and even if it were, it’s like no concrete I’ve ever seen.”

  Matthews scratched his nose. “How long ago did you say the surface here’s been buried under ice?” he asked.

  “Somewhere between 50 and 80 million years,” Reynolds answered.

  “It has to be volcanic,” said Sinclair. “That could explain the rough bottom surface.”

  “But it wouldn’t explain the top surface,” said Reynolds. “When was the last time you saw lava harden into a smooth surface?”

  “I’ve seen smooth lava fields.”

  “Not this smooth.”

  Sinclair nodded. He had to agree, the top surface was like nothing he’d ever seen in a hardened lava flow. It had a surface grain like fine sandpaper.

  “OK,” said Reynolds, “let’s preserve this lower dirt section along with the previous one that was under the ice, but what I’m really concerned with is this dark stuff. I want to do some analysis. Let’s get pictures of everything, and then move this to the lab.”

  “You got it,” Sinclair replied.

  Jill Hodge, the grad student who served as the team’s photographer, fetched her camera from the photo lab in the main shack and took photos of the sample as a whole and in sections, rotated 90 degrees for each series. When she finished, Reynolds gently tugged at the dark material until it broke free from the dirt. The process took more effort than he expected, because the dark material was heavier than he thought it would be.

  With matching grunts, he and Sinclair lifted the dark section of the core off the tray, and moved it onto a sling that Sinclair had laid down. Together they grabbed the handles on each end of the sling and lifted it.

  “At least 130 pounds,” said Sinclair.

  “More like 150,” countered Reynolds.

  In the main shack, they rolled the sample off the sling and onto the scale. The scale’s strain gauges zeroed in on the sample’s weight: 163 pounds, seven ounces.

  “This ain’t no granite. Or marble,” said Sinclair.

  “This is definitely weird,” said Reynolds, “It’s way too dense.”

  Reynolds picked up a small pick and hit the sample with the side face. The sample responded with a “tink” that sounded like marble, but a notch or two lower in pitch.

  “I want to analyze a slice,” said Reynolds. “The sample looks to be homogeneous from top to bottom. I’m going to cut it in half, and take a slice from the middle.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Sinclair replied.

  A half hour later, using a diamond rotary saw, Reynolds had a millimeter slice of the core sample, a section of which he pulverized and fed into the spectrometer. The sample was vaporized and the spectrometer went to work.

  Within a few minutes the results were displayed on the spectrometer’s screen.

  Reynolds studied the data for several minutes before retrieving a reference volume from the bookshelf and opening it, then studied the data for a few minutes more before rendering his initial verdict:

  “Damn!”

  Chapter 2

  Analysis

  Bob Fletch was standing in the shower with the water spraying his back, enjoying its warm sting, when his wife Lizzie poked her head into the bathroom. “You’ve got a phone call,” she hollered.

  “Tell ‘em I’ll call ‘em back.” he shouted.

  “It’s from Antarctica.”

  Of course it is, he thought to himself, turning off the water and stepping out of the shower. He grabbed his towel, did a cursory job of drying himself off, wrapped it around his waist and headed into the bedroom. Lizzie was wearing just a bra and panties, and he goosed her as he went past on the way to the phone. She whooped, as she always did.

  “Who do you know in Antarctica?”

  “Nobody that I know of.”

  He picked up the receiver. “Hello.”

  The voice on the other end was as clear as if calling from across town, which surprised him a bit.

  “Dr. Fletch, this is Hal Reynolds. I’m with the geology department at U. C. Berkeley.”

  “Sure, I know your work. You wrote that paper last year on tectonic analysis.”

  “I’m the guy.”

  “So what’re you doing in Antarctica, and what can I do for you?”

  “We’ve been drilling samples trying to check out some odd-looking echo readings we got around 500 feet under the ice pack, and we finally managed to bring one up. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I thought you might like to look at it.”

  Fletch nodded to himself. As chairman of the School of Geology at the University of Colorado and a specialist in mineralogy, he was a logical choice for Reynolds to turn to.

  “What do you have?” he asked.

  “The stuff we hit looked almost like granite, only denser. It had a smooth top surface, and if I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was artificial. I ran a spectrograph on a sample, and that’s what has me stumped. The chemical building blocks of granite are there, all right, but there’s also what appear to be organic compounds. Plus, while granite has a reasonably regular molecular structure, this stuff turns out to be almost perfectly regular. That’s what makes it so dense.”

  “OK, you’ve got my attention. What would you like to do?”

  “First, I’d like to e-mail you the spectrography results and some photos of the samples. I’ll follow up with some actual samples, but that’ll take a week or so, until the next supply plane makes its run.”

  “Sounds fine to me,” Fletch replied. “Let me give you my home e-mail address. I’m not planning on being in the office for a couple of days.” He recited the information for Reynolds, and agreed to be in touch once he’d had a chance to study the data.

  “So how’s the weather down there?” he asked as they were about to sign off.

  There was a moment’s hesitation as Reynolds tried to guess what kind of sense of humor Fletch might have. He decided that he didn’t want to take a chance of offending him with a caustic comment, and simply said, “Cold.”

  Fletch smiled to himself, knowing that his question had been banal. “I’ll bet,” he answered. “OK, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

  “Great. Talk to you then,” came Reynolds’ reply, and the two hung up.

  “What was that all about?” asked Lizzie, who’d been in the bathroom brushing her teeth during most of the call.

  “This guy fro
m U. C. Berkeley dug up some odd core samples that he can’t explain, and he wants me to take a look at them.”

  “You gonna have to go to the office?”

  “No, I gave him the home address. He’s gonna e-mail the stuff to me so I can look at it tonight.”

  He turned toward the bathroom to finish drying himself off, but Lizzie moved into his path. “So when the going gets tough, they turn to the expert,” she said with a grin, rubbing up against him. He grinned back as she pulled the towel from around his waist and grabbed him where he most liked to be grabbed, at least, by her.

  “Only the best will do,” he replied.

  “Oh yeah? I’ll show you ‘best.’ ” And she did.

  •

  Fletch stared at the data displayed on the screen of the computer in his den and gave a low whistle. After a while he switched to the digitized images Reynolds had sent along with the spectrographs. There were six in all, scanned from slides taken by Jill Hodge. Reynolds had been right — the material did look like marble or very dark cement.

  Switching back to the data display, he made a few notes, then switched to his browser and called up the mineral database at school over the web. There was no question that there were organic compounds present in the sample, and the combination was nothing he’d ever seen before. Nor was there anything in the database that came close to matching.

  Granite is a silicate — a combination of mainly silicon and oxygen, with lesser amounts of aluminum, iron, magnesium, calcium, sodium, potassium and traces of manganese, phosphorus, titanium, zirconium, barium and water.

  The spectrographs that Reynolds had sent him showed all of these, but there were elements present that simply didn’t belong, including carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen, all of which indicated organic compounds.

  Unfortunately, the spectrograph worked by vaporizing material and reporting the raw elements, so there was no way Fletch could determine what compounds the elements were in until he could get his hands on a sample. With chemical and other tests, he could start to get some idea of how this material was put together.

  If he had run across these data without knowing how they were obtained, he’d have assumed that the sample had been contaminated with organic matter. But the cover note that Reynolds had included made it clear that the sample Reynolds tested came from the inside of the section. Reynolds had been careful about getting uncontaminated results.

  Fletch picked up the phone and punched in a number. After a few rings there was an answer at the other end.

  “Charley, it’s Bob. Yeah, hi.”

  “Charley, I just got some spectrographic data from a guy from Berkeley who’s drilling core samples in Antarctica. It’s the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  For the next half hour he and his friend from the University of Kentucky speculated on what the team in Antarctica might have found. He described the appearance of the core sample, forwarding the images and data over the net as they talked. By the end of the conversation, Fletch had a feeling that his hunch could very well be correct.

  Reynolds had said that the material almost seemed artificial, and Fletch had a feeling that he was right. And he tried not to think too much about the implications if this proved to be true.

  Later that evening, Charles LeMont forwarded the data and images to two other colleagues, and posted them on his web site. Within three days there was a UseNet newsgroup devoted to the find, and a search of the web would have found more than a dozen web sites that included the data and images.

  Eleven days later, when Fletch received the actual samples for testing, the geology and mineralogy departments of virtually every university and college in the world knew of the find, and were busily adding their speculations on what it might be.

  Chapter 3

  Revelation

  Dewey Manley managed to find a seat in the second row of the auditorium at the College of Letters and Science at U. C. Berkeley even though the press conference was about to begin. He checked his digital recorder, turned to a clean page in his notebook and, feeling settled in, studied the group on the stage who were getting ready to take their seats.

  There were three men and one woman, ranging in age from what appeared to be early thirties to late fifties. The woman, who he thought to be rather attractive, looked to be at the lower range, right around thirty. She was about 5′ 10″, with brown hair that came just to her collar. She had little or no makeup on, and was wearing a beige skirt and jacket with a white blouse. Very professional.

  Sharing the stage with her was a large, athletic-looking man of around forty, a bit over six feet tall with dark hair, wearing a plaid shirt and corduroy slacks with no jacket. The second man looked to be in his late forties, very tall, slim, with dirty blond hair flecked with gray and a mustache, dressed in tan chinos and a blue shirt open at the collar under a tweed jacket. The final man was the elder of the group, with white hair, clean shaven and wearing dark gray slacks, a gray tweed jacket and a bow tie.

  As the speakers moved to their seats, the audience began to quiet down, and the elder man, who had taken the center seat, leaned slightly toward his microphone.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please.”

  The crowd noise went down several notches further. The speaker paused, looking around the audience with the air of one long accustomed to dealing with large groups. At the back of the auditorium there were perhaps a half dozen video cameras set up, and there were numerous flashes as the strobes of still photographers fired. After a few moments, the speaker resumed.

  “Thank you all for coming this morning. I’m Dr. Royce Clayton, chairman of the Geology Department here at U. C. Berkeley. Joining me on the panel is Dr. Harold Reynolds of our department,” — the athletic man nodded — “Dr. Stephanie Mitchell, also of our department” — the woman nodded at the audience — “and Dr. Robert Fletch, chairman of the School of Geology at the University of Colorado.” The tall man smiled.

  “We have a prepared presentation, which will be accompanied by some visuals. We’ll take questions afterwards. We will also have copies of photos and videos available for you at the end of this conference.”

  The crowd had now settled down, and the strobe flashes had ceased.

  “As I’m sure you’re all aware, a few weeks ago, an interesting and perhaps important discovery was made in Antarctica about 100 miles Southwest of McMurdo Station by Dr. Reynolds and his team while taking core samples from below the ice pack.” As he spoke, a slide was projected on the screen to the right of the stage, showing a collection of shacks and vehicles surrounding a drilling rig in what was obviously Antarctica.

  “At approximately 130 meters below the surface of the ice, their drill encountered a dense material that required considerable effort to penetrate.”

  Clayton so far was repeating what even the general press had already reported. As science editor for the San Francisco Times, Manley had written two pieces on the discovery. There had been a fair amount of speculation on what the findings meant, and the tabloids had of course had a field day. According to the American Exposer, the Antarctic team had drilled a hole into a space ship that had been buried under the ice for millions of years, and the aliens inside were really, really pissed! In his own pieces, Manley had reported that most experts took the view that the material brought up was some kind of natural compound that simply hadn’t been seen before.

  “Since the initial sample was brought to the surface, and its basic properties determined, an additional four samples have been taken from the surrounding area.”

  This was new. Following the initial surge of publicity, based on widespread exposure via the Internet, the Antarctic team had clamped down on the spread of information.

  “In each of the samples taken, analysis yielded essentially the same results.”

  As Clayton spoke, slides showing core samples laid parallel in rows at the drill site were projected.

  “With the assistance of Dr. Fletch in Colorado
and the chemistry department here at Berkeley, the samples have been carefully studied, and our present assessment is that the material is not a naturally-occurring compound.”

  This created a slight buzz in the auditorium, which Clayton chose to ignore.

  “More precisely, we now feel that the material found in the samples was artificially created.”

  Now he paused, and let the heightened buzz run its course.

  “Since the samples were taken from under more than 400 feet of Antarctic ice, and since as far as we know the part of Antarctica in question has been under ice for at least 40 million years, our findings have made us — shall we say — curious.”

  Several strobes fired, accompanied by the click-whine of still camera shutters. For maybe the hundredth time, Manley found himself both amused and slightly annoyed at the photographers. How on earth did the shots they just took look any different from the ones they took at the start of the session? He guessed that it was just human nature at work, and went back to taking notes.

  “I’d like to turn things over to Dr. Reynolds at this point, so that he can give you a better description of the drill site and what he and his team have found.”

  Reynolds nodded at Clayton, and cleared his throat.

  “Our exploration began with a series of echo soundings that revealed interesting features below the ice pack. This was what led us to drill our original core sample. As Dr. Clayton mentioned, we’ve now taken a total of five core samples.

  “Our findings were sheer luck. Most of the Antarctic ice pack is a mile deep or more. We just happened to be near the edge of the pack, where the depth was relatively shallow.

  “The material brought up from all five locations was essentially the same. It’s denser and harder than granite, and it has a tighter and more closely aligned molecular structure.

  “But while it resembles granite in many ways, and contains all of the base elements found in granite, it’s not granite, or at least not any kind we’ve ever seen.