path. He emerged on Quebec Street, straightened up, adjusted his suit, and ran his fingers through his hair. He again assumed the air of a neighbor taking the air, walking briskly, ducking into the shadows once to avoid a cruising cop car. Rounding several corners, he came to the end of the street where he’d parked his car, keeping to the shadows of a copse of trees.
Bad news. Peering through a screen of trees he could see two cop cars, light bars going, parked on either side of his rental car, obviously making the plates. Had Lockwood called the cops? Or maybe he’d left it parked too long: the house party was long over and some paranoid suburbanite had called the cops. Unfortunately, he’d rented the Mercedes in his real name—there’d been no choice.
Cursing under his breath, Ford melted back into the darkness and threaded his way through backyards and parkland toward American University and the bus stop on Massachusetts Avenue.
56
Abbey scanned the files on the 160 terabyte hard drive, sampling a few at random. There were hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of images of Mars, spectacular, amazing, extraordinary images of craters, volcanoes, canyons, deserts, dune fields, mountains, and plains. The radar images were equally spectacular, slices through the Martian crust. But the gamma ray data were simply tables of numbers and various arcane graphs, impossible to decipher. No images there—just numbers.
One folder caught her eye, titled GAMMA ANOMALY. Inside was a single file with a pps extension—a PowerPoint presentation, and it had been created on the disk only a few weeks before.
Abbey clicked on the pps file. A screen popped up and the presentation began.
The MMO Compton Gamma Ray Scintillator:
An Analysis of Anomalous High-Energy
Gamma Ray Emission Data
Mark Corso, Senior Data Analysis Technician
This was looking good—this must be the presentation that irritated his supervisor, Derkweiler, and got him fired. His obsession. She clicked to the next page, which showed a schematic of the planet Mars with the orbital trajectories of the MMO satellite drawn around it, the multiple orbits overlaid. Then came a graph labeled Theoretical Signature of Gamma Ray Point Source on the Surface of Mars, showing a nice, neat square wave pattern. The next one was labeled Actual Gamma Ray Signature, which was hard to make out, and then both were combined for what looked to her like a pretty tenuous match, with large error bars and a lot of background noise. There were peaks and valleys, but just barely, and the theoretical and actual signatures looked out of phase.
She clicked again but that was the end.
What did it mean? It was obviously an oral presentation, no written text to go along with it.
She clicked through it again, trying to figure it out. Theoretical Gamma Ray Point Source on the Surface of Mars. She thought back to her freshman physics class at Prince ton and what she was supposed to know about gamma rays. They were the most energetic part of the electromagnetic spectrum, higher energy than X-rays. Gamma rays, gamma rays . . . Like she told Ford, there shouldn’t be any coming from Mars—or should there? She cursed herself for not studying harder.
She Googled gamma rays and read up on them. They were produced only by extremely violent events—supernovae, black holes, neutron stars, matter-antimatter annihilations. In the solar system, she read, gamma rays were naturally created in one way and one way only: when powerful cosmic rays from deep space struck the atmosphere or surface of a planet. Each cosmic ray strike tore apart atoms of matter, producing a flash of gamma radiation. As a result, all the solar system’s planets, bathed in a diffuse cosmic ray bombardment from deep space, glowed faintly in gamma rays. The glow was diffuse, planetwide.
She read through several articles but it all came down to the same thing: no known natural process could create a point source of gamma rays in the solar system. No wonder Corso was interested. He’d found a point source for gamma rays on Mars—and no one at NPF believed him. Or was it all in his head? It was hard to tell.
She stared at the computer screen, rubbed her eyes, glanced at the clock. Three A.M. Where was Ford?
She sighed and got up, rummaged in the small fridge. Empty. She had drunk up all her Diet Cokes, eaten the bags of Cheetos and wolfed down the Mars Bars. Maybe she should sleep. But the thought of sleep did not appeal to her. She was