the earth to navigate and the tides linked directly to the phases of the moon.’
Franklin nodded. ‘All right I’m listening. What do you think might be causing it – and please don’t say aliens.’
‘OK, so while I was working at NASA I realized that the things that get reported are only a tiny fraction of what actually gets discovered. NASA is very prickly about its standing in the scientific community and is very careful to keep a lid on anything that might attract the wrong kind of headlines. A few years back, while I was working there, Hubble picked up the trail of some immense gravity wash. It was never reported because no one could work out what had caused it, but one of the theories was that it might have been created by a planet travelling on an erratic, millennia-long orbit that would make it vanish for thousands of years before it swung back to sweep right through our solar system. There are plenty of records of events like it in ancient civilizations, suggesting that people may have witnessed similar fly-pasts thousands of years ago. With the intersection of orbits and the combined gravity pulls of massive celestial objects a collision would not be out of the question. It would be cataclysmic, the end of everything, the end of days – just like Kinderman wrote in his diary. So perhaps he and Professor Douglas did see something coming, like a meteor or this huge planet the ancient prophets warned us about. And maybe that’s why the whole world has gone nuts.’
‘Then why not go public with it?’
Shepherd shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’ He pointed at Cooper still preaching from the live feed. ‘And I can’t work out how he fits into all this either.’
‘Maybe he doesn’t,’ Franklin said. ‘Perhaps the whole Tower of Babel, hell and damnation thing is just a coincidence, another symptom of whatever’s going on.’ He took a breath and blew it out in a long stream. ‘OK, confession time. This … what you’re describing, this feeling or whatever it is that’s making people behave strangely – I feel it too.’
‘Since when?’
‘A few months maybe.’
‘And getting stronger.’
‘Yeah.’
Shepherd nodded. ‘Like that feeling you get when you’re running late. A sick feeling almost – half physical and half an emotion – like you’re in the wrong place and need to be somewhere else.’
Franklin nodded. ‘You feel it too.’
‘For the last few months and getting stronger.’
‘OK, so just for instance let’s assume everyone is experiencing the same thing, only Cooper comes to the conclusion that it’s all down to God’s impending judgement and decides he’s the man to try and do something about it. So he sends the cards, maybe even sends the letters.’
‘Agreed, but it still doesn’t follow that it made Kinderman and Douglas effectively take hammers to several billion dollars’ worth of space hardware.’
The laptop beeped loudly, drawing Franklin’s attention. ‘What’s that?’
Shepherd felt blood rush to his face and was about to launch into a lie when he realized that the alert had sounded different from the previous ones. It had not come from his MPD search but from the ghost file. He opened it up and found a note from Smith.
Managed to recover a few more bits of data. Two terms pop up a few times: Göbekli Tepe and Home. Let me know if it’s astronomy jargon or not. Smith
‘Anything useful?’ Franklin asked.
‘Maybe.’ Shepherd dug out his phone, scrolled to the recent calls list and called a number. It clicked a few times then connected.
‘Hubble Control center.’
‘Merriweather, it’s Shepherd. We found something else. Does Göbekli Tepe ring any bells?’
‘How you spelling that?’
Shepherd told him.
‘Never heard of it, where’s it come from?’
‘We found it on Dr Kinderman’s hard drive. You don’t think it’s something he might have been studying?’
‘If he was, he never mentioned it to me.’
‘OK, thanks.’
‘Sorry I wasn’t more help. Oh, by the way after we spoke last time I called a buddy of mine over at Keck in case he’d seen anything weird in Taurus. He said there’s nothing there that shouldn’t be.’
‘OK, thanks, Merriweather.’
‘Anytime. How’s the manhunt going?’
‘Still hunting.’
‘Good luck with that. Anything I can do, I’m here all week.’
‘Thanks.’ Shepherd hung up. ‘According to our man on the inside it’s not a star or anything like that.’ He leaned forward, his fingers fast-typing GOBEKLI TEPE into Google and hitting Return, half expecting no response at all. What he got was almost two hundred thousand hits. The top one was a Wikipedia