Authors: David DeBatto
David
He drove to the University of New Mexico campus after being told by the department secretary who’d answered the phone that
Dr. Burgess would be finished teaching at two o’clock. He walked discreetly behind her as a student, an earnest young fellow
with a crewcut, followed her from class, pestering her with questions all the way to her office door. When DeLuca knocked,
she opened it quickly and said, exasperatedly, “What? Oh. It’s you.”
“Your student left,” DeLuca said. “The coast is clear. I thought you said students avoided you during office hours.”
“Come on in,” Burgess said, smiling and rolling her eyes. “These aren’t my office hours. It’s the goddamn GI Bill. These guys
get out of the service and come to school for free, and they’re the best students I have because they’re so disciplined and
motivated, but they won’t leave me alone. I had one follow me all the way to my car.”
“Isn’t that what the GI Bill was supposed to be for?” DeLuca said.
“It is,” she agreed. “I just need time to catch my breath once in a while. What can I do for you?”
She was dressed in a white turtleneck sweater and a denim skirt that fell just to the top of the knee-high suede boots she
was wearing. She had, DeLuca thought, an interesting way of getting more attractive each time he saw her, not that it meant
anything to him—just an observation.
“I read the papers you gave me,” he said. “I was hoping we could talk about them a little bit.”
“All right,” she said, “but I didn’t get a chance to eat before class and I’m starving. Do you eat pizza?”
“I’m Italian,” DeLuca said. “I eat pizza.”
She walked him to a place called Dinardo’s, off-campus but full of students eating slices and pecking away on their laptops
or reading books while they ate. DeLuca and Burgess got a booth by the window. Outside, across the street, a group of protesters
marched carrying signs saying,
US TROOPS OUT OF IRAQ
and
STOP THE OCCUPATION
. After they ordered, Burgess asked him what he thought of the protesters.
“They remind me of myself,” he said. “I marched against Vietnam. I was really young and the war was practically over, but
I guess I felt a small sense of accomplishment when it ended. Actually, not when it ended—when Nixon resigned. Which was sort
of the same thing, in my mind.”
“You marched against the war but you enlisted anyway?”
“Later,” he said. “It’s a long story.”
“What about now?” she said. “What about the signs?”
“Do I think the Army should get out?” he said. “Yeah. Don’t get me wrong, Doctor…”
“Penny,” she said.
“Penny,” he agreed. “And I’m David. I was saying, don’t get me wrong about one thing—I have a lot of good friends in the Army
and they’re good men who do the toughest job on earth extremely well. My only problem is that the Army is really good at one
thing, and that’s blowing stuff up, but after you conquer a country, you don’t want the Army anymore. War’s a mess and it’s
a bitch to straighten everything out afterward, and I know because that’s exactly what I was doing over there, but it just
seems to me that once we kicked Saddam out, we didn’t know what to do next. It seemed like every time I helped rebuild a school
or get a hospital’s generator restarted, some insurgent would blow up a car and then the Army would come in and level the
building. And how else do you respond? Maybe I don’t know how you win hearts and minds, but I don’t think you do it by blowing
stuff up. The Army fights fire with fire. I think you fight fire with water. I think maybe if we had a civil reconstruction
corps that was as well trained and equipped as the Fourth Army and maybe with as many numbers to do the job, we could avoid
what we’ve got now. But what do I know.”
“You were there,” she said. “You know more than I do.” She gestured out the window. “And more than they do. I have wondered
if farming out the reconstruction jobs to the lowest bidders was such a good idea.”
“Halliburton was the
lowest
bidder?” DeLuca said. “That’s news to me.”
“You wanted to talk about my work?” she said.
“Mostly I want to ask a whole lot of stupid questions,” he said. “Just to clear some things up in my head.” He’d meant to
talk with her even before his conversation with Sami, but the talk with Sami had added a few new dimensions to his line of
inquiry. “I promise I won’t follow you to your car.”
“You, I’d welcome,” she said. “Ask away.”
“Well,” he said, “from what I understand, this probe you’re developing to detect life on Mars is sort of like an electronic
sniffer. Is that a fair categorization? I say that because when I was in Iraq, actually, we had recon teams with sniffers
to look for biologicals and chemical agents—my understanding of how they worked was that they collect the chemical elements
in the air, all the spores and bacteria and viral particles, and then they break them down into their molecular parts and
give each molecular building block an electrical charge so that it can be read, and then they compare that signature against
the ones stored in the onboard computer. And from reading your paper, it sounded to me like the probe you’re building is something
more sophisticated but similar. Is that right?”
She smiled.
“You’re very perceptive,” she said. “My husband told me ten years ago that I should have patented the work I did on that.
Yes, the sniffers you used in Iraq were more or less developed from work a number of us started as graduate students, actually.
I never expected my work would ever have a defense application…”
“Given that it could save millions of lives some day,” DeLuca said, “I think you should be pleased. But that’s essentially
what you’re sending to Mars?”
“Essentially,” she said. “Although after we compare the particles we find to what we already know, we’re going to have to
compare them to what we don’t already know, because life there may not fit the definitions we have of life here. The program
is going to have to be adaptable.”
He noticed that the girl at the booth next to them was crying while the boy she was with held her hands. She was getting dumped,
apparently. The girl looked like a sorority sweetheart. The boy had Elvis sideburns, pierced eyebrows, and a tattoo on the
back of his neck of some Chinese character. DeLuca suspected she’d land on her feet.
“And you use lasers to read the molecular particles,” he said.
“That’s right,” Burgess said.
“I’m interested in what lasers can do,” he said. “Just sort of generally speaking. How they can measure things and affect
things.”
“Okay,” she said. “I suppose I know a little bit about that.”
“Your husband was working with lasers, too, right?” DeLuca said.
“Rather different kinds of lasers, but yes,” she said. “He was.”
“So let me just ask you,” he said. “So I can get a picture in my head. Generally speaking. Energy is energy, and it takes
different forms at different wavelengths, but it’s all the same thing, right? Microwaves, infrared, X-rays, radio signals,
they can all be lased, right?”
“Right,” she said.
“And at low power levels, like what you’re talking about, you can read the feedback you get from a molecular building block
and tell what it is, right?”
“You can measure certain properties of the electrical field surrounding it,” she said.
“And everybody generates an electrical field, right?” he said. “That’s what sharks have in their noses to detect prey in the
water. They can read the electrical field of an injured fish, or something like that, right?”
“You probably know more about sharks than I do,” she said. “All I know is what I see on the Discovery channel. But yes to
your question about electrical fields.”
“And CAT scans and PET scans measure the electrical activity of various tissues and parts of the body,” he said. “Isn’t that
how they work?”
“I believe it is,” she said. “If you want to drastically simplify it.”
“Drastically simple is the best I can do,” DeLuca said. “And to read something, lasers send a pulse and then they measure
how that pulse is modified by the return. That’s how the scanners at the supermarket work, reading the bar code.”
“Again, to drastically simplify, I suppose the answer is yes. You can also phase the signals from one or more lasers to watch
what happens at the interface.”
“That’s good,” DeLuca said. “And the lasers in your Mars probe can adjust the wavelength to send different pulses to measure
different things, right?”
“Right,” she said.
“So in theory, just in theory,” he said, “could you use a laser to identify a person by his electrical field?”
“In theory, you could,” she said, “though he’d have to be isolated from surrounding fields. That’s why we’ve been doing the
work we’ve been doing in caves, and at Sinkhole. Past tense. Sinkhole was a government neutrino lab deep underground, connected
to the Carlsbad system. Shut down now. You need to work in places like that. Though I suppose the bigger the computers get,
the more easily we’ll be able to pull discrete data from a larger field of conflicting information. It’s kind of like hearing
one voice in a roaring crowd.”
“But in theory, you could do it,” he said. “Say, with a person standing all alone in the desert, as opposed to us sitting
here in this restaurant?”
“In theory, yes.”
“You know, the Army is working with a tactical microwave beam for crowd control,” he said, “part of the nonlethal initiative,
where they can use a dish mounted on top of a truck to zap a crowd with microwaves to get it to disperse. Apparently people
feel like their skin is burning and it’s quite uncomfortable, so they run away. Have you heard of this?”
“I think I read about it in the paper,” she said. “I remember wondering, if they had such a thing to deliver energy at nonlethal
doses to disperse crowds, what was stopping them from increasing the power until they were working with lethal doses?”
“I wouldn’t think anything is stopping them,” DeLuca said. “My understanding was that at the tested power level, it only affects
the target’s skin. So, in theory, you could develop a laser, or tune a laser, to only affect a particular kind of body tissue.
The way they use ultrasound to break up kidney stones but leave the kidneys alone.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose it might be possible.”
“So in theory,” he said, “suppose the target was a cornstalk—could you focus or tune or phase a laser to destroy or denature
the cell walls in a cornstalk, without hurting the rest of the plant?”
“You mean, could you use a laser to make crop circles?”
“Yes.”
“I think you could.”
“Burn the lips and udders off a cow?”
“Yes.”
“Could you hit a person with an energy beam that might affect only the rectal or vaginal tissues, to give him a warm feeling
that makes him feel like he’s been probed?” he asked her. She looked him in the eye for a moment.
“I guess you could,” she said. “You could probably even project the image of the Virgin Mary onto the side of a building.”
“But why would you want to do that?” he said. “Why would you want to use technology to mislead people?”
“Maybe just because you can,” she said.
“Could a laser cause an earthquake?”
“No,” she said. “At least I don’t think so. Earthquakes are caused by the release of subterranean pressures. Lasers can’t
cause subterranean pressures. Or release them. I don’t see how.
“One last question,” he said. “The lasers in your probe work at very close range. What limits the range?”
“There are a number of variables,” she said. “One is the amount of power you need to generate and sustain. And the sensitivity
of the measuring instruments. The dosages of the X-rays you get at the dentist or in a hospital are vastly smaller than what
they were twenty years ago. ”
“That’s interesting,” DeLuca said. “You’ve been very helpful.”
“I don’t see how,” she said. “The last I knew, you were looking for a missing girl. What does any of this have to do with
that?”
He couldn’t tell her what he was really thinking—he was really thinking that Cheryl Escavedo had been zapped, vaporized, erased
from the planet by a powerful weapon that no one knew was up there, one that could, at any instant, zap and/or vaporize anybody
Darkstar deemed a threat.
“I don’t know,” he lied. “Like I said, I just ask a lot of stupid questions and then wait for the answers to become less stupid
in my head. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t.”
“I think you could have been a good scientist,” she told him. “Do you mind if I take the leftover pizza home? I can always
zap it in the microwave for a midnight snack. Unless you think using the microwave is too dangerous.”
“It’s all yours,” he said. “Thanks for your time.”
When he checked his messages, he learned that Ed Clark had called him back, saying only that he’d be on the air tonight and
could possibly talk tomorrow. DeLuca decided that tomorrow would be too late. It was two hundred miles to Roswell, but it
was only four in the afternoon—he could be there by seven, he estimated, or earlier if the roads were as straight and as bleak
and empty as he expected they’d be.
They were. He made Roswell by seven-fifteen, delayed by a speeding ticket he picked up along the way. He passed a number of
UFO-related tourist traps on his way into town, including a place claiming to have an exact replica of the alien body taken
from the UFO crash in 1947, as well as a motel called the Ali-Inn and, of course, the International UFO Museum and Research
Center. There was a fantasy bookstore and a place selling telescopes and related material to help you spot the visitors from
other planets before they spotted you. He picked up a sandwich at an Albertsons and headed for the radio station, a small
single-story white building in the middle of nowhere, at a crossroads in the desert that was technically in the town of Dexter.
The radio tower reached high into the starlit sky, its red warning light blinking a thousand feet above the ground, which
explained how WROZ was able to broadcast from “sea to shining sea.” An awning protruded from the side of the building to form
a carport, and beneath it, two lawn chairs. No one answered when DeLuca knocked on the front door of the radio station. When
he went around the side, he found a second door that was open. He knocked again and didn’t get an answer, so he let himself
in.