Chapter Nine

“Claude, I have an urge to walk on the sphere—stop me.”

A break in training at Johnson gave Kallandra the opportunity to catch up with her Canadian friend. “I had a nightmare about being absorbed by the sphere and falling through it. It was weird, terrible, but so fantastic I can’t get it out of my head until—”

“Until you are purged by actually doing it? Mon Dieu, no Kallandra. What does Derek say, assuming you told him?”

“I had to, he was being thrashed by my flailing arms when he shook me out of the dream. Strange, because I was paralysed while in the dream–sphere.”

“Not strange at all. Your muscles are locked when in REM sleep, but as you awoke you probably lashed out. So, what did your fiancé say about your desire to enact your crazy dream?”

“I’m not sure. He just says it’s stupid, and I’d be killed, either from something weird, or by falling off it. But we could string a safety net beneath, couldn’t we?”

“We? Very amusing, but this isn’t a circus act. Derek is right. Kallandra, if you weren’t an antivivisectionist, we could throw a live rabbit at it to see if it’s injured.”

“Yeah, then interrogate it to assess its experiences if it survives. No thanks. And what mild electric or electrostatic charge might kill a rabbit mightn’t affect protection-suited me.”

“Well, I will stop you, you mad bitch.” They both laughed. “Did you hear that Lester has gone deranged? He’s in a psychiatric unit rambling on about having been absorbed by the sphere.”

“I’d heard. It’s also strange he’s lost all his body hair. There’s more going on here than we’ll ever find out. Oops, look at the time—we’re always late for briefings, and it’s about the hole findings.”

* * *

“Two billion years? That must be an error,” said Derek, when Colin Feubacher, a NASA geologist, gave an assessment of the age of the spheres. Derek’s outburst in the otherwise silenced briefing room met with nods of agreement. Kallandra, sandwiched between Claude and Derek, couldn’t get her head around the concept.

“Excuse me,” she said to the worried-looking man, whose skinny appearance made him a blur when he shook with embarrassment. “To clarify, two billion is the age of the rock strata at the base of the hole? But we have no way of measuring the age of the spheres.”

“I agree. It is an assumption that if a sphere cut its way out of a hard layer, then it must have been there before that stratum was formed.”

“Unless it cut its way down too,” she said, although she could think of no reason why the sphere might do that.

“That doesn’t seem likely, Miss, sorry, Major. The base of the hole is rougher than we’d expect if the same polishing effect on the sides were applied above and below.”

Derek stood to ask a question. “What sort of rocks have you found down there and how did you date them?”

“The oldest, at the base, are conglomerates—like a concrete mix of ancient sedimentary rocks and granites. We used radiometry and lead isotope ratio dating, which gave us two billion, plus or minus ten percent.”

Claude, smiling, also stood and turned to the group who knew he specialised in geophysics. “Two billion might seem a lot, but I’m surprised it wasn’t older at that depth.

There are four-billion-year-old granites in the Jack Hills of Western Australia. However, tectonic upheavals in the Sierra Nevada means that new and old rocks have played around with each other in the past, so they look like folded blankets now. So the age of the base rock isn’t a sure thing for the age of the sphere.”

Fran Hope, a young electronic wizard, stayed in her chair when she made a statement. “These methods of dating are not foolproof. They depend, for example, on statistical assumptions such as that radioactive decay continues in the distant past to the same regressive equations as laboratory short-term measurements. Contamination could interfere with the collected data, not just since sampling, but in the hole as the sphere rose, if it rose.”

The frail Mr. Feubacher stared at Fran for a few but long seconds. “Yes, Miss.

We are aware of the objections to those techniques by Young Earth Creationists, and others. We don’t say their ideas are wrong, but that we have presented our best conjecture to fit the data. Our highest probability view, given possible errors.” He threw her the partial smile that said: “I don’t want to upset you, but you’re wrong and that’s it.”

Before Fran could retaliate, Feubacher wisely rushed on. “Data from the Glastonbury and Uluru holes concur with the El Capitan findings. All three spheres seem to have originated below rocks around two billion years old.” He glanced at Fran.

“With the usual assumptions and caveats. We await data from Table Top and Huashan.”

An awkward silence followed as Feubacher shuffled his notes. Kallandra wondered whether he was waiting for Fran to object again, or had something even more startling to say. Muttering replaced silence as the notion of the spheres being in the crust for half the Earth’s life span sunk in to the astronauts and support teams. She turned to Derek.

“What do you think of the spheres being that ancient?”

“Preposterous. They’re almost certainly alien artefacts so that implies an advanced engineering race, either living on this planet or travelling across space, when the only life on Earth was bacterial.”

“Amazing concept, isn’t it?” said Claude, leaning across Kallandra to join in. “The moon then would’ve been so close to Earth, the tides would be over three-hundred metres high. There would have been hurricane winds every day, and—”

The Colonel clapped his hands. “Our expert here has more to add. Buckle your seatbelts. All yours, Feubacher.”

“I was going to emphasise that the two billion years is give or take ten percent. If we take the oldest possibility, that is two point two billion years ago, that puts the time frame to correspond with a particularly exciting event on the planet.” His papers shuddered in tune with his mounting exuberance.

“The moon being broken off the Earth?” shouted an impatient exobiologist.

“No, no—the formation of abundant free oxygen on the planet.”

Claude muttered: “That’s what I was going to say.”

“Ummph,” said Derek, as his hand on its way to his left ear was intercepted by Kallandra.

Feubacher was on a roll. “As you know, oxygen was the greatest polluter this planet has known. Anaerobic life forms died in their millions when this highly corrosive, and dangerous gas became important. Fossil records show that oxygen became sufficient to allow aerobic processes in the atmosphere just over two billion years ago.

This begs the question—”

“The spheres came to bring oxygen to Earth? Never,” said Derek.

“More precisely,” said Claude, “to engineer conditions to create oxygen.”

“It could just be a coincidence,” said Kallandra.

“You still believe in coincidences?” asked Claude.

“It’s just that I have a feeling. That’s all,” she said, not sure what she felt, and certainly not willing or able to broadcast her inner soul.

Feubacher hadn’t finished. “Oh, and the holes taper in the lowest kilometre to three centimetres.”

Gasps followed by murmuring rippled around the room at that news until the front table was banged.

The colonel wound the meeting up with another thought for the group. “It would be ironic indeed for the planet who had plans to terraform Mars, find itself terraformed.”

A laugh rippled through the room.

Before that ripple had completed its resonant ricochets, Kallandra’s vision blurred for a second. Her seat shuffled a few millimetres making her instinctively put her hands down to grab the sides. It was as if a micro-tremor had hit the room. She realised it wasn’t confined to her as many others had grabbed their seats. A premonition made her look at the clock over the exit, but it told her nothing. A crepuscular ray of sunlight sneaking in through Venetian blinds lit up motes, dancing more vigorously than she’d seen before.

“That had nothing to do with oxygen,” she said to Claude, loud enough for anyone else to hear, if they were sufficiently calm to listen.

“I’ve experienced and studied earth tremors,” said Claude. “And that wasn’t one.”

“I know you’re right,” she said, “but I only have a suspicion about what it was.”

“Spheres?”

“Of course, but what exactly, I don’t want to say at present.”