Black Rain

She understood his skepticism. There was something unbalancing about the idea, which created an almost automatic prejudice against it.

“Of course,” she said. “By themselves, simple star charts don’t prove the theory any more than having a calendar for next year proves that you’ve been there already, but we found objects on those panels that could not be seen with the naked eye, not even with a powerful optical telescope. I’m talking about comets in the cold depths of space at the apogee of thousand-year orbits, neutron stars that emit no light, just radio waves and X-rays. The Maya could not have seen these things, Galileo couldn’t see these things. Some of them can only be studied with massive radio telescopes like the dish in Arecibo. Something the native tribes and the Maya obviously did not have.

“One example that made me believe was on the third panel. It displayed the remnants of an exploded star, a supernova in its correct position and magnitude, the light from which did not reach earth until 1959. Don’t forget the cradle had been recovered in the 1920s, and presumably created long before that. If it had been a simple description of where some astronomer of that era had calculated the star would be, then this supernova object would be depicted like all the other stars, but it wasn’t. The icon clearly depicted a star that had exploded. In other words, the design wasn’t based on what someone could predict; it was based on what someone knew as history.”

“And the fourth panel?” Hawker asked.

“A northern hemisphere view,” she said. “The year 3197. We don’t know the significance but one guess is obvious: the time frame from which the expedition was launched.”

The room fell silent, the group awed by the moment. If they were anything like her, their minds were fighting a back-and-forth battle between what the facts told them and what they found believable. It had taken her a long time to accept the possibility. Even as Stuart Gibbs had sent them here, they came with the knowledge that they would most likely find nothing. In fact, a chart of probabilities had been worked out, one that operated something like the Richter scale, with each additional level a full order of magnitude less likely to occur than the one below it. A level 1 result was finding nothing at all, level 2 would be the recovery of relics unrelated to the Martin’s crystals. Levels 3 and 4 described their chances of finding true Mayan artifacts. Level 5 would have meant additional recovery of items like the Martin’s crystals; level 6 would mean they’d found enough additional material to begin reverse engineering a coldfusion device. And level 7, considered to have a likelihood of one chance in ten million, was that they would find the remains of a human who had made the journey back in time.

“I know it sounds crazy,” she said, “but most physicists believe that some form of time displacement is possible. They disagree on how and on how much and whether it would be something that a human could physically survive.”

She looked at the deformed body, wondering if the journey had caused the damage or if that mutated shape was truly what humankind was destined for. “We came to believe that it had been done at least once. We assumed it would be some type of unmanned vehicle, one that would come with a power source, perhaps even something to power a beacon, one that would signal for thousands of years, so the senders could find it in their own era. We assumed the crystals were part of its power source, a cold-fusion device, similar to the nuclear materials we send on deep space probes like Voyager and Pioneer. Like the self-contained solar cell on a cell tower in the desert or a lighted beacon out at sea.”

She looked at their faces, McCarter’s in particular. “We decided that at least it was something worth searching for, operating under the theory that it had crashed, or appeared among the natives, who tore it apart, using the incredible things they found as ritual objects.”

“And the cradle and its depictions?” McCarter asked.

“I realize it’s a sort of anthropomorphism to assume others are acting as you would, but every probe we’ve sent into deep space carries a disk of gold, with various information, including greetings and music and a visual description of where earth lies in the solar system. Our guess about the cradle was that these natives found a similar object on whatever had been sent back here—perhaps even something the people who sent it could look for in the ruins of the past to prove that their experiment had worked—and they copied it meticulously.”

“Manhattan Project,” Hawker said.

She nodded. There was nothing more to say. Either they believed or they didn’t. She would let them consider the facts, while she looked for more proof.

She turned and her flashlight picked through the piles of crumbled rock before settling on the far wall. She stepped toward it and the Geiger counter began rattling again. “Are there any other passageways down here?”