Black Rain

Danielle read the letter over again, cringing in disgust at the words and the ego boost they’d once brought her. With deliberate force she crumpled it up, dropping it in the small bin between the seats, right beside an empty soda can and the wrappers from someone’s fast-food lunch.

She sighed, leaning back once again and listening to the sound of the windshield wipers, the tires on the wet road and the static-filled news on the radio. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she had absolutely nothing to do, no deadline to meet, no superior to answer to, no goal to chase with every waking moment. To her great surprise, she found it a supremely agreeable feeling.

Twenty miles away, in the basement of Building Five at the VIC, Arnold Moore stood in a darkened, lead-lined room with the NRI’s head research scientist and another specialist, who worked with fusion theory. They’d been studying the glowing, triangular stone that Danielle had brought back from the Amazon.

“It’s definitely generating power,” the head scientist told Moore. “Massive amounts of it, in fact. But how, I don’t know.”

“Not from cold fusion?” Moore asked.

The scientist shook his head. It seemed they’d been looking for one thing and found something else.

“It’s more advanced than that,” the scientist told him.

“Is it hot?” Moore asked.

“Warm,” the man said, “but the heat is the least of its manifestations.”

Moore wanted answers. “So where is the power going?”

“Most of it is being channeled into an electromagnetic pulse,” the scientist said, then pointed to the walls around them. “That’s why we had to bring it down here and line this room with lead.”

The glowing stone sat in front of them. Clean and polished now; it was almost invisible from the right angle. Unlike the Martin’s crystals, it contained no inclusions or scratches. To the naked eye, at least, it appeared devoid of any internal structures at all. And yet, the white glow had to come from somewhere, as did the heat and the power.

At this point, the researchers had only just begun to study it, but Moore expected they’d find similar properties to the Martin’s crystals, including the microscopic lines, nano-tubes and other, even more exotic designs.

It was machinery, Moore knew, but it looked like art. There was something mesmerizing about it, almost hypnotic. The longer he stared, the more certain he became that he could actually see the fluctuating pulse the men were talking about. It was rhythmic, harmonic.

“Does it always do that?” Moore asked.

The scientist nodded. “That’s the pulse,” he said. “The pattern is extremely complex with rapid fluctuations. But it is a pattern and it repeats itself over and over.”

Moore stared. He could see it, sense it.

The researcher gazed at him, studying his face. “You know what it is,” he guessed.

The data had not yet been disclosed to him, but Moore had a feeling about it. “Yes,” he said gravely. “I think I do.”

The two men exchanged glances. “Well, you should know,” the scientist said, “that we believe you’re right.”

“A signal of some kind,” Moore said. “A message.”

The man nodded. “As I told you, it repeats itself, over and over, identical and unchanging,” he said. “Except for …”

Moore looked into the man’s eyes. “Except for what?”

“For one minor change,” the man explained reluctantly, “one we didn’t notice until we separated out the various phases of the signal.”

“What kind of change?”

The man flicked on a computer screen that displayed what looked like a sound chart, a digital representation of this complex signal, with thousands of peaks and valleys. With a click of the mouse, the chart began scrolling to the left. It moved that way for seventeen seconds and then froze. A second color began to overlay it. The peaks and valleys were identical, matching exactly as the screen scrolled along. Except for the very last one, which, in the new color, was of a slightly lesser magnitude. Moore watched as the third iteration of the signal reduced the last bar once again.

“It’s counting down to something,” Moore said, guessing at the significance of what he was seeing.

“Each new version of the pulse is fractionally shorter than the one previous to it,” the scientist said.

“Have you calculated the duration?”

The scientist nodded. “If we’re right, the signal will reach a zero state sometime on December 21, 2012.”

Moore knew that date. The end of the Mayan calendar.

“We don’t know what it means,” the researcher added. “But considering the power this thing is generating, we are concerned.”

The man offered nothing further, except a grim face and a tightly clenched jaw. Moore felt his own concern beginning to build.

He turned his attention back to the softly pulsing stone. Try as he might, he could not take his eyes off it, or strike down the sense of awe it filled him with, or shake away the feeling that the destinies of a great many people would be affected by what was found in that stone.

AUTHOR’S NOTE