Spears of God Page 3

  “Joe Retticker,” said the man, extending his hand for Darla Pittman to shake. “Pleased to meet you, Doctor.” She shot a quick glance around her lab to make sure the man was talking to her. He was. Her lab techs were out on break with her postdoctoral research assistant, Barry Levitch.

  Although he wasn’t in uniform, from the man’s ramrod bearing, close-cropped white hair and mustache—and the forceful way he pumped her hand—Darla suspected he was military. He was handsome, even somehow charismatic, in an Ooh-Daddy kind of way. It took her a moment to place his name, though, and tag a title to it. Major General Joseph A. Retticker, U.S. Army (Retd), director for operations, NSA/CIA joint Special Collection Service.

  “This is a surprise, General Retticker,” Darla said, running a hand through her curly blond hair as she collected her thoughts. “I believe you were on the DARPA board when I submitted my proposal—is that right?”

  “Very good, Doctor Pittman. And congratulations on getting the grant. I was already a fan of your work, even before you submitted your paperwork to us.”

  Retticker turned to survey his surroundings, then began to walk about the lab as if he were a major shareholder in the place. Striding to keep up, Pittman supposed she couldn’t much argue that point. The Combat Personnel Enhancement Program grant—$4.6 million, jointly administered by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Astrobiology Institute—would keep the lab running here in Boulder, Colorado, for the next two years.

  “So this is where it all happened, is it? Where you proved it was meteorites that caused the Big Blow-Up of 1910?” The general peered curiously at a high-pressure liquid chromatograph.

  “I found nonterrestrial components, trapped in fullerenes taken from the ash layer, yes,” Pittman said.

  “Fullerenes are the fourth major form of carbon—after coal, graphite, and diamond.”

  “‘Metadiamonds,’ you called them, in one of your comments to the press. Said something like ‘I never metadiamond I didn’t like.’ Ha!”

  Pittman reddened at his comment.

  “That was a mistake—I’m terrible at humor. But the reseach was unmistakable. The forest fires broke out across eastern Washington, northern Idaho, and western Montana on August 20 of 1910. They were an unanticipated offshoot of unusually high meteoritic activity.”

  “A perturbation of the annual Perseid meteor shower’s debris cloud,” Retticker said, quoting her report from memory and turning away from the chromatograph. “As that cloud itself was affected by the 1910 passage of Comet Halley.”

  “You really do know my work,” Darla said, glancing at the floor, embarrassed and flattered. “I’m gratified.”

  “A good deal of it, yes,” Retticker said. “It was a high-profile discovery. Right up there with Miskulin’s work on nonterrestrial amino acids. Pretty soon they’ll be calling you ‘Doctor Meteor’ instead of him.”

  Darla winced. “I’ll be more than happy to leave that title to Miskulin.”

  “Oh?”

  “I can’t say I’m impressed with his methods. About the best that can be said for his work on prebiotics and DNA precursors is that it’s forced the specialists to pay more attention to my research.”

  The general smiled as he glanced out the window and noted the view of the Flat Irons.

  “I see,” Retticker said. “But there’s more to it, isn’t there? I gather some of your colleagues in the scientific community view Miskulin as…ambitious, shall we say?”

  “He’s a dilettante and a publicity hound is more like it,” Pittman said, then she shrugged. “He’s out of his league, and trespassing on our turf. I worked with him on a project for the National Science Foundation.

  Part of the ANSMET program—Antarctic Search for Meteorites. He was trained as an M.D. I think he actually snuck himself onto the project as the expedition physician.”

  Darla neglected to mention any of the more intimate activities she and Miskulin—he of the dark wavy hair and all-too-telegenic smile—had undertaken together during the nightless summer days of Antarctic deep-field work. That, however, had been years ago.

  “Yet he has had some successes….”

  “Undeniably,” Pittman admitted. From all this talk of Miskulin, she wondered if maybe she wasn’t DARPA’s first choice. Then again, she mused, they weren’t likely to have wanted the kind of security risk Miskulin would have posed, given his views.

  Putting such thoughts out of her head, she followed the general’s gaze toward the upturned triangular slabs of the Flat Irons. She had free-climbed many a route on many a spire of that uplifted rock. One of her reasons for taking the job here at Colorado University, despite some internal department opposition to her appointment, was the campus’s proximity to some of the best bouldering and rock-climbing country in the world.

  “I’m not saying that Miskulin isn’t a very shrewd researcher, in his own way,” Darla added. “For all the controversy surrounding it, I think his work with meteoritic amino acids and DNA precursors is solid science. Still, he’s not a professional meteoriticist. He’s not even a geologist or geochemist. That’s the real reason he’s controversial.”

  “But he’s not alone in being controversial, is he, Doctor?” General Retticker said, arching his eyebrows in a quizzical fashion. “Your ideas linking meteorites to religious dreams and visions—particularly Jacob’s stone pillow, in the Bible—those haven’t exactly passed unnoticed in some quarters. Pretty fanciful stuff.”

  Darla Pittman dismissed the controversy with a quick wave of her hand.

  “There’s nothing fanciful about it. There’s solid documentation of persons who have experienced prophetic visions when they came into contact with, or even prolonged close proximity to, certain meteoritic stones.”

  “Other people have written about it besides you, then?”

  “Just look at the publications of ethnographers from Mircea Eliade onward. The list of ‘affective stones’ is long. The Benben stone of Heliopolis in ancient Egypt, the hierophanic stones of Astarte in Tyre and of Cybele in Phrygia, the Sun-Stone omphalos at Thebes, the conical stone at the center of the Aphrodite temple in Byblos, the sacred stone that embodied the sun god Heliogabalus at Emesa, the oracular stones at Delphi, the Great Stone of Cronos, the Zeus Baetylos, the Chintamani stone purported to have ‘telepathically guided’ those who came in contact with it—”

  “But those are all found in different parts of the world.”

  “Exactly! And despite that, they are all associated with instances of vision and prophecy. Among the ancient Nabateans of northern Arabia and Trans-Jordan, for instance, all the gods and goddesses were represented as stones or god-blocks. Aniconic rocks, monoliths and megaliths, were worshipped throughout the ancient world. I’ve always thought the black monolith that set our shaggy prehuman ancestors on the road to becoming Homo sapiens in that old movie 2001: A Space Odyssey nicely echoed the long tradition of vision-inducing god-blocks.”

  “An interesting speculation,” Retticker said, suppressing a smile. “But when you start saying that some of the foundations of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic world religions—”

  “Like Jacob’s stone pillow dream,” Pittman interjected wearily, “or the Black Stone of the Kaaba in Mecca.”

  “Right. When you say those foundations might have been built on ‘sensations of disembodied euphoria and visionary insight’ resulting from ‘hydrocarbon outgassing by recently arrived meteorites,’ well, it gives entirely new meaning to the idea of being stoned. You’ll be lucky if they don’t stone you for suggesting it.”

  “Frankly, I’ve heard more stoned-on-religion jokes than I ever wanted to hear, thank you. Both the jokes and the personal attacks are unimportant, though. My concern is what the facts point to. Even the Vatican has a substantial meteorite collection, for heaven’s sake! The Latin word vates means ‘prophet’ or ‘seer,’ though the priests there will publicly deny any linkage between stone and vision. Determining the legitimate cause
of that linkage is a perfectly appropriate area for scientific inquiry—denials notwithstanding.”

  “No doubt, no doubt.”

  “It wouldn’t necessarily have to be ethylene outgassing, either. That was just one possibility. Even if you don’t buy Miskulin’s DNA-precursor push, it’s long been known that meteorites harbor large numbers of various hydrocarbons—aliphatic linear ones and aromatic polycyclic rings—as well as exotic amino acids. Siegfried Haberer suggests even iron meteorites might play an affective ‘spiritual’ role, given Michael Persinger’s work.”

  “What work is that?”

  “Persinger has been very successful at artificially inducing religious experiences in his patients by exposing the temporal lobes of their brains to weak magnetic fields. Rotating fields in the nanotesla range induce the feeling of a ‘sensed presence’—usually interpreted as God—in over eighty percent of test subjects. I have to admit that’s pretty good, though personally I think meteoritic magnetism is probably a weaker explanation than the chemical one.”

  She turned and pulled a Bible from a bookshelf, where its tooled red leather binding made it look very much out of place among the more workaday scientific volumes.

  “Just look objectively at this passage from Genesis twenty-eight: ‘Jacob left Beersheeba and set out for Haran. When he reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep. He had a dream in which he saw a great ladder resting on the earth with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.

  “‘There too stood the Lord, and he said, I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south.

  All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring. I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I promised you.

  “‘When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it. He was afraid and said, How awesome is this place. This is none other than the House of God; this is the Gate of Heaven.

  “‘Early the next morning Jacob took the stone he had placed under his head and set it up as a pillar and poured oil on top of it. He called that place Bethel….’”

  Professor Pittman snapped shut the red leather volume.

  “Other sources specify that the ‘certain place’ where Jacob stopped was a shallow depression with other such stones scattered about, probably an impact pit or penetration hole at least, if not an actual crater.

  The crater interpretation is strengthened by the tradition of Jacob’s Bethel altar-rock being found at the center of a labyrinth—meteorite in crater, stone at the heart of a labyrinth. His dream that he floated up an angel staircase and listened to God certainly sounds like disembodied euphoria to me. A number of traditions claim that Jacob’s stone was located in its ‘pit’ or ‘labyrinth’ at what is now the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, beneath the Dome of the Rock.

  “The clincher, though, is that Jacob uses what is in many sources called an ‘oil received from heaven’ to anoint the stone itself. And then he calls the place Beth El, the Gate of Heaven or House of God. Beth El is linked linguistically to the root of the word Babel, ‘Gate of God.’ Also to baetyl, the Greek ‘House of God,’ as in Zeus Baetylos. A betyl is a sacred rock that both manifests and houses the deity—and the root meaning of baetylos is ‘sacred skystone.’”

  “And the Black Stone of the Kaaba?” Retticker asked, turning from the window and peering over a suite of spectrometers.

  “Al Hajar al Aswad,” Pittman replied. “Sometimes referred to as the ‘right hand of God’ and the ‘navel of the world.’ Bayt Allah, to the Muslims. Another bethel-baetyl House of God. Most likely a meteorite, but also perhaps what’s called a Wabar pearl—a type of impactite, impact glass resulting from a large meteorite strike.”

  “I’ve also heard it dismissed as an old hunk of touchstone basalt.”

  “If that’s the case, then why should it become the literal touchstone of millions of Muslims on Hajj every year? The Black Stone was sacred in Mecca long before the Muslims got hold of it, too. It was worshipped with the moon god and his three ‘sister’ or ‘daughter’ goddesses from time immemorial. We can’t know for sure what it is. Since the Black Stone’s sacred, no one’s ever been allowed to run experiments on the thing. We do know, however, that the tradition of kissing it during the Hajj actually goes back to pressing one’s head against the sacred stone.”

  “Presumably to induce some sort of visionary experience.”

  “Exactly right,” Darla said, fiddling absently with two small stones she had picked up from the top of a metal cabinet—one an iron-nickel meteorite, the other a stony iron. “Making them sacred does help preserve them, thank goodness, but it also makes them untouchable by science. What I wouldn’t give to get hold of all those old holy rocks, and open them up!”

  At that, Retticker glanced up at Pittman from the readout screen of a mass spec.

  “We’re pretty eager to find out what might be in those rocks, as well,” he said, thoughtfully. “That’s what interested us in your work, Doctor. If those meteorites possess valuable properties for chemically reactive armor, or mind-enhancing pharmaceuticals, say, then they could have important implications, from a military point of view.

  “Since the recent unpleasantness with China, we’ve been following up on every lead that might prove to give us an advantage. Protective exoskeletons and musculature augmentation, drugs, hormones, microchip implants, even reworking the soldier’s DNA—anything that builds up performance and locks out stress, fatigue, fear, or trauma. If the stuff that makes for these ‘visionary’ or seemingly ‘magical’ properties really exists, and could be harnessed, well, anything you and your skystones can contribute to our efforts will be greatly appreciated.”

  Darla nodded. There had been hints of a “recent unpleasantness with China” in the media, though not much in the way of particulars had been made public. That didn’t matter to her, though, as much as the fact that she might make the current political climate work to her advantage.

  “Any assistance you can offer in helping me gain access to those skystones,” she said, “would likewise be greatly appreciated.”

  “Glad to hear it,” the general said. “We’ve already collected some items we think you might be interested in.”

  Retticker went to the window and motioned to someone in the parking lot below. When he turned back to her, Darla gave him a puzzled look, but he only flashed her an enigmatic smile.

  A few moments later a pair of clean-cut young troopers in crisp uniforms strode into her lab. Each held a handle mounted to a large case of polished wood.

  At a nod from Retticker, the men stepped forward and hefted the wooden box onto a black-topped lab table. Judging from the way the men worked with it, Darla guessed that whatever was inside the case was pretty heavy. These men weren’t exactly lightweights. After a moment, they snapped open fastenings and pulled the casing apart.

  As she stepped in front of the two soldiers—who had moved aside and now stood at attention—her heart began to beat a bit faster.

  Inside a sealed containment bag of clear plastic sat a pitted stone, ranging in color from reddish brown to charcoal black, and showing the clear presence of a fusion crust. It was a meteoritic, and a good-size chunk at that. She approached it, pulling a hand lens out of her pocket.

  “An especially mixed specimen,” she said, examining its surface through the plastic. “See the pressure marks that look like thumbprints? Typical of an iron meteorite. They’re called piezoglypts, or regmaglypts. They’re made by turbulent eddies in the superhot incandescent gases that passed over the meteor
on its way through our atmosphere.”

  She turned her attention to where the hunk of skystone had been cut away from another surface.

  “I think these are iron crystals. Sections of this rock might show very interesting Widmanstätten patterns, if you were to etch them with a nital solution. But there’s a lot of silicate material here, too. A silicated iron meteorite? Maybe a mesosiderite? But those types are achondrites, and these look like nicely formed chondrules, here.”

  She walked around the stone, thoroughly oblivious to the rigid soldiers now, carefully examining it from several angles.

  “Some of this material isn’t far from microdiamonds,” she continued, “of the type found in ureilites. Almost as if several space-rocks of varying types had smashed together and fused. Evidence of melt and brecciation too—a violent and very mixed history too indeed. I don’t think I’ve come across this particular stone in the literature before.”

  “I don’t believe you would have,” Retticker said. “It’s a new find.”

  “Really. What’s its provenance? Where’d you get it?”

  “A rather remote region of South America.”

  “General, the tradition is to name the stone after the town or landmark nearest to where the fall was found. Like the Murchison meteorite, or the Allende stone.”

  “Yes, I’ve gathered that. We don’t know with certainty whether this stone originally fell where we found it, or was moved there. Let’s just say it came from one of the high plateaus called tepuis. But you do think this ugly old rock has some scientific value?”

  “Ugly?” Pittman asked as she continued to examine the surface. “Looks can deceive, General. Some of the ugliest meteorites—the carbonaceous chondrites—are among the most scientifically rewarding.”

  “Well, the more important thing is, it’s all yours now.”

  Darla ran her hands through her hair and smiled broadly, hoping she didn’t look too girlishly enthusiastic.

  “The ‘tepui stone’ it is. Thank you, General. I’ll do my best to make this fellow tell us what he knows.”