David Golemon - Legacy

“That’s the thing I wanted you to see. Remember when the senator said that inside the crate that fell over there were skeletal remains and some strange-looking rocks?”

Jack looked at the report again. Then he found the spot where Niles’s memory had recorded the senator’s exact words. “I didn’t until you just mentioned it.” Collins looked at the video feed again. “Is this live?”

“Yes, they’re running a special on CNN about the collections going on in the crater, that’s why the picture is so grainy,” Niles said. “It’s streaming right to us before JPL’s had a chance to clean it up. The point is, look at those rocks. I’ve seen Moon rocks before. Hell, I’ve probably held at least two hundred of them. They’ve always fascinated me.” He stood and moved closer to the large screen. “I have to say this, and I think someone else also has noticed this at NASA and JPL. Those are not rocks indigenous to the lunar surface.”

Jack stood. He tried to focus on the grainy picture. The rocks resembled lava. They looked porous. But he had seen Moon rocks that looked the same way.

“How can you be sure?” Collins asked.

“Look here,” Niles said, pointing at the uppermost layers of rocks that the robot had piled in the center of the crater. “That silverish material looks like mercury, or possibly even lead. That’s not a Moon rock.”

“Maybe small asteroids or meteors then. That would go a long way to explaining the devastation inside the crater.”

“I don’t know, but point taken, Jack,” Niles said, watching the robot pick up the rock it had just placed on the pile. “Maybe we’ll find out something in a moment. It looks like they’re going to try and get a spectrograph report.”

Stan Nathan had just agreed with Hugh Evans in Houston that they should run a spectrograph analysis on one of the stones. Stan was hesitant at first. Hugh had just sanctioned the use of a limited supply of bottled air and water to clean off the surface of the rock before running the analysis. The Beatles all had a very limited supply of air and water, and Stan hated the idea of expending the supply of George for the test. But as Hugh had pointed out, they had supplies from three other Beatles if they needed water or air.

“Okay, REMCOM, get the order out to George to start the centrifugal force rotation of its hands.”

“Roger, Flight, commencing spin.”

A full minute later they all watched as the two-handed George started to spin the rock in its three-fingered grip. They saw dust fly off the stone as the centrifugal force became too great for the small particulate matter to adhere to the porous surface. It spun for fifteen seconds and then came to a halt. By that time, the command to wash and blow off the small rock had been sent and received.

As the world watched live, a third arm located beside the small drilling derrick extended and came within two inches of the rock. The finger grips started spinning once more as a stream of heated water shot from a small nozzle embedded in the arm. The water struck the stone. Frozen particles of ice were thrown free as the centrifugal force forced them from the porous stone. A fourth arm extended. A burst of air hit the spinning stone. More particulate matter blasted away from the rock and then as quickly as it had started, the spinning and washing ceased.

“That went well,” Stan said with relief as he reached over his console and patted one of the programmers on the back. “Pretty flawless, now we need to connect the spectrograph and see-”

“Flight, we have a glitch in the power readings for George. The stored battery charge has risen by thirteen percent.”

“What?” Nathan moved rapidly to his console and looked at the telemetry streaming in from Shackleton.

“I’m also showing a rise from the stored battery power of Ringo, Flight.”

“That’s impossible. Where can they be picking up power? Ringo ’s not even in sunlight.”

“I don’t know, Flight, but George is now back up to fifty-two percent power and rising.”

As they watched, the grainy picture from Shackleton cleared and became crystalline in clarity.

“Flight, we have a one hundred percent surge in communications from John on the upper rim of the crater. Whatever is going on is affecting the remote from almost a half a mile up.”

Stunned, Nathan looked at the programmers and technicians.

“Look!” someone said, louder than necessary.

On the main screen, the rock that was being held by George was glowing with a soft luminescence. The illumination was silverish in color and seemed to act as a halo around the stone.

“Pasadena, this is Houston,” Hugh Evans called on the VOX system. “Stan, this reaction started happening when oxygen and water was added to that rock. For the time being have George drop the rock and get the hell away before we lose him.”

“Right,” Nathan answered as he nodded for REMCOM to pass along the order.

Technicians started to furiously type commands from their stations. They were ordering all three of the Beatles to get as far back from the stone as they could without climbing out of the crater. The rock on the screen was glowing brighter.

“Come on, come on!” Nathan said out loud.

“The batteries can’t take this. The voltage regulators onboard are not shutting down the charge. We are at one hundred and twelve percent and rising on all three Beatles. John on the rim is at eighty-five percent recharge and rising.”

Finally, on the television screens and in front of most of the world, George dropped the rock and immediately started backing away.

“Leave John in place on the rim, I want to get as many readings from the crater floor as we can,” Nathan said. He wished the Beatles would move faster.

“We have no effect. Power readings are off the scale. We may have to-”

“Jesus, look at that!” another technician said. Nathan was glad that their reactions were kept in-house. CNN had left it up to JPL’s science advisor for descriptions of what was happening. He wished he could hear how he would explain this.

The pile of strange rocks began to glow, apparently reacting to the air- and water-contaminated rock. They were much brighter than the first stone.

“That’s it,” the George remote leader called out. “We just lost George. Massive power surge and overload. He’s dead.”

On the main viewing screen the picture from a retreating George went to snow.

“That’s it for Ringo and Paul!”

Ringo and Paul had maxed out at over 100 stored amps. Stan Nathan watched as his robots succumbed to the strange properties of the rock they had found inside of the crater.

“Jesus-”

That was as far as Nathan got in his exclamation over the event happening more than 244,000 miles away. The entire view screen, along with the picture coming from the rover John on the Shackleton Crater rim, turned to snow after a fantastic flash from the interior.

“What the hell just happened?” Nathan demanded. “Did we lose John to the same power surge?”

The room grew silent as the picture from John looked as though it wanted to come back on. Then it went white again.

“Pasadena, this is Houston,” called the voice of Evans at the Johnson Space Center. “Pasadena, Houston!”

“Go ahead, Houston,” Nathan finally answered.

“Goddamn it, get on the ball out there, Stan, we’ve just recorded a large detonation from the surface of the Moon. It was caught from orbit by Peregrine 1, over.”

Peregrine 1 was the mother vehicle orbiting the Moon as a relay platform for the Beatles. It had also been the vessel that brought the four lunar rovers to the launch point for their landing the day before.