Warren Murphy: Scorched Earth

"Then you anticipated a lightning strike?" a reporter asked quickly.

"No."

"Then you were negligent?" another demanded.

"No one was negligent!" Bulla snapped.

"Then why are nearly thirty scientific volunteers now entombed in glass like so many ants in amber?"

There was no answer for that. No good answer, and Amos Bulla knew that. He swallowed hard and considered giving his reply in cryptic, TV unfriendly Latin when a scarlet Saturn SU sedan came down the winding road and out stepped a serious-faced man with short black hair, professorial glasses and the vague air of a professional stage magician. He wore a camel-colored corduroy coat over a brick red turtleneck.

The man stood poised by the scarlet Saturn, saw his arrival was unnoticed and slammed the rear door shut. The sound carried but made no impression. So he opened it again and slammed it harder.

And this time heads turned. Gasps came from those turned heads, and as if the media had been sprinkled with magician's magic dust, they turned their attention from Amos Bulla to the media-friendly presence they all recognized.

"Hey! Isn't that Dr. Pagan?"

"He's always good for a snappy soundbite!"

A concerted rush was made for Dr. Cosmo Pagan, who struck a pose by the scarlet Saturn. He was quickly ringed by a horseshoe of reporters straining their mikes and cameras in his direction.

"Dr. Pagan, what can you tell us about this event?"

"Is this the work of extraterrestrials?"

"The BioBubble people say lightning. Can you refute this?"

"I have not yet examined the site," said Dr. Cosmo Pagan in the singsongy voice that America had first experienced on a famous PBS special many years ago, and revisited on countless science and astronomy specials ever since. He stepped forward.

The converging media abruptly backed up, parting like the Red Sea before a latter-day Moses.

The glass video lenses tracked Dr. Pagan as if he were some kind of glass magnet. The media throng followed like iron filings trailing after a lodestone.

Dr. Pagan walked up to the outer edges of the BioBubble mass, wearing a studious expression. He sucked on an unlit briar pipe. His corduroy coat had felt patches at the elbows, and the Arizona wind played at his hair like a mother's gentle fingers.

"This is not the work of lightning," he announced.

The hovering media crowded close, as if afraid to miss a single crumb of scientific wisdom. No one asked questions. No one questioned him at all. Such was the reverence in which Dr. Cosmo Pagan was held.

"The absence of fulgurites confirms this," he added.

Out of microphone range, Amos Bulla groaned to himself.

Walking farther along, Dr. Pagan purposefully broke the thin-edged glass under his Hush Puppies as if it were a melting ice bank.

"I see blisters and seeds and stones-things that occur when an impure mix is turned to glass."

Geologist Tom Pulse drifted up to Bulla's side, and Bulla asked, "Is he making sense?"

"Not as much as the press thinks. He's throwing glass-manufacturing terminology around. Not applicable here."

"The black color is interesting," Dr. Pagan continued. "It reminds me of obsidian, which is glass produced in the intense natural furnace of erupting volcanoes."

Tom Pulse snorted. "Arizona isn't volcanic."

"But no volcano did this, of course," Dr. Pagan added thoughtfully. "The brownish tinge that glass has at its edge is very suggestive, however." Dr. Pagan turned to face the expectant cameras then. He looked them square in the eye. "Not many laymen know this, but in nuclear power plants, observation windows are forged of special glass because ordinary glass turns brown under exposure to hard radiation."

The press seemed stunned by this pronouncement.

"Hard radiation may be the culprit in this event."

Someone found his voice and lobbed a polite question. "Dr. Pagan, can you speculate as to the source of this hard radiation?"

"There are many possibilities. Billions and billions of them, in truth." Pagan paused. "Billions and billions," he repeated as if tasting the words. "They are endless in their complexity, in their richness, in their sheer wonderment."

Taking the cold briar from his mouth, Pagan pointed to the eastern horizon of red sandstone buttes.

"Not fifty miles in that direction lies Meteor Crater, where an unknown object from space fell, gouging out a rude cup in the hard stone of Earth's mantle that endures to this day."

"Do you suspect a meteor strike?"

"If this is a meteor-impact site," allowed Dr. Cosmo Pagan, "it is unlike any meteor strike ever recorded by man."

"Then you're saying it's not a meteor strike?" another reporter prompted.

Dr. Pagan shook his head slowly. "Too early to say. For many years, the Tunguska event in Siberia was an unfathomable mystery. Now we think we know that a comet or rocky asteroid exploded before it impacted with our fragile blue planet, flattening a zillion square kilometers of tundra forest. Nothing like it has been documented since."

"Could a comet have done this?"

"No one on Earth knows. We simply don't have the knowledge. This is why our efforts to plumb the depths of space must go on. How can we confront the unknown if we have not ventured beyond our thin atmosphere to challenge it?"

"Are you saying you don't know?" a more astute reporter wondered ahead.

Dr. Pagan shrugged his corduroy shoulders and offered no reply.

At the back of the pack, Amos Bulla nodded. This man knew his stuff. TV, like radio, abhors a vacuum. They would not broadcast his silence. And with it went the reporter's penetrating question.

"Guy's amazing," he said with ill-disguised admiration. "A genius."

Tom Pulse snorted derisively. "Hell, so far all he's done is spout some high-school textbook facts, hardly any of it in his specialty."

"So how come he's famous and you're not?"

"The cameras are pointing his way, not mine," Pulse drawled.

"You got a point there."

"So far, he hasn't offered anything useful you couldn't drag out of an Astronomy 101 student."

Then Dr. Pagan gave the soundbite that led the evening news.

"Visitors from the mighty cosmos can't be ruled out in this inexplicable event. Not with the Hubble telescope discovering new superplanets in distant galaxies every other week. Did you know that igneous meteorites from Mars have been landing on Earth for decades, blown our way by an unknown upheaval? One made planet-fall in Egypt in 1911, killing a dog. We are standing in a perfect approximation of the Martian landscape. Consider the sheer irony, the stupendous odds of a piece of Mars striking the beachhead of man's eventual conquest of the Red Planet. Gives new meaning to the term 'first strike."'

Pagan took a thoughtful suck on his pipe and added, "It is my fervent hope that the BioBubble, despite its troubled past, will be reconstituted as the forerunner of man's first base on the Red Planet, Mars."

That was it. The media began breaking down their sound equipment and putting away their cameras. The helicopters dropped in response to walkie-talkie summonses and, reloaded once more, they left the site like buzzing electronic locusts.

Dr. Cosmo Pagan hopped into his waiting Saturn and departed, his interest in the BioBubble event seemingly as transient as the media's.

"I don't believe it!" Bulla exploded.

"What?"

"No one cares."

Tom Pulse looked back at the sealed tomb that was the BioBubble and summed it up in two words, "No bodies."

"Say again?"

"No bodies. If you had bodies sticking up from the glass, they'd stay with this story till April Fool's Day."

Bulla shrugged. "I don't want bodies. I want the goddamn media out of my hair."

"Now all you have to deal with are the Feds. And they're not going to accept the lightning-bolt hypothesis."