Starcode

By Carter Damon

In the first decades of the 21st-century, humanity manages to establish communication with other intelligent beings. Apparently harmless, the contact progressively strays towards being something far more dangerous than anybody ever imagined. It will not be as we had expected.

"Starcode" tackles a star topic of science fiction with a radically original plot, whose development and outcome will surprise the reader, as much the aficionado of the genre as one who is simply in search of an entertaining and addictive book.

As described online:

"Starcode is a kind of high voltage ‘Contact' by Carl Sagan which will delight readers of science fiction. A fresh touch for science fiction, in a light read, whose ending and epilogue will make you reflect on the entire book. Recommended!" 

Carter Damon is an author who has sold thousands of books through Amazon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BadPress
• Release date: Sep 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781507179000

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Manley sat up on the floor, where had been lying for a long time. His body was crying out for respite, and a strong pain in his head told him that he had been hit with a blunt object. Nevertheless, above the tiredness and the pain there prevailed an emotion that was significantly more powerful. It was fear, pure fear.

An apocalyptic clamour, a deafening boom, was affecting everything around him.

The ground was shaking in a never-ending earthquake.

The dust from the crumbled cement was floating surreally in the air, whilst the lights in his office flickered off and on again intermittently. In the semi-darkness, Manley felt around on the floor. He urgently needed to locate his laptop. His weak hands seemed old and clumsy to him. Finally, he came across the leather case that held the small computer, and he took a look around. It seemed that everything had changed place. The furniture, moved by the tremors, had amassed against the wall. A fallen shelf was preventing him from even getting close to the door. He tugged at the shelf, but his strength was limited. He felt like a decrepit old man. With a great amount of difficulty, virtually on all fours, he managed to navigate the fallen furniture, and in spite of the floor’s shaking, he was able to position himself alongside the door.

The building groaned cruelly, like a dying beast, or like a rattle being shaken by a child who is oblivious to the fact that, inside of it, there is an ant fighting for its life.

He struggled with the lock, but it turned out to be virtually impossible to move the door, and he barely managed to open it by just a few centimetres. Some light-source from outside the building was illuminating the hallway and the living room. A pair of legs lying on the floor, in uniform, and kitted out in military boots, indicated a body that was otherwise half buried beneath an avalanche of rubble. Manley did not have time for sentiment. There was only one thought, a conviction, which shone inside his brain like a single light: the thought of how much needed to be done. He gripped his laptop more tightly. That was where his salvation lay... where everybody’s salvation lay.

Suddenly, −Manley did not know if it was due to a sudden increase in the tremors or whether it was because of the building collapsing,− part of the wall that included the door he was up against started to weaken, and in so doing, the timber panel separated from its hinges, opening a passage, as if it were a latter day version of the Red Sea parting in front of Moses. Manley sprung out through the door in search of the building’s exit. He supported himself against one of the walls as he stumbled his way along. A brilliant but unnatural glow was filtering in through the cracked windows and walls, coming from the outside. But it was not daylight. Manley skirted around the legs of the buried body, and headed for the building’s entrance hall. The doors were open, destroyed. Behind him there could be heard pieces of falling rubble, broken glass... chaos.

At last, he made his way outside.

The trees were shaking excessively whilst a dull murmur caused the ground to groan. A dense cloud of dust prevented him from making out the horizon, and the valley, which must be extending out at his feet, with the city lights far away in the distance, was dark and indistinguishable. Manley coughed, and covered his face with his shirtsleeve in an attempt to filter the air.

But in spite of the heavy atmosphere, the unhealthy luminosity lent a surreal and dreamlike appearance to the landscape. He raised his gaze up to the sky, and in the night, he saw the Moon.

It was not the same pallid and immovable moon as always, the moon that would apathetically observe the Earth from its perpetual and well-known orbit. This was a threateningly close moon, so much so that Manley, upon unexpectedly finding it like this, felt shaken by a sudden fear. He was sensing The End.

The Moon was spanning half the horizon, bathing the Earth’s night in a pale but powerful light that was capable of penetrating the gloomy atmosphere and illuminating the darkness, like an unusually foggy day. It was easy to make out its mountains, and its craters, which were meandering yet abrupt: the shadow of the sun in the valleys sketched out sharp silhouettes. Its proximity, and the clarity of its details, were breath-taking.

In spite of that particular sight, which was terrifying enough on its own, Manley knew that it was not going to crash into the Earth. Somehow, he knew intuitively, perhaps due to the complex calculations he had carried out but no longer remembered the details of, that the satellite was going to pass close to the Earth in one final rotation, and then in that moment it would be at its final perigee, because the Moon was about to leave its orbit of the Earth forever. According to what he felt he remembered in his state of profound disorientation, it would shoot off in an expansive orbit around the sun. He was practically certain that in not too many solar orbits, it would collide with Jupiter.

And the Earth... the Earth’s future was even more compromised. Its orbit had been altered irrevocably, the radius of which was going to gradually decrease. The momentum that had been generated by the breaking of the Earth-Moon link was sufficiently strong enough to sweep the Earth onto an apocalyptic course towards the Sun. Nothing would be able to survive that outcome. It would not be too long before life on the planet became impossible.

Manley came out of his stupor. It felt like a genuine nightmare. What could he do to make himself wake up?

He opened out his laptop. The battery was almost on the lowest level, on the verge of running out completely. This situation startled the scientist. I don’t have time to carry out a video transmission... perhaps something simpler. His brain effervesced in two screaming factions of panic against calm.

He sat down on a damaged bench, next to the old car park, and in spite of the vibrations from the ground, with the device resting on his lap, he typed conscientiously. He was clutched by a feverish sensation. He could feel that there was blood running down his forehead, which, upon reaching his eyebrow, accumulated before falling as one thick droplet. Some piece of rubble must have hit him... but he did not remember anything.

Above his head, the canopy of pines shook their branches, quivering, in a strange and disturbing murmur. It seemed as if they were whispering something in his ear... It is all futile.

A simple communication will have to do, he said to himself.

CHAPTER 2

Manley awoke with a start, victim to a strong hangover, experiencing a queasy stomach, an intense headache, and an unpleasant sensation that was without doubt the product of a bad dream. Yes, he had suffered an exceedingly unpleasant dream.

He remembered the previous day, and smiled. The farewell do from his colleagues had been brutal. At least they had had a good time. He vaguely remembered jumbled scenes that made no sense at all: the feeling of laughing his head off with his friends; a surge of rage, which at one point was on the verge of turning into a bar fight; or the rather more pleasant one of having flirted with several girls at a pub located in the Victorian area of San Francisco. Yes, he remembered there had been a pub, ‘chillout’, which had been dominated by a bizarre and rhythmic kind of music, and had been where the night had begun. He had been given a telephone number... or had it been two telephone numbers? Rachel, a quirky, hippie girl who studied political sciences, or something along those lines. He remembered that she had not stopped talking the whole night, and Manley had provoked her incessantly by taking on the role of the young republican man, inclined to resolve all of the world’s conflicts through relevant military interventions. His impossible, radical, and hare-brained points of view infuriated yet simultaneously made his beautiful antagonist laugh helplessly. It had been fun. But that had been only one of his pursuits ... he vaguely remembered others.

Yes, every now and then Manley liked to do a mental ‘reset’, as he liked to call it. To become drunk in such a way that it ended up being impossible to think about anything else. That, and laughing non-stop. Such good therapy! And it really was an important thing for him to do, because the step he had just taken in his professional life was making him dizzy. He knew that the revelry was going to be over with for a decent amount of time now. Oh, what the hell! ...I’m not thirty yet, he said to himself.

He showered in tepid water that was getting progressively colder, and he got the impression that part of his malaise was running away down the shower drain. He wrapped himself in a fluffy dressing gown and headed to the kitchen. He prepared himself a hearty breakfast of fried eggs and bacon, accompanied by a little leftover rice that he had in the fridge. He liked to begin the day properly.

Whilst he contemplated the distant Golden Gate Bridge on a blue-skied summer day out of the living room window, and turned the fried eggs and bacon, he remembered one of the fun moments from the night before. He smiled as he did so. He activated the message service on his mobile, so that it would play via the device’s loudspeaker.

Hello Manley, came a young voice, from a girl with a pleasant tone, and a lot of noise in the background: voices, music. It’s Rachel... we arranged for me to call you so that you would have my number. Give me a call before you embark on that secret mission to that other planet you were talking about, she ended with a few laughs. Manley smiled. It was a shame he was going to be leaving San Francisco.

You jerk. It was Max Cooper, a friend from his studies who had found a job in an engineering company. Mind telling me what you’ve been saying all night? What’s all this about you going off to start communicating with Martians, and all that nonsense? You were talking with such conviction that Jennifer and Karl are convinced you were being entirely serious. I’ve now told them that you were just out of it. To sum the whole thing up... I think you overdid it with the rum yesterday; I always tell you, rum doesn’t agree with you. Max hung up. He never said goodbye. That was how he was.

Manley raised his eyebrows. Did I really say that? At the end of the day, he thought, it was an innocent slip.

A beep let him know that there were no more messages.

His gaze settled finally on the papers scattered on the round dining room table. It was the part of the house where he liked to work. Manley enjoyed his job; theoretical physics, astronomy, cosmology, and all of that bound together by the glue of mathematics... The work never ended when he left the University lecture theatres where he gave classes. It always inexorably accompanied him back home. His mind was a hive of ideas that needed to be captured on paper, and which over time had been confined to various exercise books in which he wrote extensively. Often, whilst he was explaining a topic in class, his discourse would move further and further away from the subject of the class, and digress until it arrived at curious contemplations, ‘mathematical adventures’ as he called them, which impelled him to relate one theorem with another; to apply, in the middle of an explanation of the most mundane thing, a theory extracted from another branch of physics which he wanted to put to the test. On occasions, he would sink into a deep self-absorption, sporadically running his fingers through his light brown hair... and he would stop speaking to the class, whilst the board progressively filled with formulae that he would then photograph with his mobile phone in order to continue working on them at home. More than once the class would finish, the students would leave... and he would continue working until the cleaning staff arrived, and thus, abruptly coming out of his profound state of concentration, he would realise... that he was hungry.

He glanced at the papers that he had there on the table. It was relevant information that he had gathered over the last few weeks. Since a little under a year ago, he had set himself a goal in order to develop what he considered to be a fascinating line of investigation. But in order to achieve that, he had come to the conclusion that he needed to shut himself away in an isolated place, with a team of people whom he could guide... or control, or at least trust and feel comfortable with. It had to be a limited number of collaborators. After having a list of almost twenty laboratories, university departments, and varying locations for all types of investigations that might potentially be open to accepting his proposal, he chose one. He had spent time making this decision, but he felt confident. There, on top of the table, organised and grouped together by elastic bands, were the names, photographs, and scientific achievements of half a dozen astronomers, all of whom lived shut away, and almost forgotten by the scientific world, in a small observatory on Mount Lemmon. They dedicated themselves to the laudable task of locating and cataloguing NEOs, that is to say, asteroids near the Earth, which could, potentially, one day have the reckless audacity to collide with our planet.

Manley had studied them painstakingly. Yes, he had found his place. On that splendid July morning, as he sat in an armchair enjoying a cappuccino, he admired the vistas beneath an impeccable blue sky, and, resting his feet on the coffee table, he made his final decision.

CHAPTER 3

Two days later

––––––––

When the bald and experienced Jason Donovan set his eyes on the young Manley Stuart as he offloaded his tools, belongings, and investigation equipment from on-board a heavy-duty caravan which he had ‘docked’ in the car park of Mount Lemmon, he knew right away that they were going to have trouble with him. He could sense that, somehow, the observatory was never going to be the same again.

The observatory was a ‘close’ place of work, as the fifty-something year-old astronomer liked to say. Although it was indeed located in the highest peaks of the Santa Catalina mountain range, to the north of Tucson in the state of Arizona, −which invited him to think of wide open spaces and endless walks through the mountain,− the bleak outside climate, especially during the afternoon and the night, did not invite him to remain outside for too long. They were few and far between, the days in summer and spring that ended up being agreeable enough for one to wander astray in the mountain just in shirtsleeves. So the inclemency of the nature there, along with the narrow units comprising the observatory, forced its inhabitants and workers to maintain a close coexistence in which frictions were easy, and small disputes were a regular occurrence. If to this already bleak cocktail of personalities one added an eccentric character whose IQ could well be able to make a fool of any one of the other scientists in the observatory (Jason had taken the trouble to ascertain that), one would say that the mixture had reached a critical testing point. Jason liked to think of his small team of astronomers in that way, and the fact of having early retirement so tantalisingly within hand’s reach awarded him the perspective of the coming conflicts not as a problem, but rather more like an amusing epilogue to his multi-faceted career in astrophysics.

Nobody in the observatory appeared to pay any particular attention to the arrival of the ‘new guy’ apart from Jason. It was common that there would always be a couple of wild cards in the observatory; grant holders, passing investigators, ambitious astronomers wishing to find some available time slots with the most powerful telescopes, or even NASA itself, all of whom would finally disappear, grumbling, returning back to a mediocre destiny, similar to the one they had had before coming to Mount Lemmon. All of them, the old family of the observatory, presided over by the veteran Jason, watched them come and go without paying any particular attention. Manley seemed to be just another one of those. He arrived ebullient, with a certain smile on his attractive face, filled with conviction, moving quickly and nervously from one place to the other, until the point that Jason tried to calm him down as he watched him, sweaty in his hectic task of installing himself in the tiniest office in the building.

Easy, son ... the stars aren’t going anywhere, he murmured sardonically whilst he pushed backed his Texan hat and watched, in amusement, the exhibition of Manley unloading. Several computers, along with an endless stream of cardboard file boxes, was a perfectly normal thing. However, Jason’s attention was caught by a couple of heavy boxes that were being transported by a removals team. It was weighty equipment that was not easy to move in to the hall of the main telescope. There they remained whilst Jason nosed around trying to deduce what sort of artefact was hidden away inside. But when he asked the ‘kid’, the latter smiled at him as widely as his jaw would allow, looked at him with open, honest eyes, and... of course, gave no explanation whatsoever.

All of the astronomers at the Lemmon observatory took themselves for mediocre investigators. It was not something that they openly recognised, obviously, but it was definitely implicitly accepted in their conversations. This location was ‘the hole’ from which ‘there was no escape’, and their professional career was ‘going through a dry spell’. All of those expressions were common amongst them, like castaways who have accepted that they must acclimatise to the island on which they find themselves, without any hope at all of help or escape. None of them had excelled in any scientific field in particular, in spite of having insistently tried, in the case of the majority of them, for years. The fact of having failed in their professional expectations had led the group to thrive on a certain sense of fatalism and resignation. For many different reasons, none of them of any merit, they had all ended up there. They found themselves trapped on the top of that mountain, together with obsolete equipment consisting in several telescopes that had not been updated, some of them even defective, and without great prospects of extricating themselves from scientific anonymity. Needless to say, the idea of making any extraordinary contribution to science was completely thrown by the wayside. The observation time was divided up through nondescript routines... the hunt for asteroids near to Earth, observations of the range of an endless string of stars, and other lesser and additional jobs to main research investigations, the majority of which were carried out thousands of miles from there. ‘We’re in the age of the Internet’ they said amongst each other, and any of their relative successes would win the crumbs of discreet ‘congratulations’. That place was the ‘black hole of Tucson’; the kind of place that no astronomer who overstepped the threshold of its event horizon would ever be capable of escaping.

Perhaps the soul who had most confronted this fatal resignation that reigned supreme in the atmosphere was the recalcitrant David Spencer, who had tried for more honourable fates both actively and passively. Thus, he had sent off a host of requests to relocate to the ultra-famous Keck, in Hawaii, where he claimed to have important contacts. Every time he received a rejection, his colleagues, at the petition of Jason himself, would give him a small gift by way of a consolation jest; one time, a key ring with a surfboard, another time a wobbly Hawaiian figurine for the car dashboard, and thereby they continued their jokes as the rejections piled up. Spencer would smile forcedly, accept the gift, and then quietly hurl the present into the wastepaper bin in his office when nobody was looking: a sign that the joke had indeed injured his pride. When later on Jeremy Hudson, an entertaining grant holder with the vocation of becoming just another member of the tribe, recovered it and showed it, with an expression of triumph, to the rest of the team in David’s absence, the group effervesced in a lewd delight. Jason smiled, on deeming that surely the laughter could be heard for several miles around.

However, he sensed that Manley was not the type of person whose pride could be hurt. He observed in the young man the existence of a character as obstinate and firm as the very Mount Lemmon itself, and did not know how he would deal with those types of frictions and jokes with the rest of the ‘family’.

... and here we have the coffee machine; and watch out, because the cleaning lady who keeps it stocked often messes up and throws rat poison in the dispenser... and I assure you, it’s difficult to tell which is which, Jason told him sarcastically, as they strolled through the facilities. Manley followed him, weighed down by a bulky cardboard box on the way to his office, the most wretched hole in the wall in the entire observatory. It was obvious that Manley had been the last to arrive.

And Manley went along with each and every one of his quips with a good laugh, as if they were the wittiest jokes he had ever heard in his life. They strolled outside, and Jason proceeded, listing each of the telescopes within the complex. He talked about them like old pack animals who have already done more than they should; Old Steward, One-eyed Dahl, the Chinese one− although with that nickname he was actually referring to a telescope which operated from Korea− and so on, successively. Manley smiled in the face of Jason’s impertinence as he passed through his realm with the arrogance of a cowboy showing his herd.

Of course, Manley was not the average reserved and withdrawn exceptionally gifted person that Jason had inferred after an initial reading of his curriculum vitae. In fact, Jason was beginning to feel a liking towards this elated young man who was full of life. What the hell could have brought you to the asshole of nowhere? Any university would be fighting over you, ...he thought, as he told him about the main telescope’s capacity, and also about a few tricks to use for when any of the mechanisms got stuck.

But at one point, Manley became withdrawn. Jason realised that he was talking to himself, because the young man had become engaged in mental calculations regarding the available space. They were in the hangar of the Steward telescope’s dome. He began to murmur in a way that was unintelligible to Jason, taking measurements and calculating where he would be able to set up his computers and equipment, as if he were already seeing them. He pointed to all of the packed up boxes, which were piled up on one side of the room.

This can go here, and the computer equipment right there, so they don’t get in the way.

When Jason asked why the heck he needed more computer equipment, and what the hell it was that he was planning on setting up there, he became immediately lost in all of the quantum particles jargon that Manley was overwhelming him with. He had two options: to end up looking like a fool and beg him to explain all of that to him again; or to give the certain impression of understanding what he had been told, and nod with a certain air of boredom. He opted for this last one, with a certain internal resignation. He felt old.

Jason found him to be so resolute, and with so much energy, that he himself felt infected by this youthful enthusiasm, and for a moment he forgot that they were there, in the ‘gutter’; he forgot that he was an old veteran astronomer nearing early retirement; and he allowed himself to be taken prisoner by the resolution and vigour of this young man. Against all comprehension, Manley, being a perfect freak ... was getting along well with him. It is also true that he thought, with utter compassion, ‘poor innocent guy, upon remembering what little output could be yielded from those ancient facilities.

CHAPTER 4

Two weeks later

––––––––

It was a sunny day, but cold, and as was common at these hours, the few resident astronomers at Mount Lemmon had arranged to have a mid-morning coffee in the lounge area. Jason, well versed in the base’s social customs, arrived on time, wearing a thick woollen jumper. He had just been taking a stroll outside, and he had still not managed to shake off the cold.

What’s up, Darcy? Any supernovas today?

Darcy was an astronomer appointed to the observatory, thirtyish, capable of seeming enchantingly attractive in her plainness, with a good heart and a demanding character. Hardworking and efficient, Jason had always counted on her as his right-hand woman. A few years previously, she had broken away from Jason’s own lines of investigation, which in a certain sense he lamented, and she had joined a group of astrophysicists from the Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a job observing supernovas, in which the collaborative time spent at the observatory telescopes was almost token. Darcy was hoping to find a needle in a haystack... like virtually all of us, thought Jason, with a trace of bitterness.

David, who could also be found in the room, was very arrogantly chatting away with the youngest member of the observatory, Jeremy. The only one missing was Manley, who, as always, avoided those routine moments of social life at the base. Generally, it was strange to see him raise his head from his laptop and leave his meagre office. He had turned it into a real Marx brothers cabin. It was not possible to fit in a single thing more. Boxes of documents piled one on top of the other were occupying every single corner of the tiny room. His small writing desk had become crammed with documents, magazines, and, sitting on top of all of that, a couple of laptops, always switched on, and connected via the network with the flashy set of instruments he had set out in the dome room. The only person who had certain preferential treatment and accessed Manley’s sancta sanctorum, as they had gained the stubborn astronomer’s confidence, apart from Jason of course, was Darcy herself, who appeared to be helping Manley with some small issue of bureaucratic paperwork, the content of which she had not wanted to clarify with her colleagues. It seemed that Manley had insisted on not divulging his projects beyond his office door. And Darcy was very true to her word.

What do we have here today? asked Jason in a loud voice, by way of general greeting, inviting David and Jeremy to come out of their private whispering and share it.

David smiled, feeling satisfied. One might say that he could not wait to disclose whatever it was he was going to say.

It’s about our friend Manley. Jeremy has been doing his homework, and none of you have ever seen such a résumé. David whistled.

I believe it, said Jeremy immediately, who considered himself a whizz with computers, and never missed a chance to boast about his capacity to extract information from the net. Of course, you can all imagine already that I have been investigating into the life and wonders of our latest acquisition and... ta-dah! We should be delighted... we have a real-live Einstein among us!

Darcy smiled innocently. Jason put on a suitable expression for the circumstances. Between colleagues, researching each other, or rather snooping, was inevitable, regardless of whom it was. Published articles, academic records, university forums, and even social networks. An expert, and Jeremy was that, was capable of reconstructing the ins and outs of anyone who came into the firing line.  Manley had done the latter, so the relevant scrutiny was unavoidable.

What exactly do you mean by that, Jeremy?

Well, it means that our Manley is a total cum laude. He started the astrophysics course at fifteen years old. His IQ is beyond our comprehension, my little grasshopper. Even though Jeremy was the youngest out of all of them, his mocking and clownish behaviour meant that he was able to have many privileges with everyone. Darcy was ‘little grasshopper’. "He finished the course in no time at all, and ended up with several PhDs... not just one, he exaggeratedly arched his eyebrows. A genius."

But... tell them how he ended up spending his days in this remote exile... come on, we’re all going to laugh at this, commented David.

Ah, yes. Perhaps the most disturbing, or noteworthy, or... outstanding thing about our young guest, Jeremy proceeded with enthusiasm, is his tendency to proclaim crazy theories, of all kinds. He must think that, as he is highly intelligent and highly wise, well... he says everything that comes to him, believing himself to be the possessor of the gift of infallibility. To sum up... his professional career, however, in spite of what his magnificent résumé could foretell, has been a profound fiasco. He’s tried to publish the most diverse theories in different scientific publications of note... Jeremy laughed, he was having a great time, and yet he’s only managed to get certain ones of dubious scientific quality to publish them... you know, those kinds of magazines where next to your article there’s an interview with some guy who says he was abducted.

Jeremy and David laughed sarcastically at the joke, whilst Darcy raised a censorial eyebrow, and Jason watched them with a certain amount of scepticism. Jeremy loved pulling peoples’ leg, and David was happy whenever he thought he had found more sorrow in a fellow man than he himself carried around with him.

And do you mind telling us what those theories are that Manley has suggested that are so strange and... ‘esoteric’? asked Darcy, cagily.

David started to take the floor, but Jeremy became impatient, and put his hand on his chest as if to stop him.

No, no, no... I’m the one who came across it; you’ll allow me to be the one to outline it, Jeremy huffed. "Well... It is, without doubt, highly original, and very simple. I call it ‘Mars; scratching the surface’, and it’s basically an explanation of the scar that is the great Martian valley, the Valles Marineris. You all remember what it looks like, right? Well Manley made a highly original observation. For him, the explanation of it being a withdrawal from the crust as a result of the activity of the Tharsis volcano, which has always been considered the most probable cause of said geological event, is a pure nineteenth century error. For him, it is crystal clear that it’s to do with a new type of meteoric impact, which we could call the ‘slash type’. His theory defends the idea that a bone-shaped asteroid, of considerable size, did not impact Mars, but rather, quite literally, grazed it... Jeremy laughed, very amused. Can you imagine that? It grazed it! He took a breath. Anyway... what an imagination. The fact is that, according to him, that asteroid’s irregular bone shape would explain why there are three or even four points of friction; all of them parallel, of course. The lower, or main canyon, is the larger one, and there are a couple more, which are shorter in length, more to the north, along with a bunch of small furrows, all of them going in the same direction, as would have happened with bits breaking off from the asteroid that collided with the planet. Furthermore, there’s a point where the ‘grazing’, or friction, occurred in a ricochet that is precisely in the central part of the valley... in which something vaguely similar to an amorphous looking impact crater is visible..."

What an original explanation! exclaimed Darcy, but with an entirely warning air. She looked at Jeremy with one eyebrow arched, letting him know that she did not like his mocking tone one bit.

Jason shook his head. Mars was not exactly his forte, but he had read enough about it to know that refuting the official theory was not simply a question of throwing oneself into the arena with a good idea. Exactly one photograph of Mars, with its Valles Marineris, decorated one of the walls in the room. Jason looked at it for a long while as he sipped his steaming cup of white coffee, and forgot about the conversation that the rest of the ‘kids’ were carrying out. Indeed, it was astonishing that all of the longitudinal lines would be straight, parallel to each other, in fact. Coincidence? On Earth, it was difficult to find a similar phenomenon, after all... The debate proceeded further. In any case, though, it was not his field, and nor did he plan on dedicating another second to the matter.

Darcy, please... don’t be naïve! ...The theory of Mars being scratched is the biggest load of nonsense that’s ever been written about the red plan...

Jeremy’s voice cut off suddenly.

Jason stopped looking at Mars and turned parsimoniously back towards the room. Manley Stuart had just arrived, and who knew how long he had been listening without saying a word, but without doubt he had taken note of the valuable opinion that Jeremy was spilling about his speculation. The intern had discovered to his horror that he had just put his foot in it, royally. David played with the spoon in his cup of coffee, his gaze centred on the whirlpool it caused, pleased to not be the obnoxious one of the group this time, as that was a stigma that had always landed on him, and that for once he had been let off the hook.

Darcy appeared to be the only annoyed one present, and looked furiously at Jeremy for his lack of consideration.

Manley cracked a wide smile. He seemed genuinely amused, in spite of the mocking tone in which Jeremy had expounded his theory. His countenance, whether through timidity or through abject indifference, (Jason could not tell), did not appear to show any kind of opposition, nor even the slightest insecurity, which brought him to emit a long sigh of relief. He sensed that Manley was a force to be reckoned with. His body was obviously athletic, and Jason was certain that Manley went to the gym on a daily basis.

Doctor Donovan, I need a minute of your time, please. His words cut through the electrified air in the room.

They were just walking out through the door of the meetings room when Manley turned towards Jeremy. There was no trace of resentment in his voice, when he said after a sigh:

"By the way Jeremy, several supercomputers are busy verifying the accuracy of my calculations, which are extremely complex, as you can imagine. We have the Cry Titan and the IBM Sequoia in the United States, and the