Dr. Vickers had doffed his jacket, but still wore the thick herringbone waistcoat and slacks. How he managed to hike in wool and wingtips was beyond O’Connor, but the very fact that he hadn’t bothered to loosen his tie, or even roll up his sleeves, left the sergeant with the impression that the professor was actually the alien artifact.
O’Connor hadn’t planned for a day hike up into the foothills of bumfuck California. Only a hundred yards from where they’d parked, he’d already finished his water and he was fairly confident that flip flops were the wrong footwear choice entirely. His sweating feet soaked in the dust making his soles slippery at a time that he entirely lacked dexterity. He stumbled uphill, following the professor’s fresh footprints. He didn’t doubt that the professor knew where he was going; even in wingtips, the herringbone adventurer was hustling top speed up the hill.
The entire excursion seemed pointless. He didn’t need to climb a mountain to confirm the find, he just needed GPS coordinates for satellite imaging. Hell, he probably didn’t even need that. With a little high-speed Wi-fi, he could be sitting beside the pool in Santa Monica, sipping a Seabreeze as Dr. Vickers gave him directions over the phone. Just the thought of a drink made him retch slightly. He wondered how unprofessional it might look if he puked on assignment.
The professor stopped abruptly, standing on a boulder, looking over into what O’Connor assumed was obviously just more hill. By the time he reached Dr. Vickers, he was relieved to see that the professor was drenched in sweat, soaking through the underarms of his dress shirt, and darkening the collar. Dr. Vickers dabbed at his forehead with a paisley silk pocket square. “I don’t understand.” He glanced around, looking at the ground as if he had just lost a contact lens or dropped his keys somewhere. O’Connor examined the space where the professor stood, a large empty hollow of dirt and crumbling granite gravel.
“Where is it?” O’Connor queried, slowly realizing that he had just hiked up the side of a Sierra Nevada foothill in search of a Rorschach blot image in a grainy pixelated LIDAR scan of an almond-shaped crater. For this he was missing out on a weekend with his wife.
“Well, it was,” he gestured towards the immense hole in the hill side, about the size of a car, “right there.” There had obviously been something there, and possibly recently, although the evening’s rain had washed most of the details away. “I just can’t imagine how…” The Professor fondled his push broom mustache, contemplating how his alien artifact had entirely vanished overnight.
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O’Connor photographed the site, edging around it, snapping different angles. He planted a fiberglass pole in various spots, for reference. This wasn’t an alien investigation. This wasn’t even a weather balloon. Chief Martinez had dragged O’Connor’s ass a hundred miles into the desert so that he could hike a half mile uphill to snap a few selfies beside a crater too shallow to bury a dead dog. Rifling through his field bag for the pocket Geiger counter, he watched the professor, clearly distraught, attempt to photograph the rain-washed tire tread marks with an antique Nikon camera. O’Connor didn’t exactly have a travel forensics lab, and even if he did, those tread marks were too far gone to identify, and why in the hell would he bother running a set of treads on some fucking random tire marks on some fucking random road in the middle of nowhere anyway?
“Poolside,” he muttered, flicking the power button on the little toy Geiger counter.
“Sergeant O’Connor, I assure you—” the Professor started.
“Skip it.” O’Connor said, stifling the urge to retch all over his investigation site.
Of the ridiculous number of tools that he carried with him on assignment, the Geiger counter was by far his favorite. Beyond the fact that it happened to look like an old-school Star Trek prop, nothing soothed a witness like watching O’Connor pull out the little official looking toy. Waving a spiral-corded saltshaker around a potential crash site looked official. Even in faded blue jeans and a pastel polo shirt, poking at the edges of the crater with a little plastic cylinder lent O’Connor a little more credibility as the tiny box hanging from a strap over his shoulder crackled out a steady baseline.
Passing his toy tricorder over the edge of the crater, the Geiger counter needle hopped faintly, registering a light residual radioactivity. Granted, it had the weak signal of a truckload of bananas, but it definitely had a signal. Without a proper lab, it would be impossible to isolate the isotope to determine whether it was extraterrestrial. The signal was too strong for solar radiation, but too weak for nuclear waste. The surrounding gravel might be about as harmful as a dental X-ray, if someone filled a pillowcase with it and slept on it for a few months.
O’Connor knelt down and gently scooped samples of the radioactive gravel into a small canister, securing it in a lead lined pouch for transport.
Despite the artifact’s disappearance, Dr. Vickers seemed excited to see the agent taking soil samples. “What is it?” the doctor asked.
O’Connor switched off the Geiger counter and dropped it next to his kit. Ignoring the doctor, he dialed the chief directly from the satellite phone.
“We got a code yellow, Chief. You might want to get up here.”