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."
"Screw them," Bulla snorted.
Pulse lifted his white Stetson, replacing it at a cockier angle than before.
"Whether you're the screwer or the screwee, I don't know. But history tells us the federal government has pretty much the upper hand in screwing folks. I'd be prepared for the worst."
Then Amos Bulla felt a hard tapping on his shoulder, and a cold voice that made him all but jump out of his skin said in his ear, "Remo Kobialka, EPA."
"Where'd you come from?" Bulla sputtered, whirling.
"The taxpayers. They want some answers to some questions."
"You just missed Dr. Cosmo Pagan," Bulla said, deciding to toss the ball into another court entirely. "He said it was aliens."
"You believe that?" asked Remo Kobialka, who looked as much like an EPA investigator in his white T-shirt and tan chinos as Tom Pulse in his white Stetson and snakeskin. boots looked like a scientific consultant on earthquakes, volcanos and other Earth hazards.
"I'm only a glorified PR agent. Dr. Pagan is a world-renowned expert," Bulla answered.
"Who once predicted that the firing of the old wells in Kuwait would turn Africa into a winter wonderland," said Remo Kobialka.
"Well, he was off his subject. If it's up in the sky, Pagan knows it inside and out."
"What's your theory?"
"Lightning."