Dark Discovery

DARK DISCOVERY North West China Fu Cheng could not believe his bad luck. It was his daughter’s fourteenth birthday and here he was bouncing along a dirt road in a military truck on the Lop Nur test range. At nearly 40,000 square miles, the Lop Nur weapons test range occupied an unpopulated patch of dessert about the size of Ohio. Fu Cheng did not feel the least bit privileged to be driving through the world’s largest weapons test range. His back was aching. He was too old to be playing soldier. He had served as the Minister of Science and Technology for the People’s Republic of China for the past six years and had begun thinking about retirement. During the past two hours of pounding, he thought of little else. Why this old military truck had such an impossibly hard suspension, he could not imagine. Maybe the driver was going too fast. However, asking his driver to slow down would only extend the agony. The four-wheel drive truck had no air conditioning. Consequently, the windows remained down, letting in billows of dust from the dirt road that made it nearly impossible to breath. Fu Cheng lamented — slow the driver down, roll the windows up — no matter how you looked at it, the cure was worse than the disease. On a paved road with a little cloud cover, the 79 degree, October afternoon would have made for perfect weather. With the blistering sun beating down through a dry, cloudless sky, it might as well have been 100 degrees. Calling the truck in which they rode dilapidated would have been too complimentary. The vinyl seats were cracked in multiple places adding to the discomfort of the ride. The Spartan interior was mostly a dull green exposed metal frame. Any trim work that might have come with the truck was long gone, leaving small square holes in the frame where the trim would have popped into place. Officer Gang, Fu Cheng’s driver, had a warrior’s confidence, bordering on cocky, that Fu Cheng found reassuring. Gang said, “At the top of this next ridge we should be able to see the test site. Do you want me to stop there so we can survey the area, or keep driving to the observation bunker?” “Are you joking? Keep driving,” Fu Cheng replied. Fu Cheng watched the Army truck in front of them screech to a halt as it crested the ridge. He had a sickening feeling he might be stuck out here for hours. When their vehicle reached the ridge summit, Fu Cheng’s eyes opened wide in surprise and he sucked in a lungful of dusty air. He let out a series of enormous coughs. Through tearing eyes, he tried to take in the stark landscape below. He could not believe the scene on the other side of the splattered windshield. At the target location, a massive crater blotted out the scenery. His skillful driver maneuvered past the other vehicle as Fu Cheng screamed, “Stop!” “I thought you wanted to keep moving.” Gang did not appear to be the least bit affected by the wide-ranging devastation in front of him. “Don’t you see what’s in front of us?” Fu Cheng nearly screamed. Officer Gang, still apparently oblivious to the unexpected destruction, said, “With the ground clearance this vehicle has, it’s not a problem.” Fu Cheng was already out of the vehicle looking through binoculars when Gang’s truck came to a complete stop. The man-made crater in the valley below had to be at least a mile across and a couple of hundred feet deep. The walls of the crater seemed unnaturally steep. No vehicle, tracked or otherwise, could negotiate those crater walls. Large truck-size boulders were piled around the rim of the crater. All around the crater, the scruff vegetation was gone. The blackened remains of struggling groves of poplar trees could be seen in a quarter-mile ring around the crater. The smoke from the smoldering vegetation wafted lazily into the air around the rim of the crater. Scrawny poplars interspersed with dead poplars were visible all the way to the horizon. The standing dead poplars were most likely killed off by the drying climate and the thirsty irrigation systems up stream, Fu Cheng thought. Fu Cheng shuddered at the destruction. They had just fired a new weapon, which on prior tests had made only 20-foot wide craters. Fu Cheng felt stomach acids churning. Something was dreadfully wrong. Twenty minutes later, they pulled up to the concrete observation bunker, which rose above the stark terrain two miles from the newly formed crater’s edge. Gang headed into the bunker without even pausing at the threshold. Fu Cheng fiddled with his radiation meter and exhaled loudly when he saw no measureable radiation. He followed Gang’s path into the bunker, through the low doorway, carrying his Geiger counter for good measure. Fu Cheng looked around the bunker and noticed the clock on the wall still had the correct time. Racks of test equipment appeared to be functioning normally. He checked out the computer systems. The computers were flashing red failed-sensor warnings. The young officer approached Fu Cheng. “I can’t believe how ill-conceived this test program has been. I don’t think anyone on the program really understands the weapon they are testing.” “It would be hard to argue the point,” Fu Cheng reluctantly conceded. “I’ve been asked to produce a report for my chief. It will be hard to convey the level of recklessness the test team has consistently displayed.” With an audible sigh, Fu Cheng said, “We are on the verge of something so fantastic that big risks come with the territory.” With a respectful closed-mouth smile, Gang said, “I’ll copy you on my report.” As Fu Cheng continued his inspection of the observation bunker, he felt a sense of panic rise through his body. It started down around his knees, which were weakening by the minute. Now his stomach was knotting up. A wave of nausea washed over him. He struggled to remember the timeline for symptoms of radiation poisoning. He had been in the bunker only twenty minutes, but a profound sense of loneliness made it seem like an eternity. Checking his Geiger counter, he could read nothing but background radiation. Was he succumbing to some new form of radiation poisoning not detected by his sophisticated meter? He quickly sat down before he collapsed. Sitting down, he began to feel better. Maybe it was not radiation poisoning after all. Maybe it was just the stench from the seven corpses strewn about the floor.