The Rock by Robert Doherty Page B

the pages of the textbook.
    Susan Pencak watched the taillights of the bus disappear into the growing darkness. The sun was almost completely down and the temperature had taken the quick dive it always does on a winter desert night. She could hear the noises of the night creatures coming alive out in the flatlands.
    They always cut her off when she started challenging their reality. She found it quite discouraging. She was widely recognized among her colleagues as the foremost expert on the geological aspects of Meteor Crater, yet she infuriated them by not toeing the party line and blindly accepting that the crater had been formed as its name indicated.
    She reached up with both arms toward the stars that were beginning to appear overhead. The five fingers on her good hand reached higher and higher, as if she were trying to touch the stars. Her withered hand was inches below, forced down by the ruined shoulder. Slowly, she lowered her arms and turned her eye back to earth. With a slight limp she headed for the Jeep parked just off the rim road. Off in the distance she could hear the discordant thump of a helicopter headed in her direction and she paused and waited.

     
     
     

VOYAGER 
     
    The Edge of the Solar System
    21 DECEMBER 1995, 0100 ZULU
     
    Outside the orbit of the farthest planet in the solar system, the effects of the sun are still present. A continuous stream of charged particles from the sun's magnetic field is swept by the solar wind and creates a huge bubble-like structure known as the heliosphere. From mankind's perspective it serves a most useful function by keeping the solar system relatively free of interstellar matter and slowing the entry of cosmic rays.
    Voyager 2, intrepid visitor of four planets and fifty-seven moons during the past eighteen years, was only a third of the way to the edge of the heliosphere but well beyond the orbit of Pluto-a vast, empty hinterland where there is little for the probe's scanners to search out and examine. Indeed, most of the equipment on board the Voyager was turned off shortly after the probe passed Neptune in August of 1989. Since that time only the spectrometer-a device that detects ultraviolet radiation--has been kept active.
    With its large dish oriented back into the plane of the planets and the high-gain antenna in the center centered on Earth, Voyager heads for the edge of the heliosphere, projected to reach it by the year 2000. The plutonium power on the probe is expected to run out in 2020. After that, it is estimated that it will take Voyager millions of years before it comes close to another star.
    When Voyager was launched in 1977, there were people who believed shooting out into space what was essentially a guidebook back to Earth might not have been the most prudent idea. Those worries were overruled. After all, the scientists argued, the radio and television rays from Earth were much farther out already than Voyager would ever reach intact. Those rays not only pinpointed Earth's stellar location but also depicted life--and not a very flattering one, as a survey of the channels indicates--on Earth.
    At precisely 0100, Greenwich mean time, the transmitter secreted away in the guts of the probe powered up and began pulsing out a binary code representing the readings from the spectrometer for the past twenty-four hours. The radio waves began their four-hour, ten-minute, twenty-three-second trip back to Earth to be gathered in at the deep-space communications center near Alice Springs, Australia, where a giant dish would grudgingly turn from higher priority missions to gather in Voyager's data during its fifteen minute daily allocation of dish time.
    Seven minutes later--four and a half billion miles into its seventeen-year journey and midway through the transmission--Voyager 2's journey ended abruptly.
     
     
    DSCC 14, Australia
    21 DECEMBER 1995, 1440 LOCAL
    21 DECEMBER 1995, 0510 ZULU
     
    Hawkins felt the pounding of a massive headache behind his