Jack Thompson had made the long drive south from Darwin to Alice Springs three days ago and was only now to the point that he could do what he came here to do. If you’re a Geologist and you want to explore Australia’s Outback, there are a few things that have to get done first before you can hop in your jeep and drive out into the middle of nowhere. You have to find living quarters with air conditioning to get out of the January heat. He had rented a one room bungalow on Knuckey Avenue in Alice Springs; it had a small kitchenette, a cramped bathroom, a lumpy queen sized bed and a noisy window unit that managed to keep the place cool enough. Jack had found a small grocery a few blocks over when he was renting his post office box. He had brought several jugs to hold water but he wanted to find an extra spare tire in case he ran into trouble while out in the desert here.
Jack finished tying down the spare and made sure his geology tool bag was in the back before starting up the jeep and heading east toward Stuart Highway. It is the main north-south road in Alice Springs. If you head north and drive for 15 hours you’ll find yourself in Darwin on the northern coast. Heading south for 13 hours will put you in Port Augusta on the southern coast, which puts this place in just about the center of Australia. Jack was only going about a mile north, then he turned right on Herbert Heritage Drive, which was a dirt road only about two miles long and ended abruptly at the old telegraph station. It stopped in the middle of the desert only because there was nothing else beyond it except desert, which is exactly where he wanted to be. He made sure the jeep was in four wheel drive and turned the steering wheel hard left and headed northeast, to nowhere in particular.
The desert here isn’t like a “desert” in the classical sense, where there is nothing but white sand and sand dunes. The dirt is a reddish color and there are ravines and canyons with rocky ledges, carved out of the ground by the rare rain storms that happen here. The majority of the landscape is flat and level with sparse grasses and shrubs and an occasional Acacia tree struggling to survive. The lack of water available has limited the wildlife to a few lizard species, some red kangaroos and the rare Bilby, which resembles a big eared rat. One of the lizards that is able to exist in this harsh environment is the Thorny Devil, whose diet consists of only one type of black ant.
Jack kept the jeep’s speed at a slow pace, no more than twenty miles per hour, because he was just out looking around and exploring. He wanted to find a ravine that exposed the underground layers of the earth, perhaps find a few interesting rocks, or dig in the dirt near a billabong; he had taken two weeks off for this and wasn’t in any hurry.
After a few hours of exploring the jeep reached the crest of a small hill which gave Jack a good view of the landscape ahead. At the bottom of the hill in front of him was a small ravine that had been carved into the ground by a long ago rain storm, but off in the distance to the right was something that looked interesting. From here it looked like a deeper washout but the dirt was much darker, so he descended the hill in that direction. As he got closer, he could see that it wasn’t a canyon at all, and the ground looked scorched, like there was a fire. Jack stopped the jeep at a safe distance and shut it off, slowly stepping towards the edge of a huge crater.
It looked like it was about fifty feet across and thirty feet deep. The ground was scarred and blackened, with debris thrown out from the center reaching a hundred yards. At the bottom of the crater was a boulder the size of a small car. Jack picked up his bag from the rear of the jeep and descended into the darkened crater. The meteorite looked like a large chunk of coal, the surface was rough, and upon closer inspection he could see that there were different colored pockets of minerals in it. He walked around it and counted three different colors of these impurities; the blue and the green ones were the size of his palm and looked like glass or crystal. There was also a powdery orange substance that was in a long crack that ran the length of the meteorite. Using the pointy end of his rock hammer, Jack scraped some of the powder into a small pill bottle and capped it. Then, again using the pointy end, he began to try and chip out some of the blue crystalline mineral by striking near the edge of it. The boulder didn’t budge; it seemed extremely hard and dense, like iron. Then he tried chipping at the blue part, and it produced a spark. Not like when he hits a piece of flint with his rock hammer and getting an orange spark, more like an electrical spark, bright white and arcing out to his hand and it felt like a shock. None of the blue crystal chipped off so he decided to hit it harder. Jack pulled his arm back and swung it down as hard as he could, striking dead center of the blue part; and the last thing he saw was a very bright flash, then darkness. The explosion cracked the meteorite in half, throwing debris into the air and a cloud of black smoke drifted up and away. Jack’s body was thrown halfway up the side of the crater, the upper part of the torso missing. When the sun set and darkness descended on the scene, the only light available was the glow from the blue spots in the fractured meteorite.