This rather mild proposal did much to calm the furor in NASA and contractor engineering circles and soon the press had abandoned it for other, more sensational stories. But Hennesey and a number of other officials didn't forget. Some of them believed Jim Cochran was a charlatan at worse and an incompetent at best. They considered he had degraded American science with his fantastic theory.
Scientific judgement was being held in abeyance until actual moon samples were available on earth. For the present, at least one of Jim's predictions had come true. The hypothesis was becoming known as Cochran's Theory. That it was also called Cochran's Idiocy by a few didn't matter.
Jim continued his own sixteen-hour stints at the analyzer controls, probing in a wide pattern over the floor of the Sea of Rains, and striking deeper toward the heart of the moon with each probe.
Probing to such great depths was made possible by a development that didn't even exist when the Prospector design was begun. Then, it was hoped that penetration to a foot and a half of the moon's surface might be possible. Five-hundred-foot holes were only a madman's nightmare. How could you carry such drilling equipment all the way to the moon?
Then, in the last months of Prospector design, laser devices had been produced, capable of burning holes in a diamond. It was only a small step, then, to the design of a drilling head which mounted a cluster of laser beams. These would literally burn their way toward the heart of the moon.
The laser drilling head was lowered on five hundred feet of minute cable, which had tremendous tensile strength. The vaporized moon substance boiled out of the hole and condensed above the surface, settling as fine dust. As the hole deepened, the condensation products coated the upper portions of the hole and the cable. To keep the hole from thus being closed, the cable was vibrated at a frequency that shook loose the condensing rock products, and the laser head was raised with beams shooting upward to clear the hole.
Jim found that a very special technique was required to raise and lower the head at the proper intervals to keep the hole clear and prevent loss of the drilling head. A spare was carried, but he didn't want to face the loss of even one. After three weeks, he felt confident in his operation and began lowering the drilling head to depths of two hundred and three hundred feet.
As he had expected, along with the lunar geologists who were participating, the moon showed a definite pattern of stratification. But the differences between the layers seemed slight. Chalky, calcium compounds were abundant. Some were powdery; others were pressed into brittle limestone formations. No really hard rocks such as granite were encountered, however. The boundaries between layers were ill-defined. No one knew what to make of it. The observations were interesting. Explanations were wholly lacking.
Then, after five weeks of probing, on the edge of the four-hundred-foot level, Jim found something new. He sought out Sam at the end of the day.