The Orthogonal Galaxy (15 page)

Reyd was the first to try
to console the professor. “There does appear to be one answer,
Professor.”

Zimmer looked up and gave
a half-smile to his student.

“
We now know that the
cloud is not deep enough to obscure the entire canyon. We can see
some of the walls. The cloud may be a couple of thousand feet
thick, but certainly is not fifty thousand feet thick.”

“
We might be able to get a
better estimate,” began Joram. “If we scan the telescope along the
canyon to the west, it will bring us to the Labyrinth, where we
will be able to see various depths of the canyon and whether the
cloud fully covers these more shallow regions or not.”

Without saying a word, the
professor scaled the telescope platform again. Slowly guiding the
telescope towards the west, they continued to see the occasionally
billowing cloud of dust, indicating that the dynamics of the event
causing this phenomenon were not local to the Candor region. Where
clouds were not billowing, they saw a flat layer of dust hanging
off of the valley floor. As they approached the western edge of the
canyon, a massively wide expanse ended abruptly into a series of
canyon narrows which intertwined in a chaotic, mazelike structure
known as the Noctis Labyrinthus.

Joram broke the silence.
“The Labyrinth of the Night. Professor, this is wonderful! We are
nearing the end of the labyrinth where the canyons get narrower and
shallower and yet we are still able to make them out.”

“
What is the depth of the
canyon here?” asked the professor turning away from the telescope
controls and looking at his trio of helpers intently.

Reyd clicked the mouse a
couple of times and noted the elevation on the plateau above and
the floor below. “Twelve hundred feet, Professor!”

“
Twelve hundred feet,” the
professor nodded approval. “That sounds much better than fifty
thousand feet! Kath, please call Dr. Avram again and let him know
of our results. See if you can get him to assess a time frame for
when this type of dust will settle out and give us a visual on the
camp.”

“
Yes, sir.” Kath raced
back to her station and quickly placed the headset on her
head.

“
Gentlemen,” proceeded
Zimmer. “It is time for us to turn our attention to the satellites.
I’d like to get a visual lock on Satellite Four. Could you please
calculate its current position and provide me with coordinates? If
we can find this satellite, then we’ll be able to tune our
telescope accordingly, and spot the remaining satellites in their
current locations. Then, we’ll turn our attention to the shuttle,
although it might be tougher to calculate its precise location and
distance. Looking at my watch, I can see that we only have about an
hour of nighttime left, so we’ll still have much to do tomorrow
night as well.”

While Reyd pounded at the
keyboard in front of them in an effort to make some very hurried
calculations, and while Kath reintroduced herself to Ravid Avram to
notify him of their discovery, Joram was beginning to feel a bit
more helpful. His knowledge of the Martian terrain and suggestions
for where to turn to for answers was proving to be a valuable asset
to the team after all. Turning in his chair, he saw Professor
Zimmer reclining in a chair with his hands behind his head and his
eyes closed.

“
Mr. Anders,” the
professor spoke without opening eyes or appearing to be awake at
all for that matter.

“
Yes,
Professor.”

“
Thank you for your
suggestion on using Marineris to assess the dust cloud. A very
astute suggestion that has provided us with a significant answer to
an important question.”

Joram’s head lowered in
humility for this recognition from a giant of an astrophysicist.
“Thank you, Professor. I really just want to be as helpful as
possible.”

The professor maintained
his position and did not respond, but nodded his head slowly and
took a deep breath.

“
Professor,” interrupted
Reyd. “I believe I have the coordinates for you, but I’m afraid
that Satellite Four is behind Mars presently. It won’t emerge for
another 6 hours.”

“
Ok, if it wants to play
hide-and-seek, then so be it. In the meantime, I think I’ll simply
zoom away from the planet and put ourselves into
needle-in-a-haystack mode of operation. In the meantime, can you
calculate the remaining satellite coordinates?”

“
Yes, sir.”

As Reyd typed again, Joram
sat back and watched the show. The telescope slowly zoomed away
from the labyrinth revealing Marineris on the left and Tharsis on
the right. Olympus shortly came into view and a host of other
unidentifiable features, but for the most part, the entire planet
seemed to be covered in a cloud of dust. Joram was stunned that a
dust storm could occur on such a global scale.

Presently, the entire
globe was within the view of the telescope, and continued to
diminish just a little more before the professor locked its
position. Joram continued to wonder at the view and dream about
what it would be like to be on Mars. How he envied those astronauts
who had been able to step on its surface and study its features up
close. And then… he saw… well… he saw something, but did not quite
know what to make of it? He leaned forward, tilting his head and
wrinkling his brow.

“
Reyd, what the heck is
this?”

Reyd looked up to where
Joram was pointing at a dim undulating yellow stripe in the upper
right hand corner of the screen. He shrugged his shoulders and
stated indifferently. “Imaging anomaly, I guess. We see some
strange things from time to time depending on the lighting
situation and the optics.”

Reyd went back to typing
on the keyboard, but Zimmer overheard the conversation and wandered
over to take a look at what Joram had noticed.

“
Can you try to clean that
up, Reyd? It’s a curious piece of imagery.”

“
Do you think that is
necessary, Professor? It’s surely just some image problem,” Reyd
rebutted.

“
It may not be necessary,”
responded Zimmer honestly. “However, I always lose faith in my data
when optical abnormalities need to be filtered.”

“
Understood,
Professor.”

For a few minutes, Reyd
and Zimmer worked on their stations respectively, talking back and
forth about their efforts to remove this figment. While the stripe
was in the image, Zimmer worried about their ability to pinpoint
the satellites. He figured that image problems would only turn
their task of looking for a needle in a haystack into something
much worse.

After persistent attempts
to clean up the image, Reyd and Zimmer grew increasingly
frustrated. This was not the time to be having technical
difficulties. In just minutes now, the earliest light of dawn would
begin.

“
Professor, may I make a
suggestion?” Joram spoke out.

“
Absolutely.”

“
Would it be prudent to
zoom out a little bit more and see if the optics will clean up the
stripe?”

“
Couldn’t
hurt.”

Zimmer slowly retracted
the telescope and the red globe began retreating slowly from the
screen again. The yellow streak persisted.

“
Maybe we should try to
pan as well,” suggestion Zimmer. “In case there is some pre-dawn
light that might shift out of view with a different horizontal
angle.”

This, however, drew more
perplexing concern from the team, since the relative position of
the stripe remained fixed, and as the red planet dipped out of the
bottom of the image, the yellow stripe continued to pulse its dim
straight beam of light just as a flashlight might do inside of a
dark, dusty cave.

“
Well, it just can’t be a
real object,” stated Zimmer. “There must be some technical reason
for this stripe to persist in our system. I’ll have our maintenance
team look at it today…” He paused… “and yet, the stripe remains
straight as an arrow. I would expect an imaging problem to
demonstrate more curvature, because of the curved nature of our
lenses.”

“
Could it be a tail of a
meteor or some other object, Sir?” suggested Joram.

Zimmer shook his head
readily. “No, this… thing appears to be emanating light. Look at
the undulating pattern. If this were a tail of some object, we
might see some reflectivity of sunlight coming off of the dust and
ice, but this pulsating… waving… geez… it almost looks like an
Aurora in a straight, thin yellow line of light. Very
strange.”

“
I agree, Professor,”
joined Reyd. “It may not be an imaging problem, but it may be some
rendering problem with the image digitization software.”

“
We definitely need
maintenance to look at this.”

A few moments of
thoughtful pondering and wonder was broken by the ring of a cell
phone.

Zimmer tapped his ear
implant and answered, “Hello, Carlton Zimmer here.”

“
Hello, Professor, this is
Vurim Gilroy at Johnson. Have you been able to assess anything this
evening?”

“
Yes, Dr. Gilroy. We’ve
noticed that the dust cloud is much thinner than originally
anticipated. We are talking with Ravid Avram now to assess a time
frame for visual assessment.”

“
Anything else odd,
Professor?”

“
No, nothing else at the
moment, we will certainly continue our study tomorrow evening.
Hopefully, Madrid can make some good progress tonight as
well.”

“
Professor, there is a
report…” Vurim paused.

“
A report,
Doctor?”

“
Yes… it appears that an
amateur astronomer from the Mojave Desert called in a report at
4:15 AM pacific time. NASA has been notified that he discovered a
faint yellow streak across the south-eastern sky stretching to both
horizons.”

Zimmer stopped dead in his
tracks, grew pale, and fixed a gaze at the telescope monitor,
walking towards it slowly.

“
Professor?”

“
Vurim! We are seeing it
as well, but we assumed an imaging problem. This thing has no
visual signature that I can ever recognize seeing.”

“
There’s one other thing
you should know, Professor.”

“
Go ahead,” Zimmer said
while remaining fixed on the yellow stripe.

“
There are reports of a
spike of electromagnetic activity on portions of Earth.”

After a brief pause,
Zimmer asked quietly, “What kind of radiation are we talking about,
Vurim?”

“
Well, we’re not sure yet,
but it is some form of high-energy ionizing particle radiation that
is detectable, but not identifiable. It was a very quick, sudden,
and low-volume burst… we don’t believe there is any harm to
communications at this point, but there is something very odd about
it, Professor.”

“
Go on.”

“
The time of impact
coincides with the Martian anomalies, and only the portions of the
Earth which were facing Mars at the time of the incident report any
such detection.”

“
So, you calculate the
impact to be about the same time as the satellite
disappearance.”

“
Not ‘about’, Professor.
Exactly the same time.”

“
Sounds like a significant
piece of the puzzle, Vurim. Martian satellites disappear due to a
radiation event, and the event is detected after the radiation hits
sensors on Earth.”

“
Professor, there is no
after. Let me clarify. The radiation is detected synchronously at
several stations on at least three continents. Then, three minutes
and forty-seven seconds later, an alarm event in our control room
indicated that we’d lost communication with the satellite up there.
Considering that we are about forty-two million miles from Mars,
three forty-seven is precisely the time it takes for signals to
travel from Mars to Earth. That means, the exact point in time when
the satellite stopped transmitting was the same point in time when
the radiation hit the Earth. They are perfectly simultaneous
events.”

Zimmer weighed this new
information for a moment, stood up and clapped his
hands.

“
Vurim! This is great
news.”

“
What do you mean,
Professor?”

“
Well, what has stumped us
the most is the exact timing of the loss of signals between objects
at different distances! Now, we can relate this to a radiation
event which probably knocked out all of your sensors at the same
point in time… on Earth, not up on Mars.”

“
Yes, it would seem so,
but we’ve been studying the sensors, and they seem undamaged. They
are able to receive signals from test sources in the labs here at
the space center… And there’s one other thing.”

“
Yes?”

“
A solar observatory in
South Africa noticed a flash of intensity from the Sun—”

Zimmer paused, not wanting
to admit he knew the point Gilroy was about to make.

“—
at the exact same time!”
Gilroy concluded. “Well, the clock at the African facility wasn’t
accurate enough to show exactness in simultaneity, but they can
confirm that the event occurred approximately at the same time,
plus or minus three seconds.”