BOUNDARY(170)

"You know, I'm not sure anyone's ever used this many smart-dust motes before in one application. Hell, Dust-Storm freaked when I told them before we left how many of my custom motes I was going to need to take with me. They'd never done a single run that large before. But I sure as hell wasn't getting caught short way out here, and now I'm real, real glad I didn't. I'm still offloading a lot of the housekeeping and data analysis tasks off to Nike, except for the ones that just have to be done local."



Rich had backed up a bit. He clearly found the oily, alien flowing motion unnerving.



"Relax, Rich. I know it looks funky, but I'm pretty sure it's not going to become an alien intellect and suck out all our brains."



"Ha, ha." Rich came closer. "So how are you getting around the need to spin the thing?"



"I'm scanning it in various wavelengths as indicated, and if I can manage to get down to the resolution we need—that's the tricky part, and why I'm using a lot of capacity—we can basically replicate each layer of the disc and emulate spinning it by reading the data directly, if you see what I mean."



Rich's eyebrows rose inside his helmet. "Yes . . . yes, I think I do see. But do you really need so many to just read it?"



"Yeah, because if the initial data I got from scanning the disc is right, they've encoded the data just a little bit too fine for our regular sensors to pick up. So I have to pull off a major enhancement trick. Image enhancement really relies on the fact that you can increase the information content of your data through more resolution in space and time, and that with very small shifts in the perspective from which your data is accumulated, you can often derive much more data which is hidden within your apparently too-coarse data stream. You can average out noise, you can take pictures from multiple sequential perspectives and see how things change at borderline points . . . Oh, there's about a million and one ways to do it."



He gazed with great satisfaction on the Fairy Dust now covering the alien artifact. "I've coated the surface of that thing with over a billion sensors, all examining the surface as closely as they can, and the sensors are shifting points of view slowly as they record the data. By the time they've done a ten-times-redundant scan—sometime late tomorrow evening—Nike will be able to shift her work from maintaining the network to doing serious, serious number crunching—using everything from simple image enhancement with interpolation all the way to synth aperture and a whole bunch of other approaches to get that hidden info out."



He checked some telltales on his HUD; everything okay so far. "Assuming the Fairy Dust network holds out. What I'm doing here is way off the beaten path. Those little black boxes at the corners are RF transmitters supplying the power to the Fairy Dust, on a frequency which shouldn't mess with the rest of the work too much. But, basically, what I'm doing to these little guys is running them on overdrive for a whole day. Way out of spec. Theoretically they should be able to do it, but . . . " He shrugged. "If it works, though, you guys get to do your work making a full-scale translation protocol, and together we just might read this thing before we even leave Mars!"





Ken Hathaway's expression on Thoat's screen was solemn, as he looked at Madeline.



"You're sure?"



"Yes, Ken, I'm sure. Just pass along the transmission to Earth exactly as I send it up to you."



"I'll be glad to—"



"No. First, because there's no reason for your name to be on it anywhere. Mine is enough for the authorization. Second, because I see no reason in the world that we need to sink two careers here." She gave Hathaway a very warm smile. "Thanks, Ken. I appreciate the offer, I really do. But there's still no point to it. For the record, you heard nothing, saw nothing, said nothing. Just-Following-Orders-Hathaway, that's you."



He looked away, seeming to swallow a bit. "Okay."



"Hey, look on the bright side. It's not as if they can actually have me shot." Now she gave him the great gleaming Fathom smile. "We didn't bring any guns down here with us. Security issues, you know?"



That got a laugh, at least.



"Sending now, Captain Hathaway."





To her surprise, Joe was waiting for her when she came out of the rover. She'd deliberately timed the transmission for a period when everyone would be occupied elsewhere.



"Joe? What're you—"



"You just sent it, didn't you?" He cleared his throat so noisily it was quite audible over the radio. "Whatever it was you decided to clear, I mean."



She could feel her expression going blank. "Yes. I did."