Breakthrough(29)

“We can’t leave without them!”

“Ma’am I understand your dilemma, but if things get too rough I have no choice but to weigh anchor. I cannot risk the safety of the other passengers.”

“How much longer do we have?” she asked.

“It’s hard to say. If conditions continue as they are, I would estimate we have one, maybe two hours.”

Alison was clearly starting to worry. She nodded to the captain and turned back to the water looking for signs of Dirk and Sally.

As they stepped back into the bridge, Clay gave Emerson a curious look. “Have you noticed anything strange about the weather?”

“What do you mean?” Emerson asked peering back outside.

“Well the current is getting rougher, but there is no wind and not a cloud in the sky.”





16





Sitting on twenty-nine acres of land and housing over seventeen miles of corridor, the Pentagon was one of the world’s largest and most efficient office buildings. On the bottom floor, tucked away in a tiny lab sat Will Borger toiling over a program to try to remove some of the static from the Triton’s video. It started with a long call with one of the programmers at U.C. Berkeley who spent an hour sending over computer code and walking Borger through the logistics, including the mathematical algorithms necessary. Since Borger was not looking for planets he had to rewrite several large sections of the program.

Behind him Caesare walked back in with an extra-large pizza and two six packs of Jolt; his payment for commandeering the afternoon of the smartest guy in the building. Borger had been typing nonstop from the time Caesare left, and upon returning he was beginning to worry that this might take even longer, in which case he was on the hook for dinner as well.

“How are we looking?” Caesare asked sitting back down next to him.

Borger took a break and ran carefully through the syntax of the text he had just added. “Had a couple of bugs I’ve been trying to work out. I think we may have it.” He switched to another window and typed a command to compile all the pieces again. “Good, no errors this time.” He typed one last command and slapped the enter key. “Let’s give it a whirl.”

Borger turned around and popped open the top of the pizza box. He grabbed a big piece and a napkin and turned back to the monitor. The screen filled with the video footage and advanced the frames again in slow motion. Caesare bit into his own slice and leaned back watching.

The frames advanced quickly until the computer reached the point in which the first dots of interference became visible in the video. Suddenly the video slowed considerably and the computer could be seen scanning the frozen picture pixel by pixel and eliminating the extra dots before moving to the next. The two men watched silently as each picture became clearer and clearer. By the time the program finished, both Borger and Caesare were leaning forward trying to understand what they were looking at in the final frame. The Triton had changed direction as the object on the screen was no longer visible in the corner. It was now stretching across most of the window.

“What in the world is that?”

Borger shook his head. “No idea. It looks like…an arc of some kind.”

“Is that,” Caesare asked getting even closer, “on the bottom?”

“I think so. See some of this darker material around the outsides? That’s coral.” He thought a moment. “This reminds me of the bundles of fiber optic cable that the telecommunications companies lay underwater, but this is much bigger.”

Caesare frowned. “It’s not cable. The ocean is not that deep here but even with this depth we should not be able to see it. There’s not enough light that far down. And there is no way the Triton’s lights are strong enough.”

“True,” Borger agreed. “But that means that whatever it is, it’s emitting its own light.”

“This is bizarre. Can we determine how big it is?”

“We can do better than that.” He began typing again. “If we invert the color…” the object suddenly turned black while the rest of the screen inverted to white. “…and we tell the computer to zoom out…we can have it use the current dimension to estimate what the overall shape is.” He hit the return key again and watched the object shrink in size, and then the computer began to add in pieces to complete what it calculated the shape to be. When it finished they were both shocked.

“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

Borger nodded. “It looks like…a giant ring.”





Lee sat at his small table and tried repeatedly to summon the dolphins. Every few minutes he typed Hello Dirk, Hello Sally and waited. No reply came. Alison stumbled in and grabbed for the wall behind him.