“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.”
“I’m guessing the radiation couldn’t have screwed with those solar readings?”
“South Africa was not in the radiation path, Professor. They were on the opposite side of the planet when the rays hit.”
Zimmer shook his head vigorously. “I’m sorry, Vurim, but I’m not convinced. There simply must be a correlation. Sensor failure is the only rational explanation. The solar event could be a coincidence.” Then he glanced back at the yellow stripe. A sickening feeling hit his stomach. His voice grew quiet, as he spoke more to himself than to the NASA administrator. “But then again… there hasn’t been anything very rational about this whole mystery, has there? Dr. Gilroy, thank you for the call. We will continue to investigate.”
As he tapped his ear to terminate the communication with Gilroy, he stared at the streak in the image. Briefing his researchers on the situation, he explained, “So, we have a yellow streak in the sky, the likes of which have never been seen. Further, we have a communication failure from Mars, a radiation event on Earth, and a solar flare on the Sun that all happened within three seconds of each other.”
“But, Professor,” Reyd protested. “Light takes twelve minutes to travel from the Sun to Mars. No single event would be synchronized between these three heavenly bodies within a matter of seconds, unless the source of the event was equidistant to all three orbs.”
“Or, perhaps three different synchronous sources which were all equidistant to their respective locations,” suggested Kath.
“You realize,” Joram chimed in, “that either of those answers would suggest something orchestrated.”
“But, but whom? And why?!” Zimmer spoke more to himself than to the students as he fixed his gaze on the yellow undulating beam in the large video monitor overhead. “And what does that yellow beam have to do with it?”
Zimmer shook his head slowly, his brow furrowed in confusion and frustration. “I—I—don’t know.”
As the world’s foremost expert on all things astronomical, he tried to formulate a theory, but failed to think of anything reasonable. The entire room was embraced in silence. Zimmer, flanked by three confused graduate students, looked back up and continued to watch the yellow streak until the light of dawn persisted in obscuring it completely from view.
Chapter
9
Summer thunderstorms blackened the sky outside of the Atlanta courthouse. The thunder and driving rain were a stark contrast to the quiet hall in which Paol Joonter was found pacing back and forth. The defendant, his wife, and attorney were all speechless as they waited for the second day of deliberations to finish. He looked at his watch. It now said 4:38 PM, just four minutes past the last time he glanced. He turned on his heels and began pacing the opposite direction. As his anxiety level was increasing, his lawyer looked more and more comfortable.
“I’m telling you, Paol,” the lawyer broke the tense silence with a cool voice, “the longer this jury hashes it over, the more likely they are to acquit.”
“Or hang,” sighed Paol as he stopped to face the man who had given it his all to help his cause. “And then, we’d just have to start all over again. Warron, I don’t think I can go through this again.”
“Even if they hang, Paol, it gives us great confidence. Then we know that we can inject doubt into jury members. If we can do it once, we can do it better the next time around, because it buys us more time to create an even better case.”
“Warron,” Paol broke a faint smile onto his pale face. “I’m sure glad you’re here. Thanks for believing in me. It’s just that this is torture, waiting around to hear the verdict.”
They heard footsteps rapidly approaching down the hall. As a lady in a gray skirt and white blouse turned the corner hurriedly, she looked at the lawyer and panted.
“Warron,” she gulped for more air. “They’re ready.”
“Thanks, Monay,” responded the lawyer. “Please inform the clerk that we’ll be present in two minutes.”
She vanished down the hall as quickly as she arrived, echoes of footsteps trailing off quickly.
“If the worst happens, Paol… we’ll appeal, you know.” Warron assured confidently.
Paol did not return an answer. Instead, he faced his wife, grabbed her hand, and began the walk towards his fate.
The courtroom was empty, except for the district attorney, who was pacing in front of his table with his hands clasped behind his back, and the court clerk, looking through a stack of papers on her desk just beside the judge’s bench.
They took their seats and other court participants and spectators began to file in. Paol watched the jury enter intent on picking up body language that might indicate the decision which was reached. Warron was less interested in this technique, because he’d been wrong on these clues too many times—usually in his favor. In the end, Paol wasn’t sure what to make of any facial expressions or other body movements as each of the twelve jurors took their seat. He suspected that most were eager to finish up this ordeal and get back to their normal lives. He only hoped that they were going to afford him the same privilege.
“All rise. The honorable judge Walldar J. Etherton presiding.”
“You may be seated,” Etherton offered just before taking his seat. At Warron’s request, Paol always remained standing until the judge was comfortably seated in his own chair—a sign of respect for the authority who presided over Paol’s future. Warron noted that defendants typically received lighter sentences than might otherwise be the case, when his clients followed all of his courtroom instructions perfectly.
The judge looked over to the jury stand. “Ms. Foreperson, has the jury reached a verdict?”
A middle-aged woman dressed in a tan business suit stood and faced the judge. “We have, your Honor.”
“Will you please read your verdict to this court?” asked the judge.
“We will, your Honor,” she paused as she unfolded the verdict form she had filled out just moments before. “On count number one, we find the defendant, Paol R. Joonter… guilty of first degree murder against Rawson Becker. On count number two, we find the defendant, Paol R. Joonter… guilty of first degree murder against Shannyl Cox.”
Joonter bowed his head and stared at the table. While he managed to maintain his composure emotionally in spite of the quiet sobbing of his wife that word guilty echoed violently through his head. It was the last word he would hear before he was nudged by Warron.
“Mr. Joonter,” the judge addressed him. “Do you understand the verdict which have been given by this jury of your peers?”
Paol stood and faced the judge. He could not blame this man whose life service was in the performa
nce of justice. In fact, he did not know who to blame for the failure in justice being delivered to him. “Yes, your Honor.”
“Ladies and gentlemen of the court, I thank you for your patience and service here in this courtroom. Jury members, I thank you and release you from the service of this court. My clerk will provide you with instructions upon your return to the jury office downstairs. This court is adjourned until a date for sentencing can be arranged.”
With that, the gavel came crashing down onto the judge’s desk, and the sharp noise made Paol flinch. With wide eyes, Paol watched the jury file out of the courtroom, but nobody returned his gaze. As the door closed behind the last juror, he knew that this day would be a tremendous turning point in his life and in the life of his family. However, even he could not begin to comprehend how tremendous that change would be.
Chapter
10
“Ah, here is box of tools we will need.” Dmitri Boronov had rifled through the contents of one workbench after another in the under-ground bunker. He looked up at his new colleague. “I must apologize. I am not usually so careless with equipment. I am some little off routine with your arrival.”
“No problem, Dmitri,” accepted Garrison O’Ryan. “I knew we would find the toolbox. Even Martian gravity is sufficient to keep things from floating off into—”
The junior astronaut was cut short by thick darkness, so complete that in looking all around him, he could make out nothing—not a scrap of light to be found anywhere.
“Dmitri, what happened?” called O’Ryan loudly, as if the sudden darkness had greatly increased the distance between the two astronauts. After a series of load clicks were heard, a faint blue-green light filled the room. Thankfully, O’Ryan’s companion, toolbox in hand, was still right by the workbench just a few feet away from him.
“We lose power,” Dmitri answered. “Emergency battery system has engaged, which is why the light is so dull now.”
The Orthogonal Galaxy Page 11
