The Orthogonal Galaxy (13 page)

“
Ok, it looks like the
dust storm is still pretty intense down there then. I’m going to
try to zero in on Olympus Mons. We should be able to at least
calibrate our image quality there… the peak has got to be above the
dust storm.”

Joram focused on the
images of Mars, and while he knew enough about the planet to find
his way around the geographical features, he admitted that he was
lost with this view. Finally, however, as the telescope zoomed and
focused in on the massive dormant volcano, he gasped at the sight
of it. He was surprised to see the mountain come into
view.

“
Something wrong?” Reyd
turned to Joram with concern in his voice.

“
It’s delightful!” Joram
exulted boyishly. “I’ve just never seem Mars so clearly
depicted.”

Indeed, the reddish-brown
caldera and impact craters deep on the top of the volcano were in
exquisite view. Anders easily discerned which impacts were older
based on the portion of the crater which was obscured by more
recent impacts.

“
That looks good,
Professor,” I’m seeing the top of the mountain in clear view. Looks
like we could use a little sharpening… That’s better… better…
perfect!”

“
How much of the mountain
is in clear view, Reyd? How far down are we obscured by the dust
storm.”

“
I’m not really sure. I’m
not very familiar with the features of the mountain. I’ll have to
digitize the image and compare it to the database. It should just
be a couple of minutes.”

Lowering his voice, Reyd
continued to speak to his fellow student. “So, to get to the image
database, Joram, simply gesture with your finger like this to pull
down the database menu, select Solar System, and then Mars. You can
see a list of objects here. We’ll select mountains and just scroll
down the list here… Nereidum Montes, Oceanidum Mons, Octantis Mons…
Ah, there we are, Olympic Mons.

“
Now the default view, as
you can see is straight above the top of the mountain, but we’ll
want to rotate the 3D image to coincide with the angle of the
satellite. Hover over the mountain with your finger and drag like
this… Ok, it looks like we have an approximate angle, judging by
our picture on the right. Now, we just need to spin the mountain
around to the correct side. To do that, we move our finger in a
little bit closer and swipe with a curving motion like this to spin
the digital image around, and there. Now, we’ll pull down the tools
menu, and select the measure tool. We’ll pull it to about here.
Well that looks like a pretty close match.”

Reyd pointed to a feature
on the side of the mountain in both the left and right frames of
his monitor where the digitized image and the live image of Olympus
were depicted respectively.

“
Ok, so that gives us the
distance along the slope, but we need to know the elevation
difference between these two points, so we gesture with a
spiral—like drawing a lower case ‘E’ in the air—to give us the
elevation.”

Another voice interjected
from the back. “Thirty-two thousand feet!”

While Joram focused on the
controls of the system, he didn’t notice that Professor Zimmer had
now appeared behind the two students observing the data.

“
Wow!” Joram exclaimed.
“That’s some elevation… several thousand feet taller than Mount
Everest altogether! But then again, Olympus does stand eighty
thousand feet above the surface of Mars! Does that means we’re
seeing a dust storm that is nearly fifty thousand feet
deep?!”

Zimmer frowned as he
turned to look at Kath, hoping that her time spent on the phone may
provide some additional clues.

“
Yes, I do see the wind
patterns and speeds now on my computer, Ravid.” Kath was quickly
ramping up on the weather simulations that the team in Israel had
been putting together for the last twelve hours.

“
So, if I understand
correctly, we have a ton of dust in the air, but not much wind. It
looks like average global wind speeds are about fifteen kilometers
per hour, and that the maximum is about fifty, right?”

“
Yes that is correct,”
said Ravid. “It is actually a calm day on Mars. This dust just
makes no sense.”

“
This thing seems to cover
the entire planet, right now. How large can dust storms get to,
Ravid?”

“
Well, storms can cover
the entire planet, and when they do, they can last for a
month.”

Kath let this last comment
settle. “Ravid… are you telling me it could be a month before we
get a visual on the astronauts up there?”

“
I don’t think so in this
case, Kath. The typical scenario for a global dust storm is that
wind speeds reach one hundred kilometers per hour. This kicks up
dust, which absorbs sunlight and heats the atmosphere. This heating
then creates convection that only increases the wind even more. By
the time these atmospheric conditions subside, we’re talking easily
a month of global dust cover. However, the winds are too light in
this case.”

“
But you just told me that
dust in the air will heat the atmosphere…”

Ravid completed her
sentence, “… and increase the winds. Yes, this is what has us very
concerned, also. If that proves to occur, then it may be weeks
before we are able to assess the status of the astronauts. At this
point, we don’t believe that will happen and must hope for the
best. We need to break through visually as soon as possible to
understand how the astronauts are coping with this atmospheric
anomaly.”

Kath’s eyes raced across
the screen. She rotated the planet to the east, west, east, and
west again in order to get a better picture of the wind patterns
across the globe. She tilted it north and south in order to assess
the differences between the polar and equatorial
patterns.

“
Ravid,” she spoke into
the phone after a long silence. “So we’ve assessed that this is not
a typical wind-induced solar storm. I don’t want to ask stupid
questions, but could this be caused by an impact?”

“
No, it is not a stupid
question. We keep coming back to that question ourselves. However,
we have seen impacts, and it doesn’t have the characteristic
signature of an impact. For example, impacts are always more
localized. This layer of dust covers 75% of the surface of the
planet.”

“
How about a really big
impact, then?” Kath offered.

“
An impact that you are
suggesting would have to come from a known object. Radio
astronomers would have certainly detected an object this large as a
shadow in the magnetic signature of the solar system. Besides, an
impact of an object that kicks up this much dust would have to be
large enough to alter the orbit or rotation of the planet. We have
no indication that this has happened.”

“
Lots of little objects,
then?”

“
Again too much dust.
Small objects would not kick up this much dust.”

“
Can we tell how high the
dust has been? Perhaps the objects kicked up the dust, and then the
wind continued to agitate it, by kicking it up higher and higher
into the atmosphere. No that sounds ridiculous, again, because the
winds aren’t strong enough.”

Kath received a tap on her
shoulder. She gave a start and turned around quickly to see who had
been watching her.

“
Kath, can you put Mr.
Avram on the speakerphone for me,” Professor Zimmer
asked.

“
Ravid, I’m going to put
you on the speaker. Professor Zimmer would like to talk to
you.”

With that, Kath looked
around to find Joram. He was still engaged with Reyd. Their voices
were low, but she could tell by their gestures that Joram was
engaging Reyd in a question and answer session on the control panel
they were working together. Reyd pointed to a series of buttons on
the control panel, and Joram responded with a nod. Another gesture,
another nod.

“
Ravid, this is Carlton
Zimmer.”

“
Good evening, Professor.
How are you?”

“
Tired, naturally, and
perplexed. Hey, I couldn’t help overhearing that you two were
wondering about the depth of the dust cloud?”

“
Yes, we think it would
help us to understand how much volume we are talking about. We
suspect that it is thousands of feet deep, based on the obscurity
of features that we have observed. However, we cannot tell for sure
with the images we are working from.”

“
We just got a visual lock
and measure on Olympus Mons which indicates the depth of the cloud
to be nearly 50 thousand feet at this region.”

There was silence on the
other end.

“
Ravid, are you still
there, can you hear me ok?”

“
Yes, professor, but… that
just can’t be! How can it be that deep? Typical dust storms kick up
no more than ten kilometers into the atmosphere. Here we are
talking fifteen kilometers… and there is no wind to do this. Are
you sure of your calculation?”

“
It looks accurate to me.
Unless—it could also be that the dust has whipped up on the slope
of the mountain as well, giving us the impression that the cloud is
really that deep.”

“
Professor, the atmosphere
is so thin at those elevations that the dust should settle quickly
above even thirty thousand feet, let alone fifty thousand. It’s a
fascinating data point, but it only creates more questions and
fewer answers. I will have to share this with my team and see if we
can make sense of it.”

“
Well, I will let you get
back to Ms. Mirabelle. She’s probably got more questions for you as
well. In the meantime, I’ll go take a look at the Tharsis region.
If the cloud is truly at fifty thousand feet, then we will be able
to assess this from the elevation of the cloud on these mountains.
If the cloud is simply whipping up on the slopes of these
mountains, then we may see a different elevation profile on these
mountains than we do on Olympus.”

“
That will be a very
helpful piece of data. Thank you, Professor. Keep us informed if
there are any further developments.”

“
We’ll do just that,
Ravid. And good luck on your end as well.”

Kath placed the headset
back on her head again as Zimmer walked back to the telescope. From
the sound of the conversation, she quickly returned to her
brainstorming session with the Israeli areologist. He approached
Reyd and Joram to inform them of their next data collection
effort.

“
Gentlemen,” Zimmer stated
as he sat down in a vacant chair next to Reyd. The two students
leaned away from the console which had engaged their attention for
nearly an hour. “We are going to the Tharsis Region. Dr. Avram, an
atmospheric specialist with whom Kath is speaking, is baffled by
the dust patterns on Mars. We believe that we have found a fifty
thousand foot cloud of dust covering much of the surface of Mars.
However, we’re not sure if the cloud really isn’t lower, and that
we’re seeing dust coming off of the surface of Olympus Mons
itself.

“
In other words, we need
to figure out if the dust has only kicked up a few hundred feet
from ground level all the way up the slopes of the mountains. If we
look at a smaller mountain peak, where the atmosphere is more dense
than it is on the upper reaches of Olympus Mons, we might get a
clearer idea of how much dust we really have swirling around up
there.”

Wheeling back to the
telescope platform, Zimmer announced, “Give me a few minutes to
dial in the coordinates and calibrate the surface angle for best
imagery. You guys might want to warm up the image database for the
Tharsis Mountains. We’ll be performing similar elevation
calculations there as well.”

The professor returned to
the telescope and began calculating coordinates for Ascraeus Mons,
the tallest mountain in the Tharsis Region, and the second highest
peak on Mars.

Reyd whispered to Joram,
“My money is on the professor’s theory, and the dust proves to be a
thin layer that’s just being stirred up to low levels all over the
planet.”

“
But all of the
circumstances have just been bizarre enough so far that I wouldn’t
be surprised if we really have a fifty thousand foot tall dust
cloud,” Joram rebutted. “Remember that this dust is really just a
barrier to the real task at hand here. We need to find out how a
group of satellites and a shuttle just disappear into thin air, or
thin space. I’m guessing there is a link to the disappearance and
the dust… hopefully, if we solve one mystery, we get all of our
questions answered.”

“
That’s a good point.
Either way, let’s start taking a look at the Tharsis Mountains,
shall we?”

Reyd started negotiating
the database menu again, when he stopped suddenly.

“
What’s wrong?” asked
Joram looking at his companion.

“
Well, I’m trying to
recollect the names of the mountains that the professor needs us to
look at… but I’ll just go to the ‘regions’ portion of the database
to find the names of the Tharsis mountains. I know I’ve heard them,
but I forget now.”

“
Ascraeus, Arsia, and
Pavonis,” Joram said.

“
What?” Reyd didn’t grasp
that his peer had just named all three Tharsis mountains in two
seconds.