The Orthogonal Galaxy (56 page)

After perhaps a half dozen
times through the message, he again removed the headset and after
looking down while replacing it in its compartment, he was startled
by an apparent flash on the video display. Slightly worried, his
eyes shot all about the domed display, looking up, to the left,
right, behind, and straight ahead. Nothing appeared out of the
ordinary, but had there not been a flash of light out of the corner
of his eyes?

“
What’s up, Partna’?”
Blade asked curiously, having sensed the sudden movements of Paol.
Noticing Paol’s wide eyes glancing about in different directions,
he restored his seat to its full upright position, and was restored
from his meditative state to full attention.

“
Nothing—I—think” was
Joonter’s reply.

Blade’s stare was
persistent. “I’m thinkin’ that was a bit less than convincin’
there, Paol. What happened?”

“
No, I—I just was putting
up the headset and I thought I saw—”

Paol’s sentence was cut
off abruptly at the second flash, which equally caught both of the
astronauts by surprise. Neither directly saw the brief flare that
flashed directly in front of the Star Transport, but there was no
denying a brief and sudden explosion of white light directly in
front of them.

Blade forced a smile onto
his face. “No, wait! Ya’ know how much I love guessin’ games. You
thought ya’ saw a flash of brilliant white light out in the front
of the ship, didn’t you?”

Since both were now
staring at the video display with both eyes fully open, Paol
couldn’t see the expression on his companion’s face, but having
familiarized himself with Blade’s playful inflections, Paol
responded, “Why, how on Earth2 did you know that,
Blade?”

“
Lucky guess, Partna’…
lucky guess.”

Complete silence in the
cockpit added to the tension, when all of a sudden.

“
Whoa!”

“
What the—?”

A third, nearly blinding
flash occurred.

“
Blade, can you see?” Paol
questioned, while shielding his eyes. “I was practically looking at
that thing straight on.”

“
I know what ya’ mean.”
Blade’s eyes were closed, but he was feeling around the control
panel when he saw a fourth and fifth flash through his eyelids.
Locating a compartment underneath the panel, he pulled out a pair
of dark glasses and put them on. Shielding the top of his eyes with
his left hand, he squinted through his glasses, while searching the
darkened control panel for the right button, as a few more flashes
occurred with increasing frequency.

“
Ah, there ya’ are,” Blade
addressed the button of interest. In a moment, the flashing ceased,
as the planetarium quickly transitioned from video display to
cockpit lighting. Both astronauts were left squinting and blinking
rapidly, as the lights came on.

“
Thanks, Buddy,” Paol
said. “Good thinking, on shutting off the display.”

“
Sure thing, Cap’n, but
what the heck is goin’ on out there.”

“
That’s a good question.”
Paol was reeling from the excitement, but quickly regained his
focus, and went to work. “Can you start a communication to Ground
Control? Send them a video feed starting at time 14 hundred 12
hours. Give them a full 360 video. I know we only saw flashes
directly in front, but let’s not rule out any pertinent data. Let
them know that I’ll provide them with full diagnostic reports in
ten minutes. I’m going to head to the back of the ship first, to
make sure mechanical and life support systems aren’t impacted by
the event. I’ll be back in 2 minutes.”

With that, Paol quickly
flipped himself out of his seat and drifted towards the back of the
vehicle, and the cockpit was a blur of activity. Paol opened and
closed panels, took note of monitor and gauge levels, while Blade
threw on his headset and spoke out his message while fervently
working with the buttons and touch screens on the control
panel.

While floating
horizontally and holding on to a handrail with his left hand, Paol
worked through the panels and meters with his right hand, when he
started to feel a tug on his left arm. Star Transport was beginning
to slowly lurch. He fixed his gaze towards the front of the ship in
order to assess the change in direction of the vehicle.

“
Blade! Why are we
drifting downward?” Paol shouted to gain the attention of his
companion in the middle of his message to NASA.

“—
at least eight or ten
flashes in increasin’ frequen—hold on—we’re moving. Yes, Paol.
You’re right we are pitchin’ fo’ward gradually. Um—debris
detection, Paol… debris… the nav-comp says we’re goin’ through a
debris field. You might want—you should come buckle up buddy, I
don’t know what kind of course correction this system’s gonna do to
us. Uh. Mission Control, please corroborate event. Do the flashes
correspond to debris detection event? Over.”

Blade flipped off the
recording and pushed the transmit button. “Gimme yer hand, Paol,”
Blade partially fastened his seat harness with his right hand while
looking back and extending as far as he could with his left
hand.

Paol grabbed his partner
by the hand and around the wrist, as the latter gradually pulled
him back into the cockpit. He clumsily tossed himself into his
seat, and both engaged full seat harnesses.

“
Ok, Cap’n… d’ya ever
remember hearin’ the Star Shield team mention flashes? Could this
thing be zappin’ debris? Would that cause the light?”

“
Makes sense, Pal. All of
the flashes were almost directly ahead of us, which is where the
impact of debris should be occurring, but you’re right. I don’t
remember being prepped for the extreme light show. By the way, what
is our heading now, Blade?”

“
Looks like we’re ‘bout
0.8 degrees below ecliptic and 2.3 degrees to the left
side.”

“
Aha! Here we go.” Paol
exclaimed while working one of the monitors. Pointing to the
screen, he presented his findings. “Right there. An asteroid about
50K miles down range. The computer estimates it at about five
hundred meters wide! That’s definitely an object worth steering
around.”

“
Ya’ think the flashes was
debris from the asteroid, then?”

“
I think we can figure out
if it was.” Pointing to a monitor, Paol described his assessment.
“You see, the first flash occurred right here around 14 hundred 15
hours. We should pass the orbit of the asteroid at about 14 hundred
28 hours. That means the debris on the other side should cease
around 14 hundred 45, say 50 at the most. We’ll try to fade up the
video display around 14 hundred 40 hours to see. In the meantime,
we’ll want to capture the entire video, and Star Shield sensor data
and wrap it up for NASA.”

“
I don’t gets it, Paol.
They tolds us that the trip through the belt would be
easy.”

“
They said that it was a
very, very low probability that we would experience any debris.
They based their calculations on their map of the asteroid belt and
our timeframe through here, but it is purely statistical. Even NASA
doesn’t know all of the tiniest asteroids that orbit up here. The
space is too big to categorize all of the smallest rocks. Either we
just got really lucky—”

“
Uh—dontcha mean unlucky,
Joonter!” Blade corrected.

Paol smiled
appreciatively. “Either we got really unlucky, or perhaps this
indicates a much more dense field in the asteroid belt than was
previously estimated. I mean NASA has sent hundreds, if not
thousands of probes up here, you’d think that would be sufficient
to get a decent idea of density. But then again—” Paol trailed off
as he noticed another slight course correction. The ship had
leveled off below the asteroid and was traveling parallel to the
ecliptic plane of the solar system. Likely, this meant that they
had cleared the bottom of the asteroid already.

“
Then again,” persued
Blade. “The asteroid belt is ‘bout 2 billion miles in
circumference. Even if two thousand probes have come out this way,
that’s still one fer every million miles of circumference. That’s
hardly sufficient to know what’s really out here.”

“
Aha!” Paol interjected
triumphantly. “Look at monitor five. The computer is beginning to
collate data sets from the Star Shield.”

Paol swiped his finger
across the top of the monitor, where a blue 3D line drawing in the
shape of the Star Transport demonstrated itself on the monitor.
After pressing the playback indicator, the video showed an
accelerated time lapse of collisions with the Star Shield indicated
by red flashing dots on various parts of the front of the
spaceship. An impact counter went from a start of zero to nearly
three thousand.

“
I’m so glad you turned
off that video display. Could you imagine how bright it is out
there right now with a peak of several impacts every
second?”

“
Well, at least we know
that the shield is workin’.”

“
Indeed.” Paol nodded and
sighed, in realization that the pair had successfully come through
the first of what could be many challenges and risks in the years
to come.

…

The ST3 mission control
room was a much larger and more active facility than the room in
which Professor Zimmer and his research contingency used for
studying the yellow beam just over six years ago. Rather than just
two rows of flat work stations, there were sixteen independent
stations scattered throughout the large floor, with each station
serving two mission specialists. The stations had sizeable work
surfaces with eighteen inch walls at the back of the station where
mounted stacked glass monitor panels filled the back wall. Each
station and wall jutted out at a 30 degree angle on either side,
providing a second set of wall-mounted panels, giving each
specialist a wrap-around work space. The angle allowed for
efficient usage of both monitors, as specialists could quickly see
data from both screens equally well.

The stacked glass panels
were a relatively new and costly technology. When turned off, the
monitors appeared as little more than a stack of four panes of
glass, each just three millimeters thick. Each panel is separated
by a vacuum space of five millimeters, and together, the panels
were all encased in a single, light-weight housing. When turned on,
each panel was independently controlled by any computer capable of
multiple parallel image generation. The computer manages pixel
transparency independently, such that any portion of the screen can
be fully transparent, fully opaque, or any degree of transparency
in between. In this way, a portion of the screen can be opaque,
while others can be partially transparent to allow seamless
overlapping of multiple images. This can be useful when engineers
wish to see a model of Star Transport on the back screen with
overlays of surface temperature on another, an astronaut position
on a third screen, and air quality on a fourth. Each pixel
projection is controlled by a system of lasers mounted in the
bottom of the display on the edge of the glass, and each pixel is
projected onto a curved bubble inside of the glass pane in order to
provide image shifting for parallax control. For a single engineer
looking straight on to the display, parallax is not an issue, but
the concept of parallax adjustment on curved pixilation is
necessary to allow multiple viewers to see the same stacked images
without image shifting. If one viewer is sitting to the right of
the screen, then his angle of view would otherwise cause images to
appear shifted, thus distorting the stacking of images. The
computer takes this problem into account by shifting the image for
each panel onto different pixels for viewers of different
angles.

The front wall of the room
contained a main mission control monitor 20 feet tall and 40 feet
wide. It was flanked on either side by two smaller monitors, each
of which was only 10-15 feet in diameter. On the center of the main
control, a computerized image depicted the planet Jupiter. A thin
red circle tightly hugging the planet showed the orbit of the Star
Transport, with a small dot indicating the current location of the
ship. On the opposite side of the planet, at the right edge of the
screen a curving yellow line emerged and disappeared on the
display, indicating the predicted course of the superluminal comet,
and its flyby of the largest planet in the Solar System. Star
Transport was clearly using the planet as a shield from the intense
radiation field anticipated from the comet in a high-tech game of
hide and seek.

From a curved theater-like
balcony, which is used as an observation deck, a large gathering of
media, NASA officials, and politicians were gathered. Seated on the
front row on the right side of the balcony, Professor Zimmer sat
with his three post-doc astronomers, Joram Anders, Kath Mirabelle,
and Reyd Eastman. There was an obvious tension throughout the room,
with all eyes glued to the central display.

“
Professor,” Joram
whispered as he leaned over in his seat towards his white-haired
mentor. “What are your thoughts on the matter? Our calculations
indicated an arrival of the comet nearly a half hour
ago.”

“
No need for worry yet,
Mr. Anders,” Zimmer consoled his colleague. “A thirty minute
discrepancy on an orbit of nearly six and a half years is not
outside of normal statistical deviation.”