“Does Kodak know?” Peter asked.
When Lopez didn’t answer, Peter said, “Never mind. You said you tried to run the decompression sequence using the software we provided. Can you tell me what happened?”
When Lopez fell silent again Peter began to get annoyed. “Mr. Lopez?”
“Yes, I’m here. Sorry, I’m just looking over the file. It actually looks like we were unable to find the software. According to the engineer’s report they tried decompressing the data with one of our newer systems but the results were—”
“A dog’s breakfast,” Peter finished, finally losing his patience. “Sir, have you actually
seen
the letter you sent me or did you just sign it? DFPCS uses a dual-pass algorithm. Another system wouldn’t work. That should be obvious to anyone.”
“Professor,” Lopez said, “forgive me if I sound insensitive, but the Jupiter Eye is a redundant system. To answer your question, no, I probably didn’t read the letter. If I read every letter that left my desk I’d have no time for anything else. That said, if we can recover the data on those reels, it may prove valuable, so any help you could offer would be greatly appreciated.”
Peter made a concerted effort to calm himself before he spoke. “I’ll have a look at them.”
He considered adding that the university was under no obligation to pay him for his time and decided it would be pointless.
“Thank you,” Lopez said. “I appreciate it. And I apologize if I’ve come across the wrong way. The truth is I could use another six people in this office.”
“That’s all right,” Peter said. “I understand. I’ll get back to you as soon as I’ve got something.”
“That would be great,” Lopez said. “I look forward to hearing from you, professor.”
Peter put the phone down and stood looking at the tape reels for a long time. His frustration notwithstanding, the thought of being the first person to see a picture taken several million miles from Earth had a certain appeal. Assuming there was anything on the tapes but scrambled data. It also occurred to him that if the people who had sent him the reels weren’t as disorganized as they were he might never have had the chance. In fact, he would never have known the Jupiter Eye had even been used.
Kevin was waiting for him outside the office when Peter stepped out.
“I’m afraid the lesson is going to have to wait,” Peter said. “I need your help with something.”
Kevin was visibly relieved. “What is it?”
“Just give me a minute,” Peter said and walked back into the office.
Mabel wasn’t there, but the keys in the press on the wall were clearly labeled and he found the one he was looking for.
They made their way to the archive building on the east corner of the campus. Kevin waited as Peter wrestled with the rusting padlock on the door.
“You try,” Peter finally said, standing back.
Kevin grabbed the lock and pulled. It opened with a faint screech.
“All right,” Peter said when he saw Kevin was smiling, “don’t rub it in. I’m old enough to be your grandfather.”
Peter’s heart sank as the overhead strip-lights began to flicker on, revealing an enormous room with high, tightly spaced shelving running wall to wall.
“Over here,” Kevin said, pointing to a notebook gathering dust on a small desk just inside the door.
Peter had all but given up when he finally found the entry he was looking for and realized why he hadn’t seen it sooner. The date was March 1980, several months after the project had been terminated. That meant the person who had brought the box in here either hadn’t cared enough to look, or the box itself had languished in the corner of an office for six months before someone got tired of looking at it. He thought the latter was more likely.
“Third row, second shelf,” Peter said. “It should say
DFPCS
on it. You get the box, I need to find something to run it on.”
Kevin looked puzzled but didn’t say anything. Peter walked to the other end of the room and began scanning the shelves. He found what he was looking for at the end of the second row.
“Kevin?”
Kevin came around the corner holding a large box.
“Up there,” Peter said. “Second shelf from the top. We need to get it down.”
Kevin looked up and frowned. “The thing that looks like a printing press.”
Peter laughed. “Yeah, I guess it does. It’s a DEC minicomputer. It’s probably the only tape drive machine in here that will run the program in that box you’re holding.”
Kevin walked back to the door and returned a moment later with a ladder. “You better stand back, professor. That thing looks pretty heavy.”
Peter watched from a safe distance as Kevin climbed to the top and had a brief nightmarish vision of both Kevin and the computer hurtling toward the ground as the ladder collapsed beneath him.
“You okay up there?” Peter asked.
“I would be if I could get a grip on this thing,” Kevin said.
Peter watched him descend the ladder slowly, wincing as the awkward housing of the machine dug into his shoulder and decided Kevin might pass computer programming after all, albeit with a C minus.
When Kevin asked him where they were taking the computer, Peter considered for a moment and said, “If there’s power in here I don’t think we need to take it anywhere.”
There was.
When he had finished setting up the machine, Peter scribbled something on one of the empty pages in the index, tore it out and handed it to Kevin. “Take this to my office and tell Mabel I need them right away. If she asks you what for, tell her you don’t know.”
“I don’t,” Kevin said.
“Yes, good point. Just hurry back.”
When Kevin was gone Peter offered the gods a short prayer, turned on the computer and breathed a sigh of relief when it began to boot up. He took the reel out of the box Kevin had found and spooled it onto the machine, then picked up the notebook containing most of his own notes and spent several minutes reorienting himself with the commands. By the time Kevin returned he had loaded the program into memory and replaced the reel with the first of the ones he had received that morning.
“Here goes nothing,” Peter said and pressed the “enter” key.
The reel began to spin, first one way, then the other at a series of seemingly random intervals.
“What’s it doing?” Kevin asked.
“Converting the compressed files on that tape into something we can use,” Peter said. “At least that’s what I hope it’s doing.”
Kevin nodded to suggest this made perfect sense.
Five minutes later the reel stopped and the words
compression sequence completed
appeared on the small screen. Peter removed the reel and replaced it with one of the empty ones Kevin had brought. He studied the notebook in his hand for a moment, then typed:
transfer://all-k:
and pressed enter. The reel began to spin again, only this time it ran at a constant speed in only one direction. When it stopped Peter removed the tape and began the sequence again with the second reel.
It took half an hour to decompress and transfer the remaining three reels. When it was done Peter shut down the computer and said, “I don’t suppose you’d be up for putting this thing back.”
“I’m not sure I can,” Kevin said.
“No. And I don’t think I want to see you kill yourself trying. But we’ll have to put it somewhere. If Mabel comes in and sees it here she would kill us both.”
“I believe you,” Kevin said.
“Did she put up a fight when you asked for the reels?”
“She wasn’t happy, let’s put it that way.”
“Mabel’s a nosy old bitch,” Peter said, “but I wouldn’t trade her for anything. Let’s stick this on the bottom shelf somewhere out of the way. She’ll find it eventually, you can bet your ass on that. But with any luck you’ll have graduated by then and I’ll be retired.”
Peter put the box containing the project files back where it had been before they left but made no entry in the catalog to say he had retrieved it. He didn’t know why, but it felt like the right thing to do, and Peter had always gone with his gut when he was in two minds about anything.
When they had turned off the lights and locked up, Peter thanked Kevin for his help and sent him to his next class, but not before extracting a promise from the boy that they would pick up where they had left off the following week. It was a promise Kevin would never get a chance to keep.
Peter returned to the lecture hall for his final class of the day, but soon discovered he was too distracted to do anything but prod at the subject matter. His eyes kept wandering back to the box on his desk. He dismissed the students early and didn’t realize he had forgotten to assign them any work until one of his more enthusiastic pupils pointed it out to him.
“Then I suggest you take advantage of my absentmindedness and catch up on anything you’re not on top of,” Peter said. “Now go on, get out of here before I change my mind.”
The Research and Development center was located in a new building not far from the old archive. Peter found a room on the second floor that contained the equipment he needed. Several students were using it for whatever project they were working on and they were less than enthusiastic at being kicked out.
When they were gone—he actually helped the last one out the door with a gentle push—he set to work transferring the newly decompressed files into the machine that would render the actual images on a large color TV at the back of the room.
Half an hour later, exhausted with anticipation, he stood back and watched the first of the images render on the screen. If not for the faint lines at the bottom of the picture, he might have suspected that he had forgotten to turn on the TV. He cycled through the remaining images on the first reel and found they were all the same; black.
By the time he got to the last image on the third reel his anticipation had given way to dread. He wasn’t sure what frustrated him more, the fact that DFPCS was apparently working just fine—the pictures on the screen were valid image files—or the fact that it was apparently wasted on the Jupiter Eye, which clearly
wasn’t
working.
He loaded the last reel more out of habit than expectation, so his surprise at what he saw when he opened the first file was all the greater. The image was still mostly black; however, there was a faint but clear curve running along one edge. When he loaded the next one the curve was sharper and he was damned if there wasn’t just a hint of color. He cycled forward quickly, watching as the shape filled out and took on a clear tint of orange-brown. By the time he reached the fifteenth of the twenty pictures on the reel there was no mistaking the planet; it was Jupiter.
He stood looking at the picture for a long time, feeling his heart begin to beat faster. He knew he wasn’t the first person to see images of the gas giant from this distance—Voyager II had plenty of other cameras that worked just fine—but he
was
the first person to see
these
, and the idea filled him with a sense of mystic euphoria.
He cycled through the last five pictures. They were all the same, the image changing only slightly as the planet revolved. By the time he reached the last picture the feeling that he was standing on the bow of history was already beginning to fade a little. He reached for the keyboard, intending to put the reels back in the box and call Lopez in the morning with the good news, then stopped. He walked to the TV and ran a finger across the top right-hand corner of the screen, then stood back. The longer he looked at it the more obvious it became that it wasn’t just some coding error or problem with the camera. The black shape on the screen was just that: a shape. To Peter it looked a little like a fish, only the lines were symmetrical—too symmetrical. He walked back and called the preceding image back onto the screen. And there it was again. Only in this picture the tip of the shape was no longer in the image. He cycled to the picture in front and saw only half of it. In the last of the four shots only a small section of the end was visible.
His mind, a machine—and a brilliant one by the reckoning of some—devoted to logic above all things, insisted that what he was seeing was either a joke, a bizarre anomaly, or pure hallucination. What it was not—what it
could
not be—was the word on the tip of his tongue. Peter ignored his own plea for reason and said it anyway. “It’s a fucking spaceship.”
The moment he heard the words leave his mouth the room seemed to grow smaller. His legs, good for at least two miles a day at a steady jog, suddenly felt weak. He stepped back, his eyes fixed to the screen, and sat down in the chair behind him. The longer he looked at the picture the more distinct the shape became.
He sat there for a long time, his thoughts lost in a whirlwind of denial, implication and shock. What forced him back into the present was the sound of voices coming from down the hall. He was suddenly overwhelmed by the absolute conviction that no one must know. In that respect, his mind was working just fine.
The picture that invaded his thoughts, as vivid as any movie he had ever seen, was one of Lopez standing in front of the Joint Chiefs of Staff with the image of Jupiter on the screen behind him. He was pointing at the thing—spaceship?—with the air of a man who appreciated the gravity of the situation. Peter could almost feel the sense of victory in the room, could see it on the faces looking back. Not elation or even excitement, but hunger, devious and full of malice.
He stood up, walked to the TV and turned it off just as a group of students passed the door in a cacophony of excited chatter. When he heard the door close at the end of the hall, he quickly removed the reel and put them all back in the box.
Twenty minutes later he was sitting behind the wheel of his car, the box on the passenger seat beside him, his mind on fire. All he knew for certain was that there would be no call to Lopez, just a polite letter confirming that the data was beyond recovery and that he had disposed of the reels. He would also have to remove everything from the archive in case NASA had copies. Beyond that, he had no plan, no idea where to go or what to do.
That would soon change.