Eric Flint: Boundary

"Ah. In that case I cannot see any reason why you would not have access to virtually all of our processing capacity at the time you specify."

"Didn't think so. A.J. out."

He started for the exit. "Joe! You coming?"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm coming. Remember that Mr. Gimpy is slower than you are. Mind telling me exactly what it is we have to tinker together out of duct tape and WD-40?"

"Sure, won't take a minute."

Joe had a lot of questions and comments that changed the design somewhat. But by the time they got back to Thoat and the tools they needed, the basic design was already visible in their HUDs.

"Not too hard. Yeah, A.J., we can do that in a day."

It actually took ten hours and seventeen minutes.

A.J. carefully unpacked the device from the container he'd used to carry it all the way from the surface to the innermost sanctum of the Vault. He placed it on the polished, flat surface that was clearly a desk or table and, despite millions of years of waiting, seemed to be just as solid as the day it was made.

"It's showtime."

Rich looked at the thing in bemusement. "Just what is it? It looks like something you and Joe dreamed up with a box of metal Tinkertoys and a few electronic lab kits."

The object was about half a meter across, a square framework of slender metal tubes or thick wires with a carefully arranged clamping device in the center, and round black cases at the corners. Wires trailed from it to connect to a fuel cell.

"That," A.J. said, as he gingerly extracted the precious disc from its case, "is the support and supply framework for the device that's going to read this old book-on-disc for you."

"Ah… there's no reader or anything on that framework," Rich pointed out, as A.J. clamped the disc carefully into the holder. "And that clamp won't let the disc spin, which seems almost certain to be the way it was read."

"There will be, and it doesn't have to spin," A.J. replied confidently. "Just watch."

And with that, he took the entire bag of Fairy Dust he'd brought with him and upended it onto the framework, disc, and all.

In that large a mass, the dust-sized, motile sensor motes looked more like liquid graphite than dust, but unlike any liquid, the mass stopped flowing long before it could spill off the table. Eerily, the stuff began to move upward, spreading first along all the structural supports of the framework, and then filling in the gaps, and covering the entire surface of the alien disc.

"You know, I'm not sure anyone's ever used this many smart-dust motes before in one application. Hell, Dust-Storm freaked when I told them before we left how many of my custom motes I was going to need to take with me. They'd never done a single run that large before. But I sure as hell wasn't getting caught short way out here, and now I'm real, real glad I didn't. I'm still offloading a lot of the housekeeping and data analysis tasks off to Nike, except for the ones that just have to be done local."

Rich had backed up a bit. He clearly found the oily, alien flowing motion unnerving.

"Relax, Rich. I know it looks funky, but I'm pretty sure it's not going to become an alien intellect and suck out all our brains."

"Ha, ha." Rich came closer. "So how are you getting around the need to spin the thing?"

"I'm scanning it in various wavelengths as indicated, and if I can manage to get down to the resolution we need-that's the tricky part, and why I'm using a lot of capacity-we can basically replicate each layer of the disc and emulate spinning it by reading the data directly, if you see what I mean."

Rich's eyebrows rose inside his helmet. "Yes… yes, I think I do see. But do you really need so many to just read it?"

"Yeah, because if the initial data I got from scanning the disc is right, they've encoded the data just a little bit too fine for our regular sensors to pick up. So I have to pull off a major enhancement trick. Image enhancement really relies on the fact that you can increase the information content of your data through more resolution in space and time, and that with very small shifts in the perspective from which your data is accumulated, you can often derive much more data which is hidden within your apparently too-coarse data stream. You can average out noise, you can take pictures from multiple sequential perspectives and see how things change at borderline points

… Oh, there's about a million and one ways to do it."

He gazed with great satisfaction on the Fairy Dust now covering the alien artifact. "I've coated the surface of that thing with over a billion sensors, all examining the surface as closely as they can, and the sensors are shifting points of view slowly as they record the data. By the time they've done a ten-times-redundant scan-sometime late tomorrow evening-Nike will be able to shift her work from maintaining the network to doing serious, serious number crunching-using everything from simple image enhancement with interpolation all the way to synth aperture and a whole bunch of other approaches to get that hidden info out."

He checked some telltales on his HUD; everything okay so far. "Assuming the Fairy Dust network holds out. What I'm doing here is way off the beaten path. Those little black boxes at the corners are RF transmitters supplying the power to the Fairy Dust, on a frequency which shouldn't mess with the rest of the work too much. But, basically, what I'm doing to these little guys is running them on overdrive for a whole day. Way out of spec. Theoretically they should be able to do it, but… " He shrugged. "If it works, though, you guys get to do your work making a full-scale translation protocol, and together we just might read this thing before we even leave Mars!"

Ken Hathaway's expression on Thoat's screen was solemn, as he looked at Madeline.

"You're sure?"

"Yes, Ken, I'm sure. Just pass along the transmission to Earth exactly as I send it up to you."

"I'll be glad to-"

"No. First, because there's no reason for your name to be on it anywhere. Mine is enough for the authorization. Second, because I see no reason in the world that we need to sink two careers here." She gave Hathaway a very warm smile. "Thanks, Ken. I appreciate the offer, I really do. But there's still no point to it. For the record, you heard nothing, saw nothing, said nothing. Just-Following-Orders-Hathaway, that's you."

He looked away, seeming to swallow a bit. "Okay."

"Hey, look on the bright side. It's not as if they can actually have me shot." Now she gave him the great gleaming Fathom smile. "We didn't bring any guns down here with us. Security issues, you know?"

That got a laugh, at least.

"Sending now, Captain Hathaway."

To her surprise, Joe was waiting for her when she came out of the rover. She'd deliberately timed the transmission for a period when everyone would be occupied elsewhere.

"Joe? What're you-"

"You just sent it, didn't you?" He cleared his throat so noisily it was quite audible over the radio. "Whatever it was you decided to clear, I mean."

She could feel her expression going blank. "Yes. I did."

"Yeah, I figured that was what you were so tense about, the past day or so."

She hadn't thought he'd noticed. The knowledge that he had warmed her, at a moment when she felt very cold. So much so, that she almost explained.

But…

No. Let it be on my head alone.

"Okay," Joe said. "I just wanted to know because…"

He was acting, for all the world, like a high school boy trying to work up the nerve to ask a girl on a date. More precisely, the way a geek acts when he's trying to work up the nerve to ask out the high school head cheerleader. Even in the suit, Madeline could see him fidgeting.

She almost burst into laughter. "Joe, what's on your mind?"

As if by sheer force of will, she could see him settling down. "Sorry. It's just…"