Congo Page 2

  At the age of two, while accompanying her mother to the supermarket, she had worked out in her head whether a ten-ounce can at 19C was cheaper than a one-pound-twelve-ounce can at 79C. At three, she startled her father by observing that, unlike other numbers, zero meant different things in different positions. By eight, she had mastered algebra and geometry; by ten, she had taught herself calculus; she entered M.I.T. at thirteen and proceeded to make a series of brilliant discoveries in abstract mathematics, culminating in a treatise, “Topological Prediction in n-Space,” which was useful for decision matrices, critical path analyses, and multidimensional mapping. This interest had brought her to the attention of ERTS, where she was made the youngest field supervisor in the company.

  Not everyone liked her. The years of isolation, of being the youngest person in any room, had left her aloof and rather distant. One co-worker described her as “logical to a fault.” Her chilly demeanor had earned her the title “Ross Glacier,” after the Antarctic formation.

  And her youth still held her back—at least, age was Trav­is’s excuse when he refused to let her lead the Congo expedition into the field, even though she had derived all the Congo database, and by rights should have been the onsite team leader. “I’m sorry,” Travis had said, “but this con-

  tract’s too big, and I just can’t let you have it.” She had pressed, reminding him of her successes leading teams the year before to Pahang and Zambia. Finally he had said, “Look, Karen, that site’s ten thousand miles away, in four-plus terrain. We need more than a console hotdogger out there.”

  She bridled under the implication that that was all she was—a console hotdogger, fast at the keyboard, good at playing with Travis’s toys. She wanted to prove herself in a four-plus field situation. And the next time she was determined to make Travis let her go.

  Ross pressed the button for the third-floor elevator, marked “CX Access Only.” She caught an envious glance from one of the programmers while she waited for the elevator to arrive. Within ERTS, status was not measured by salary, title, the size of one’s office, or the other usual corporate indicators of power. Status at ERTS was purely a matter of access to information—and Karen Ross was one of eight people in the company who had access to the third floor at any time.

  She stepped onto the third-floor elevator, glancing up at the scanner lens mounted over the door. At ERTS the elevators traveled only one floor, and all were equipped with passive scanners; it was one way that ERTS kept track of the movements of personnel while they were in the building. She said “Karen Ross” for the voice monitors, and turned in a full circle for the scanners. There was a soft electronic bleep, and the door slid open at the third floor.

  She emerged into a small square room with a ceiling video monitor, and faced the unmarked outer door of the Communications Control Room. She repeated “Karen Ross,” and inserted her electronic identicard in the slot, resting her fingers on the metallic edge of the card so the computer could record galvanic skin potentials. (This was a refinement instituted three months earlier, after Travis learned that Army experiments with vocal cord surgery had altered voice characteristics precisely enough to false-positive Voiceident programs.) After a cycling pause, the door buzzed open. She went inside.

  With its red night lights, Communications Control was

  like a soft, warm womb—an impression heightened by the cramped, almost claustrophobic quality of the room, packed with electronic equipment. From floor to ceiling, dozens of video monitors and LEDs flickered and glowed as the technicians spoke in hushed tones, setting dials and twisting knobs. The CCR was the electronic nerve center of ERTS:

  all communications from field parties around the world were routed through here. Everything in the CCR was recorded, not only incoming data but room voice responses, so the exact conversation on the night of June 13, 1979, is known.

  One of the technicians said to her, “We’ll have the transponders hooked in in a minute. You want coffee?”

  “No,” Ross said.

  “You want to be out there, right?”

  “I earned it,” she said. She stared at the video screens, at the bewildering display of rotating and shifting forms as the technicians began the litany of locking in the bird bounce, a transmission from a satellite in orbit, 720 miles over their heads.

  “Signal key.”

  “Signal key. Password mark.”

  “Password mark.”

  “Carrier fix.”

  “Carrier fix. We’re rolling.”

  She paid hardly any attention to the familiar phrases. She watched as the screens displayed gray fields of crackling static.

  “Did we open or did they open?” she asked.

  “We initiated,” a technician said. “We had it down on the call sheet to check them at dawn local time. So when they didn’t initiate, we did.”

  “I wonder why they didn’t initiate,” Ross said. “Is something wrong?”

  “I don’t think so. We put out the initiation trigger and they picked it up and locked in within fifteen seconds, all the appropriate codes. Ah, here we go.”

  At 6:22 A.M. Congo time, the transmission came through:

  there was a final blur of gray static and then the screens cleared. They were looking at a part of the camp in the

  Congo, apparently a view from a tripod-mounted video camera. They saw two tents, a low smoldering fire, the lingering wisps of a foggy dawn. There was no sign of activity, no people.

  One of the technicians laughed. “We caught them still sleeping. Guess they do need you there.” Ross was known for her insistence on formalities.

  “Lock your remote,” she said.

  The technician punched in the remote override. The field camera, ten thousand miles away, came under their control in Houston.

  “Pan scan,” she said.

  At the console, the technician used a joystick. They watched as the video images shifted to the left, and they saw more of the camp. The camp was destroyed: tents crushed and torn, supply tarp pulled away, equipment scattered in the mud. One tent burned brightly, sending up clouds of black smoke. They saw several dead bodies.

  “Jesus,” one technician said.

  “Back scan,” Ross said. “Spot resolve to six-six.”

  On the screens, the camera panned back across the camp. They looked at the jungle. They still saw no sign of life.

  “Down pan. Reverse sweep.”

  Onscreen, the camera panned down to show the silver dish of the portable antenna, and the black box of the transmitter. Nearby was another body, one of the geologists, lying on his back.

  “Jesus, that’s Roger

  “Zoom and T-lock,” Ross said. On the tape, her voice sounds cool, almost detached.

  The camera zoomed in on the face. What they saw was grotesque, the head crushed and leaking blood from eyes and nose, mouth gaping toward the sky.

  “What did that?”

  At that moment, a shadow fell across the dead face onscreen. Ross jumped forward, grabbing the joystick and hitting the zoom control. The image widened swiftly; they could see the outline of the shadow now. It was a man. And he was moving.

  “Somebody’s there! Somebody’s still alive!”

  “He’s limping. Looks wounded.”

  Ross stared at the shadow. It did not look to her like a limping man; something was wrong, she couldn’t put her finger on what it was.

  “He’s going to walk in front of the lens,” she said. It was almost too much to hope for. “What’s that audio static?”

  They were hearing an odd sound, like a hissing or a sighing.

  “It’s not static, it’s in the transmission.”

  “Resolve it,” Ross said. The technicians punched buttons, altering the audio frequencies, but the sound remained peculiar and indistinct. And then the shadow moved, and the man stepped in front of the lens.

  “Diopter,” Ross said, but it was too late. The face had already appeared, very near the lens. It was too close to focus w
ithout a diopter. They saw a blurred, dark shape, nothing more. Before they could click in the diopter, it was gone.

  “A native?”

  “This region of the Congo is uninhabited,” Ross said.

  “Something inhabits it.”

  “Pan scan,” Ross said. “See if you can get him onscreen again.”

  The camera continued to pan. She could imagine it sitting on its tripod in the jungle, motor whirring as the lens head swung around. Then suddenly the image tilted and fell sideways.

  “He knocked it over.”

  “Damn!”

  The video image crackled, shifting lines of static. It became very difficult to see.

  “Resolve it! Resolve it!”

  They had a final glimpse of a large face and a dark hand as the silver dish antenna was smashed. The image from the Congo shrank to a spot, and was gone.

  2. Interference Signature

  DURING JUNE OF 1979, EARTH RESOURCES TECHNOLOGY had field teams studying uranium deposits in Bolivia, copper deposits in Pakistan, agricultural field utilization in Kashmir, glacier advance in Iceland, timber resources in Malaysia, and diamond deposits in the Congo. This was not unusual for ERTS; they generally had between six and eight groups in the field at any time.

  Since their teams were often in hazardous or politically unstable regions, they were vigilant in watching for the first signs of “interference signatures.” (In remote-sensing terminology, a “signature” is the characteristic appearance of an object or geological feature in a photograph or video image.) Most interference signatures were political. In 1977, ERTS had airlifted a team out of Borneo during a local Communist uprising, and again from Nigeria in 1978 during a military coup. Occasionally the signatures were geological; they had pulled a team from Guatemala in 1976 after the earthquake there.

  In the opinion of R. B. Travis, called out of bed in the late hours of June 13, 1979, the videotapes from the Congo were “the worst interference signature ever,” but the problem remained mysterious. All they knew was that the camp had been destroyed in a mere six minutes—the time between the signal initiation from Houston and the reception in the Congo. The rapidity was frightening; Travis’s first instruction to his team was to figure out “what the hell happened out there.”

  A heavyset man of forty-eight, Travis was accustomed to crises. By training he was an engineer with a background in satellite construction for RCA and later Rockwell; in his thirties he had shifted to management, becoming what aerospace engineers called a “rain dancer.” Companies manufacturing satellites contracted eighteen to twenty-four months in advance for a launch rocket to put the satellite in orbit—and then hoped that the satellite, with its half-million working parts, would be ready on the assigned day. If it was not, the only alternative was to pray for bad weather delaying the launch, to dance for rain.

  Travis had managed to keep a sense of humor after a decade of high-tech problems; his management philosophy was summarized by a large sign mounted behind his desk, which read “S.D.T.A.G.W.” It stood for “Some Damn Thing Always Goes Wrong.”

  But Travis was not amused on the night of June 13. His entire expedition had been lost, all the ERTS party killed— eight of his people, and however many local porters were with them. The worst disaster in ERTS history, worse even than Nigeria in ‘78. Travis felt fatigued, mentally drained, as he thought of all the phone calls ahead of him. Not the calls he would make, but those he would receive. Would so-and-so be back in time for a daughter’s graduation, a son’s Little League playoff? Those calls would be routed to Travis, and he would have to listen to the bright expectation in the voices, the hopefulness, and his own careful answers—he wasn’t sure, he understood the problem, he would do his best, of course, of course. . . . The coming deception exhausted him in advance.

  Because Travis couldn’t tell anyone what had happened for at least two weeks, perhaps a month. And then he would be making phone calls himself, and visits to the homes, and attending the memorial services where there would be no casket, a deadly blank space, a gap, and the inevitable questions from families and relatives that he couldn’t answer while they scrutinized his face, looking for the least muscle twitch, or hesitation, or sign.

  What could he tell them?

  That was his only consolation—perhaps in a few weeks, Travis could tell them more. One thing was certain: if he were to make the dreadful calls tonight, he could tell the

  families nothing at all, for ERTS had no idea what had gone wrong. That fact added to Travis’s sense of exhaustion. And there were details: Morris, the insurance auditor, came in and said, “What do you want to do about the terms?” ERTS took Out term life insurance policies for every expedition member, and also for local porters. African porters received U.S. $15,000 each in insurance, which seemed trivial until one recognized that African per capita income averaged U.S. $180 per year. But Travis had always argued that local expedition people should share risk benefits—even if it meant paying widowed families a small fortune, in their terms. Even if it cost ERTS a small fortune for the insurance.

  “Hold them,” Travis said.

  “Those policies are costing us per day—”

  “Hold them,” Travis said.

  “For how long?”

  “Thirty days,” Travis said.

  “Thirty more days?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But we know the holders are dead.” Morris could not reconcile himself to the waste of money. His actuarial mind rebelled.

  “That’s right,” Travis said. “But you'd better slip the porters’ families some cash to keep them quiet.”

  “Jesus. How much are we talking about?”

  “Five hundred dollars each.”

  “How do we account that?”

  “Legal fees,” Travis said. “Bury it in legal, local disposition.’’

  “And the American team people that we’ve lost?”

  “They have MasterCard,” Travis said. “Stop worrying.”

  Roberts, the British-born ERTS press liaison, came into his office. “You want to open this can up?”

  “No,” Travis said. “I want to kill it.”

  “For how long?”

  “Thirty days.

  “Bloody hell. Your own staff will leak inside thirty days,” Roberts said. “I promise you.”

  “If they do, you’ll squash it,” Travis said. “I need another thirty days to make this contract.”

  “Do we know what happened out there?”

  “No,” Travis said. “But we will.”

  “How?”

  “From the tapes.”

  “Those tapes are a mess.”

  “So far,” Travis said. And he called in the specialty teams of console hotdoggers. Travis had long since concluded that although ERTS could wake up political advisers around the world, they were most likely to get information in-house. “Everything we know from the Congo field expedition,” he said, “is registered on that final videotape. I want a seven-band visual and audio salvage, starting right now. Because that tape is all we have.”

  The specialty teams went to work.

  3. Recovery

  ERTS REFERRED TO THE PROCESS AS “DATA RECOVERY,” or sometimes as “data salvage.” The terms evoked images of deep-sea operations, and they were oddly appropriate.

  To recover or salvage data meant that coherent meaning was pulled to the surface from the depths of massive electronic information storage. And, like salvage from the sea, it was a slow and delicate process, where a single false step meant the irretrievable loss of the very elements one was trying to bring up. ERTS had whole salvage crews skilled in the art of data recovery. One crew immediately went to work on the audio recovery, another on the visual recovery.

  But Karen Ross was already engaged in a visual recovery.

  The procedures she followed were highly sophisticated, and only possible at ERTS.

  Earth Resources Technology was a relatively new company, formed in 1975 in resp
onse to the explosive growth of information on the Earth and its resources. The amount of material handled by ERTS was staggering: just the Landsat imagery alone amounted to more than five hundred thousand pictures, and sixteen new images were acquired every hour, around the clock. With the addition of conventional and draped aerial photography, infrared photography, and artificial aperture side-looking radar, the total information available to ERTS exceeded two million images, with new input on the order of thirty images an hour. All this information had to be catalogued, stored, and made available for instantaneous retrieval. ERTS was like a library which acquired seven hundred new books a day. It was not surprising that the librarians worked at fever pitch around the clock.

  Visitors to ERTS never seemed to realize that even with computers, such data-handling capacity would have been impossible ten years earlier. Nor did visitors understand the basic nature of the ERTS information—they assumed that the pictures on the screens were photographic, although they were not.

  Photography was a nineteenth-century chemical system for recording information using light-sensitive silver salts. ERTS utilized a twentieth-century electronic system for recording information, analogous to chemical photographs, but very different. Instead of cameras, ERTS used multi-spectral scanners; instead of film, they used CCTs—computer compatible tapes. In fact, ERTS did not bother with “pictures” as they were ordinarily understood from old-fashioned photographic technology. ERTS bought “data scans” which they converted to “data displays,” as the need arose.

  Since the ERTS images were just electrical signals recorded on magnetic tape, a great variety of electrical image manipulation was possible. ERTS had 837 computer programs to alter imagery: to enhance it, to eliminate unwanted elements, to bring out details. Ross used fourteen programs on the Congo videotape—particularly on the static-filled section in which the hand and face appeared, just before the antenna was smashed.

  First she earned out what was called a “wash cycle,” getting rid of the static. She identified the static lines as occurring at specific scan positions, and having a specific gray-scale value. She instructed the computer to cancel those lines.