Caidwell intervened.
“Cool it, you guys. D’you think we haven’t had enough arguments
like this around here for the last few weeks?”
“I really think it’s about time we had some lunch,” Lyn Garland
interrupted with well-timed tact.
Danchekker turned abruptly and began walking back toward the door,
reciting statistics on the density of body hair and the thickness
of subdermal layers of fat, apparently having dismissed the
incident from his mind. Hunt paused to survey the body once more
before turning to follow, and in doing so, he caught Gray’s eye for
an instant. The engineer’s mouth twitched briefly at the corners;
Hunt gave a barely perceptible shrug. Caldwell, still standing by
the foot of the table, observed the brief exchange. He turned his
head to look after Danchekker and then back again at the
Englishmen, his eyes narrowing thoughtfully. At last he fell in
a few paces behind the group, nodding slowly to himself and
permitting a faint smile.
The door slid silently into place and the room was once more
plunged into darkness.
chapter seven
Hunt brought his hands up to his shoulders, stretched his body back
over his chair, and emitted a long yawn at the ceiling of the
laboratory. He held the position for a few seconds, and then
collapsed back with a sigh. Finally he rubbed his eyes with his
knuckles, hauled himself upright to face the console in front of
him once more, and returned his gaze to the three-foot-high wall of
the cylindrical glass tank by his side.
The image on the Trimagniscope tube was an enlarged view of one of
the pocket-size books found on the body, which Danchekker had shown
them on their first day in Houston three weeks before. The book
itself was enclosed in the scanner module of the machine, on the
far side of the room. The scope was adjusted to generate a view
that followed the change in density along the boundary surface of
the selected page, producing an image of the lower section of the
book only; it was as if the upper part had been removed, like a cut
deck of cards. Because of the age and condition of the book,
however, the characters on the page thus exposed tended to be of
poor quality and in some places were incomplete. The next step
would be to scan the image optically with TV cameras and feed the
encoded pictures into the Navcomms computer complex. The raw input
would then be processed by pattern recognition techniques and
statistical techniques to produce a second, enhanced copy with many
of the missing character fragments restored.
Hunt cast his eye over the small monitor screens on his console,
each of which showed a magnified view of a selected area of the
page, and tapped some instructions into his keyboard.
“There’s an unresolved area on monitor five,” he announced.
“Cursors read X, twelve hundred to thirteen eighty; Y, nine ninety
and, ah, ten seventy-five.”
Rob Gray, seated at another console a few feet away and almost
surrounded by screens and control panels, consulted one of the
numerical arrays glowing before him.
“Z mod’s linear across the field,” he advised. “Try a block
elevate?”
“Can do. Give it a try.”
“Setting Z step two hundred through two ten . . . increment point
one. . . step zero point five seconds.”
“Check.” Hunt watched the screen as the surface picked out through
the volume of the book became distorted locally and the picture on
the monitor began to change.
“Hold it there,” he called. Gray hit a key. “Okay?”
Hunt contemplated the modified view for a while.
“The middle of the element’s clear now,” he pronounced at last.
“Fix the new plane inside forty percent. I still don’t like the
strip around it, though. Give me a vertical slice through the
center point.”
“Which screen d’you want it on?”
“Ah. . . number seven.”
“Coming up.”
The curve, showing a cross section of the page surface through the
small area they were working on, appeared on Hunt’s console. He
studied it for awhile, then called:
“Run an interpolation across the strip. Set thresholds of, say,
minus five and thirty-five percent on Y.”