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GREGORY BENFORD'
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God, the spectra are coming closer together in time."
"So?" Max asked.
"We've got the system almost on automatic. It collects light long enough to
make a reliable, smooth spectrum, then compiles it. A week or so ago, we took
data for days to get one spectrum. These last few, though, have been shaping
up in less than an hour of data collecting."
"So the intensity was climbing."
She typed furiously, her eyes widening. "Yes. Climbing through today,
particularly. While I was busy and Brad was registering all this and saying
nothing."
"Up by a couple orders of magnitude, looks like."
Max was leaning over her shoulder, reading numbers off the vertical axis of
the spectra. She did not like people doing that but suppressed her annoyance;
he was right about the increase, too. "Why didn't Brad tell me? Damn."
"His discovery, he figured?"
"That would fit the Brad I know. He was competing with Zak
Nguyen, some issue between them."
"Ambitious grad students go with the territory."
"He must have known this for days. I was working on other stuff--"
"Don't start blaming yourself," he said emphatically.
e"Right, just do the data." She sat up straight, smoothed her hair back from
her forehead.
"Let me have that intensity data, though. I want to look it over."
She quickly printed out the spectra; let him get whatever he liked from them.
She felt herself veering away from all this, her thoughts shooting off in all
directions to escape somehow from what had happened.
A long watery sigh escaped and Max gave her a worried look. Get a grip, she
told herself fiercely.
"Let's ... let's follow these spectra forward," she muttered. There was
trouble with the data files as she stepped them forward in time.
Those from this afternoon were much more powerful and the program had trouble
accommodating the huge increases. The smooth spectra also showed a thin,
jagged peak.
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"This looks wrong," she said.
"Or maybe it's not a blackbody anymore," Max said.
She studied the peak in what had been the expected blackbody curves, thinking.
As an emitter became transparent, it lost the simple blackbody emission form.
Instead, the radiation began breaking through, light no longer captured and
reemitted. Sharper, distinctive lines could begin to poke their heads above
the smoothness.
"The intensity's going up fast, too," Max pointed out.
"Ummm." She jumped through the late-afternoon collection bin;
the peak got bigger, jutting out. "Don't know if I trust any of this."
"Is there any more?"
She checked the compilation lag. "Incomplete collection in the next run, seems
to be." She told the program to display the spectrum anyway, narrowed to the
odd peak. The software ground around as the hard disks buzzed, trading
information, and then the screen filled with a ragged spike, a classic atomic
radiation line.
"Very energetic emission," Max said.
"Look at the intensity!"
"Up orders of magnitude."
"Bright and sharp." She checked the time log. "This would be right around when
Brad..."
"Yeah. The smoking gun."
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"What line is that?"
"Let me look up something..." Somewhere in the software menu, she recalled,
there was a finder routine that matched an observed line with candidate
frequencies of various atoms and molecules.
She found it and pulled down the appropriate menus, the usual pointing and
clicking that still reminded her of kids' games. In less than a minute she
said, "It's hydrogen."
"Can't be."
"It fits the basic recombination line."
"You're sure?" Max was leaning over her shoulder again.
"Of course I'm not. That's just the closest comparison."
"That's the line emitted when an electron falls into the lowest hydrogen
orbit?"
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