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The lights were out!
That he had ed to make his way back down the catwalk and descend the ladder at so close to a dead run, in utter darkness, was a feat that, in hindsight, seemed completely incredible He had taken the last few , knees bent to absorb the ihthouse "Elton!" he was shouting as he skidded around the corner and h the door "Elton, wake up!" He expected to find the syste into the roolow of the CRTs, all hts off?
He lurched across the room to the box, and there he saw the problem The main breaker was open All he had to do was close it, and the lights caht The story of the power surge was the best he could cohthouse And he supposed a surge could do it, although this would have been logged by the syste in the file The problem could have been a short somewhere, but if that were true, the breaker wouldn’t have held; the circuit would have failed again thechecking every connection, venting and reventing the ports, charging the capacitors There was si
Was anyone in here? he asked Elton Did you hear anything? But Elton only shook his head I was sleeping, Michael I was sound asleep in the back I didn’t hear a thing until you ca
It was past half-day before Michael was able to reassemble the frame of mind to return to work on the radio In all the exciteotten about it, but as he exited the Lighthouse in search of the spool he had dropped the night before, then found it lying undisturbed in the dust, the long wire arcing up to the top of the Wall, he was convinced anew of its importance He spliced the wire to the copper filahthouse, pulled the logbook down off the shelf to check the frequency, and clamped the headphones to his ears
Two hours later, lit with adrenaline, his hair and jersey drenched with sweat, he found Peter in the barracks Peter was sitting on a bunk, spinning a blade around his index finger No one else was in the roolanced up with only passing interest He looked like soht Like he wanted to use that blade on someone but couldn’t decide just who And come to think of it, Michael wondered, where was everybody? Wasn’t it awful da
"What is it?" Peter said, and resu "Because whatever it is, I hope it’s good news"
"Oh et the words out "You have to hear this"
"Michael, do you have any idea what’s going on around this place? What do I have to hear?"
"Amy," he said "You have to hear Ahthouse, Michael took a seat at his terirl’s neck now lay in pieces on a leather mat beside Michael’s CRT
"The power source," Michael was saying, "now, that’s interesting Very interesting" With a pair of tweezers, he lifted a tiny metal capsule fro I’ve seen Given how long it’s been running, erous?"
"It wasn’t to her, apparently And it’s been inside her a long ti?" Peter looked at his friend, whose face gloith exciteuest answers to Peter’s questions "You rinnedon a ain to the object on the counter, using his tweezers to identify the parts "So you’ve got a transuess was a memory chip, but it ay too small to fit into any of the ports on the mainframe, so I had to solder it hard"
With a couple of quick strokes on his keyboard, Michael called up a page of information on the screen
"The information on the chip is divided into two partitions, oneat is the first partition"
Peter saw a single line of text, letters and nuether "I can’t really read it," he confessed
"That’s because the spaces have been removed For some reason, some of it’s transposed, too I think it’s just a bad sector on the chip Maybe so happened when I soldered it to the board Either way, it looks like a lot of it is gone But what’s here tells us a lot"
Michael called up a second screen The saanized themselves
AMY NLN
SUB 13
ASSTO NOAH USAMRIID SWD
G:F W:2272K
"Amy NLN" Peter lifted his eyes froirl I don’t know for sure what NLN stands for, but I’et to the stuff in the middle in a second, but the bottoht, 2272 kilos That’s about the size of a five-or six-year-old kid So I’e when the transmitter was put in"
None of it was clear to Peter, and yet Michael spoke with such confidence he could only take his friend’s word for it "So it’s been in there, what, ten years?"
"Well," Michael said, still grinning, "not exactly And don’t juot a lot to show you It’s better if you just let et from the first partition, and it isn’tstuff by a long shot The second partition is the real storehouse Close to sixteen terabytes That’s sixteen trillion bytes of data"
He pressed another key Dense coluan to fly up the screen
"It’s soht at first it was so’s right here, it’s just all run together like the first partition" Michael did soainst the glass "The key was this number here, first in the sequence, repeated down the coluhty-six?"
"Close Ninety-eight point six Ring any bells?"
Peter could only shake his head "Not really, no"
"Ninety-eight point six is a nor the old Fahrenheit scale Now look at the rest of the line The seventy-two is probably heart rate You’ve got respiration and blood pressure I’ the rest has to do with brain activity, kidney function, that sort of thing Sara would probably understand it better than I do But the roups It’s pretty obvious if you look for the first nu this thing is a kind of body uess is she was a patient of some kind"
"A patient? Like in an infirmary?" Peter frowned "No one could do this"
"No one could now And here’s where it getsAll told, there are five hundred forty-five thousand four hundred and six groups on the chip The transmitter was set to cycle every ninety minutes The rest was just arithmetic Sixteen cycles a day times three hundred sixty-five days in a year"