Sensitivity

“We can find. Easy. Use Petrovascope.”

I slam my fist into my palm. “Yes! Of course!”

Astrophage have to breed somewhere. Some partial pressure of carbon dioxide will be key. But we don’t have to work that out or take any guesses. When an Astrophage divides, it and its offspring head back to Tau Ceti. And they use IR-light emission to make it happen. That means there will be a glow of Petrova-frequency light coming from all over the planet at that specific altitude.

“To the control room!” I say.

“Control room!” He scampers across the lab ceiling tunnel and disappears through his personal control-room entrance. I follow along beside but I’m not quite as fast.

I climb up the ladder, take the pilot’s seat, and flip on the Petrovascope. Rocky has already taken up position in his bulb and points his camera at my main screen.

The entire screen glows red.

“What is this, question? No data.”

“Wait,” I say. I bring up the controls and options and start moving sliders. “We’re inside the Petrova line. There’s Astrophage all around us. Let me just change the setting to only show the brightest sources….”

It takes a lot of manipulation, but I finally manage to get the brightness range set. What I’m left with are irregular blotchy areas of IR light coming from Adrian.

“I think this is our answer,” I say.

Rocky gets closer to his textured screen to “see” what I’m looking at.

“Not what I expected,” I say.

I thought it would just be a general layer of IR glow at a given altitude. But it’s nothing like that. The clumps are basically clouds. And they don’t match up with the wispy white clouds I can see with visible light. These are, for lack of a better term, IR clouds.

Or, more accurately, clouds of Astrophage that are emitting IR. For whatever reason, Astrophage breed much more in some areas than others.

***

Chapter 18