“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.

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 response 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.

The resulting image showed blank spaces where the static was removed. So she did “fill-in-the-blanks”-instructing the computer to introject imagery, according to what was around the blank spaces. In this operation the computer made a logical guess about what was missing.

She now had a static-free image, but it was muddy and indistinct, lacking definition. So she did a “high-priced spread”-intensifying the image by spreading the gray-scale values. But for some reason she also got a phase distortion that she had to cancel, and that released spiking glitches previously suppressed, and to get rid of the glitches she had to run three other programs.

Technical details preoccupied her for an hour, until suddenly the image “popped,” coming up bright and clean. She caught her breath as she saw it. The screen showed a dark, brooding face with heavy brows, watchful eyes, a flattened nose, prognathous lips.

Frozen on the video screen was the face of a male gorilla.

Travis walked toward her from across the room, shaking his head. “We finished the audio recovery on that hissing noise. The computer confirms it as human breathing, with at least four separate origins. But it’s damned strange. According to the analysis, the sound is coming from inhalation, not exhalation, the way people usually make sounds.”

“The computer is wrong,” Ross said. “It’s not human.” She pointed to the screen, and the face of the gorilla.

Travis showed no surprise. “Artifact,” he said.

“It’s no artifact.”

“You did fill-in-the-blanks, and you got an artifact. The tag team’s been screwing around with the software at lunch again.” The tag team-the young software programmers- had a tendency to convert data to play highly sophisticated versions of pinball games. Their games sometimes got sub-routed into other programs.

Ross herself had complained about it. “But this image is real,” she insisted, pointing to the screen.

“Look,” Travis said, “last week Harry did fill-in-the-blanks on the Karakorum Mountains and he got back a lunar landing game. You’re supposed to land next to the McDonald's stand, all very amusing.” He walked off. “You’d better meet the others in my office. We’re setting advance times to get back in.”

“I’m leading the next team.”

Travis shook his head. “Out of the question.”

“But what about this?” she said, pointing to the screen.

“I’m not buying that image,” Travis said. “Gorillas don’t behave that way. It’s got to be an artifact.” He glanced at his watch. “Right now, the only question I have is how fast we can put a team back in the Congo.”