Out of the Fire

Part 1 - The Astronomer

Head Astronomer Doctor Roger Fergusson, called Rodge by just about everyone now, pulls his five year old jeep into the car park outside the annex to the Mt Singtel radio telescope.

The wheels made their usual disconcerting crunch as he steered into his designated parking spot, right outside the main entrance to the Axell Corporate Astronomical Research Offices. As he killed the engine and reached across to retrieve his briefcase he once again wondered who the genius was who thought loose white pebbles were a suitable surface for a car park. "Oh well," he thought "at least my parking space is just outside the office." Not that there was a shortage of parking now after the cutbacks.

The annex was a large grey demountable building, set on steel stumps three steps from the ground and right next to the main telescope. During the privatisation trend a decade ago, Axell Corporation had purchased the facility from the University and they opted to convert the temporary office building into an annex to the main research lab. Before privatisation, Rodge had been the University's Head of Science Operations, then after privatisation, the Mt Singtel Head Astronomer, and had overseen the successful transition from University Faculty to Commercial Research Unit. He often thought that if he was honest with himself, his pride and joy, was probably just a tax minimisation scheme for the corporation. However, his unit was well regarded internationally, had scored a famous mathematician and had produced some world class pure science.

"Ah Autumn," he mused "my favourite time of year." He looked back to where the on-duty security guards were throwing rocks at the Keep-Out signs hanging on the chain wire security fence and chuckled. The observatory was a good hour drive from the city and nothing ever happened out here. The early morning mountain air was still and in the shadow of the array's alpha dish, it was quite chilly, hinting at the winter to come.

The foyer was still dark as he swiped his way in. Being the first there, he keyed the alarm at the main keypad, flicked the lights on and unlocked his office. Rodge felt content. He actually treasured this first hour before the rest of the staff started wandering in, it allowed him to be productive, or not, depending on his mood. But it was quiet and no-one bothered him for a decision or an opinion, or with any of the hundred other annoying requests. Since their Project had entered the data analysis stage, start times were more flexible and most of his staff opted for sleeping-in. He booted his terminal and while waiting for it to start, glanced at the framed certificates and citations on his office wall. It had been a long road from university, the grudging acceptance of his highly controversial doctoral dissertation, to tenure with the Axell Corp deep space research faculty at the Mt Singtel radio telescope facility.

For the previous three years, his team at Singtel had been collecting and analysing data from a very small section of space. The focus of their study was an area on the same arm of the galactic spiral as our sun, but further out from the galactic centre. Some unusual radio signals had been detected from this region twenty years ago. However, as with so much astronomical research, the amount of data collected far exceeds the means to analyse it, so it was hardly surprising it's taken this long to become a research item.

The team under Axell Corp patronage, had spent the previous three years studying this anomaly and comparing historic and up-to-date data from the visible and radio spectrums, from Hubble and the COBE satellite as well as the Mt Singtel array. Now they just needed to make sense of it all. That thought made Rodge chuckle to himself as he loaded the latest data set and began processing the first of a sequence of algorithms.

Early analysis of the data had produced some unexpected figures and, as his major focus, Rodge had undertaken the task of understanding what those results may mean. He had also assigned two distinguished astrophysicists to the task. Both Dr Gundar Singh and Dr Lei Yoi had more than fifty years experience between them in astronomical mathematics and were highly regarded by their peers.