Edge

He asked the bartender for another whiskey, another double whiskey. He rarely drank and when he did it was usually a white wine spritzer, however white wine spritzer did not fit the occasion.

As head of the Hubble reconstruction team, he had spent the last five years personally overseeing the Wide Field Camera and Cosmic Origins Spectrograph Division. These updates allowed Hubble the capability to view the ultraviolet and visible spectrums of the outer edge of the universe.

The whiskey was slowly starting to change his original panic into a sort of giddy wonderment. His shoulders hunched up and down as he tried unsuccessfully to withhold a guffaw when he imagined the response of the crew.

For the past three days, they had been receiving transmissions of an anomaly that at first they thought had to be a malfunction in the new digital command data handling system.

However, the backup showed the same thing!

A horizontal line from one side of the camera’s view field to the other, no elevations, no depressions, just one straight line, each day they would rotate the view corridor to see how far this line continued; it took a number of days but when completed, there was 360 degrees of a straight line horizon.

With Hubble, there are two data transmissions every twenty-four hours, one at 11:00 the other at 20:00. On a normal day, they would wait until the morning when they came to work to review the evening’s download, but these were not normal days.

Being Friday evening he said he would stay behind to take a look at the latest transmission and if anything of interest came up he would call, and call he would once he got his brain together… for there were additional horizontal and vertical lines with this transmission.

He waved to the bartender for another, downed it, and asked for more; while waiting he kept scratching out on a bar napkin the lines that came into focus. “Petri Dish”…