'Thanks, Professor,' Troy laughed, 'I believe you saved Carol from being talked to death.' He walked over to where all the monitoring equipment had been set up on the footlocker next to the canopy. He turned on the power supply. 'Hey, angel, you want to tell me now how this all works?'
Dale Michaels' ocean telescope was programmed to take three virtually simultaneous pictures at each fixed setting. The first of the pictures was a normal visible image, the second was the same field of view photographed at infrared wavelengths, and the third was a composite sonar image of the same frame. The sonar subsystem did not produce crisp pictures, only outlines of objects. However, it probed to greater depths than either the visible or infrared elements of the telescope and could be used even when the water underneath the boat was murky.
Affixed to the bottom of almost any boat, the compact telescope could be driven thirty degrees back and forth about the vertical by a small internal motor. The observation schedule for the telescope was usually defined by a preprogrammed protocol. The details of this sequence as well as the critical optical parameters for the telescope were all stored in the system microprocessor; however, everything in the software could be changed in realtime by manual input if the operator desired.
Data from the telescope was carried to the rest of the electronic equipment on the boat by means of very thin fiber optics. These cables were bracketed along the edge of the boat. About ten percent of the pictures reconstructed from this data were then displayed (after some very crude enhancements) on the boat's monitor in realtime. But all the data taken by the telescope was automatically recorded in the one hundred gigabit memory unit that adjoined the monitor. Another set of fiber optics connected the same memory unit with the boat's central navigation system and the servomotor actuators controlling the telescopes. These circuits were pulsed every ten milliseconds so that the orientation of the telescope and the boat's location at the time of each telescope image could be stored together in the permanent file.
Next to the monitor on top of the footlocker, but on the other side from the memory unit, was the system control panel. Dr. Dale Michaels and MOI were famous throughout the world for the cleverness of their inventions; however, these ingenious creations were not so easy to operate. Dale had tried to give Carol a crash course on the workings of the system the night before she had driven down to Key West from Miami. It had been almost useless. Eventually frustrated, Dale had simply programmed into the microprocessor an easy sequence that mosaicked the area under the boat in regular patterns. He then set the optical gains at normal default values, and instructed Carol not to change anything. 'All you have to do,' Dr. Michaels had said as he had carefully loaded the system control panel into the station wagon, 'is push this GO button. Then cover the panel to make certain that nobody inadvertently hits the wrong command.'
So Carol certainly could not explain to Troy how anything worked. She walked over beside him on the boat, put her arm on his shoulder, and grinned sheepishly. 'I hate to disappoint you, my inquisitive friend, but I don't know any more about how this thing works than I told you when we were setting up all the equipment. To operate it, all we have to do is turn on the power supply, which you have already done, and then push this button.' She pushed the GO button on the panel. A picture of the clear ocean about fifty feet underneath the boat appeared immediately on the color monitor. The picture was amazingly sharp. The threesome watched in wonder as a hammerhead shark swam through a school of small gray fish, swallowing hundreds of them in his awesome rush.
'As I understand it,' Carol continued as both men stayed glued in fascination to the monitor, 'the telescope system then does the rest, following a planned set of observations stored in its software. Obviously we see what it sees here on this monitor. At least we see the visual image. The simultaneous infrared and sonar pictures are stored on the recorder. My friend at MOI (she didn't want to alert them even more by using Dale's name) tried to explain how I could change between the visual and infrared and sonar images, but it wasn't simple.