him. 'But it looks like they've finished developing the pictures. Incidentally, I think the whole business about the whales' memories is fascinating. I want to come back and do a feature on it Maybe next week sometime. Give my love to your daughter and grandson.'
Carol had become so engrossed in the discussion with Oscar that she had momentarily forgotten why she had flown to Miami early that morning. Now she felt anew a keen sense of excitement as she drove back to the main MOI administrative building from the aquarium. Dale had been confident at breakfast that processing the infrared images would reveal something of interest. 'After all,' he had said logically, 'the foreign object alarm was triggered repeatedly And nothing could be seen in the visual images. Therefore, either the infrared observations caused the alarm or the algorithm did not work properly. The second possibility is very unlikely, since I designed the data flow myself and my best programmers tested it after it was coded.'
Dale was uncharacteristically excited when she walked into the conference room. Carol started to ask him a question but was silenced by a vigorous negative motion of the head that followed his smile of greeting. Dale was talking to two of the image-processing technicians. 'Okay, then, we're squared away? Display the images in this sequence. I'll call for each one by using the pickle.' The technicians left the room.
Dale came over and grabbed Carol. 'You are not going to believe this,' he said, 'what a bonanza. What a fucking bonanza!' He settled down a little. 'But first things first. I promised myself that I would not spoil it for you. 'He showed her to a seat at the conference table in front of the large screen and then sat down beside her.
He pushed the remote-control switch. Up on the large screen came a still frame of the three whales in the reef area under the boat. The fissure could clearly be seen to the right and beneath the whales. Dale looked at Carol. 'I see,' she shrugged, 'but what's the deal? I took pictures with my underwater camera that are just as good.'
Dale turned back to the screen and pushed thc remote several more times. The successive scenes zoomed in on the hole in the coral reef, eventually isolating and centering on a small glint in the lower left side of the fissure. Again Dale looked at Carol. 'I have a similar blowup,' she said pensively. 'But it's impossible to tell if something is really there or if it's an artifact of the photographic process. 'She stopped herself. 'Although the fact that two distinctly different techniques found the light in essentially the same place suggests that it might not be a processing distortion.' She leaned forward, interested. 'So what's next?'
There was no way he could contain himself Dale jumped up and started pacing around the room. 'What's next,' he began, 'could be your ticket to the Pulitzer dinner in New York. Now I am going to show you exactly the same sequence of images, only these were taken in the infrared a fraction of a second later. Watch closely, especially in the center of the fissure.'
The first processed infrared image covered the same area underneath the boat that the first visual image had shown. In the infrared picture, however, what was shown were thermal variations in the scene. In the processing, each pixel (an individual picture element in the image) was given a specific temperature based on the infrared radiation observed from that portion of the frame. Similar temperatures were then grouped together by the computer processing and assigned the same color. This process created isothermal regions, or regions of roughly the same temperature, that were visually connected by color. The result was that in the first picture the whales stood out in red, most of the reef plants were blue, and the normalized water temperature formed a dusky gray background. It took Carol a moment to adjust to the display. Dale was smiling triumphantly. Before Carol had a chance to focus on two small regions, one red and another brown down in the center of the hole in the reef, the zoom process had begun. In a few seconds an infrared close-up of the fissure clearly demonstrated why Dale was so excited.
'I told you there was something under the boat,' he said, walking to the screen and pointing at a brown, elongated object. The object was cylindrical at one end and tapered to a