“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.
3. Recovery
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.