Amy now came alongside Peter's head and began to groom him, plucking at his beard and scalp. The gray gorillas signed rapidly. Then the male began his rhythmic ho-ho-ho once more. When she saw this Amy turned to Peter and signed, Amy hug Peter. He was surprised: Amy never volunteered
to hug Peter. Ordinarily she only wanted Peter to hug and tickle Amy.
Elliot sat up and she immediately pulled him to her chest, pressing his face into her hair. At once the male gorilla ceased grunting. The gray gorillas began to backpedal, as if they
had committed some error. In that moment, Elliot under-
stood: she was treating him like her infant.
This was classic primate behavior in aggressive situations. Primates carried strong inhibitions against harming infants, and this inhibition was invoked by adult animals
in many contexts. Male baboons often ended their fight when one male grabbed an infant and clutched it to his chest; the sight of the small animal inhibited further attack. Chimpanzees showed wore subtle variations of the same thing. If juvenile chimp play turned too brutal, a male would grab one juvenile and clutch it maternally, even though in this case both parent and child were symbolic. Yet the posture was sufficient to evoke the inhibition against further violence. In this case Amy was not only halting the male's attack but protecting Elliot as well, by treating him as an infant - if the gorillas would accept a bearded six-foot-tall infant.
They did.
They disappeared hack into the foliage. Amy released Elliot from her fierce grip. She looked at him and signed, Dumb things.
"Thank you, Amy," he said and kissed her.
Peter tickle Amy Amy good gorilla.
"You bet," he said, and he tickled her for the next several minutes, while she rolled on the ground, grunting happily.
It was two o'clock in the afternoon when they returned to camp. Ross said, "Did you get a gorilla?"
"No," Elliot said.
"Well, it doesn't matter," Ross, said, "because I can't raise Houston."
Elliot was stunned: "More electronic jamming?"
"Worse than that," Ross said. She had spent an hour trying to establish a satellite link with Houston, and had failed. Each time the link was broken within seconds. Finally, after confirming that there was no fault with her equipment, she had checked the date. "It's June 24," she said. "And we had communications trouble with the last Congo expedition on May 28. That's twenty-seven days ago."
When Elliot still didn't get it, Munro said, "She's telling you it's solar."
"That's right," Ross said. "This is an ionospheric disturbance of solar origin." Most disruptions of the earth's ionosphere - the thin layer of ionized molecules 50-250 miles up - were caused by phenomena such as sunspots on the surface of the sun. Since the sun rotated every twenty-seven days, these disturbances often recurred a month later.
''Okay," Elliot said, "it's solar. How long will it last?"
Ross shook her head. "Ordinarily, I would say a few hours, a day at most. But this seems to be a severe disturbance and it's come up very suddenly. Five hours ago we had perfect communications - and now we have none at all. Something unusual is going on. It could last a week."
"No communications for a week? No computer tie-ins, no nothing?"
"That's right," Ross said evenly. "From this moment on, we are entirely cut off from the outside world."
5. Isolation
THE LARGEST SOLAR FLARE OF 1979 WAS RECORDED on June 24, by the Kitt Peak Observatory near Tucson, Arizona, and duly passed on to the Space Environment Services Center in Boulder, Colorado. At first the SESC did not believe the incoming data: even by the gigantic standards of solar astronomy, this flare, designated 78/06/4l4aa, was a monster.
The cause of solar flares is unknown, but they are generally associated with sunspots. In this case the flare appeared as an extremely bright spot ten thousand miles in diameter, affecting not only alpha hydrogen and ionized calcium spectral lines but also the white light spectrum from the sun. Such a "continuous spectrum" flare was extremely rare.
Nor could the SESC believe the computed consequences. Solar flares release an enormous amount of energy; even a modest flare can double the amount of ultraviolet radiation emitted by the entire solar surface. But flare 78/06/4l4aa was almost tripling ultraviolet emissions. Within 8.3 minutes of its first appearances along the rotating rim - the time it takes light to reach the earth from the sun - this surge of ultraviolet radiation began to disrupt the ionosphere of the earth.
The consequence of the flare was that radio communications on a planet ninety-three million miles away were seriously disrupted. This was especially true for radio transmissions which utilized low signal strengths. Commercial radio stations generating kilowatts of power were hardly
inconvenienced, but the Congo Field Survey, transmitting signals on the order of twenty thousand watts, was unable to establish satellite links. And since the solar flare also ejected X-rays and atomic particles which would not reach the earth for a full day, the radio disruption would last at least one day, and perhaps longer. At ERTS in Houston, technicians reported to Travis that the SESC predicted a time course of ionic disruption of four to eight days.
"That's how it looks. Ross'll probably figure it out," the technician said, "when she can't re-establish today."
"They need that computer hookup," Travis said. The ERTS staff had run five computer simulations and the outcome was always the same - short of airlifting in a small army, Ross's expedition was in serious trouble. Survival projections were running "point two four four and change" - only one chance in four that the Congo expedition would get out alive, assuming the help of the computer link which was now broken.