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flight
information during their return. It was a long worrisome trip. The
balloon held together, but it was being pushed further eastward
without any increase in altitude. It survived, hour after hour,
then suddenly spun out of the main air stream and seemed to gain
sufficient height to clear the winds altogether. It seemed to go
straight up, but it was too late. It was night by the time the
device reached an altitude sufficient to enter the light-of-day and
any record any clouds that might be visible. It would be hours
before it would be bright again. An opportunity lost, or so it
seemed.
    ObLa’s daily cycle of light and
dark had never been explained, although there were any number of
myths and stories to describe its presence. It was generally
believed that some substance high above the surface the planet
emitted light much like some plants and small animals did on the
surface (photoluminescence, for those who care), and that this
patch oscillates in a daily cycle (thirty-hours our time) that
continuously made its way around the planet.
    MaxNi fell asleep in the jostling
van fearing that the balloon would burst apart without recording
anything but black clouds, still it had reached a record altitude,
he was sure of that. He was still asleep in the van's hammock when
the light meter recorded a significant rise. Nothing near the
intensity expected, but then it was the middle of the night. Why
was there any light at all? Excitement shook the van. What this
might mean was still a guess when they received a second report.
Another substantial light meter reading was obtained, but it had
come from a different direction. It was still a long trip back to
the Center, but spirits were high. It looked like this mission was
going to be a success. No one then knew that it would be the stuff
of legend.
    Three days later, MaxNi, JaDom and
HuMat arrived at the Center. Their colleagues greeted them with a
rush of excitement. The balloon had held together for hours and
hours, well into the new day, and all of the instruments had worked
perfectly. More importantly, the instruments successfully separated
from the balloon when it finally ruptured and had parachuted to the
ground. All of the instrument measurements and over ninety percent
of the photographic data were transmitted before the package
crashed to the land and broke apart. There was a mountain of new
data to climb.
    Another three weeks had passed
before MaxNi finished with the pressure, temperature, wind speed,
humidity, and the other common data that the COW was accustomed to
seeing, and he finally had a chance to look through the imaging
data. The camera had started operating at an elevation well below
the topmost clouds. It was night at the time. It was hard to tell
from the black-on-black featureless images that the camera was
working at all. After an hour of looking at sequential images of
blackness, MaxNi's famous discipline deserted him, and he jumped
forward to something better.
    The first image he chose showed a
few dim, blurred white dots against a black background. The next
two images had the same white spots, very clearly all across the
frame. That was disappointing. MaxNi did not know what they were,
but he suspected that the camera's photon detector was
deteriorating at the high altitude. Perhaps the failed matrix
elements were giving a burst of signal. That would explain why the
same pattern of dots showed up in different images, but no. The
pattern was constant, but it shifted across the frame as the camera
slowly rotated around its long tether. It had to be a real image of
something.
    The light meter had recorded high
signals on three occasions. The image corresponding to the first
instance had the now familiar small white dots on a black
background, but it appeared to have a light haze on the lower left
corner. MaxNi’s disappointment was wiped away with the next
picture. It clearly showed what appeared to be a crescent shape,
probably a sphere that was lit from