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was quietly financing this pioneer commercial venture, using a satellite dubbed GeoSat. Relegated to the back pages of the news because of the reams of print covering our competition with the USSR, little notice was taken of the successful launch of this commercial satellite. By achieving a relatively low orbit, and passing over every part of the globe, GeoSat opened the entire planet to its sensors.
    With the consent of friendly governments, receiving stations had been set up throughout the world, ostensibly as monitoring posts for radio signals from outer space. They were equipped to receive the orbiter’s signals, which were then relayed to Buell's Corporate Headquarters in Southern California’s Culver City.
    It had long been known that signals of a magnetic type emanate through fractures in earth’s crust. As GeoSat circled the earth, it became apparent that the radiation the sensors were picking up over the numerous fault lines was so intense as to make interpretation of the data obtained nearly impossible. That problem was partially overcome when the Cray Research Company came up with a version of their super computer, available to private industry. Without such processing, the readings from the satellite appeared to be massive tangles of magnetic static, punctuated by scattered infrared hot spots.
    It was recognized that the heat in the Earth’s crust indicated volcanic activity, and it was easy to see the magnetic signal complexes radiating from within. Some of the signals were solitary and linear, continuing uninterrupted from a hot spot, and others, complex in form, ringed the volcanic signal. Then there were more complex patterns of these circles, broken by energy radiating away from the source in all directions.
    A linear pattern could be seen in the Pacific’s “Ring of Fire,” with its faults defining the tectonic plates of continents as they ground against or over marine plates, the thinner crust under the seas. There, the great shield volcanoes that had formed in part by that action could be seen in infrared, reminding one of a huge game of “connect the dots.” This pattern could also be seen in the mid-oceanic ridges, such as those making up the Hawaiian Islands, and even in the Atlantic, with the northernmost point being around Iceland. For other areas on earth, the patterns were not as predictably regular, as in the volcanic chain of islands making up much of Java, and certain regions in Africa.
    The participating oil companies had rich information from the satellite, raw as the data was. It was already known that oil deposits did occur along fault lines, as on the Pacific Coast of California, but of the oil found in Africa, aside from the Southern Sudan and the equatorial belt in the west, there seemed few other likely sites. East Africa had largely turned up barren, at least before GeoSat, and this led to a focus on that area once again by oil engineers privy to the satellite data. It was evident that fault lines, especially along the Great Rift Valley, that had been unexplored previously, existed in abundance on that side of the continent, and so it was a prime area to examine more closely.
    The data was being read from the satellite signals by the big computer at the Buell Tool Corporation in Culver City, across Los Angeles from the JPL in Pasadena. Buell had the fastest computer at that time, an early Cray. Even then, there were problems because of its size, and as it ran continuously, there were difficulties with cooling.
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    How Diana, in Chicago, longed for a warmer climate in which to work, since a cold autumn, nothing like the usual Midwestern Indian summer, promised a particularly frigid winter. She may have been descended from Vikings, but as she shivered much of the time, she fancied that ice and snow must have been the reason why her Norman forebears on her father’s side, and the Swedes on her mother’s, had left Scandinavia.
    An opportunity to finish her