Hunt allowed some time for the others to study them. "These are the results of a series of quantitative analytical tests that were performed recently in the J5 labs. The tests involved the routine determination of the chemical constituents of cells from selected organs in the animals you've just been talking about--the ones from the ship." He paused for a second, then continued matter-of-factly. "These numbers show that certain combinations of elements turned up over and over again, always in the same fixed ratios. The ratios strongly suggest the decay products of familiar radioactive processes. It's exactly as if radioisotopes were selected in the manufacture of the enzymes."
After a few seconds, one or two puzzled frowns formed in response to his words. Danchekker was the first to reply. "Are you telling us that the enzyme incorporated radioisotopes into its structure. . . selectively?" he asked.
"Exactly."
"That's ridiculous," the professor declared firmly. His tone left no room for dissent. Hunt shrugged.
"It appears to be fact. Look at the numbers."
"But there is no way in which such a process could come about," Danchekker insisted.
"I know, but it did."
"Purely chemical processes cannot distinguish a radioisotope from a normal isotope," Danchekker pointed out impatiently. "Enzymes are manufactured by chemical processes. Such processes are incapable of selecting radioisotopes to use for the manufacture of enzymes." Hunt had half expected that Danchekker's immediate reaction would be one of uncompromising and total rejection of the suggestion he had just made. After working closely with Danchekker for over two years, Hunt had grown used to the professor's tendency to sandbag himself instinctively behind orthodox pronouncements the moment anything alien to his beliefs reared its head. Once he'd been given time to reflect, Hunt knew, Danchekker could be as innovative as any of the younger generation of scientists seated around the room. For the moment, then, Hunt remained silent, whistling tunelessly and nonchalantly to himself as he drummed his fingers absently on the table.
Danchekker waited, growing visibly more irritable as the seconds dragged by. "Chemical processes cannot distinguish a radioisotope," he finally repeated. "Therefore no enzyme could be produced in the way you say it was. And even if it could, there would be no purpose to be served. Chemically the enzyme will behave the same whether it has radioisotopes in it or not. What you're saying is preposterous!"
Hunt sighed and pointed a weary finger toward the screen.
"I'm not saying it, Chris," he reminded the professor. "The numbers are. There are the facts--check'em." Hunt leaned forward and cocked his head to one side, at the same time contorting his features into a frown as if he had just been struck with a sudden thought. "What were you saying a minute ago about people wanting to fit the evidence to suit the answers they'd already made their minds up about?" he asked.
Chapter Two
At the age of eleven, Victor Hunt had moved from the bedlam of his family home in the East End of London and gone to live with an uncle and aunt in Worcester. His uncle--the odd man out in the Hunt family--was a design engineer at the nearby laboratories of a leading computer manufacturer and it was his patient guidance that first opened the boy's eyes to the excitement and mystery of the world of electronics.
Some time later young Victor put his newfound fascination with the laws of formal logic and the techniques of logic-circuit design to its first practical test. He designed and built a hard-wired special-purpose processor which, when given any date after the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1582, would output a number from 1 to 7 denoting the day of the week on which it had fallen. When, breathless with expectation, he switched it on for the first time, the system remained dead. It turned out that he had connected an electrolytic capacitor the wrong way around and shorted out the power supply.
This exercise taught him two things: Most problems have simple solutions once somebody looks at things the right way, and the exhilaration of winning in the end makes all the effort worthwhile. It also served to reinforce his intuitive understanding that the only sure way to prove or disprove what looked like a good idea was to find some way to test it. As his subsequent career led him from electronics to mathematical physics and thence to nucleonics, these fundamentals became the foundations of his permanent mental makeup. In nearly thirty years he had never lost his addiction to the final minutes of mounting suspense that came when the crucial experiment had been prepared and the moment of truth was approaching.
He experienced that same feeling now, as he watched Vincent Carizan make a few last-minute adjustments to the power-amplifier settings. The attraction in the main electronics lab at Pithead Base that morning was an item of equipment recovered from the Ganymean ship. It was roughly cylindrical, about the size of an oil drum, and appeared to be rather simple in function in that it possessed few input and output connections; apparently it was a self-contained device of some sort, rather than a component in some larger and more complex system.
However, its function was far from obvious. The engineers at Pithead had concluded that the connections were intended as power inlet points. From an analysis of the insulating materials used, the voltage clamping and protection circuits, the smoothing circuits, and the filtering arrangements, they had deduced the kind of electrical supply it was designed to work from. This had enabled them to set up a suitable arrangement of transformers and frequency converters. Today was the day they intended to switch it on to see what happened.
Besides Hunt and Carizan, two other engineers were present in the laboratory to supervise the measuring instruments that had been assembled for the experiment. Frank Towers observed Canzan's nod of satisfaction as he stepped back from the amplifier panel and asked:
"All set for overload check?"
"Yep," Carizan answered. "Give it a zap." Towers threw a switch on another panel. A sharp clunk sounded instantly as a circuit breaker dropped out somewhere in the equipment cabinet behind the panel.
Sam Mullen, standing by an instrumentation console to one side of the room, briefly consulted one of his readout screens. "Current trip's functioning okay," he announced.
"Unshort it and throw in some volts," Carizan said to Towers, who changed a couple of control settings, threw the switch again and looked over at Mullen.
"Limiting at fifty," Mullen said. "Check?"
"Check," Towers returned.
Carizan looked at Hunt. "All set to go, Vic. We'll try an initial run with current limiters in circuit, but whatever happens our stuff's protected. Last chance to change your bet; the book's closing."
"I still say it makes music." Hunt grinned. "It's an electric barrel organ. Give it some juice."
"Computers?" Carizan cocked an eye at Mullen.
"Running. All data channels checking normal."
"Okay then." Carizan rubbed the palms of his hands together. "Now for the star turn. Live this time, Frank--phase one of the schedule."
A tense silence descended as Towers reset his controls and threw the main switch again. The readings on the numeric displays built into his panel changed immediately.
"Live," he confirmed. "It's taking power. Current is up to the maximum set on the limiters. Looks like it wants more." All eyes turned toward Mullen, who was scanning the computer output screens intently. He shook his head without looking around.
"Nix. Makes a dodo look a real ball of fire."
The accelerometers, fixed to the outside of the Ganymean device standing bolted in its steel restraining frame on rubber vibration absorbers, were not sensing any internal mechanical motion. The sensitive microphones attached to its casing were picking up nothing in the audible or ultrasonic ranges. The heat sensors, radiation detectors, electromagnetic probes, gaussmeters, scintillation counters, and variable antennas--all had nothing to report. Towers varied the supply frequency over a trial range but it soon became apparent that nothing was going to change. Hunt walked over to stand beside Mullen and inspect the computer outputs, but said nothing.
<
br /> "Looks like we need to wind the wick up a little," Carizan commented. "Phase two, Frank." Towers stepped up the input voltage. A row of numbers appeared on one of Mullen's screens.
"Something on channel seven," he informed them. "Acoustic." He keyed a short sequence of commands into the console keyboard and peered at the wave form that appeared on an auxiliary display. "Periodic wave with severe even-harmonic distortion, low amplitude . . . fundamental frequency is about seventy-two hertz."
"That's the supply frequency," Hunt murmured. "Probably just a resonance somewhere. Shouldn't think it means much. Anything else?"
"Nope."
"Wind it up again, Frank," Carizan said.
As the test progressed they became more cautious and increased the number of variations tried at each step. Eventually the characteristics of the input supply told them that the device was saturating and seemed to be running at its design levels. By this time it was taking a considerable amount of power but apart from reporting continued mild acoustic resonances and a slight heating of some parts of the casing, the measuring instruments remained obstinately quiet. As the first hour passed, Hunt and the three UNSA engineers resigned themselves to a longer and much more detailed examination of the object, one that would no doubt involve dismantling it. But, like Napoleon, they took the view that lucky people tend to be people who give luck a chance to happen; it had been worth a try.
The disturbance generated by the Ganymean device was, however, not of a nature that any of their instruments had been designed to detect. A series of spherical wave fronts of intense but highly localized space-time distortion expanded outward from Pithead Base at the speed of light, propagating across the Solar System.
Seven hundred miles to the south, seismic monitors at Ganymede Main Base went wild and the data validation programs running in the logging computer aborted to signal a system malfunction.
Two thousand miles above the surface, sensors aboard the Jupiter Five command ship pinpointed Pithead Base as the origin of abnormal readings and flashed an alert to the duty supervisor.
Over half an hour had passed since full power had been applied to the device in the laboratory at Pithead. Hunt stubbed out a cigarette as Towers finally shut down the supply and sat back in his seat with a sigh.
"That's about it," Towers said. "We're not gonna get anyplace this way. Looks like we'll have to open it up further."
"Ten bucks," Carizan declared. "See, Vic--no tunes."
"Nothing else, either," Hunt retorted. "The bet's void."
At the instrumentation console Mullen completed the storage routine for the file of meager data that had been collected, shut down the computers and joined the others.
"I don't understand where all that power was going," he said, frowning. "There wasn't nearly enough heat to account for it, and no signs of anything else. It's crazy."
"There must be a black hole in there," Carizan offered. "That's what the thing is--a garbage can. It's the ultimate garbage can."
"I'll take ten on that," Hunt informed him readily.
Three hundred and fifty million miles from Ganymede, in the Asteroid Belt, a UNSA robot probe detected a rapid succession of transient gravitational anomalies, causing its master computer to suspend all system programs and initiate a full run of diagnostic and fault-test routines.
"No kidding--straight out of Walt Disney," Hunt told the others across the table in one corner of the communal canteen at Pit-head. "I've never seen anything like the animal murals decorating the walls of that room in the Ganymean spacecraft."
"Sounds crazy," Sam Mullen declared from opposite Hunt.
"What d'you think they are--Minervans or something else?"
"They're not terrestrial, that's for sure," Hunt replied. "But maybe they're not anything. . . anything real that is. Chris Danchekker's convinced they can't be real."
"How d'you mean, real? " Carizan asked.
"Well, they don't look real," Hunt answered. He frowned and waved his hands in small circles in the air. "They're all kinds of bright colors . . . and clumsy . . . ungainly. You can't imagine them evolving from any real-life evolutionary system--"
"Not selected for survival, you mean?" Carizan suggested. Hunt nodded rapidly.
"Yes, that's it. No adaptation for survival . . . no camouflage or ability to escape or anything like that."
"Mmm. . ." Carizan looked intrigued, but nonplussed. "Any ideas?"
"Well, actually yes," Hunt said. "We're pretty sure the room was a Ganymean children's nursery or something similar. That probably explains it. They weren't supposed to be real, just Ganymean cartoon characters." Hunt paused for a second, then laughed to himself. "Danchekker wondered if they'd named any of them Neptune." The other two looked at him quizzically. "He reasoned that they couldn't have had a Pluto because there wasn't a Pluto then," Hunt explained. "So maybe they had a Neptune instead."
"Neptune!" Carizan guffawed and brought his hand down sharply on the table. "I like it. . . . Wouldn't have thought Danchekker could crack a joke like that."
"You'd be surprised," Hunt told him. "He can be quite a character once you get to know him. He's just a bit stuffy at first, that's all. . . . But you should see them. I'll bring some prints over. One was bright blue with pink stripes down the sides--body like an overgrown pig. And it had a trunk!"
Mullen grimaced and covered his eyes.
"Man . . . The thought's enough to put me off drink for keeps." He turned his head and looked toward the serving counter. "Where the hell's Frank?" As if in answer to the question, Towers appeared behind him carrying a tray with four cups of coffee. He set the tray down, squeezed into a seat and proceeded to pass the drinks round.
"Two white with, a white without, and a black with. Okay?" He settled himself back and accepted a cigarette from Hunt. "Cheers. The man over by the counter there says you're leaving for a spell. That right?"
Hunt nodded. "Only five days. I'm due for a bit of leave on J5. Flying up from Main the day after tomorrow."
"On your own?" Mullen asked.
"No--there'll be five or six of us. Danchekker's coming too. Can't say I'll be sorry for a break, either."
"I hope the weather holds out," Towers said with playful sarcasm. "It'd be too bad if you missed the holiday season. This place makes me wonder what the big attraction ever was at Miami Beach."
"The ice comes with scotch there," Carizan suggested.
A shadow fell across the table. They looked up to greet a burly figure sporting a heavy black beard and clad in a tartan shirt and blue jeans. It was Pete Cummings, a structures engineer who had come to Ganymede with the team that had included Hunt and Danchekker. He reversed a chair and perched himself astride it, directing his gaze at Carizan.
"How'd it go?" he inquired. Carizan pulled a face and shook his head.
"No dice. Bit of heat, bit of humming. . . otherwise nothing to shout about. Couldn't get anything out of it."
"Too bad." Cummings made an appropriate display of sympathy. "It couldn't have been you guys that caused all the commotion then."
"What commotion?"
"Didn't you hear?" He looked surprised. "There was a message beamed down from J5 a little while back. Apparently they picked up some funny waves coming up from the surface. . . seems that the center was somewhere around here. The commander's been calling all around the base trying to find out who's up to what, and what caused it. They're all flappin' around in the tower up there like there's a fox in the henhouse."
"I bet that's the call that came in just when we were leaving the lab," Mullen said. "Told you it could have been important."
"Hell, there are times when a man needs coffee," Carizan answered. "Anyhow, it wasn't us." He turned to face Cummings. "Sorry, Pete. Ask again some other time. We've just been drawing blanks today."
"Well, the whole thing's mighty queer," Cummings declared, rubbing his beard. "They've checked out just about everything else."
Hunt was frowning to himself and draw
ing on his cigarette pensively. He blew out a cloud of smoke and looked up at Cummings.
"Any idea what time this was, Pete?" he asked. Cummings screwed up his face.
"Lemme see--aw, under an hour." He turned and called across to a group of three men who were sitting at another table: "Hey, Jed. What time did J5 pick up the spooky waves? Any idea?"
"Ten forty-seven local," Jed called back.
"Ten forty-seven local," Cummings repeated to the table.
An ominous silence descended abruptly on the group seated around Hunt.
"How about that, fellas?" Towers asked at last. The matter-of-fact tone did not conceal his amazement.
"It could be a coincidence," Mullen murmured, not sounding convinced.
Hunt cast his eyes around the circle of faces and read the same thoughts on every one. They had all reached the same conclusion; after a few seconds, he voiced it for them.
"I don't believe in coincidences," he said.
Five hundred million miles away, in the radio and optical observatory complex on Lunar Farside, Professor Otto Schneider made his way to one of the computer graphics rooms in answer to a call from his assistant. She pointed out the unprecedented readings that had been reported by an instrument designed to measure cosmic gravitational radiation, especially that believed to emanate from the galactic center. These signals were quite positively identified, but had not come from anywhere near that direction. They originated from somewhere near Jupiter.
Another hour passed on Ganymede. Hunt and the engineers returned to the lab to reappraise the experiment in light of what Cummings had told them. They called the base commander, reported the situation, and agreed to prepare a more intensive test for the Ganymean device. Then, while Towers and Mullen reexamined the data collected earlier, Hunt and Carizan toured the base to beg, borrow or steal some seismic monitoring equipment to add to their instruments. Suitable detectors were finally located in one of the warehouses, where they were kept as spares for a seismic outstation about three miles from the base, and the team began planning the afternoon's activities. By this time their excitement was mounting rapidly, but even more their curiosity; if, after all, the machine was an emitter of gravity pulses, what purpose did it serve?
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