Danchekker snorted but seemed hard-pressed for a reply. The terminal on a side table by the desk saved him by emitting a calltone. “Excuse me,” he muttered, leaning past Hunt to accept. “Yes?” Danchekker inquired.
It was Ginny, calling from Navcomms HO. “Hello, Professor Danchekker. I believe Dr. Hunt is with you. I have an urgent mes
sage for him. Gregg Caidwell said to find him and let him know right away.”
Danchekker moved back a pace, and Hunt rolled his chair forward in front of the screen. “Hi, Ginny,” he acknowledged. “What’s new?”
“A message has come in for you from Jupiter Five.” She looked down to read something below the edge of the screen. “It’s from the Mission Director-Joseph B. Shannon. It reads, ‘The lab tests worked out just as you hoped. Complete ifie of results being assembled for transmission now. Good luck.” Ginny looked up again. “Is that what you wanted to know?”
Hunt’s face was radiating jubilation. “It sure is, Ginny!” he said. “Thanks. . . a lot.” Ginny nodded and tossed him a quick smile; the screen blanked out.
Hunt swiveled his chair around to find two awed faces confronting him. “I guess we can stop arguing about it,” he told them. “It looks as if we’ll know for sure before very much longer.”
chapter six
The main receiver dish at Giordano Bruno was like a gigantic Cyclopean eye-a four-hundred-foot-diameter paraboloid of steel latticework towering into the starry blackness above the lifeless desolation of lunar Farside. It was supported by twin lattice towers moving in diametric opposition around the circular track that formed the most salient surface feature of the observatory and base. As it stood motionless, listening to whispers from distant galaxies, the lines of its lengthening shadow lay draped as a distorted mesh across the domes and lesser constructions huddled around it, spilling over on one side to become indistinct and lost among the boulders and craters scattered beyond.
Karen Heller stood gazing up at it through the transparent wall of an observation tower protruding from the roof of the two-story Main Block. She had gone there to be alone and recompose herself after yet another acrimonious meeting of the eleven-person UN Farside delegation, which had gotten nowhere. Their latest scare was that the signals might not be coming from Ganymeans at all, which was her own fault for ill-advisedly introducing the thought that Hunt had voiced when she was in Houston a week earlier. She wasn’t sure even now why she had brought that possibility up at all, since with hindsight it provided an opportunity for procrastination that they were bound to latch onto. As she had commented to a surprised Norman Pacey afterward, it had been a badly calculated attempt at a shock tactic to spur any positive reaction, and had misfired. Perhaps in her frustration she hadn’t been thinking too clearly at the time. Anyway it was done now, and the latest transmission sent out toward Gistar had discounted the possibility of any landing in the immediate future and instead talked reams of insignificant detail to do with rank and protocol. Ironically this in itself should have said clearly enough that the aliens, Ganymean or not, harbored no hostile intentions; if they did, they would surely have just arrived, if that was what they wanted to do, without waiting for a cordial invitation. It all made the UN
policy more enigmatic and reinforced her suspicions, and the State Department’s, that the Soviets were setting themselves up to go it alone and were manipulating the UN somehow. Nevertheless the U.S. would continue to follow the rules until Houston succeeded in establishing a channel via Jupiter-assuming Houston succeeded. If they did, and if none of the efforts to speed things up at Bruno had borne fruit by that time, the U.S. would feel justified in concluding that its hand had been forced.
As she gazed up at the lines of metal etched against the blackness by the rays of the setting sun, she marveled at the knowledge and ingenuity that had created an oasis of life in a sterile desert a quarter of a million miles from Earth, and built instruments such as this, which even as she watched might be silently probing the very edges of the universe. One of the scientific advisors from NSF had told her once that all of the energy collected by all the world’s radiotelescopes since the beginnings of that branch of astronomy almost a century earlier was equivalent to no more than that represented by the ash from a cigarette falling through a distance of several feet. And somehow the whole fantastic picture painted by modern cosmology-of collapsed stars, black holes, X-ray-emitting binaries, and a universe consisting of a “gas” of galaxy “molecules”-had all been reconstructed from the information contained in it.