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.
“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.