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 15 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 drawing 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 15 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?
One thousand five hundred million miles from Ganymede, not far from the mean orbit of Uranus, a communications subprocessor interrupted the operation of its supervisory computer. The computer activated a code-conversion routine and passed a toppriority message on to the master-system monitor.
A transmission had been received from a standard Model 17 Mark 3B Distress Beacon.