been brought into the UN Space Arm from England to head a small group of UNSA scientists; the group #146;s task was to correlate the findings of the specialists working on the project both on and around Ganymede and back on Earth. The specialists painted the pieces of the puzzle; Hunt #146;s group fitted them together. This arrangement was devised by Hunt #146;s immediate boss, Gregg Caldwell, executive director of the Navigation and Communications Division of UNSA, headquartered in Houston. The scheme had already worked well in enabling them to unravel successfully the existence and fate of Minerva, and first signs were that it promised to work well again.
He listened while the debate between the biologists went full circle to end up focusing on the unfamiliar enzyme that had started the whole thing off.
'No, I #146;m afraid not,' Danchekker said in reply to a question from Rousson. 'We have no idea at present what its purpose was. Certain functions in its reaction equations suggest that it could have contributed to the modification or breaking down of some kind of protein molecule, but precisely what molecule or for what purpose we don #146;t know.' Danchekker gazed around the room to invite further comment but nobody appeared to have anything to say. The room became quiet. A mild hum from a nearby generator became noticeable for the first time. At length Hunt stubbed his cigarette and sat back to rest his elbows on the arms of his chair. 'Sounds as if there #146;s a problem there, all right,' he commented. 'Enzymes aren #146;t my line. I #146;m going to have to leave this one completely to you people.'
'
'Listening and learning.' Hunt grinned. 'Didn #146;t have a lot to contribute.'
'That sounds like a philosophical approach to life,' Fichter said, shuffling the papers in front of him. 'Do you have many philosophies of life. . . maybe a little red book full of them like that Chinese gentleman back in nineteen whatever it was?'
' #146;Fraid not. Doesn #146;t do to have too many philosophies about anything. You always end up contradicting yourself. Blows your credibility.'
Fichter smiled. 'You #146;ve nothing to say to throw any light on our problem with this wretched enzyme then,' he said.
Hunt did not reply immediately but pursed his lips and inclined his head to one side in the manner of somebody with doubts about the advisability of revealing something that he knew. 'Well,' he finally said, 'you #146;ve got enough to worry about with that enzyme as things are.' The tone was mildly playful, but irresistibly provocative. All heads in the room swung around abruptly to face in his direction.
'Vic, you #146;re holding out on us,' Sandy declared. 'Give.'
Danchekker fixed Hunt with a silent, challenging stare. Hunt nodded and reached down with one hand to operate the keyboard recessed into the edge of the table opposite his chair. Above the far side of Ganymede, computers on board
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
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 #146;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 #146;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 #146;s tendency to sandbag himself instinctively behind orthodox pronouncements the moment anything alien to his beliefs reared its head. Once he #146;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 #146;re saying is preposterous!'
Hunt sighed and pointed a weary finger toward the screen.
'I #146;m not saying it, Chris,' he reminded the professor. 'The numbers are. There are the facts #151;check #145;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. '
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 #151;the odd man out in the Hunt family #151;was a design engineer at the nearby laboratories of a leading computer manufacturer and it was his patient guidance that first opened the boy #146;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
