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 #146;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
Sam Mullen, standing by an instrumentation console to one side of the room, briefly consulted one of his readout screens. 'Current trip #146;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 #146;ll try an initial run with current limiters in circuit, but whatever happens our stuff #146;s protected. Last chance to change your bet; the book #146;s closing.'
'I still say it makes music.' Hunt grinned. 'It #146;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 #151;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 #146;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 #151;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 #146;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 #146;s the supply frequency,' Hunt murmured. 'Probably just a resonance somewhere. Shouldn #146;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
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 #146;s about it,' Towers said. 'We #146;re not gonna get anyplace this way. Looks like we #146;ll have to open it up further.'
'Ten bucks,' Carizan declared. 'See, Vic #151;no tunes.'
'Nothing else, either,' Hunt retorted. 'The bet #146;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 #146;t understand where all that power was going,' he said, frowning. 'There wasn #146;t nearly enough heat to account for it, and no signs of anything else. It #146;s crazy.'
'There must be a black hole in there,' Carizan offered. 'That #146;s what the thing is #151;a garbage can. It #146;s the ultimate garbage can.'
'I #146;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 #151;straight out of Walt Disney,' Hunt told the others across the table in one corner of the communal canteen at Pit-head. 'I #146;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 #146;you think they are #151;Minervans or something else?'
'They #146;re not terrestrial, that #146;s for sure,' Hunt replied. 'But maybe they #146;re not anything. . . anything real that is. Chris Danchekker #146;s convinced they can #146;t be real.'
'How d #146;you mean,
'Well, they don #146;t
'Not selected for survival, you mean?' Carizan suggested. Hunt nodded rapidly.
'Yes, that #146;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 #146;re pretty sure the room was a Ganymean children #146;s nursery or something similar. That probably explains it. They weren #146;t supposed to be real, just Ganymean cartoon characters.' Hunt paused for a second, then laughed to himself. 'Danchekker wondered if they #146;d named any of them Neptune.' The other two looked at him quizzically. 'He reasoned that they couldn #146;t have had a Pluto because there wasn #146;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 #146;t have thought Danchekker could crack a joke like that.'
