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.

"That's about it," Towers said. "We're not gonna get anyplace this way. Looks like we'll have to open it up further."

"Ten bucks," Carizan declared. "See, Vic--no tunes."

"Nothing else, either," Hunt retorted. "The bet'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't understand where all that power was going," he said, frowning. "There wasn't nearly enough heat to account for it, and no signs of anything else. It's crazy."

"There must be a black hole in there," Carizan offered. "That's what the thing is--a garbage can. It's the ultimate garbage can."

"I'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--straight out of Walt Disney," Hunt told the others across the table in one corner of the communal canteen at Pit-head. "I'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'you think they are--Minervans or something else?"

"They're not terrestrial, that's for sure," Hunt replied. "But maybe they're not anything. . . anything real that is. Chris Danchekker's convinced they can't be real."

"How d'you mean, real? " Carizan asked.

"Well, they don't look real," Hunt answered. He frowned and waved his hands in small circles in the air. "They're all kinds of bright colors . . . and clumsy . . . ungainly. You can't imagine them evolving from any real-life evolutionary system--"

"Not selected for survival, you mean?" Carizan suggested. Hunt nodded rapidly.

"Yes, that'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're pretty sure the room was a Ganymean children's nursery or something similar. That probably explains it. They weren't supposed to be real, just Ganymean cartoon characters." Hunt paused for a second, then laughed to himself. "Danchekker wondered if they'd named any of them Neptune." The other two looked at him quizzically. "He reasoned that they couldn't have had a Pluto because there wasn'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't have thought Danchekker could crack a joke like that."

"You'd be surprised," Hunt told him. "He can be quite a character once you get to know him. He's just a bit stuffy at first, that's all. . . . But you should see them. I'll bring some prints over. One was bright blue with pink stripes down the sides--body like an overgrown pig. And it had a trunk!"

Mullen grimaced and covered his eyes.

"Man . . . The thought's enough to put me off drink for keeps." He turned his head and looked toward the serving counter. "Where the hell's Frank?" As if in answer to the question, Towers appeared behind him carrying a tray with four cups of coffee. He set the tray down, squeezed into a seat and proceeded to pass the drinks round.

"Two white with, a white without, and a black with. Okay?" He settled himself back and accepted a cigarette from Hunt. "Cheers. The man over by the counter there says you're leaving for a spell. That right?"

Hunt nodded. "Only five days. I'm due for a bit of leave on J5. Flying up from Main the day after tomorrow."

"On your own?" Mullen asked.

"No--there'll be five or six of us. Danchekker's coming too. Can't say I'll be sorry for a break, either."

"I hope the weather holds out," Towers said with playful sarcasm. "It'd be too bad if you missed the holiday season. This place makes me wonder what the big attraction ever was at Miami Beach."

"The ice comes with scotch there," Carizan suggested.

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 J5 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 J5 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.