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Hunt sighed and pointed a weary finger toward the screen.
"I'm not saying it, Chris," he reminded the professor. "The numbers are. There are the facts--check'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. "What were you saying a minute ago about people wanting to fit the evidence to suit the answers they'd already made their minds up about?" he asked.
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--the odd man out in the Hunt family--was a design engineer at the nearby laboratories of a leading computer manufacturer and it was his patient guidance that first opened the boy'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 co
This exercise taught him two things: Most problems have simple solutions once somebody looks at things the right way, and the exhilaration of wi
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 co
However, its function was far from obvious. The engineers at Pithead had concluded that the co
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'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 clunk sounded instantly as a circuit breaker dropped out somewhere in the equipment cabinet behind the panel.
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 a
"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 gri
"Computers?" Carizan cocked an eye at Mullen.
"Ru
"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 sca
"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 ante
"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 cha
"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 ru
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 ru