Hunt wrinkled his nose and frowned. "Isn’t that the ESP-and-pyramid bunch?"

"Right. They’re all excited because they’ve got a superpsychic going there tonight. He predicted everything about Minerva and the Ganymeans years ago. It has to be true-Amazing Supernature magazine said so."

Hunt knew she was teasing but couldn’t suppress his irritation. "Oh for Christ’s sake. . . I thought there was supposed to be an educational system in this bloody country! Don’t they have any critical faculties at all?" He drained the last of his coffee and banged the mug down on the bar. "If he predicted it years ago, why didn’t anybody hear about it years ago? Why do we only hear about it after science has told him what he was supposed to predict? Ask him what the Shapieron will find when it gets to the Giants’ Star and make him write it down. I bet that never gets into Amazing Supernature magazine."

"That would be taking it too seriously," Lyn said lightly. "I only go there for the laughs. There’s no point in trying to explain Occam’s Razor to people who believe that UFOs are timeships from another century. Besides, apart from all that, they’re nice people."

Hunt wondered how this kind of thing could still go on after the Ganymeans, who flew starships, created life in laboratories, and built self-aware computers, had affirmed repeatedly that they saw no reason to postulate the existence of any powers existing in the universe beyond those revealed by science and rational thinking. But people still wasted their lives away with daydreams.

He was becoming too serious, he decided, and dismissed the matter with a wave of his hand and a grin. "Come on. We’d better do something about sending you on your way."

Lyn headed for the living room to collect her shoes, bag, and coat, then met him again at the front door of the apartment. They kissed and squeezed each other. "I’ll see you later, then," she whispered.

"See you later. Watch out for those crazies."

He waited until she had disappeared into the elevator, then closed the door and spent five minutes clearing the kitchen and restoring some semblance of decency to the rest of the place. Finally he put on a jacket, stuffed some items from the desk into his briefcase, and left in an elevator heading for the roof. Minutes later his airmobile was at two thousand feet and climbing to merge into an eastbound traffic corridor with the rainbow towers of Houston gleaming in the sunlight on the skyline ahead.

Ginny, Hunt’s slightly plump, middle-aged meticulous secretary, was already busy when he sauntered into the reception area of his office, high in the skyscraper of Navcomms Headquarters in the center of Houston. She had three sons, all in their late teens, and she hurled herself into her work with a dedication that Hunt sometimes thought might represent a gesture of atonement for having inflicted them on society. Women like Ginny always did a good job, he had found. Long-legged blondes were all very nice, but when it came to getting things done properly and on time, he’d settle for the older mommas any day.

"Good morning, Dr. Hunt," she greeted him. One thing he had never been able to persuade her to accept fully was that Englishmen didn’t expect, or really want, to be addressed formally all the time.

"Hi, Ginny. How are you today?"

"Oh, just fine, I guess."

"Any news about the dog?"

"Good news. The vet called last night and said its pelvis isn’t fractured after all. A few weeks of rest and it should be fine."

"That’s good. So what’s new this morning? Anything panicky?"

"Not really. Professor Speehan from MIT called a few minutes ago and would like you to call back before lunch. I’m just finishing going through the mail now. There are a couple of things I think you’ll be interested in. The draft paper from Livermore, I guess you’ve already seen."

They spent the next half-hour checking the mail and organizing the day’s schedule. By that time the offices that formed Hunt’s section of Navcomms were filling up, and he left to update himself on a couple of the projects in progress.

Duncan Watt, Hunt’s deputy, a theoretical physicist who had transferred from UNSA’s Materials and Structures Division a year and a half earlier, was collecting results on the Pluto problem from a number of research groups around the country. Comparisons of the current solar system with records from the Shapieron of how it had looked twenty-five million years before established beyond doubt that most of what had been Minerva had ended up as Pluto. Earth had been formed originally without a satellite, and Luna had orbited as the single moon of Minerva. When Minerva broke up, its moon fell inward, toward the Sun, and by a freak chance was captured by Earth, about which it had orbited stably ever since. The problem was that so far no mathematical model of the dynamics involved had been able to explain how Pluto could have acquired enough energy to be lifted against solar gravitation to the position it now occupied. Astronomers and specialists in celestial mechanics from all over the world had tried all manner of approaches to the problem but without success, which was not all that surprising since the Ganymeans themselves had been unable to produce a satisfactory solution.

"The only way you can get it to work is by postulating a three-body reaction," Duncan said, tossing up his hands in exasperation. "Maybe the war had nothing to do with it. Maybe what broke Minerva up was something else passing through the solar system."

Thirty minutes later and a few doors farther along the corridor, Hunt found Marie, Jeff, and two of the students on loan from Princeton, excitedly discussing the set of partial-differential tensor functions being displayed on a large mural graphics screen.

"It’s the latest from Mike Barrow’s team at Livermore," Marie told him.

"I’ve already seen it," Hunt said. "Haven’t had a chance to go through it yet, though. Something about cold fusion, isn’t it?"

"What it seems to be saying is that the Ganymeans didn’t have to generate high thermal energies to overcome proton-proton repulsion," Jeff chipped in.

"How’d they do it then?" Hunt asked.

"Sneakily. They started off with the particles being neutrons so there wasn’t any repulsion. Then, when the particles were inside the range of the strong force, they increased the energy gradient at the particle surfaces sufficiently to initiate pair production. The neutrons absorbed the positrons to become protons, and the electrons were drawn off. So there you’ve got it-two protons strongly coupled. Pow! Fusion."

Hunt was impressed, although he had seen too much of Ganymean physics by that time to be astounded. "And they could control events like that down at that level?" he asked.

"That’s what Mike’s people reckon."

Shortly afterward, an argument developed over one of the details, and Hunt left the group as they were in the process of placing a call to Livermore for clarification.

It seemed as if the information left by the Ganymeans was all starting to bear fruit at once, causing something new to break out every day. Caldwell’s idea of using Hunt’s section as an international clearinghouse for the research into Ganymean sciences was starting to produce results. When the first clues concerning Minerva and the Ganymeans were coming to light, Caldwell had set up Hunt’s original pilot group to do exactly this kind of thing. The organization had proved well suited to the task, and now it formed a ready-made group for tackling the latest studies.

Hunt’s last call was on Paul Shelling, whose people occupied a group of offices and a computer room on the floor below. One of the most challenging aspects of Ganymean technology was their "gravitics," which enabled them to deform spacetime artificially without requiring large concentrations of mass. The Shapieron’s drive system had utilized this capability by creating a "hole" ahead of the ship into which it "fell" continuously to propel itself through space; the "gravity" inside the vessel was also manufactured, not simulated. Shelling, a gravitational physicist on a sabbatical from Rockwell International, headed up a mathematical group which had been delving into Ganymean field equations and energy-metric transforms for six months. Hunt found him staring at a display of isochrons and distorted spacetime geodesics, and looking very thoughtful.