Caldwell stared back over his desk impassively. "The Jupiter Five Mission will depart from Luna in six weeks time," he stated. "Danchekker has gone about as far as he can go with Charlie. What details are left to be found out can be taken care of by his staff at Westwood. He's got better things he'd like to be doing on Ganymede. There's a whole collection of alien skeletons there, plus a shipload of zoology from way back that nobody's ever seen the like of before. It's got him excited. He wants to get his hands on them. Jupiter Five is going right there, so he's getting together a biological team to go with it."

Hunt already knew all this. Nevertheless, he went through the motions of digesting the information and checking through it for any point he might have missed. After an appropriate pause he replied:

"That's fine—I can see his angle. But what does it have to do with me?"

Caldwell frowned and drummed his fingers, as if he had been expecting this question to come, while hoping it wouldn't.

"Consider this an extension of your assignment," he said at last. "From all the arguing that's going on around this place, nobody seems to be able to agree just how the Ganymeans fit into the Charlie business. Maybe they're a big part of the answer, maybe they're not. Nobody knows for sure."

"True." Hunt nodded.

Caldwell took this as all the confirmation he needed. "Okay," he said with a gesture of finality. "You've done a good job so far on the Charlie side of the picture; maybe it's time to balance things up a bit and give you a crack at the other side, too. Well"—he shrugged—"the information's not here—it's on Ganymede. In six weeks time, J Five shoves off for Ganymede. It makes sense to me that you go with it."

Hunt's brow remained creased in an expression that indicated he still didn't quite see everything. He posed the obvious question. "What about the job here?"

"What about it? Basically you correlate information that comes from different places. The information will still keep coming from the places whether you're in Houston or on board Jupiter Five. Your assistant is capable of stepping in and keeping the routine background research and cross-checking running smoothly in Group L. There's no reason why you can't continue to be kept updated on what's going on if you're out there. Anyhow, a change of scene never did anybody any harm. You've been on this job a year and a half now."

"But we're talking about a break of years, maybe."