A Guest of Ganymede

His employer had paid enormously to have the small ship camouflaged as a chunk of asteroid-belt rock, and Gil Murdoch had successfully maneuvered it past the quarantine. Now it lay snugly melted into the ice; and if above them enough water had boiled into space to leave a scar, that was nothing unique on Ganymede's battered surface. In any case, the Terran patrols weren't likely to come in close.

Murdoch applied heat forward and moved the ship gingerly ahead.

"What are you doing now?" Waverill demanded.

Murdoch glanced at the blind man. "Trying to find a clear spot, sir, so I can see into the place."

"What for? Why don't you just contact them?"

"Just being careful, sir. After all, we don't know much about them." Murdoch kept the annoyance out of his voice. He had his own reasons for wanting a preliminary look at the place, though the aliens had undoubtedly picked them up thousands of miles out and knew exactly where they were now.

Something solid, possibly a rock imbedded in the ice, bumped along the hull. Murdoch stopped the ship, then moved on more slowly.

The viewscreens brightened. He stopped the drive, then turned off the heat forward. Water, milky with vapor bubbles, swirled around them, gradually clearing. In a few minutes it froze solid again and he could see.

They were not more than ten feet from the clear area carved out of the ice. Murdoch had the viewpoint of a fish in murky water, looking into an immersed glass jar. The place was apparently a perfect cylinder, walled by a force-field or whatever held back the ice. He could see the dark translucency of the opposite wall, about fifty yards away and extending down eighty or ninety feet from the surface. He'd only lowered the ship a third that far, so that from here he looked down upon the plain one-story building and the neat lawns and hedges around it.

The building and greenery occupied only one-half of the area, the half near Murdoch being paved entirely with gravel and unplanted. That, he presumed, was where they'd land. The building was fitted to the shape of its half-circle, and occupied most of it, like a half cake set in a round box with a little space around it. A gravel walkway, bordered by grass, ran along the straight front of the building and around the back curve of it. The hedges surrounded the half-circle at the outside.

There was an inconspicuous closed door in the middle of the building. There were no windows in the flat gray wall.

The plants looked Terran, and apparently were rooted in soil, though there must be miles of ice beneath. Artificial sunlight poured on the whole area from the top. Murdoch had heard, and now was sure, that something held an atmosphere in the place.

"What are we waiting for?" Waverill wanted to know.

Murdoch reached for a switch and said, simply, "Hello."