Dinoli made an almost imperceptible gesture and a motion-picture screen unreeled itself in the back of the great room. “Executive Brewster has brought us a film of his activities on Ganymede. I’d like all of us to see this film before we go any further in this meeting.”

Two of Dinoli’s young undersecretaries appeared, pushing a sliding table on which was mounted a movie projector. One girl deftly set up the projector while another pressed the control that would opaque the picture window. The room grew dim; Dinoli signaled and the remaining lights were extinguished: Kennedy turned in his seat to see the screen.

The projector hummed.

said the opening title, against a pulsing background of red, white, and blue. Credit-lines followed. And then, quite suddenly, Kennedy found himself staring at an alien landscape, oddly quiet, oddly disturbing.

Bleak whiteness confronted him: the whiteness of an almost endless snowfield, beneath a pale blue sky. Jagged mountain ranges, rock-bare and snow-topped, loomed in the distance. Clouds of gray-green gas swirled past the eye of the camera.

“This is the surface of Ganymede,” came the attractively resonant voice of Brewster. “As you can see, frozen ammonia-methane snow covers the ground in most areas. Ganymede, of course, is virtually planetary in size—its diameter is thirty-two hundred miles, which is slightly more than that of Mercury. We found the gravitation to be fairly close to that of Earth, incidentally. Ganymede’s a heavy-core planet, probably torn out of Jupiter’s heart at the time the system was formed.”

As he spoke, the camera’s eye moved on, and Kennedy’s with it: on to examine the fine striations in an outcropping of rock, on to peer down at a tiny, determined lichen clinging to the side of an upthrust tongue of basalt.