in' o' curious."

"So give it here and I'll read it for you. Quit shakin' it or you'll
tear it all up," Freddy snorted.

"Read it to me, huh, Freddy," Willy said, handing over the paper. "I
don't know no one else that reads so good."

Freddy studied the headline and the first paragraph silently, then
whistled lightly and lowered the paper.

"Y'know, Willy," he said, "the last thing I read before I dropped off a
while ago was about these signals. But the funny thing is, I'd just
assumed they were from Cygnus."

"What's a Cygnus, Freddy?" Willy asked, still pop-eyed. "A smoke? A
dame? Or you mean like from Hunger?"

"Cygnus, my boy," Freddy explained patronizingly, "is a constellation
within which there are two colliding galaxies. These colliding galaxies
produce the most powerful electromagnetic radiations in the universe--an
undecillion watts!"

"What's an undecillion?"

"An undecillion is ten raised to the 36th power," Freddy sighed, fearing
that he wasn't getting through to Willy.

"No foolin'? What's a watt ... aw, you're pullin' my leg again, Freddy,
talkin' riddles. Where'd ya ever learn to talk that way anyhow!"

"Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Oxford, Georgia Tech, Oklahoma. Picked up a
little here, a little there," Freddy said, reflecting on his
indiscriminate past.

"Aw, cut it out, Freddy! C'mon, read it to me. Betcha can't! Where'd ya
say it was from? Cygnus?"

"Not Cygnus. Ganymede." Freddy cleared his throat and rattled the
newspaper authoritatively. "Washington: White House sources declared
today that intelligent beings on a Jupiter moon have contacted the
United States government. While the contents of the message have been
made secret, the White House emphasized the message was friendly."

Freddy continued, "The signals, which were intercepted yesterday, were
decoded this morning by a team of government scientists and
cryptographers who had been at the task all night. While officials were
noncommittal about the nature of the message contained in the signals,
they declared, 'We are authorized to state that the received message was
friendly and appears to represent a sincere attempt by another race of
intelligent beings to contact the people of Earth. A reply message is
being formulated.' Officials further explained that the possibility of
the signal's being a hoax has been thoroughly investigated and that
there is no doubt whatsoever that the message is a genuine interspatial
communication fro