Professor Kurious Whitedimple was an unassuming teacher of archaeology at Space-Home University . . . Junior Badille was a 20-year-old wrinkled gnome with an improbably high IQ, living with his parents in an isolated research station orbiting Saturn at 3.5 million kilometers . . . The odds of these two meeting, sharing high adventure, and forming a lasting friendship were astronomical--on the same order, for instance, as the accidental discovery of an alien artifact on the surface of lapetus . . .