Chapter Nine

Hunt saw less and less of the Trimagniscope during the weeks that followed the progress meeting. Caldwell seemed to go out of his way to encourage the Englishman to visit the various UNSA labs and establishments nearby, to "see what's going on first-hand," or the offices in Navcomms HQ to "meet someone you might find interesting." Hunt was naturally curious about the Lunarian investigations, so these developments suited him admirably. Soon he was on familiar terms with most of the engineers and scientists involved, at least in the Houston vicinity, and he had a good idea of how their work was progressing and what difficulties they were encountering. He eventually acquired a broad overview of the activity on all fronts and found that, at least at the general level, the awareness of the whole picture that he was developing was shared by only a few privileged individuals within the organization.

Things were progressing in a number of directions. Calculations of structural efficiency, based on measurements of Charlie's skeleton and the bulk supported by it, had given a figure for the surface gravity of his home planet, which agreed within acceptable margins of error with figures deduced separately from tests performed on the crystals of his helmet visor and other components formed from a molten state. The gravity field at the surface of Charlie's home planet seemed to have been not much different from that of Earth; possibly it was slightly stronger. These results were accepted as being no more than rough approximations. Besides, nobody knew how typical Charlie's physical build had been of that of the Lunarians in general, so there was no firm indication of whether the planet in question had been Earth or somewhere else. The issue was still wide open.

On equipment tags, document headings, and appended to certain notes, the linguistics section had found examples of Lunarian words which matched exactly some of the labels on the calendar, just as Hunt had suggested they might. While this proved nothing, it did add further plausibility to the idea that these words indicated dates of some kind.

Then something else that seemed to connect with the calendar appeared from a totally unexpected direction. Site-preparation work in progress near Lunar Tycho Base Three turned up fragments of metal fabrications and structures. They looked like the ruins of some kind of installation. The more thorough probe that followed yielded no fewer than fourteen more bodies, or more accurately, bits of bodies from which at least fourteen individuals of both sexes could be identified. Clearly, none of the bodies was in anything approaching the condition of Charlie's. They had all been literally blown to pieces. The remains comprised little more than splinters of charred bone scattered among scorched tatters of space suits. Apart from suggesting that besides being physically the same as humans, the Lunarians had been every bit as accident-prone, these discoveries provided no new information—until the discovery of the wrist unit. About the size of a large cigarette pack, not including the wrist bracelet, the device carried on its upper face four windows that looked like miniature electronic displays. From their size and shape, the windows seemed to have been intended to display character data rather than pictures, and the device was thought to be a chronometer or a computing-calculating aid; maybe it was both—and other things besides.

After a perfunctory examination at Tycho Three the unit had been shipped to Earth along with some other items. It eventually found its way to the Navcomms laboratories near Houston, where the gadgets from Charlie's backpack were being studied. After some preliminary experimenting the casing was safely removed, but detailed inspection of the complex molecular circuits inside revealed nothing particularly meaningful. Having no better ideas, the Navcomms engineers resorted to applying low voltages to random points to see what happened. Sure enough, when particular sequences of binary patterns were injected into one row of contacts, an assortment of Lunarian symbols appeared across the windows. This left nobody any the wiser until Hunt, who happened to be visiting the lab, recognized one sequence of the alphabetic sets as the months that appeared on the calendar. Hence, at least one of the functions performed by the wrist unit seemed closely related to the table in the diary. Whether or not this had anything to do with recording the passage of time remained to be seen, but at least odd things looked as if they were beginning to tie up.

The linguistics section was making steady, if less spectacular, progress toward cracking the language. Many of the world's most prominent experts were getting involved, some choosing to move to Houston, while others worked via remote data links. As the first phase of their assault, they amassed volumes of statistics on word and character distributions and matchings, and produced reams of tables and charts that looked as meaningless to everybody else as the language itself. After that it was largely a matter of intuition and guessing games played on computer display screens. Every now and again somebody spotted a more meaningful pattern, which led to a better guess, which led to a still more meaningful pattern—and so on. They produced lists of words in categories believed to correspond to nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs, and later on added adjectival and adverbial phrases—fairly basic requirements for any advanced inflecting language. They began to develop a feel for the rules for deriving variants, such as plurals and verb tenses, from common roots, and for the conventions that governed the formation of word sequences. An appreciation of the rudiments of Lunarian grammar was emerging from all this, and the experts in Linguistics faced the future with optimism, suddenly confident that they were approaching the point where they would begin attempting to match the first English equivalents to selected samples.

The mathematics section, organized on lines similar to linguistics, was also finding things that were interesting. Part of the diary was made up of many pages of numeric and tabular material—suggesting, perhaps, a reference section of Useful Information. One of the pages was divided vertically, columns of numbers alternating with columns of words. A researcher noticed that one of the numbers, when converted to decimal, came out to 1836—the proton-electron mass ratio, a fundamental physical constant that would be the same anywhere in the Universe. It was suggested that the page might be a listing of equivalent Lunarian units of mass, similar to equivalence tables used for converting ounces to grams, grams to pounds . . . and so on. If so, they had stumbled on a complete record of the Lunarian system of measuring mass. The problem was that the whole supposition rested on the slender assumption that the figure 1836 did, in fact, denote the proton-electron mass ratio and was not merely a coincidental reference to something completely different. They needed a second source of information to check it against.

When Hunt talked to the mathematicians one afternoon, he was surprised to learn that they were unaware that the chemists and anatomists in other departments had computed estimates of surface gravity. As soon as he mentioned the fact, everybody saw the significance at once. If the Lunarians had adopted the practice that was common on Earth—using the same units to express mass and weight on their own planet—then the numbers in the table gave Lunarian weights. Furthermore, there was available to them at least one object whose weight they could estimate accurately: Charlie himself. Thus, since they already had an estimate of surface gravity, they could easily approximate how much Charlie would have weighed in kilograms back home. Only one piece of information was missing for a solution to the whole problem: a factor to convert kilograms to Lunarian weight units. Then Hunt speculated that there could well be among Charlie's personal documents an identity card, a medical card—something that recorded his weight in his own units. If so, that one number would tell them all they needed to know. The discussion ended abruptly, with the head of the mathematics section departing in great haste and a state of considerable excitement to talk to the head of the linguistics section. Linguistics agreed to make a special note if anything like that turned up. So far nothing had.

Another small group, tucked away in offices in the top of Navcomms HQ building, was working on what was perhaps the most exciting discovery to come out of the books so far. Twenty pages, right at the end of the second book, showed a series of maps. They were all drawn to an apparently small scale, each one depicting extensive areas of the world's surface—but the world so depicted bore no resemblance to Earth. Oceans, continents, rivers, lakes, islands, and most other geographical features were easily distinguishable, but in no way could they be reconciled with Earth's surface, even allowing for the passage of fifty thousand years—which would have made little difference anyway, aside from the size of the polar ice caps.

Each map carried a rectangular grid of reference lines, similar to those of terrestrial latitude and longitude, with the lines spaced forty-eight units (decimal) apart. These numbers were presumed to denote units of Lunarian circular measure, since nobody could think of any other sensible way to dimension coordinates on the surface of a sphere. The fourth and seventh maps provided the key: the zero line of longitude to which all the other lines were referenced. The line to the east was tagged "528" and that to the west "48," showing that the full Lunarian circle was divided into 576 Lunarian degrees. The system was consistent with their duodecimal counting method and their convention of reading from right to left. The next step was to calculate the percentage of the planet's surface that each map represented and to fit them together to form the complete globe.

Already, however, the general scheme was clear. The ice caps were far larger than those believed to have existed on Earth during the Pleistocene Ice Age, stretching in some places to within twenty (Earth) degrees of the equator. Most of the seas around the equatorial belt were completely locked in by coastlines and ice. An assortment of dots and symbols scattered across the land masses in the ice-free belt and, more thinly, over the ice sheets themselves, seemed to indicate towns and cities.

When Hunt received an invitation to come up and have a look at the maps, the scientists working on them showed him the scales of distance that were printed at the edges. If they could only find some way of converting those numbers into miles, they would have the diameter of the planet. But nobody had told them about the tables the mathematics section thought might be mass-unit conversion factors. Maybe one of the other tables did the same thing for units of length and distance? If so, and if they could find a reference to Charlie's height among his papers, the simple process of measuring him would allow them to work out how many Earth meters there were in a Lunarian mile. Since they already had a figure for the planet's surface gravity, its mass and mean density should follow immediately."

This was all very exciting, but all it proved was that a world had existed. It did not prove that Charlie and the Lunarians originated there. After all, the fact that a man carries a London street map in his pocket doesn't prove him to be a Londoner. So the work of relating numbers derived from physical measurements of Charlie's body to the numbers on the maps and in the tables could turn out to be based on a huge fallacy. If the diary came from the world shown on the maps but Charlie came from somewhere else, then the system of measurement deduced from the maps and tables in the diary might be a totally different system from the one used to record his personal characteristics in his papers, since the latter system would be the system used in the somewhere else, not in the world depicted on the maps. It all got very confusing.

Finally, nobody claimed to have proved conclusively that the world on the maps wasn't Earth. Admittedly it didn't look like Earth, and attempts to derive the modern distribution of terrestrial continents from the land areas on the maps had met with no success at all. But the planet's gravity hadn't been all that much different. Maybe the surface of Earth had undergone far greater changes over the last fifty thousand years than had been previously thought? Furthermore, Danchekker's arguments still carried a lot of weight, and any theory that discounted them would have an awful lot of explaining to do. But by that time, most of the scientists working on the project had reached a stage where nothing would have surprised them any more, anyway.

"Got your message. Came straight over." Hunt announced as Lyn Garland ushered him into Caldwell's office. Caldwell nodded toward one of the chairs opposite his desk, and Hunt sat down. Caldwell glanced at Lyn, who was still standing by the door.

"It's okay," he said. She left, closing the door behind her.

Caldwell fixed Hunt with an expressionless stare for a few seconds, at the same time drumming his fingers on the desk. "You've seen a lot of the setup here during the past few months. What do you think of it?"

Hunt shrugged. The answer was obvious.

"I like it. Exciting things happen around here."

"You like exciting things happening, huh?" The executive director nodded, half to himself. He remained thoughtful for what seemed a long time. "Well, you've only seen part of what goes on. Most people have no idea how big UNSA is these days. All the things you see around here—the labs, the installations, the launch areas—that's just the backup. Our main business is up front." He gestured toward the photographs adorning one of the walls. "We have people right now exploring the Martian deserts, flying probes down through the clouds on Venus, and walking on the moons of Jupiter. In the deep-space units in California, they're designing ships that will make Vegas and even the Jupiter Mission ships look like paddleboats. Photon-drive robot probes that will make the first jump to the stars—some seven miles long! Think of it—seven miles long!"

Hunt did his best to react in the appropriate manner. The problem was, he wasn't sure what manner was appropriate. Caldwell never said or did anything without a reason. The reason for this turn of conversation was far from obvious.

"And that's only the beginning," Caldwell went on. "After that, men will follow the robots. Then—who knows? This is the biggest thing the human race has ever embarked on: USA, US Europe, Canada, the Soviets, the Australians—they're all in on it together. Where does a thing like that go once it starts moving, huh? Where does it stop?"

For the first time since his arrival at Houston, Hunt detected a hint of emotion in the American's voice. He nodded slowly, though still not comprehending.

"You didn't drag me here to give me a UNSA commercial," he said.

"No, I didn't," Caldwell agreed. "I dragged you over because it's time we had a serious talk. I know enough about you to know how the wheels go round inside your head. You are made out of the same stuff as the guys who are making all the things happen out there." He sat back in his chair and held Hunt's gaze with a direct stare. "I want you to quit messing around at IDCC and come over to us."

The statement caught Hunt like a right hook.

"What . . . ! To Navcomms!"

"Correct. Let's not play games. You're the kind of person we need, and we can give you the things you need. I know I don't have to make a big speech to explain myself."

Hunt's initial surprise lasted perhaps half a second. Already the computer in his head was churning out answers. Caldwell had been building toward this and testing him out for weeks. So, that was why he had moved in Navcomms engineers to take over running the scope. Had the thought been in his mind as long ago as that? Already Hunt had no doubt what the outcome of the interview would be. However, the rules of the game demanded that the set questions be posed and answered before anything final could be pronounced. Instinctively he reached for his cigarette case, but Caldwell preempted him and slid his cigar box across the desk.

"You seem pretty confident you've got what I need," Hunt said as he selected a Havana. "I'm not sure even I know what that is."

"Don't you . . . ? Or is it that you just don't like talking about it?" Caldwell stopped to light his own cigar. He puffed until satisfied, then continued: "New Cross to the Journal of the Royal Society, solo. Some achievement." He made a gesture of approval. "We like self-starters over here—sorta . . . traditional. What made you do it?" He didn't wait for a reply. "First electronics, then mathematics . . . after that nuclear physics, later on nucleonics. What's next Dr. Hunt? Where do you go from there?" He settled back and exhaled a cloud of smoke while Hunt considered the question.

Hunt raised his eyebrows in mild admiration. "You seem to have been doing your homework," he said.

Caldwell didn't answer directly but asked, simply, "How was your uncle in Lagos when you visited him on vacation last year? Did he prefer the weather to Worcester, England? Seen much of Mike from Cambridge lately? I doubt it—he joined UNSA; he's been at Hellas Two on Mars for the last eight months. Want me to go on?"

Hunt was too mature to feel indignant; besides, he liked to see a professional in action. He smiled faintly.

"Ten out of ten."

At once Caldwell's mood became deadly serious. He leaned forward and spread his elbows on the desk.

"I'll tell you where you go from here, Dr. Hunt," he said. "Out—out to the stars! We're on our way to the stars over here! It started when Danchekker's fish first crawled up out of the mud. The urge that made them do it is the same as the one that's driven you all your life. You've gone inside the atom as far as you can go; there's only one way left now—out. That's what UNSA has to offer that you can't refuse."

There was nothing Hunt could add. Two futures lay spread out before him: One led back to Metadyne, the other beckoned onward toward infinity. He was as incapable of choosing the first as his species was of returning to the depths of the sea.

"What's your side of the deal, then?" he asked after some reflection.

"You mean, what do you have that we need?"

"Yes."

"We need the way your brain works. You can think sideways. You see problems from different angles that nobody else uses. That's what I need to bust open this Charlie business. Everybody argues so much because they're making assumptions that seem obvious but that they shouldn't be making. It takes a special kind of mind to figure out what's wrong when things that anybody with common sense can see are true turn out to be not true. I think you're the guy."

The compliments made Hunt feel slightly uncomfortable. He decided to move things along. "What do you have in mind?"

"Well, the guys we have at present are top grade inside their own specialties," Caldwell replied. "Don't get me wrong, these people are good—but I'd like them to concentrate on doing the things they're best at. However, aside from all that, I need someone with an unspecialized, and therefore impartial, outlook to coordinate the findings of the specialists and integrate them into an overall picture. If you like, I need people like Danchekker to paint the pieces of the puzzle, but I need someone like you to fit the pieces together. You've been doing a bit of that, unofficially, for quite a while anyway; I'm saying, 'Let's make it official.'"

"How about the organization?" Hunt asked.

"I've thought about that. I don't want to alienate any of our senior people by subordinating them or any of their staffs to some new whiz kid. That's only good politics. Anyhow, I don't think you'd want it that way."

Hunt shook his head to show his agreement.

"So," Caldwell resumed, "what I figure is, the various departments and sections will continue to function as they do at present. Our relationship with outfits outside Navcomms will remain unaffected. However, all the conclusions that everybody has reached so far, and new findings as they turn up, will be referred to a centralized coordinating section—that's you. Your job will be to fit the bits together, as I said earlier. You'd build up your own staff as time goes on and the work load increases. You'd be able to request any particular items of information you find you need from the specialist functions; that way you'd be defining some of their objectives. As for your objectives, they're already spelled out: Find out who these Charlie people were, where they came from, and what happened to them. You report directly to me and get the whole problem off my back. I've got enough on my schedule without worrying about corpses." Caldwell threw out an arm to show that he was finished. "Well, what do you say?"

Hunt had to smile within himself. As Caldwell had said, there was really nothing to think about. He took a long breath and turned both hands upward. "As you said—an offer I can't refuse."

"So, you're in?"

"I'm in."

"Welcome aboard, then." Caldwell looked pleased. "This calls for a drink." He produced a flask and glasses from somewhere behind the desk. He poured the whiskey and passed a glass to his newest employee.

"When do you want it to start?" Hunt asked after a moment.

"Well, you probably need a couple of months or so to sort out the formalities with IDCC. But why wait for formalities? You're on loan here from IDCC anyway and under my direction for the duration; also, we're paying for you. So what's wrong with tomorrow morning?"

"Christ!"

Caldwell's manner at once became brisk and businesslike.

"I'll allocate offices for you in this building. Rob Gray takes full charge of scope operations and keeps the engineers I've assigned to him as his permanent staff for as long as he's in Houston. That frees you totally. By the end of this week I want estimates of what you think you'll need in the way of clerical and secretarial staff, technical personnel, equipment, furniture, lab space, and computer facilities.

"By this time next week, I want you to have a presentation ready for a meeting of section and department heads that I'm going to call, to tell them how you see yourself and them working together. Make it tactful. I won't issue any official notification of these changes until after the meeting, when everybody knows what's going on. Don't talk about it until then, except to myself and Lyn.

"Your outfit will be designated Special Assignment Group L, and your position, will be section head, Group L. The post is classed as 'Executive, grade four, civilian,' within the Space Arm. It carries all the appropriate benefits of free use of UNSA vehicles and aircraft, access to restricted files up to category three, and standard issues of clothing and accessories for duties overseas or off-planet. All that is in the Executive Staff Manual; details of reporting structures, admin procedures, and that kind of thing are in the UNSA Corporate Policy Guide. Lyn will get you copies.

"You'll have to get in touch with the federal authorities in Houston regarding permanent residence in the USA; Lyn knows the right people. Arrange transfer of your personal belongings from England at your own convenience and charge it to Navcomms. We'll help out finding you somewhere to live, but in the meantime stay on at the Ocean."

Hunt had the fleeting thought that had Caldwell been born three thousand years previously, Rome might well have been built in a day.

"What's your current salary?" Caldwell asked.

"Twenty-five thousand European dollars."

"We'll make it thirty."

Hunt nodded mutely.

Caldwell paused and checked mentally for anything he might have overlooked. Finding nothing, he sat back and raised his glass. "Cheers, then, Vic."

It was the first time he had addressed Hunt informally.

"Cheers."

"To the stars."

"To the stars."

A low roar from a point outside the city reached the room. They glanced toward the window to see a column of light climbing into the blue as a Vega lifted off from a distant launch pad. A quiet surge of excitement welled up in Hunt's veins as he took in the sight. It was a symbol of the ultimate expression of man's outward urge, and he was about to become part of it.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 620