Chapter Ten

Demands for the services of Special Assignment Group L commenced as soon as the new unit officially went into operation, and they continued to increase rapidly in the weeks that followed. By the end of a month Hunt was swamped and forced to take on extra people at a faster rate than he had intended. Originally his idea had been to keep going with a skeleton staff for a while, at least until he formed a better idea of what was required. When Caldwell first announced the establishment of the new group, there had been one or two instances of petty jealousy and resentment, but the attitude that prevailed in the end was that Hunt had contributed several worthwhile ideas, and it seemed only sensible to get him in on the team permanently. After a while, even the dissenters grudgingly began to concede that things seemed to run more smoothly with Group L around. Some of them eventually did a complete about-face and became enthusiastic supporters of the scheme, as they came to appreciate that the communication channels to Hunt's people worked in bidirectional mode, and for every bit of data they fed in, ten bits came back in the other direction. As the oil thus added to Caldwell's jigsaw-puzzle-solving machine began to prove effective, the machine shifted fully into top gear, and suddenly pieces started fitting together.

The mathematics section was still working on the equations and formulas found in the books. Since mathematical relationships would remain true irrespective of the conventions used to express them, their interpretation was a far less arbitrary affair than that of deciphering the Lunarian language. The mathematicians had been stimulated by the discovery of the mass conversion table. They turned their attention to the other tables contained in the same book and soon found one that listed many commonly used physical and mathematical constants. From it they quickly picked out pi as well as e, the base of natural logarithms, and one or two more, but they still didn't understand the system of units well enough to evaluate the majority.

Another set of tables turned out to be simple trigonometric functions; these were easily recognized once the cartographers had provided the units of circular measure. The headings of the columns of these tables gave the Lunarian symbols for sine, cosine, tangent, and the like. Once these were known, many of the mathematical expressions elsewhere started making more sense; some of them fell out immediately as familiar trigonometric relationships. These in turn helped establish the conventions used to denote normal arithmetic operations and that of exponentiation, which led to the identification of the equations of mechanical motion. Nobody was surprised when these equations revealed that Lunarian scientists had deduced the same laws as Newton. The mathematicians progressed to tables of elementary first integrals and standard forms of low-order differential equations. On later pages were expressions which they suspected might describe systems of resonance and damped oscillations. Here again, the uncertainty over units presented a problem; expressions of this type would be in a standard form that could apply equally well to electrical, mechanical, thermal, or many other types of physical phenomena. Until they knew more about Lunarian units, they could not be sure precisely what these equations meant, even if they succeeded in interpreting them mathematically.

Hunt remembered having noticed that many of the electrical subassemblies from Charlie's backpack had small metal labels mounted adjacent to plugs, sockets, and other input-output connections. He speculated that some of the symbols engraved on these labels might represent ratings in units of voltage, current, power, frequency, and so on. he spent a day in the electronics labs, produced a full report on these markings, and passed it on to Mathematics. Nobody had thought to tell them about it sooner.

The electronic technicians located the battery in the wrist unit from Tycho, took it to pieces, and with the assistance of an electrochemist from another department, worked out the voltage it had been designed to produce. Linguistics translated the markings on the casing, and that gave a figure for the Lunarian unit for electrical voltage. Well, it was a start.

Professors Danchekker and Schorn were in charge of the biological side of the research. Perhaps surprisingly, Danchekker exhibited no reluctance to cooperate with Group L and kept them fully updated with a regular flow of information. This was more the result of his deeply rooted sense of propriety than of any change of heart. He was a formalist, and if this procedure was what the formalities of the arrangement required, he would adhere to it rigidly. His refusal to budge one inch from his uncompromising views regarding the origins of the Lunarians, however, was total.

As promised, Schorn had set up investigations to determine the length of Charlie's natural day from studies of body chemistry and cell metabolism, but he was running into trouble. He was getting results, all right, but the results made no sense. Some tests gave a figure of twenty-four hours, which meant that Charlie could be from Earth; some gave thirty-five hours, which meant he couldn't be; and other tests came up with figures in between. Thus, if the aggregate of these results meant anything at all, it indicated that Charlie came from a score of different places all at the same time. Either it was crazy, or there was something wrong with the methods used, or there was more to the matter than they thought.

Danchekker was more successful in a different direction. From an analysis of the sizes and shapes of Charlie's blood vessels and associated muscle tissues, he produced equations describing the performance of Charlie's circulatory system. From these he then derived a set of curves that showed the proportions of body heat that would be retained and lost for any given body temperature and outside temperature. He came up with a figure for Charlie's normal body temperature from some of Schorn's figures that were not suspect and were based on the assumption that, as in the case of terrestrial mammals, the process of evolution would have led to Charlie's body regulating its temperature to such a level that the chemical reactions within its cells would proceed at their most efficient rates. By substituting this figure back into his original equations, Danchekker was able to arrive at an estimate of the outside temperature or, more precisely, the temperature of the environment in which Charlie seemed best adapted to function. Allowing for error, it came out at somewhere between two and nine degrees Celsius.

With Schorn's failure to produce a reliable indication of the length of the Lunarian day, there was still no way of assigning any absolute values to the calendar, although sufficient corroborating evidence had been forthcoming from various sources to verify beyond reasonable doubt that it was indeed a calendar. As more clues to Lunarian electrical units were found by Electronics, an alternative approach to obtaining the elusive Lunarian unit of time suggested itself. If Mathematics could untangle the equations of electrical oscillation, they should be able to manipulate the quantities involved in such a way to express the two constants denoting the dielectric permittivity and magnetic permeability of free space in Lunarian units. The ratio of these constants would yield the velocity of light, expressed in Lunarian units of distance per Lunarian units of time. The units for representing distance were understood already; therefore, those used for measuring time would be given automatically.

*

All this activity in UNSA naturally attracted widespread public attention. The discovery of a technologically advanced civilization from fifty thousand years in the past was not something that happened very often. Some of the headlines flashed around the World News Grid when the story was released, a few weeks after the original find, were memorable: MAN ON

MOON BEFORE ARMSTRONG; some were hilarious: EXTINCT CIVILIZATION ON MARS; some were just wrong: CONTACT MADE WITH ALIEN INTELLIGENCE. But most summed up the situation fairly well.

In the months that followed, UNSA's public relations office in Washington, long geared to conducting steady and predictable dealings with the news media, reeled under a deluge of demands from hard-pressed editors and producers all over the globe. Washington struggled valiantly for a while, but in the end did the human thing, and delegated the problem to Navcomms' local PR department at Houston. The PR director at Houston found a ready-made clearinghouse of new information in the form of Group L, right on his doorstep, so still another dimension was added to Hunt's ever growing work load. Soon, press conferences, TV documentaries, filmed interviews, and reporters became part of his daily routines; so did the preparation of weekly progress bulletins. Despite the cold objectivity and meticulous phrasing of these bulletins, strange things seemed to happen to them between their departure from the offices of Navcomms and their arrival on the world's newspaper pages and wall display screens. Even stranger things happened in the minds of some people who read them.

One of the British Sunday papers presented just about all of the Old Testament in terms of the interventions of space beings as seen through the eyes of simple beholders. The plagues of Egypt were ecological disruptions deliberately brought about as warnings to the oppressors; flying saucers guided Moses through the Red Sea while the waters were diverted by nucleonic force fields; and the manna from heaven was formed from the hydrocarbon combustion products of thermonuclear propulsion units. A publisher in Paris observed the results, got the message, and commissioned a free-lancer to reexamine the life of Christ as a symbolic account of the apparent miracle workings of a Lunarian returning to Earth after a forty-eight-thousand-year meditation in the galactic wilderness.

"Authentic" reports that the Lunarians were still around abounded. They had built the pyramids, sunk Atlantis, and dug the Bosporus. There were genuine eyewitness accounts of Lunarian landings on Earth in modern times. Somebody had held a conversation with the pilot of a Lunarian spaceship two years before in the middle of the Colorado Desert. Every reference ever recorded to supernatural phenomena, apparitions, visitations, miracles, saints, ghosts, visions, and witches had a Lunarian connection.

But as the months passed and no dramatic revelations unfolded, the world began to turn elsewhere for new sensations. Reports of further findings became confined to the more serious scientific journals and proceedings of the professional societies. But the scientists on the project continued their work undisturbed.

Then a UNSA team erecting an optical observatory on the Lunar Farside detected unusual echoes on ultrasonics from about two hundred feet below the surface. They sank a shaft and discovered what appeared to be all that was left of the underground levels of another Lunarian base, or at any rate, some kind of construction. It was just a metal-walled box about ten feet high and as broad and as long as a small house; one end was missing, and about a quarter of the volume enclosed had filled up with dust and rock debris. In the space that was left at the end, they found the charred skeletons of eight more Lunarians, some pieces of furniture, a few items of technical equipment, and a heap of sealed metal containers. Whatever had formed the remainder of the structure that this gallery had been part of was gone without a trace.

The metal containers were later opened by the scientists at Westwood. Inside the cans was a selection of assorted foodstuffs, well preserved despite having been cooked. Presumably, whatever had done the cooking had also cooked the Lunarians. Most of the cans contained processed vegetables, meats, and sweet preparations; a few, however, yielded a number of fish, about the size of herrings and preserved intact.

When Danchekker's assistant dissected one of the fish and began looking inside, he couldn't make sense of what he found, so he called the professor down to the lab to ask what he made of it. Danchekker didn't go home until eight o'clock the next morning. A week later he announced to an incredulous Vic Hunt: "This specimen never swam in any of our oceans; it did not evolve from, nor is it in any way related to, any form of life that has ever existed on this planet!"

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 714