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Chapter Twenty

The giant ships that would fly on the fifth manned mission to Jupiter had been under construction in Lunar orbit for over a year. Besides the command ship, six freighters, each capable of carrying thirty thousand tons of supplies and equipment, gradually took shape high above the surface of the Moon. During the final two months before scheduled departure, the floating jumbles of machinery, materials, containers, vehicles, tanks, crates, drums, and a thousand other items of assorted engineering that hung around the ships like enormous Christmas-tree ornaments, were slowly absorbed inside. The Vega surface shuttles, deep-space cruisers, and other craft also destined for the mission began moving in over a period of several weeks to join their respective mother ships. At intervals throughout the last week, the freighters lifted out of Lunar orbit and set course for Jupiter. By the time its passengers and final complement of crew were being ferried up from the Lunar surface, only the command ship was left, hanging alone in the void. As H hour approached, the gaggle of service craft and attendant satellites withdrew and a flock of escorts converged to stand a few miles off, cameras transmitting live via Luna into the World News Grid.

As the final minutes ticked by, a million viewscreens showed the awesome mile-and-a-quarter-long shape drifting almost imperceptibly against the background of stars; the serenity of the spectacle seemed somehow to forewarn of the unimaginable power waiting to be unleashed. Exactly on schedule, the flight-control computers completed their final-countdown-phase checkout, obtained "Go" acknowledgment from the ground control master processor, and activated the main thermonuclear drives in a flash that was visible from Earth.

The Jupiter Five Mission was under way.

For the next fifteen minutes the ship gained speed and altitude through successively higher orbits. Then, shrugging off the restraining pull of Luna with effortless ease, Jupiter Five soared out and away to begin overtaking and marshalling together its flock of freighters, by this time already strung out across a million miles of space. After a while the escorts turned back toward Luna, while on Earth the news screens showed a steadily diminishing point of light, being tracked by the orbiting telescopes. Soon even that had vanished, and only the long-range radars and laser links were left to continue their electronic exchanges across the widening gulf.

Aboard the command ship, Hunt and the other UNSA scientists watched on the wall screen in mess twenty-four as the minutes passed by and Luna contracted into a full disk, partly eclipsing that of Earth beyond. In the days that followed, the two globes waned and fused into a single blob of brilliance, standing out in the heavens to signpost the way they had come. As days turned into weeks, even this shrank to become just another grain of dust among millions until, after about a month, they could pick it out only with difficulty.



Hunt found that it took time to adjust to the idea of living as part of a tiny man-made world, with the Cosmos stretching away to infinity on every side and the distance between them and everything that was familiar increasing at more than ten miles every second. Now they depended utterly for survival on the skills of those who had designed and built the ship. The green hills and blue skies of Earth were no longer factors of survival and seemed to shed some of their tangible attributes, almost like the aftermath of a dream that had seemed real. Hunt came to think of reality as a relative quantity—not something absolute that can be left for a while and then returned to. The ship became the only reality; it was the things left behind that ceased, temporarily, to exist.

He spent hours in the viewing domes along the outer hull, slowly coming to terms with the new dimension being added to his existence, gazing out at the only thing left that was familiar: the Sun. He found reassurance in the eternal presence of the Sun, with its limitless flood of life-giving warmth and light. Hunt thought of the first sailors, who had never ventured out of sight of land; they too had needed something familiar to cling to. But before long, men would turn their prow toward the open gulf and plunge into the voids between the galaxies. There would be no Sun to reassure them then, and there would be no stars at all; the galaxies themselves would be just faint spots, scattered all the way to infinity.

What strange new continents were waiting on the other side of those gulfs?

*

Danchekker was spending one of his relaxation periods in a zero-gravity section of the ship, watching a game of 3-D football being played between two teams of off-duty crew members. The game was based on American-style football and took place inside an enormous sphere of transparent, rubbery plastic. Players hurtled up, down, and in all directions, rebounding off the wall and off each other in a glorious roughhouse directed—vaguely—at getting the ball through two circular goals on opposite sides of the sphere. In reality, the whole thing was just an excuse to let off steam and flex muscles beginning to go soft during the long, monotonous voyage.

A steward tapped the scientist on the shoulder and informed him that a call was waiting in the videobooth outside the recreation deck. Danchekker nodded, unclipped the safety loop of his belt from the anchor pin attached to the seat, clipped it around the handrail, and with a single effortless pull, sent himself floating gracefully toward the door. Hunt's face greeted him, speaking from a quarter of a mile away.

"Dr. Hunt," he acknowledged. "Good morning—or whatever it happens to be at the present time in this infernal contraption."

"Hello, Professor," Hunt replied. "I've been having some thoughts about the Ganymeans. There are one or two points I could use your opinion on; could we meet somewhere for a bite to eat, say inside the next half hour or so?"

"Very well. Where did you have in mind?"

"Well, I'm on my way to the restaurant in E section right now. I'll be there for a while."

"I'll join you there in a few minutes." Danchekker cut off the screen, emerged from the booth, and hauled himself back into the corridor and along it to an entrance to one of the transverse shafts leading "down" toward the axis of the ship. Using the handrails, he sailed some distance toward the center before checking himself opposite an exit from the shaft. He emerged through a transfer lock into one of the rotating sections, with simulated G, at a point near the axis where the speed differential was low. He launched himself back along another rail and felt himself accelerate gently, to land thirty feet away, on his feet, on a part of the structure that had suddenly become the floor. Walking normally, he followed some signs to the nearest tube access point, pressed the call button, and waited about twenty seconds for a capsule to arrive. Once inside, he keyed in his destination and within seconds was being whisked smoothly through the tube toward E section of the ship.

The permanently open self-service restaurant was about half full. The usual clatter of cutlery and dishes poured from the kitchens behind the counter at one end, where a trio of UNSA cooks were dishing out generous helpings of assorted culinary offerings ranging from UNSA eggs and UNSA beans to UNSA chicken legs and UNSA steaks. Automatic food dispensers with do-it-yourself microwave cookers had been tried on Jupiter Four but hadn't proved popular with the crew. So the designers of Jupiter Five had gone back to the good old-fashioned methods.

Carrying their trays, Hunt and Danchekker threaded their way between diners, card players, and vociferous debating groups and found an empty table against the far wall. They sat down and began transferring their plates to the table.

"So, you've been entertaining some thoughts concerning our Ganymean friends," Danchekker commented as he began to butter a roll.

"Them and the Lunarians," Hunt replied. "In particular, I like your idea that the Lunarians evolved on Minerva from terrestrial animal species that the Ganymeans imported. It's the only thing that accounts acceptably for no traces of any civilizations showing up on Earth. All these attempts people are making to show it might be different don't convince me much at all."

"I'm very gratified to hear you say so," Danchekker declared. "The problem, however, is proving it."

"Well, that's what I've been thinking about. Maybe we shouldn't have to."

Danchekker looked up and peered inquisitively over his spectacles. He looked intrigued. "Really? How, might I ask?"

"We've got a big problem trying to figure out anything about what happened on Minerva because we're fairly sure it doesn't exist anymore except as a million chunks of geology strewn around the Solar System. But the Lunarians didn't have that problem. They had it in one piece, right under their feet. Also, they had progressed to an advanced state of scientific knowledge. Now, what must their work have turned up—at least to some extent?"

A light of comprehension dawned in Danchekker's eyes.

"Ah!" he exclaimed at once. "I see. If the Ganymean civilization had flourished on Minerva first, then Lunarian scientists would surely have deduced as much." He paused, frowned, then added: "But that does not get you very far, Dr. Hunt. You are no more able to interrogate Lunarian scientific archives than you are to reassemble the planet."

"No, you're right," Hunt agreed. "We don't have any detailed Lunarian scientific records—but we do have the microdot library. The texts it contains are pretty general in nature, but I couldn't help thinking that if the Lunarians discovered an advanced race had been there before them, it would be big and exciting news, something everybody would know about; you've only got to look at the fuss that Charlie has caused on Earth. Perhaps there were references through all of their writings that pointed to such a knowledge—if we knew how to read them." He paused to swallow a mouthful of sausage. "So, one of the things I've been doing over the last few weeks is going through everything we've got with a fine-tooth comb to see if anything could point to something like that. I didn't expect to find firm proof of anything much—just enough for us to be able to say with a bit more confidence that we think we know what planet we're talking about."

"And did you find very much?" Danchekker seemed interested.

"Several things," Hunt replied. "For a start, there are stock phrases scattered all through their language that refer to the Giants. Phrases like 'As old as the Giants' or 'Back to the year of the Giants' . . . like we'd say maybe, 'Back to the year one.' In another place there's a passage that begins 'A long time ago, even before the time of the Giants' . . . There are lots of things like that. When you look at them from this angle, they all suddenly tie together." Hunt paused for a second to allow the professor time to reflect on these points, then resumed: "Also, there are references to the Giants in another context, one that suggests superpowers or great knowledge—for example, 'Gifted with the wisdom of the Giants.' You see what I mean—these phrases indicate the Lunarians felt a race of giant beings—and probably one that was advanced technologically—had existed in the distant past."

Danchekker chewed his food in silence for a while.

"I don't want to sound overskeptical," he said at last, "but all this seems rather speculative. Such references could well be to nothing more than mythical creations—similar to our own heroes of folklore."

"That occurred to me, too," Hunt conceded. "But thinking about it, I'm not so sure. The Lunarians were the last word in pragmatism—they had no time for romanticism, religion, matters of the spirit, or anything like that. In the situation they were in, the only people who could help them were themselves, and they knew it. They couldn't afford the luxury and the delusion of inventing gods, heroes, and Father Christmases to work their problems out for them." He shook his head. "I don't believe the Lunarians made up any legends about these Giants. That would have been too much out of character."

"Very well," Danchekker agreed, returning to his meal. "The Lunarians were aware of the prior existence of the Ganymeans. I suspect, however, that you had more than that in mind when you called."

"You're right," Hunt said. "While I was going through the texts, I pulled together some other bits and pieces that are more in your line."

"Go on."

"Well, supposing for the moment that the Ganymeans did ship a whole zoo out to Minerva, the Lunarian biologists later on would have had a hell of a problem making any sense out of what they found all around them, wouldn't they? I mean, with two different groups of animals loose about the place, totally unrelated—and bearing in mind that they couldn't have known what we know about terrestrial species . . ."

"Worse than that, even," Danchekker supplied. "They would have been able to trace the native Minervan species all the way back to their origins; the imported types, however, would extend back through only twenty-five million years or so. Before that, there would have been no record of any ancestors from which they could have descended."

"That's precisely one of the things I wanted to ask you," Hunt said. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table. "Suppose you were a Lunarian biologist and knew only the facts he would have known. What sort of picture would it have added up to?"

Danchekker stopped chewing and thought for a long time, his eyes staring far beyond where Hunt was sitting. At length he shook his head slowly.

"That is a very difficult question to answer. In that situation one might, I suppose, speculate that the Ganymeans had introduced alien species. But on the other hand, that is what a biologist from Earth would think; he would be conditioned to expect a continuous fossil record stretching back over hundreds of millions of years. A Lunarian, without any such conditioning, might not regard the absence of a complete record as in any way abnormal. If that was part of the accepted way of things in the world in which he had grown up . . ."

Danchekker's voice faded away for a few seconds. "If I were a Lunarian," he said suddenly, his voice decisive, "I would explain what I saw thus: Life began in the distant past on Minerva, evolved through the accepted process of mutation and selection, and branched into many diverse forms. About twenty-five million years ago, a particularly violent series of mutations occurred in a short time, out of which emerged a new family of forms, radically different in structure from anything before. This family branched to produce its own divergency of species, living alongside the older models, and culminating in the emergence of the Lunarians themselves. Yes, I would explain the new appearances in that way. It's similar to the appearance of insects on Earth—a whole family in itself, structurally dissimilar to anything else." He thought it over again for a second and then nodded firmly. "Certainly, compared to an explanation of that nature, suggestions of forced interplanetary migrations would appear very farfetched indeed."

"I was hoping you'd say something like that." Hunt nodded, satisfied. "In fact, that's very much what they appear to have believed. It's not specifically stated in anything I've read, but odds and ends from different places add up to that. But there's something odd about it as well."

"Oh?"

"There's a funny word that crops up in a number of places that doesn't have a direct English equivalent; it means something between 'manlike' and 'man-related.' They used it to describe many animal types."

"Probably the animals descended from the imported types and related to themselves," Danchekker suggested.

"Yes, exactly. But they also used the same word in a totally different context—to mean 'ashore,' 'on land' . . . anything to do with dry land. Now, why should a word become synonymous with two such different meanings?"

Danchekker stopped eating again and furrowed his brow.

"I really can't imagine. Is it important?"

"Neither could I, and I think it is. I've done a lot of crosschecking with Linguistics on this, and it all adds up to a very peculiar thing: 'Manlike' and 'dry-land' became synonymous on Minerva because they did in fact mean the same thing. All the land animals on Minerva were new models. We coined the word terrestoid to describe them in English."

"All of them? You mean that by Charlie's time there were none of the original Minervan species left at all?" Danchekker sounded amazed.

"That's what we think—not on land, anyway. There was a full fossil record of plenty of types all the way up to, and including the Ganymeans, but nothing after that—just terrestoids."

"And in the sea?"

"That was different. The old Minervan types continued right through—hence your fish."

Danchekker gazed at Hunt with an expression that almost betrayed open disbelief.

"How extraordinary!" he exclaimed.

The professor's arm had suddenly become paralyzed and was holding a fork in midair with half a roast potato impaled on the end. "You mean that all the native Minervan land life disappeared—just like that?"

"Well, during a fairly short time, anyway. We've been asking for a long time what happened to the Ganymeans. Now it looks more as if the question should be phrased in even broader terms: What happened to the Ganymeans and all their land-dwelling relatives?"

 

 


Date: 2015-02-03; view: 642


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