Chapter Twenty-Four

The long-awaited answers to where the Lunarians had come from and how they came to be where they had been found sent waves of excitement around the scientific world and prompted a new frenzy of activity in the news media. Hunt's explanation seemed complete and consistent. There were few objections or disagreements; the account didn't leave much to object to or disagree with.

Hunt had therefore met fully the demands of his brief. Although detailed interdisciplinary work would continue all over the world for a long time to come, UNSA's formal involvement in the affair was more or less over. So Project Charlie was run down. That left Project Ganymeans, which was just starting up. Although he had not yet received any formal directive from Earth to say so, Hunt had the feeling that Caldwell wouldn't waste the opportunity offered by Hunt's presence on Ganymede just when the focus of attention was shifting from the Lunarians to the Ganymeans. In other words, it would be some time yet before he would find himself walking aboard an Earth-bound cruiser.

A few weeks after the publication of UNSA's interim conclusions, the Navcomms scientists on Ganymede held a celebration dinner in the officers' mess at Pithead to mark the successful end of a major part of their task. The evening had reached the warm and mellow phase that comes with cigars and liqueurs when the last-course dishes have been cleared away. Talkative groups were standing and sitting in a variety of attitudes around the tables and by the bar, and beers, brandies, and vintage ports were beginning to flow freely. Hunt was with a group of physicists near the bar, discussing the latest news on the Ganymean field drive, while behind them another circle was debating the likelihood of a world government being established within twenty years. Danchekker seemed to have been unduly quiet and withdrawn for most of the evening.

"When you think about it, Vic, this could develop into the ultimate weapon in interplanetary warfare," one of the physicists was saying. "Based on the same principles as the ship's drive, but a lot more powerful and producing a far more intense and localized effect. It would generate a black hole that would persist, even after the generator that made it had fallen into it. Just think—an artificially produced black hole. All you'd have to do is mount the device in a suitable missile and fire it at any planet you took a dislike to. It would fall to the center and consume the whole planet—and there'd be no way to stop it."

Hunt looked intrigued. "You mean it could work?"

"The theory says so."

"Christ, how long would it take—to wipe out a planet?"

"We don't know yet; we're still working on that bit. But there's more to it than that. There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to put out a star using the same method. Think about that as a weapon—one black-hole bomb could destroy a whole solar system. It makes nucleonic weapons look like kiddie toys."

Hunt started to reply, but a voice from the center of the room cut him off, rising to make itself heard above the buzz of conversation. It belonged to the commander of Pithead Base, special guest at the dinner.

"Attention, please, everybody," he called. "Your attention for a moment, please." The noise died as all faces turned toward him. He looked around until satisfied that everyone was paying attention. "You have invited me here tonight to join you in celebrating the successful conclusion of what has probably been one of the most challenging, the most astounding, and the most rewarding endeavors that you are ever likely to be involved in. You have had difficulties, contradictions, and disagreements to contend with, but all that is now in the past. The task is done. My congratulations." He glanced toward the clock above the bar. "It is midnight—a suitable time, I think, to propose a toast to the being that started the whole thing off, wherever he may be." He raised his glass. "To Charlie."

"To Charlie," came back the chorus.

"No!"

A voice boomed from the back of the room. It sounded firm and decisive. Everybody turned to look at Danchekker in surprise.

"No," the professor repeated. "We can't drink to that just yet."

There was no suggestion of hesitation or apology in his manner. Clearly his action was reasoned and calculated.

"What's the problem, Chris?" Hunt asked, moving forward away from the bar.

"I'm afraid that's not the end of it."

"How do you mean?"

"The whole Charlie business—There is more to it—more than I have chosen to mention to anybody, because I have no proof. However, there is a further implication in all that has been deduced—one which is even more difficult to accept than even the revelations of the past few weeks."

The festive atmosphere had vanished. Suddenly they were in business again. Danchekker walked slowly toward the center of the room and stopped with his hands resting on the back of one of the chairs. He gazed at the table for a moment, then drew a deep breath and looked up.

"The problem with Charlie, and the rest of the Lunarians, that has not been touched upon is this: quite simply, they were too human."

Puzzled looks appeared here and there. Somebody turned to his neighbor and shrugged. They all looked back at Danchekker in silence.

"Let us recapitulate for a moment some of the fundamental principles of evolution," he said. "How do different animal species arise? Well, we know that variations of a given species arise from mutations caused by various agencies. It follows from elementary genetics that in a freely mixing and interbreeding population, any new characteristic will tend to be diluted, and will disappear within relatively few generations. However"—the professor's tone became deadly serious—"when sections of the population became reproductively isolated from one another—for example, by geographical separation, by segregation of behavior patterns, or by seasonal differences, say, in mating times—dilution through interbreeding will be prevented. When a new characteristic appears within an isolated group, it will be confined to and reinforced within that group; thus, generation by generation, the group will diverge from the other group or groups from which it has been isolated. Finally a new species will establish itself. This principle is fundamental to the whole idea of evolution: Given isolation, divergence will occur. The origins of all species on Earth can be traced back to the existence at some time of some mechanism or other of isolation between variations within a single species. The animal life peculiar to Australia and South America, for instance, demonstrates how rapidly divergence takes effect even when isolation has existed only for a short time.

"Now we seem to be satisfied that for the best part of twenty-five million years, two groups of terrestrial animals—one on Earth, the other on Minerva—were left to evolve in complete isolation. As a scientist who accepts fully the validity of the principle I have just outlined, I have no hesitation in saying that divergence between these two groups must have taken place. That, of course, applies equally to the primate lines that were represented on both planets."

He stopped and stood looking from one to the other of his colleagues, giving them time to think and waiting for a reaction. The reaction came from the far end of the room.

"Yes, now I see what you're saying," somebody said. "But why speculate? What's the point in saying they should have diverged, when it's clear that they didn't?"

Danchekker beamed and showed his teeth. "What makes you say they didn't?" he challenged.

The questioner raised his arms in appeal. "What my two eyes tell me—I can see they didn't."

"What do you see?"

"I see humans. I see Lunarians. They're the same. So, they didn't diverge."

"Didn't they?" Danchekker's voice cut the air like a whiplash. "Or are you making the same unconscious assumption that everyone else has made? Let me go over the facts once again, purely from an objective point of view. I'll simply list the things we observe and make no assumptions, conscious or otherwise, about how they fit in with what we think we already know.

"First: The two populations were isolated. Fact.

"Second: Today, twenty-five million years later, we observe two sets of individuals, ourselves and the Lunarians. Fact.

"Third: We and the Lunarians are identical. Fact.

"Now, if we accept the principle that divergence must have occurred, what must we conclude? Ask yourselves—If confronted by those facts and nothing else, what would any scientist deduce?"

Danchekker stood facing them, pursing his lips and rocking back and forth on his heels. Silence enveloped the room, broken after a few seconds by his whistling quietly and tunelessly to himself.

"Christ . . . !" The exclamation came from Hunt. He stood gaping at the professor in undisguised disbelief. "They couldn't have been isolated from each other," he managed at last in a slow, halting voice. "They must both be from the same . . ." The words trailed away.

Danchekker nodded with evident satisfaction. "Vic's seen what I am saying," he informed the group. "You see, the only logical conclusion that can be drawn from the statements I have just enumerated is this: If two identical forms are observed today, they must both come from the same isolated group. In other words, if two lines were isolated and branched apart, both forms must lie on the same bronchi."

"How can you say that, Chris?" someone insisted. "We know they came from different branches."

"What do you know?" Danchekker whispered.

"Well, I know that the Lunarians came from the branch that was isolated on Minerva . . ."

"Agreed."

". . . And I know that man comes from the branch that was isolated on Earth."

"How?"

The question echoed sharply around the walls like a pistol shot.

"Well . . . I . . ." The speaker made a gesture of helplessness. "How do I answer a question like that? It . . . it's obvious."

"Precisely!" Danchekker showed his teeth again. "You assume it—just as everybody else does! That's part of the conditioning you've grown up with. It has been assumed all through the history of the human race, and naturally so—there has never been any reason to suppose otherwise." Danchekker straightened up and regarded the room with an unblinking stare. "Now perhaps you see the point of all this. I am stating that, on the evidence we have just examined, the human race did not evolve on Earth at all. It evolved on Minerva!"

"Oh, Chris, really . . ."

"This is getting ridiculous . . ."

Danchekker hammered on relentlessly: "Because, if we accept that divergence must have occurred, then both we and the Lunarians must have evolved in the same place, and we already know that they evolved on Minerva!"

A murmur of excitement mixed with protest ran around the room.

"I am stating that Charlie is not just a distantly related cousin of man—he is our direct ancestor!" Danchekker did not wait for comment but pressed on in the same insistent tone: "And I believe that I can give you an explanation of our own origins which is fully consistent with these deductions." An abrupt silence fell upon the room. Danchekker regarded his colleagues for a few seconds. When he spoke again, his voice had fallen to a calmer and more objective note.

"From Charlie's account of his last days, we know that some Lunarians were left alive on the Moon after the fighting died down. Charlie himself was one of them. He did not survive for long, but we can guess that there were others—desperate groups such as the ones he described—scattered across that Lunar surface. Many would have perished in the meteorite storm on Farside, but some, like Charlie's group, were on Nearside when Minerva exploded and were spared the worst of the bombardment. Even a long time later, when the Moon finally stabilized in orbit around Earth, a handful of survivors remained who gazed up at the new world that hung in their sky. Presumably some of their ships were still usable—perhaps just one, or two, or a few. There was only one way out. Their world had ceased to exist, so they took the only path open to them and set off on a last, desperate attempt to reach the surface of Earth. There could be no way back—there was no place to go back to.

"So we must conclude that their attempt succeeded. Precisely what events followed their emergence out into the savagery of the Ice Age we will probably never know for sure. But we can guess that for generations they hung on the very edge of extinction. Their knowledge and skills would have been lost. Gradually they reverted to barbarism, and for forty thousand years were lost in the midst of the general struggle for survival. But survive they did. Not only did they survive, they consolidated, spread, and flourished. Today their descendants dominate the Earth just as they dominated Minerva—you, I, and the rest of the human race."

A long silence ensued before anybody spoke. When somebody did, the tone was solemn. "Chris, assuming for now that everything was like you've said, a point still bothers me: If we and the Lunarians both came from the Minervan line, what happened to the other line? Where did the branch that was developing on Earth go?"

"Good question." Danchekker nodded approval. "We know from the fossil record on Earth that during the period that came after the visits of the Ganymeans several developments in the general human direction took place. We can trace this record quite clearly right up to the time in question, fifty thousand years ago. By that time the most advanced stage reached on Earth was that represented by Neanderthal man. Now, the Neanderthals have always been something of a riddle. They were hardy, tough, and superior in intelligence to anything prior to them or coexisting with them. They seemed well adapted to survive the competition of the Ice Age and should, one would think, have attained a dominant position in the era that was to follow. But that did not happen. Strangely, almost mysteriously, they died out abruptly between forty and fifty thousand years ago. Apparently they were unable to compete effectively against a new and far more advanced type of man, whose sudden appearance, as if from nowhere, has always been another of the unsolved riddles of science: Homo sapiens—us!"

Danchekker read the expressions on the faces before him and nodded slowly to confirm their thoughts.

"Now, of course, we see why this was so. He did indeed appear out of nowhere. We see why there is no clear fossil record in the soil of Earth to link Homo sapiens back to the chain of earlier terrestrial man-apes: He did not evolve there. And we see what it was that so ruthlessly and so totally overwhelmed the Neanderthals. How could they hope to compete against an advanced race, weaned on the warrior cult of Minerva?"

Danchekker paused and allowed his gaze to sweep slowly around the circle of faces. Everybody seemed to be suffering from mental punch-drunkenness.

"As I have said, all this follows purely as a chain of reasoning from the observations with which I began. I can offer no evidence to support it. I am convinced, however, that such evidence does exist. Somewhere on Earth the remains of the Lunarian spacecraft that made that last journey from Luna must still exist, possibly buried beneath the mud of a seabed, possibly under the sands of one of the desert regions. There must exist, on Earth, pieces of equipment and artifacts brought by the tiny handful who represented the remnant of the Lunarian civilization. Where on Earth, is anyone's guess. Personally, I would suggest as the most likely areas the Middle East, the eastern Mediterranean, or the eastern regions of North Africa. But one day proof that what I have said is true will be forthcoming. This I predict with every confidence."

The professor walked around to the table and poured a glass of Coke. The silence of the room slowly dissolved into a rising tide of voices. One by one, the statues that had been listening returned to life. Danchekker took a long drink and stood in silence for a while, contemplating his glass. Then he turned to face the room again.

"Suddenly lots of things that we have always simply taken for granted start falling into place." Attention centralized on him once again. "Have you ever stopped to think what it is that makes man so different from all the other animals on Earth? I know that we have larger brains, more versatile hands, and so forth; what I am referring to is something else. Most animals, when in a hopeless situation will resign themselves to fate and perish in ignominy. Man, on the other hand, does not know how to give in. He is capable of summoning up reserves of stubbornness and resilience that are without parallel on his planet. He is able to attack anything that threatens his survival, with an aggressiveness the like of which the Earth has never seen otherwise. It is this that has enabled him to sweep all before him, made him lord of all the beasts, helped him tame the winds, the rivers, the tides, and even the power of the Sun itself. This stubbornness has conquered the oceans, the skies, and the challenges of space, and at times has resulted in some of the most violent and bloodstained periods in his history. But without this side to his nature, man would be as helpless as the cattle in the field."

Danchekker scanned the faces challengingly. "Well, where did it come from? It seems out of character with the sedate and easygoing pattern of evolution on Earth. Now we see where it came from: It appeared as a mutation among the evolving primates that were isolated on Minerva. It was transmitted through the population there until it became a racial characteristic. It proved to be such a devastating weapon in the survival struggle there that effective opposition ceased to exist. The inner driving force that it produced was such that the Lunarians were flying spaceships while their contemporaries on Earth were still playing with pieces of stone.

"That same driving force we see in man today. Man has proved invincible in every challenge that the Universe has thrown at him. Perhaps this force has been diluted somewhat in the time that has elapsed since it first appeared on Minerva; we reached the brink of that same precipice of self-destruction but stepped back. The Lunarians hurled themselves in regardless. It could be that this was why they did not seek a solution by cooperation—their in-built tendency to violence made them simply incapable of conceiving such a formula.

"But this is typical of the way in which evolution works. The forces of natural selection will always operate in such a way as to bend and shape a new mutation, and to preserve a variation of it that offers the best prospects of survival for the species as a whole. The raw mutation that made the Lunarians what they were was too extreme and resulted in their downfall. Improvement has taken the form of a dilution, which results in a greater psychological stability of the race. Thus, we survive where they perished."

Danchekker paused to finish his drink. The statues remained statues.

"What an incredible race they must have been," he said. "Consider in particular the handful who were destined to become the forefathers of mankind. They had endured a holocaust unlike anything we can even begin to imagine. They had watched their world and everything that was familiar explode in the skies above their heads. After this, abandoned in an airless, waterless, lifeless, radioactive desert, they were slaughtered beneath the billions of tons of Minervan debris that crashed down from the skies to complete the ruin of all their hopes and the total destruction of all they had achieved.

"A few survived to emerge onto the surface after the bombardment. They knew that they could live only for as long as their supplies and their machines lasted. There was nowhere they could go, nothing they could plan for. They did not give in. They did not know how to give in. They must have existed for months before they realized that, by a quirk of fate, a slim chance of survival existed.

"Can you imagine the feelings of that last tiny band of Lunarians as they stood amid the Lunar desolation, gazing up at the new world that shone in the sky above their heads, with nothing else alive around them and, for all they knew, nothing else alive in the Universe? What did it take to attempt that one-way journey into the unknown? We can try to imagine, but we will never know. Whatever it took, they grasped at the straw that was offered and set off on that journey.

"Even this was only the beginning. When they stepped out of their ships onto the alien world, they found themselves in the midst of one of the most ruthless periods of competition and extinction in the history of the Earth. Nature ruled with an uncompromising hand. Savage beasts roamed the planet; the climate was in turmoil following the gravitational upheavals caused by the arrival of the Moon; possibly they were decimated by unknown diseases. It was an environment that none of their experience had prepared them for. Still they refused to yield. They learned the ways of the new world: They learned to feed by hunting and trapping, to fight with spear and club; they learned how to shelter from the elements, to read and interpret the language of the wild. And as they became proficient in these new arts they grew stronger and ventured farther afield. The spark that they had brought with them and which had carried them through on the very edge of extinction began to glow bright once again. Finally that glow erupted into the flame that had swept all before it on Minerva; they emerged as an adversary more fearsome and more formidable than anything the Earth had ever known. The Neanderthals never stood a chance—they were doomed the moment the first Lunarian foot made contact with the soil of Earth.

"The outcome you see all around you today. We stand undisputed masters of the Solar System and poised on the edge of interstellar space itself, just as they did fifty thousand years ago."

Danchekker placed his glass carefully on the table and moved slowly toward the center of the room. His sober gaze shifted from eye to eye. He concluded: "And so, gentlemen, we inherit the stars.

"Let us go out, then, and claim our inheritance. We belong to a tradition in which the concept of defeat has no meaning. Today the stars and tomorrow the galaxies. No force exists in the Universe that can stop us."

epilogue

Professor Hans Jacob Zeiblemann, of the Department of Paleontology of the University of Geneva, finished his entry for the day in his diary, closed the book with a grunt, and returned it to its place in the tin box underneath his bed. He hoisted his two-hundred-pound bulk to its feet and, drawing his pipe from the breast pocket of his bush shirt, moved a pace across the tent to knock out the ash on the metal pole by the door. As he stood packing a new fill of tobacco into the bowl, he gazed out over the arid landscape of northern Sudan.

The Sun had turned into a deep gash just above the horizon, oozing blood-red liquid rays that drenched the naked rock for miles around. The tent was one of three that stood crowded together on a narrow sandy shelf. The shelf was formed near the bottom of a steep-sided rocky valley, dotted with clumps of coarse bush and desert scrub that clustered together along the valley floor and petered out rapidly, without gaining the slopes on either side. On a wider shelf beneath stood the more numerous tents of the native laborers. Obscure odors wafting upward from this direction signaled that preparation of the evening meals had begun. From farther below came the perpetual sound of the stream, rushing and clattering and jostling on its way to join the waters of the distant Nile.

The crunch of boots on gravel sounded nearby. A few seconds later Zeiblemann's assistant, Jorg Hutfauer, appeared, his shirt dark and streaked with perspiration and grime.

"Phew!" The newcomer halted to mop his brow with something that had once been a handkerchief. "I'm whacked. A beer, a bath, dinner, then bed—that's my program for tonight."

Zeiblemann grinned. "Busy day?"

"Haven't stopped. We've extended sector five to the lower terrace. The subsoil isn't too bad there at all. We've made quite a bit of progress."

"Anything new?"

"I brought these up—thought you might be interested. There's more below; but it'll keep till you come down tomorrow." Hutfauer passed across the objects he had been carrying and continued on into the tent to retrieve a can of beer from the pile of boxes and cartons under the table.

"Mmm . . ." Zeiblemann turned the bone over in his hand. "Human femur . . . heavy." He studied the unusual curve and measured the proportions with his eye. "Neanderthal, I'd say . . . or very near related."

"That's what I thought."

The professor placed the fossil carefully in a tray, covered it with a cloth, and laid the tray on the chest standing just inside the tent doorway. He picked up a hand-size blade of flint, simply but effectively worked by the removal of long, thin flakes.

"What did you make of this?" he asked.

Hutfauer moved forward out of the shadow and paused to take a prolonged and grateful drink from the can.

"Well, the bed seems to be late Pleistocene, so I'd expect upper paleolithic indications—which fits in with the way it's been worked. Probably a scraper for skinning. There are areas of microliths on the handle and also around the end of the blade. Bearing in mind the location, I'd put it at something related fairly closely to the Capsian culture." He lowered the can and cocked an inquiring eye at Zeiblemann.

"Not bad," said the professor, nodding. He laid the flint in a tray beside the first and added the identification sheet that Hutfauer had written out. "We'll have a closer look tomorrow when the light's a little better."

Hutfauer joined him at the door. The sound of jabbering and shouting from the level below told them that another of the natives' endless minor domestic disputes had broken out over something.

"Tea's up if anyone's interested," a voice called out from behind the next tent.

Zeiblemann raised his eyebrows and licked his lips. "What a splendid idea," he said. "Come on, Jorg."

They walked around to the makeshift kitchen, where Ruddi Magendorf was sitting on a rock, shoveling spoonfuls of tea leaves out of a tin by his side and into a large bubbling pot of water.

"Hi, Prof—hi, Jorg," he greeted as the two joined him. "It'll be brewed in a minute or two."

Zeiblemann wiped his palms on the front of his shirt. "Good. Just what I could do with." He cast his eye about automatically and noted the trays, covered by cloths, laid out on the trestle table by the side of Magendorf's tent.

"Ah, I see you've been busy as well," he observed. "What do we have there?"

Magendorf followed his gaze.

"Jomatto brought them up about half an hour ago. They're from the upper terrace of sector two—east end. Take a look."

Zeiblemann walked over to the table and uncovered one of the trays to inspect the neatly arrayed collection, at the same time mumbling absently to himself.

"More flint scrapers, I see . . . Mmmm . . . That could be a hand ax. Yes, I believe it is . . . Bits of jawbone, human . . . looks as if they might well match up. Skull cap . . . Bone spearhead . . . Mmm . . ." He lifted the cloth from the second tray and began running his eye casually over the contents. Suddenly the movement of his head stopped abruptly as he stared hard at something at one end. His face contorted into a scowl of disbelief.

"What the hell is this supposed to be?" he bellowed. He straightened up and walked back toward the stove, holding the offending object out in front of him.

Magendorf shrugged and pulled a face.

"I thought you'd better see it," he offered, then added: "Jomatto says it was with the rest of that set."

"Jomatto says what?" Zeiblemann's voice rose in pitch as he glowered first at Magendorf and then back at the object in his hand. "Oh, for God's sake! The man's supposed to have a bit of sense. This is a serious scientific expedition . . ." He regarded the object again, his nostrils quivering with indignation. "Obviously one of the boys has been playing a silly joke or something."

It was about the size of a large cigarette pack, not including the wrist bracelet, and carried on its upper face four windows that could have been meant for miniature electronic displays. It suggested a chronometer or calculating aid, or maybe it was both and other things besides. The back and contents were missing, and all that was left was the metal casing, somewhat battered and dented, but still surprisingly unaffected very much by corrosion.

"There's a funny inscription on the bracelet," Magendorf said, rubbing his nose dubiously. "I've never seen characters like it before."

Zeiblemann sniffed and peered briefly at the lettering.

"Pah! Russian or something." His face had taken on a pinker shade than even that imparted by the Sudan sun. "Wasting valuable time with—with dime-store trinkets!" He drew back his arm and hurled the wrist set high out over the stream. It flashed momentarily in the sunlight before plummeting down into the mud by the water's edge. The professor stared after it for a few seconds and then turned back to Magendorf, his breathing once again normal. Magendorf extended a mug full of steaming brown liquid.

"Ah, splendid," Zeiblemann said in a suddenly agreeable voice. "Just the thing." He settled himself into a folding canvas chair and accepted the proffered mug eagerly. "I'll tell you one thing that does look interesting, Ruddi," he went on, nodding toward the table. "That piece of skull in the first tray—number nineteen. Have you noticed the formation of the brow ridges? Now, it could well be an example of . . ."

*

In the mud by the side of the stream below, the wrist unit rocked back and forth to the pulsing ripples that every few seconds rose to disturb the delicate equilibrium of the position into which it had fallen. After a while, a rib of sand beneath it was washed away and it tumbled over into a hollow, where it lodged among the swirling, muddy water. By nightfall, the lower half of the casing was already embedded in silt. By the following morning, the hollow had disappeared. Just one arm of the bracelet remained, standing up out of the sand below the rippling surface. The arm bore an inscription, which, if translated, would have read: KORIEL.

THE END

For more great books visi

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 687