The Gentle Giants of Ganymede g-2

by James P. Hogan

  "Those murals in the ship!" Hunt turned to Danchekker as the truth suddenly hit him. "They weren't children's cartoons at all, Chris. They were real!"

  "Good Lord, Vic." The professor gaped and blinked through his spectacles in surprise, wondering why the same thought hadn't struck him. "You're right. Of course. . . you're absolutely right. How extraordinary. We must study them more closely . . ." Danchekker seemed about to say something else but stopped abruptly, as if another thought had just occurred to him. He frowned and rubbed his forehead but waited until the hubbub of voices had died away before he spoke.

  "Excuse me," he called when normality had returned. "There is something else. . . If there were no predators in existence at all, what kept the numbers of the herbivores in check? I can't see any mechanism for preserving a natural balance."

  "I was just coming to that," Shilohin answered. "The answer is: accidents. Even slight cuts or abrasions would allow poison to seep from the secondary system into the primary. Most accidents were fatal to Minervan animals. Natural selection favored natural protection. The species that survived and flourished were those with the best protection--leathery outer skins, thick coverings of fur, scaly armor plating, and so on." She held up one of her hands to display extensive nails and knuckle pads, and then shifted the collar of her shirt slightly to uncover part of the delicate, overlapping, scaly plates that formed a strip along the top of her shoulder. "Many remnants of ancestral protection are still detectable in the Ganymean form today."

  Hunt realized now the reasons for the Ganymeans' temperament being the way it was. From the origins that Shilohin had just described, intelligence had emerged not in response to any need to manufacture weapons or to outwit foe or prey, but as a means of anticipating and avoiding physical damage. Learning and the communication of knowledge would have assumed a phenomenal survival value among the primitive Ganymeans. Caution in all things, prudence, and the ability to analyze all possible outcomes of an action would have been reinforced by selection; haste and rashness would be fatal.

  Evolving from such ancestors, what else could they be but instinctively cooperative and nonaggressive? They would know nothing of violent competition in any form or of the use of force against a rival; hence they exhibited none of the types of complex behavior patterns which, in a later and more civilized society, would "normally" afford symbolic expression of such instincts. Hunt wondered what was "normal." Shilohin, as if reading his thoughts, supplied a definition from the Ganymean point of view.

  "You can imagine then how, when civilization eventually began to develop, the early Ganymean thinkers looked upon the world that they saw about them. They marveled at the way in which Nature, in its infinite wisdom, had imposed a strict natural order upon all living things: the soil fed the plants and the plants fed the animals. The Ganymeans accepted this as the natural order of the universe."

  "Like a divinely ordained plan," somebody near the bar suggested. "Sounds like a religious outlook."

  "You're right," Shilohin agreed, turning to face the speaker. "In the early history of our civilization religious notions did prevail widely. Before scientific principles were better understood, our people attributed many of the mysteries that they were unable to explain to the workings of some omnipotent agency . . . not unlike your God. The early teachings held that the natural order of living things was the ultimate expression of this guiding wisdom. I suppose you would say: The will of God."

  "Except in the deep-ocean basins," Hunt commented.

  "Well, that fit in quite well too," Shilohin replied. "The early religious thinkers of our race saw that as a punishment. In the seas, way back before history, the law had been defied. As a punishment for that, the lawbreakers had been banished permanently to the deepest and darkest depths of the oceans and never emerged to enjoy sunlight."

  Danchekker leaned toward Hunt and whispered, "Rather like the Fall from Eden. An interesting parallel, don't you think?"

  "Mmm. . . with a T-bone steak in place of an apple," Hunt murmured.

  Shilohin paused to push her glass across the bar and waited for the steward to refill it. The room remained quiet while the Earthmen digested the things she had been saying. At last she sipped her drink, and then resumed.

  "And so, you see, to the Ganymean, Nature was indeed perfect in all its harmony, and beautiful in its perfection. As the sciences were discovered and the Ganymeans learned more about the universe in which they lived, they never doubted that however far among the stars their knowledge might take them and however far they might one day probe toward infinity, Nature and its natural law would everywhere reign supreme. What reason had they even to imagine otherwise? They were unable even to conceive how things could be otherwise."

  She stopped for a moment and swept her eyes slowly around the room, as if trying to weigh up the expressions on the circle of faces.

  "You asked me to be frank," she said, then paused again. "At last, we realized a dream that we had been nurturing for generations--to go out into space and discover the wonders of other worlds. When at last the Ganymeans, still with their idyllic convictions, came to the jungles and savagery of Earth, the effect on them was shattering. We called it the Nightmare Planet."

  Chapter Twelve

  The Ganymean engineers announced that the ship beneath Pithead would provide the parts needed to repair the drive system of the Shapieron and that the work would take three to four weeks. A shuttle service between Pithead and Main came into being as technicians and scientists of both races cooperated in the venture. The Ganymeans, of course, directed and carried out the technical side of the operation while the Earthmen took care of the transportation, logistics, and domestic arrangements. Parties of UNSA experts were invited aboard the Shapieron to observe the work in progress and to stand in spellbound fascination as some of the mysteries and intricacies of Ganymean science were explained. One eminent authority on nuclear engineering from Jupiter Five declared later that the experience made him feel like "an unapprenticed plumber's mate being shown around a fusion plant."

  While all this was going on, a team of UNSA specialists at Main worked out a schedule to give ZORAC a crash course on terrestrial computer science and technology. The result of this exercise was the construction of a code-conversion and interface system, most of the details of which were worked out by ZORAC itself, to couple the Ganymean computer directly into the communications network at Main and thus into the computer complex of J5. This gave ZORAC, and through it the Ganymeans as well, direct access to J5's data banks and opened up a mine of information on many aspects of the ways of life, history, geography and sciences of Earth--for which the aliens had insatiable appetites.

  One day, in the communications room of the Mission Control Center at UNSA Operational Command Headquarters, Galveston, there was consternation when a strange voice began speaking suddenly and unexpectedly over the loudspeaker system. It was another of ZORAC's jokes. The machine had composed its own message of greeting to Earth and injected it into the outgoing signal stream of the laser link from Jupiter.

  Earth was, of course, clamoring to know more about the Ganymeans. In a press conference staged specifically for broadcast over the world news grid, a panel of Ganymeans answered questions put to them by scientists and reporters who had traveled with the J5 mission. A large local audience was expected for the event and, since none of the facilities available at Main seemed to be large enough, the Ganymeans readily agreed to the idea of holding the event inside the Shapieron. Hunt was a member of the group that flew down from Pithead to take part.

  The first questions concerned the concepts and principles behind the design of the Shapieron , especially its propulsive system. In reply, the Ganymeans stated that the speculations of the UNSA scientists had been partly right, but did not tell the whole story. The arrangement of massive toroids containing tiny black holes that spun in closed circular paths did indeed generate very high rates of change of gravity potential which resulted in a zone of inten
se space-time distortion, but this did not propel the ship directly; it created a focal point in the center of the toroids at which a trickle of ordinary matter was induced to annihilate out of existence. The mass-equivalent appeared in the form of gravitational energy, though not in any way as simple as the classical notion of a force directed toward a central point; the Ganymeans described the resultant effect as resembling "a stress in the structure of space-time surrounding the ship. . . ." It was this stress wave that propagated through space, carrying the ship with it as it went.

  The idea of being able to cause matter to annihilate at will was astonishing, and that the annihilation should result in artificial gravity phenomena was a revelation. But to learn that all this merely represented a means of bringing under control something that went on naturally anyway all over the universe. . . was astounding. For this, apparently, was exactly the way in which gravity originated in Nature; all forms of matter were all the time decaying away to nothing, albeit at an immeasurably slow rate, and it was the tiny proportion of basic particles that were annihilating at any given moment that gave rise to the gravitational effect of mass. Every annihilation event produced a microscopic, transient gravity pulse, and it was the additive effect of millions of these pulses occurring every second which, when perceived at the macroscopic level, produced the illusion of a steady field. Thus, gravity ceased to be something static and passive that existed wherever a quantity of mass happened to be; now, no longer an oddity standing apart, it fell into line with all the other field phenomena of physics and became a quantity that depended on the rate of change of something--in this case, the rate of change of mass. This principle, together with the discovery of a means of artificially generating and controlling the process, formed the basis of Ganymean gravitic engineering technology.

  This account caused consternation among the scientists from Earth who were present. Hunt voiced their reactions by asking how some of the fundamental laws of physics--conservation of mass-energy and momentum, for example--could be reconciled with the notion of particles being able to vanish spontaneously whenever they chose. The cherished fundamental laws, it turned out, were neither fundamental nor laws at all. Like the Newtonian mechanics of an earlier age, they were just approximations that would be repealed with the development of more precise theoretical models and improved measurement techniques, similar to the way in which careful experiments with light waves had demonstrated the untenability of classical physics and resulted in the formulation of special relativity. The Ganymeans illustrated the point by mentioning that the rate at which matter decayed was such that one gram of water would require well over ten billion years to disappear completely--utterly undetectable by any experiment that could be devised within the framework of contemporary terrestrial science. While that remained true, the established laws that Hunt had referred to would prove perfectly adequate since the errors that resulted from them would make no practical difference. In the same way, classical Newtonian mechanics continued to suffice for most day-to-day needs although relativity provided the more accurate description of reality. The history of Minervan science had shown the same pattern of development; when terrestrial science had progressed further, no doubt, similar discoveries and lines of reasoning would lead to the same reexamination of basic principles.

  This led to the question of the permanency of the universe. Hunt asked how the universe could still exist at all let alone still be evolving if all the matter in it was decaying at the rate that the Ganymeans had indicated, which was not slow on a cosmic time scale; there ought not to have been very much of the universe left.

  The universe went on forever, he was told. All the time, throughout the whole volume of space, particles were appearing spontaneously as well as vanishing spontaneously, the latter process taking place predominantly inside matter--naturally, since that was where there were more of them to vanish from in the first place. Thus the evolution of progressively more complex mechanisms of creating order out of chaos--basic particles, interstellar clouds, stars, planets, organic chemicals, then life itself and after that intelligence--formed a continuous cycle, a perpetual stage where the show never stopped but individual actors came and went. Underlying it all was a unidirectional pressure that strove always to bring high levels of organization from lower ones. The universe was the result of a conflict of two opposing, fundamental trends; one, represented by the second law of thermodynamics, was the tendency for disorder to increase, while the other--the evolutionary principle--produced local reversals by creating order. In the Ganymean sense, the term evolution was not something that applied only to the world of living things, but one that embraced equally the whole spectrum of increasing order, from the formation of an atomic nucleus from stellar plasma to the act of designing a supercomputer; within this spectrum, the emergence of life was reduced to just another milestone along the way. They compared the evolutionary principle to a fish swimming upstream against the current of entropy; the fish and the current symbolized the two fundamental forces in the Ganymean universe. Evolution worked the way it did because selection worked; selection worked because probability worked in a particular way. The universe was, in the final analysis, all a question of statistics.

  Basic particles thus appeared, lived out their mortal spans, and then vanished. Where did they come from and where did they go to? This question summed up the kinds of problem that had existed at the frontier of Ganymean science at the time of the Shapieron's departure. The whole universe perceived by the senses was compared to a geometric plane through which a particle passed, to be observable for a while as it made its contribution to the evolving histories of the galaxies. But in what kind of superuniverse was this plane embedded? Of what kind of truer reality was everything that had ever been observed just a pale and insignificant shadow? These were the secrets that the researchers of Minerva had been beginning to probe and which, they had confidently believed, would eventually yield the key not only to practicable intergalactic travel, but also to movement in domains of existence that even they were incapable of imagining. The scientists from the Shapieron wondered how much their descendants had learned in the years, decades, or even centuries, that had elapsed after their departure from Minerva. Could the abrupt disappearance of a whole civilization have a connection with some undreamed of universe that they had discovered?

  The newsmen present were interested in the cultural basis of the Minervan civilization, particularly the means of conducting everyday commercial transactions between individuals and between organizations. A freely competing economy based on monetary values seemed incompatible with the noncompetitive Ganymean character and raised the question of what alternative system the aliens used to measure and control the obligations between an individual and the rest of society.

  The Ganymeans confirmed that their system had functioned without the motivational forces of profit and a need to maintain any kind of financial solvency. This was another area in which the radically different psychology and conditioning of the Ganymeans made a smooth dialogue impossible, mainly because they had no comprehension of many of the facts of living that were accepted as self-evident on Earth. That some means of control was desirable to insure that everybody put into society at least as much as he took out was strange to them; so was the concept that any measure of a "normal" input-output ratio could be specified since, they maintained, every individual had his own preferred ratio at which he functioned optimally, and which it was his basic right to choose. The concept of financial necessity or any other means of coercing somebody to live a life that he would not otherwise follow was, to them, a grotesque infringement of freedom and dignity. Besides that, they seemed unable to understand why it should be necessary to base any society on such principles.

  What then, they were asked, was there to prevent everybody becoming purely a taker, with no obligation to give anything in return? That being the case, how could a society survive at all? Again the Ganymeans seemed unable to understand the problem. Surel
y, they pointed out, individuals possessed an instinct to contribute and one of the essential needs of living was the satisfaction of that instinct; why would anybody deliberately deprive himself of the feeling of being needed? Apparently that was what motivated the Ganymean in place of monetary incentives--he simply could not live with the thought of not being of any use to anybody. He was just made that way. The worst situation he could find himself in was that of having to depend on society for his wants without being able to reciprocate, and anybody who sought such an existence deliberately was regarded as a social anomaly in need of psychiatric help and an object of sympathy--rather like a mentally retarded child. The observation that this was regarded by many on Earth as the ultimate fulfillment of ambition reinforced the Ganymean conviction that Homo sapiens had inherited some awful defects from the Lunarians. On a more encouraging note they expressed the view, based on what they knew of the last few decades of Man's history, that Nature was slowly but surely repairing the damage.

  By the time the conference had finished Hunt found that all the talking had made him thirsty. He asked ZORAC if there was anywhere nearby where he might get a drink and was informed that if he went out through the main door of the room he was in, turned right and followed the corridor for a short distance, he would come to an open seating area where refreshments were available. Hunt ordered a GTB and Coke--the latest product of the fusion of the two cultures and an instant hit with both--and left the mкlйe of producers and technicians to follow the directions and pick up the drink at the dispensing unit.

  As he turned and cast an eye around the area to look for a suitable seat, he noted absently that he was the only Earthinan present. A few Ganymeans were scattered around singly or in small groups, but most of the places were empty. He picked out a small table with a few unoccupied chairs around it, sauntered across and sat down. Apart from one or two slight nods of acknowledgment, none of the Ganymeans took any notice of him; anyone would have thought it an everyday occurrence for unaccompanied aliens to wander around their ship. The sight of the ashtray on the table prompted him to reach into his pocket for his cigarette pack. Then he stopped, momentarily puzzled; the Ganymeans didn't smoke. He peered more closely at the ashtray and realized that it was standard UNSA issue. He looked around. Most of the tables had UNSA ashtrays. As usual the Ganymeans had thought of everything; naturally there would be Earthmen around with the conference that day. He sighed, shook his head in admiration and settled back into the huge expanse of upholstered luxury to relax with his thoughts.