Hunt was all ears. He made a gesture of total capitulation and said simply, "Go on."
"One thing that they did discover on Earth, however, was a family of life that had evolved from origins in a warmer environment than that of Minerva, and which had not had to contend with the load-sharing problem that had caused the double-circulatory-system architecture to become standard on their own planet. Of particular interest, terrestrial life had evolved a completely different mechanism for dealing with carbon dioxide--one that did not depend on any secondary circulation system."
Hunt looked incredulous. He stared at Danchekker for a second while the professor waited for the response.
"You're not trying to say. . . they didn't try and pinch it?"
Danchekker nodded. "If my suspicions are anything to go by, that is exactly what they tried to do. The animals from Earth were transported back to Minerva for the purpose of large-scale genetic experiments. The object of those experiments, I believe, was threefold: first, to modify the DNA coding in such a way that the C02 -tolerance portion became separated out from the scrambled form--as you put it--that had evolved naturally on Earth; second, to perfect a means--the enzyme--of isolating that block of code and passing it on in an intact and workable unit to later strains; third, but this is a guess, to implant those codes into Minervan animals in an attempt to find out if a Minervan life form could be modified into developing a mechanism for dealing with carbon dioxide that did not depend on its secondary system. We have evidence that they achieved the first two of these objectives; the third must necessarily remain speculative, at least for the time being."
"And if they did succeed in the third, then the next step would be. . ." Hunt's voice trailed off again. The sheer ingenuity of the Ganymean scheme made it difficult for him to accept it unquestioningly.
"If it worked, and if there were no undesirable side effects, the intention was no doubt to engineer the same codes into themselves," Danchekker confirmed. "Thus they would enjoy an in-built tolerance that would happily continue to perpetuate itself through succeeding generations, while at the same time preserving all the advantages that they had already gained by doing away with their secondary systems. A fascinating example of what intelligence can do to improve on Nature when natural evolution throws up a solution that leaves much to be desired, don't you think?"
Hunt rose from his chair and began pacing slowly from one side of the office to the other as he marveled at the sheer audacity of even conceiving such a scheme. The Ganymeans had expressed wonder at Man's readiness to meet Nature head-on in every challenge, but here was something, surely, that Man would have balked at. The basic instincts of the Ganymeans steered them away from physical danger, conflict and the like, but their thirst for intellectual adventure and combat, it appeared, was unquenchable; that was the spur that had driven them to the stars. Danchekker watched in silence, waiting for the question that he knew would come next. At length Hunt stopped and wheeled to face the desk.
"Yes, it was neat, all right," he agreed. "But it didn't work, did it, Chris?"
"Regrettably, no," Danchekker conceded. "But not for reasons for which, I feel, they were really to blame. We might have some catching up to do with them technically, but nevertheless I believe that we are in a position to see where they went wrong." He didn't wait for the obvious question at that point but went on. "We have the advantage of knowing far more than they possibly could have about life on our own planet. We have access to the work of thousands of scientists who have studied the subject for centuries, but the Ganymeans who came here twenty-five million years ago did not. In particular, they could not have known what Professor Tatham and his team at Cambridge have only just discovered."
"The scrambling together of the self-immunization and the CO2 -tolerance codings?"
"Yes, exactly that. The thing that the Ganymean genetic engineers would never have realized was that in isolating the latter, in order to make their proposed later experiments simpler, they were losing the former. Because of the method they adopted, the descendant strains that they bred would have been ideal subjects for further C02 -tolerance research, but they would also have lost their self-immunization capabilities. In other words, the Ganymeans created and raised a whole range of mixed terrestrial animal species that possessed no trace of the age-old mechanism for stimulating their own defensive processes by flooding the body with mild doses of pollutants--a mechanism which we still see today in the descendants of the animals that remained on Earth to continue evolving naturally, of course."
Hunt had stopped pacing and was now looking down at Danchekker with a slow frown spreading across his face, as if another thought had just struck him.
"But there's something else, isn't there?" he said. "The self-immunization process has something to do with higher brain functions. . . . Are you saying what I think you're saying?"
"I suspect so. As you know, the toxins introduced into the body by the self-immunization process in today's animals has the effect of inhibiting the development of the higher brain centers. And another thing--Tatham's latest work indicates that, because of the way terrestrial life happens to have evolved, the capacity for violence and aggression is closely related to the development of those centers too. Thus, the Ganymeans would have found themselves unable to produce variants of the type they wanted without also removing the inhibition on the development of higher brain functions, and in addition producing an enhanced tendency toward aggression. That being the case and the Ganymeans being the way they were, I can't really see them taking the experiment any further. They would never have risked introducing anything like that into themselves, whatever the urgency of the situation. Never."
"So they gave the whole thing up as a bad job in the end and went off to pastures new," Hunt completed.
"Maybe, and again maybe not. We have no way of telling for sure. I certainly hope so for the sake of Garuth and his friends." Danchekker leaned forward on the desk and at once his mood became more serious. "But whatever the answer to that is, at least we have a definite answer to another of the questions that you asked at the beginning."
"Which one?"
"Well, consider the situation that must have existed on Minerva when the Ganymeans came to the point of accepting that their ambitious genetic engineering solution was running into trouble. They could go away to another star or stay on their own world and perish. Either way, the days of the Ganymean presence on Minerva were numbered. Now take them out of the equation, and what is left? Answer--two populations of animals both of which are well adapted to handling the environmental conditions. First there are the native Minervan types, and second the artificially mutated descendants of the imported terrestrial types, free to roam the planet after the departure of the Ganymeans. Now return to the equation one further factor that I have established through long interrogation of ZORAC's archives--the native Minervan species would not have been poisonous to terrestrial carnivores--and what do you conclude?"
Hunt gazed back with eyes that were suddenly aghast.
"Christ!" he breathed. "It would have been a bloody slaughter."
"Yes, indeed. Consider a planet inhabited only by those ridiculous Technicolored cartoon animals that we found drawn on the walls of that ship at Pithead--animals that had never evolved any specializations for defense, concealment or escape, and which had no need for fight-or-flight instincts at all. Now throw in among them a typical mix of predators from Earth--every one a selected product of millions of years of improvement of the arts of ferocity, stealth and cunning. . . added to which they were evolving higher levels of intelligence that had previously been inhibited and their already fearsome aggressiveness was being further reinforced. Now what picture do you see?"
Hunt just continued to stare in horrified silence as the picture unfolded before his mind's eye.
"That's what wiped them all out," he said at last. "That poor bloody Minervan zoo wouldn't have had a chance. No wonder it didn't last for more than a few generation
s after the Ganymeans disappeared from the scene."
"With another consequence as well," Danchekker came in. "The terrestrial carnivores concentrated on the most readily available prey--the native species--and so gave the terrestrial herbivores a breathing space to increase their numbers and become firmly established. By the time the Minervan natives had been wiped out the carnivores would have been forced to revert to their old habits, but by that time the situation would have stabilized. A mixed and balanced terrestrial animal ecology had been given time to establish itself across Minerva. . . ." The professor's voice took on a soft and curious tone. "And that is the way things must have remained . . . right on through until the time of the Lunarians."
"Charlie. . ." Hunt sensed that Danchekker was at last hinting at something he had been building up to all along. "Charlie," Hunt repeated. "You found that same enzyme in him too, didn't you?"
'We did, but in a somewhat degenerate form. . . as if it were in the last phases of fading away completely. It did fade away of course, since Man no longer possesses it. . . . But the interesting point, as you say, is that Charlie had it and so, presumably, did the rest of the Lunarians."
"And there was only one place for it to come from. . ."
"Precisely."
Hunt raised a hand to his brow as the full import of these revelations hit him. He turned slowly to meet Danchekker's solemn gaze and then slowly, his features knotted into a mask of disbelief that strove to reject the things that reason now stripped bare, sank weakly down onto an arm of the nearest chair. Danchekker said nothing, waiting for Hunt to put the pieces together for himself.
"The population on Minerva included samples of the latest Oligocene primates," Hunt said after a while. "They were almost certainly as advanced as anything that Earth had produced at the time, and with the greatest potential for advancing further. The Ganymeans had unwittingly removed the inhibition on further brain development. . . ." He looked up and met Danchekker's imperturbable stare again. "They'd have raced ahead from there. There was nothing to stop them. And with their aggressive streak unleashed as well. . . a whole race of runaway mutants. . . psychological Frankenstein monsters. . . ."
"Which is, of course, where the Lunarians came from," Danchekker said. His voice was grave. "By rights they shouldn't have survived. All the theories and models of the Ganymean scientists said that they would inevitably destroy themselves. They almost did. They turned a whole planet into one vast fortress and by the time they had developed technology their lives revolved around unceasing warfare and the ruthless, uncompromising determination to exterminate all other rival states. They were capable of conceiving no other formula to solve their problems. In the end they did indeed destroy themselves and Minerva along with them, at least, they destroyed their civilization, if that is the correct term for it. They should have destroyed themselves totally, but, by a million-to-one chance, it did not quite happen. . . ." Danchekker looked up and left Hunt to fill in the rest.
But Hunt just sat and stared, overwhelmed. After the nuclear holocaust between the opposing forces of the two remaining Lunarian superstates had altered permanently the face of Minerva's moon and Minerva had disintegrated, the moon fell inward toward the Sun to be captured by Earth. The tiny band of survivors carried with it had possessed the resources to set off one last, desperate journey--to the surface of the new world that now hung in the sky above their heads. For forty thousand years the descendants of those survivors had merged into the survival struggle of Earth, but eventually they had spread all over the planet and emerged as an adversary as formidable as their ancestors had been on Minerva.
At last, Danchekker resumed quietly. "We have speculated for some time now that the Lunarians, and hence Man, originated from an unprecedented mutation that must have occurred somewhere along the primate line that was isolated on Minerva. Also, we have noted that somewhere along his line of ancestry, Man has somehow abandoned the self-immunization process that other animals have in common. Now we see not only proof that these things were true, but also how they came about. In fact, many species went along that same path, but all bar one were destroyed when Minerva was destroyed. Only one--Man in the form of the Lunarians--came back again." Danchekker paused and took a long breath. "An unprecedented mutation did indeed occur on Minerva, but it was not a natural mutation. Modern Man exhibits fewer of the extremes that drove the Lunarians to their doom, thankfully, but all the same the legacy of our ancestry is written through the pages of our history. Homo sapiens is the end-product of an unsuccessful series of Ganymean genetic experiments!
"The Ganymeans believe that Man is slowly but surely recovering from the instability and compulsive violence that destroyed the Lunarians. Let us hope they are right."
Neither man said anything more for a long time. It was ironic, Hunt thought, that after all the Ganymeans had said, their own kind should turn out to be the prime cause of all the things that had come to pass over the last twenty-five miffion years. And throughout all that time, while primates evolved into sapient beings on Minerva, and the Lunarian civilization came and went, and fifty thousand years of human history were being acted out on Earth, the Shapieron had been out there in the void, preserved by the mysterious workings of the laws that distort time and space.
"An unsuccessful series of Ganymean genetic experiments," Hunt echoed Danchekker. "They started the whole thing. They came back to find us flying spaceships and building fusion plants, and they thought our rate of progress was miraculous. And all the time they'd started the whole thing off in their own labs, twenty-five million years ago. . . and given it up as a bad job! It's funny when you think about it, Chris. It's damned funny. And now they've gone for good. I wonder what they would have said if they'd only known what we know now."
Danchekker did not reply at once, but stared thoughtfully at the top of his desk for a while, as if weighing whether or not to say what was going through his head. In the end he stretched an arm forward and began toying idly with a pen. When he spoke he did not engage Hunt's eyes directly but continued to watch the pen tumbling over and over between his fingers.
"You know, Vic, in the last months before they went, the Ganymeans became very interested in all aspects of terrestrial biochemistry, including all our available data on Charlie, Man, and the Oligocene animals from Pithead. For a long time they were bubbling over with curiosity and ZORAC couldn't find enough questions to ask about such matters. And then, about a month ago, they suddenly became very quiet about it all. They hadn't even mentioned it since."
The professor looked up and confronted Hunt with a direct and candid stare.
"I think I know why," he said, very softly. "You see, Vic, they knew all right. They knew. They knew that they had brought a pathetically deformed creature into a hostile universe and left it to fend for itself against odds that were hopeless, and they returned and saw what that creature had become--a proud and triumphant conqueror that laughs its defiance at anything the universe cares to throw at it. That is why they are gone. They believe that they owe it to Man to leave him free to perfect the world that he has built for himself in whatever way he chooses. They know what we were and they see what we have made of ourselves since. They feel that we have suffered enough interference in the past and have shown ourselves to be the better managers of our own destiny."
Danchekker tossed the pen aside, gazed up and concluded:
"And somehow, Vic, I don't think that we will let them down. The worst is over now."
Epilogue
The signal transmitted by the huge radio dish at the observatory on Lunar Farside streaked outward from the fringe of the Solar System and into the vast gulfs of empty space beyond. Its whisper brushed the sensors of a sentinel that had been maintaining an unbroken vigil for a long, long time. The circuits inside the robot understood and responded to the Ganymean code that had been used to assemble the signal.
Other equipment inside the robot transformed the signal into vibrations of forces and field
s that obeyed laws of physics unknown to Man, and dispatched it into a realm of existence of which the universe of space and time were mere shadowy projections. In another part of the shadow universe, on a warm, bright planet that orbited a cheerful star, other machines received and interpreted the message.
The builders of the machines were informed and were at once filled with wonder at the things that were reported to them.
The sentinel extracted their reply from the superstructure of space, transformed it back into electromagnetic waves, and beamed it back toward the satellite of the third planet from the Sun.
The astronomers at the Lunar Farside observatory were completely at a loss to explain the information coming from the instruments connected to their receivers; there was nothing within light-years of them from which a reply could have been evoked, but a reply was coming in hours after they had commenced transmitting. The officials at UNSA were equally bemused and time went by while scientists used the information that had been transferred from ZORAC's data banks to translate the message from Ganymean communications code into the Ganymean language. But still it meant nothing to anybody.
Then somebody thought of involving Dr. Victor Hunt of Navcomms Division. Hunt immediately remembered Don Maddson's study of the Ganymean language and sent the text down to Linguistics to see what they could make of it. Forty-eight hours passed by while Maddson and his assistant worked. The task was not one that they had practiced and, without ZORAC on tap to guide them, not one that could be accomplished readily. But the message was concise and eventually a red-eyed but triumphant Maddson presented Hunt with a single sheet of paper on which was typed:
The Gentle Giants of Ganymede g-2 Page 24