Before either of the others could reply, visar informed them, "Frenua Showm will join you now."
"We don't need the view anymore," Calazar said. The image of Queeth vanished, and a second or two later Showm was standing by Calazar.
"I don't like it," she said frankly. "The Terrans will want a confrontation with the Jevlenese, and that would mean all kinds of problems. The whole situation is complicated enough as it is."
"But we did set the Jevlenese up to handle the surveillance of Earth," Calazar pointed out. "Why shouldn't we expect to accept the consequences?"
"We didn't set them up," Showm said. "They argued and pressed demands until the Thurien administration of the time conceded. They practically took it over." She shook her head apprehensively. "And the idea of the Terrans getting involved in our investigations makes me nervous. I don't like the thought of them gaining access to Thurien-level technology. Remember what happened to the Lunarians. And look at what the Jevlenese have been doing since they acquired their own version of visar. It's simply a fact with all their kind—if they get their hands on advanced technology, they abuse it." She glanced at Garuth and Shilohin and then looked back at Calazar. "Our concern was for the Shapieron. It is now safely at Thurien. If the rest were up to me alone, I'd break off contact with Earth now and leave them out of it completely while we straighten out the situation with the Jevlenese. We don't need Terrans. They've served their purpose."
"I must protest!" Garuth exclaimed. "We regard them as close friends. If it hadn't been for their help, we would never have reached Thurien at all. We cannot simply disregard them. It would be an insult to every Ganymean on the Shapieron."
Before Calazar could reply, visar interrupted with another announcement. "Excuse me again, but Porthik Eesyan is asking to join you. He says it's urgent."
"Well, we're not going to resolve this in minutes," Calazar said. "Very well, visar. We will receive him."
Eesyan materialized at once. "I've just left Hunt and Danchekker at Thurien," he said. The Thuriens took visar so much for granted that they never bothered with preliminaries. "I was half expecting it—they've found out about the Jevlenese. They're demanding to talk to us all about them."
Calazar stared at him in astonishment. The others looked equally taken aback. "How?" Calazar asked. "How could they? visar has been censoring all references to them from the datastream beamed to Earth. They couldn't have witnessed one scene with a single Jevlenese in it."
"They've deduced that humans are here," Eesyan replied, modifying his previous statement. "They've worked out that the surveillance has to have been run by humans. We'll have to do something. I don't think I can stall them much longer—especially Danchekker."
Garuth turned toward Calazar and Showm, at the same time spreading his hands wide. "I hate to say I told you so, but it is as I said—you can't keep secrets from Terrans. Now you've got to talk to them." Calazar looked inquiringly at Showm.
Showm searched her mind for an alternative but couldn't find one. "Very well," she agreed wearily. "If it must be. Let's bring them here while we're together and tell them the facts."
"What about Karen Heller, visar?" Calazar asked. "Is she coupled into the system at this moment too?"
"She's at Thurien examining surveillance reports from earlier years," visar replied.
"In that case invite her to join us," Calazar instructed. "Then bring them all here as soon as they're ready."
"One second." A short pause followed. Then, "She's just finishing hardcopying some notes through to McClusky. She'll be here in half a minute." Simultaneously Hunt and Danchekker materialized in the middle of the floor.
"I still say I'll never get used to this," Garuth muttered to Shilohin.
Chapter Twenty
"We have conducted surveillance of Earth since the beginning of human civilization," Calazar declared. "For most of that time the operation has been entrusted to a race within our society known as the Jevlenese, which until now we have not brought to your attention. As you appear to have deduced for yourselves already, the Jevlenese are fully human in form."
"Homo sapiens are somewhat . . . volatile," Frenua Showm added, as if feeling that some additional explanation was called for. "Humans possess an intense instinct for rivalry. We felt that the issue was potentially sensitive. It could always be revealed tomorrow, but never unsaid again once said today."
"You see," Danchekker pronounced, looking toward Hunt with some evident satisfaction from where he was standing on the far side of Karen Heller. "As I maintained—an independent hominid line descended from ancestral primates taken to Thurien at the time of the migration from Minerva."
"Er . . . no," Calazar said apologetically.
Danchekker blinked and stared at the alien as if he had just uttered a blasphemy. "I beg your pardon."
"The Jevlenese are far more closely related to Homo sapiens than that. In fact they are descended from the same Lunarian ancestors as yourselves—of fifty thousand years ago." Calazar glanced anxiously at Showm, then looked back at the Terrans to await their reactions. Garuth and Shilohin waited in silence; they knew the whole story already.
Hunt and Danchekker looked at each other, equally confused, and then at the Ganymeans again. The Lunarian survivors had reached Earth from the Moon; how could any of them have got to Thurien? The only possible way was if the Thuriens had taken them there. But where could the Thuriens have taken them from? There couldn't have been any survivors on Minerva itself. All of a sudden so many questions began boiling inside Hunt's head that he didn't know where to begin. Danchekker seemed to be having the same problem.
Eventually Karen Heller said, "Let's go back to the start of it all and check some of the basics." She was still looking at Calazar and directing her words to him. "We've been assuming that the Lunarians evolved on Minerva from terrestrial ancestors that you left behind when you went to Thurien. Is that correct, or have you been leaving out something?"
"No, that is correct," Calazar replied. "And by fifty thousand years ago they had developed to the level of a fairly advanced technological civilization very much as you supposed. Up to that point all was as you reconstructed."
"That's good to know, anyhow." Heller nodded and sounded relieved. "So why don't you take the story from there and fill in what happened after that, in the order it happened," she suggested. "That'll save a lot of questions."
"A good idea," Calazar agreed. He paused to collect his thoughts, then looked from side to side to address all three of them, and went on, "When the Ganymeans migrated to Thurien, they left behind an observation system to monitor developments on Minerva. At that time they did not possess the sophisticated communications that we have today, so the information they received was somewhat sporadic and incomplete. But it was enough to give a reasonably complete account of what took place. Perhaps you would like to see Minerva as captured by the sensors operating at that time." He gave an instruction to visar, moved back a few paces, and looked expectantly at the center of the floor. A large image appeared, looking solid and real enough to touch. It was an image of a planet.
Hunt knew every coastal outline and surface feature of Minerva by heart. One of the most memorable discoveries of recent years—in fact the one that had started off the investigations which had culminated in proof of Minerva's and the Ganymeans' existence even before the Shapieron appeared—had been that of "Charlie," a space suit-clad Lunarian corpse uncovered in the course of excavations on the Moon. From maps found on Charlie, the researchers at Navcomms had been able to reconstruct a six-foot-diameter model of the planet. But the image that Hunt was examining now did not exhibit the enormous ice caps and narrow equatorial belt that Hunt remembered from the model. The two land masses were there, though changed appreciably in outline, but as parts of a more extensive system of continents that stretched north and south to ice caps much smaller—not much larger than those of contemporary Earth. For this was not the Minerva of the Lunarians of fifty thousand years back
; it was the Minerva of twenty-five million years before the Lunarians existed. And it was captured live, as it had been; it was no mere model reconstructed from maps. Hunt looked around at Danchekker, but the professor was too spellbound to respond.
For the next ten minutes they watched and listened as Calazar replayed a series of close-ups captured from orbit that showed the imported terrestrial animal species evolving and spreading, extinguishing the native Minervan forms, adapting and radiating at the rate of over two million years per minute, until eventually the first social man-apes emerged from a line that had begun with an artificially modified type of the originally imported primates.
The pattern was very much as had been conjectured for many years on Earth, except that until 2028 it had all been assumed to have taken place on the wrong planet, or at least the fossils discovered from the pre-fifty-thousand-less-a-bit years B.C. period had been attributed to the wrong hominid family. But there was a completely unexpected phase that had never appeared in the story put together by the anthropologists on Earth: early in the man-ape era, the species had returned for a period to a semiaquatic environment, mainly as a consequence of not being equipped physically to deal with predators on land. Thus they had commenced the path that whales and other aquatic mammals had taken, but they reversed it and came out of the water again when their increasing intelligence provided them with other means of protecting themselves, which happened before any significant physical adaptations had developed. This phase accounted for their upright posture, loss of body hair, rudimentary webbing between thumb and index finger, the salt-excreting function of their tear ducts, and several other peculiarities that experts on Earth had been arguing about for years. Danchekker would have spent the rest of the week talking about that alone, but Hunt persuaded him to take it up again with Eesyan at some other time.
After that came the discovery of tools and fire, tribalization, and the sequence of evolving social order that led from primitive hunter-gatherer economies through agriculture and city-building to the discovery of the sciences and the beginnings of industrialization. And there was something about this part of their history too that set them apart from terrestrial humans in Hunt's eyes: the practical and realistic approach that the Lunarians had adopted to everything they did. They had exploited their resources and talents efficiently, without drifting off into fruitless reliance on superstitions and magic to solve their problems as had so many millennia of Earth people. For the early hunters, better weapons and greater skill decided success, not the whims of imaginary gods who needed to be placated. For the crop growers, better knowledge of plants, the land, and the elements improved yields; rituals and incantations did not, and were soon abandoned. And not very long afterward it was measurement, observation, and the powers of reason that uncovered the laws governing the universe and opened up new horizons for the harnessing of energy and the creation of wealth. As a result the Lunarian sciences and industries had mushroomed almost overnight in comparison with the halting, faltering groping toward enlightenment that had come later when the same general pattern repeated itself on Earth.
The scientists on Earth who had recovered the information on the Lunarians had pictured them as an incurably aggressive and warlike breed whose discoveries of advanced technology had inevitably spelled their eventual self-destruction. Hunt and the others now learned that this picture was not really accurate. There had been some feuding and fighting in the earlier periods of Lunarian history, it was true, but by the time of the early industrial period such things had become rare. A greater common cause had united the Minervan nations. Their scientists recognized the deteriorating conditions that were descending with the coming Ice Age, and the whole race embarked on a feverish development of the sciences that would enable them to move to a warmer planet in the centuries ahead. The astronomers of the time singled out Mars and Earth as the most promising candidates. The stakes were survival, and there were no resources to be squandered on internal conflicts, until . . .
About two hundred years before the final, catastrophic war, something happened to change all that. Calazar explained, "It could have been a result of extreme genetic instabilities still inherent in the race. At about the time they had learned to harness steam and were just beginning to explore electricity, a superbreed of Lunarians appeared quite suddenly and advanced a quantum leap ahead of anything else in existence anywhere on the planet. Exactly where or when they appeared we don't know. Numerically they were few to begin with, but they spread and consolidated rapidly."
"Was that when the planet started to polarize?" Heller asked.
"Yes," Calazar replied. "The superbreed became the Lambians. They were totally ruthless. They militarized and formed a totalitarian regime that imposed itself by force on a large portion of the planet before the other nations could muster the strength to resist. Their aim was to gain control of Minerva's industrial and technical capabilities totally and exclusively to guarantee their own move to Earth, which meant taking over the nations that had been pursuing that goal collectively. Submission would have meant extinction. The other nations had no choice but to unite, arm, and defend their security. They became the Cerians. The course was set irrevocably toward a struggle to the death between the two factions."
Hunt watched more scenes showing the gradual transformation of Minerva into one enormous military and manufacturing machine dedicated to preparations for war. The tragedy of what had happened appalled him. There had been no need for it. More effort had gone into armaments than would have been needed to move the whole Lunarian race to Earth twice over. If the Lambians hadn't appeared on the scene when they did, the people on Minerva would have done it. After millennia they had gotten to within two hundred years of achieving the goal that would have saved them from extinction and preserved their civilization, and then they had thrown it all away.
visar began showing scenes from the war itself. A world quaked under the shocks of miles-high fireballs that vaporized cities; oceans boiled, and forests flared into carpets of sterile ash writhing and twisting in an atmosphere in turmoil. Then blankets of smoke and dust blotted out the surface and turned the planet into a murky ball of black and brown. Spots of red and slowly pulsating yellow appeared, isolated and glowing dimly at first, but becoming brighter and spreading, then merging as continents ruptured and the planet's interior exploded through and hurled fragments of crust into the void. The asteroids were being born, and what would eventually become Pluto was being carved into a tombstone for a whole race, destined to drift forever far from the Sun. Although Garuth and Shilohin had watched these scenes before, they became very quiet; they alone among all those present had known Minerva as home.
Calazar waited a while for the mood to lighten, then resumed, "The Ganymeans had long been troubled by their consciences over their genetic interference with the early Lunarian ancestors. Therefore their policy toward Minerva had been one of nonintervention in its affairs. You've just seen the result of that. After the calamity a few survivors were left stranded on the Moon with no hope of survival. By that time Thurien had perfected the black-hole technology that made instant communications and transfers of objects possible, so the Ganymeans were aware of events in real time, and they were in a position to intervene. After witnessing the results of their policy, they could not simply stand aside and allow the survivors to perish. Accordingly, they organized a rescue mission and sent several large vessels to the close vicinity of Luna and Minerva."
It took Hunt a few seconds to see the implications of what Calazar had just said. He stared at the Ganymeans in sudden surprise. "Not outside the Solar System?" he queried. "I thought you said you didn't establish large toroids inside planetary systems."
"It was an emergency," Calazar replied. "The Ganymeans decided to forget their rules for once. They didn't have any time to spare."
Hunt's eyes opened wider as the implication hit him: that was how Pluto had gotten to where it was! And that was what had broken the gravitational coupli
ng between Minerva and its moon. One simple statement had put half his people at Navcomms out of business.
"So the Lunarian ancestors of the human race never came to Earth with the Moon at all," Karen Heller said. "They were taken here—by the Ganymeans. The Moon only showed up later."
"Yes," Calazar replied simply.
That answered another mystery. All the math models of the process had required a long transit time for the Moon to get from Minerva to the orbit of Earth. A lot of doubt had been expressed that a handful of Lunarian survivors could have lasted for any length of time at all, let alone with the resources necessary to reach Earth. But with Ganymean intervention added into the equation, all that changed. With some Ganymean help that handful would have established a secure settlement for themselves and been able to make a viable start at rebuilding their culture. So why had they plunged back into a barbarism that had taken tens of thousands of years to recover from? The only answer could be the upheavals caused by Luna being captured later. The truth was so ironic, Hunt thought: if they hadn't been stabbed in the back by their own Moon, they could have been back into space by 45,000 B.C., if not sooner.
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