navigation than it had with communication. The down-turned corners
of Caidwell's mouth shifted back slightly in something that almost
approached a smile of anticipation. So, the knives were being
sharpened, were they? That was okay by him; he could do with a
fight. After more than twenty years of hustling his way to the top
of one of the biggest divisions of the Space Arm, he was a seasoned
veteran at infighting-and he hadn't lost a drop of blood yet. Maybe
this was an area in which Navcomms hadn't had much involvement
before; maybe the whole thing was bigger than Navcomms could
handle; maybe it was bigger than UNSA could handle; but- that was
the way it was. It had chosen to fall into Navcomms' lap and that
was where it was going to stay. If anyone wanted to help out, that
was fine-but the project was stamped as Navcomms-controlled. If
they didn't like it, let them try to change it. Man-let 'em try!
His thoughts were interrupted by the chime of the console built
into the desk behind him. He turned around, flipped a switch, and
answered in a voice of baritone granite:
"Caldwell."
Lyn Garland, his personal assistant, greeted him from the screen.
She was twenty-eight, pretty, and had long red hair and big, brown,
intelligent eyes.
"Message from Reception. Your two visitors from IDCC are here-Dr.
Hunt and Mr. Gray."
"Bring them straight up. Pour some coffee. You'd better sit in with
us."
"Will do."
Ten minutes later formalities had been exchanged and everyone was
seated. Caidwell regarded the Englishmen in silence for a few
seconds, his lips pursed and his bushy brows gnarled in a knot
across his forehead. He leaned forward and interlaced his fingers
on the desk in front of him.
"About three weeks ago I attended a meeting at one of our Lunar
survey bases-Copernicus Three," he said. "A lot of excavation and
site-survey work is going on in that area, much of it in connection
with new construction programs. The meeting was attended by
scientists from Earth and from some of the bases up there, a few
people on the engineering side and certain members of the uniformed
branches of the Space Arm. It was called following some strange
discoveries there-discoveries that make even less sense now than
they did then."
He paused to gaze from one to the other. Hunt and Gray returned the
look without speaking. Caldwell continued: "A team from one of the
survey units was engaged in mapping out possible sites for
clearance radars. They were operating in a remote sector, well away
from the main area being leveled. .
As he spoke, Caidwell began operating the keyboard recessed into
one side of his desk. With a nod of his head he indicated the far
wall, which was made up of a battery of display screens. One of the
screens came to life to show the title sheet of a file, marked
obliquely with the word RESTRICTED in red. This disappeared to be
replaced by a contour map of what looked like a rugged and broken
stretch of terrain. A slowly pulsing point of light appeared in the
center of the picture and began moving across the map as Caldwell
rotated a tracker ball set into the panel that held the keyboard.
The light halted at a point where the contours indicated the
junction of a steep-sided cleft valley with a wider gorge. The
cleft valley was narrow and seemed to branch off from the gorge in
a rising curve.
"This map shows the area in question," the director resumed. "The
cursor shows where a minor cleft joins the main fault running down
toward the left. The survey boys left their vehicle at this point
and proceeded on up to the cleft on foot, looking for a way to the
top of that large rock mass-the one tagged 'five sixty." As
Caidwell spoke, the pulsing light moved slowly along between the
minor sets of contours, tracing out the path taken by the UN team.
They watched it negotiate the bend above the mouth of the cleft and
proceed some distance farther. The light approached the side of the
cleft and touched it at a place where the contours merged into a
single heavy line. There it stopped.
"Here the side was a sheer cliff about sixty feet high. That was
where they came across the first thing that was unusual-a hole in
the base of the rock wall. The sergeant leading the group described
it as being like a cave. That strike you as odd?"
Hunt raised his eyebrows and shrugged. "Caves don't grow on moons,"
he said simply.
"Exactly."
The screen now showed a photo view of the area, apparently taken
from the spot at which the survey vehicle had been parked. They
recognized the break in the wall of the gorge where the cleft
joined it. The cleft was higher up than had been obvious from the
map and was approached by a ramp of loose rubble. In the background
they could see a squat tower of rock flattened on top- presumably
the one marked "560" on the map. Caldwell allowed them some time to
reconcile the picture with the map before bringing up the second
frame. It showed a view taken high up, this time looking into the
mouth of the cleft. A series of shots then followed, progressing up
to and beyond the bend. "These are stills from a movie record,"
Caidwell commented. "I won't bother with the whole set." The final
frame in the sequence showed a hole in the rock about five feet
across.
"Holes like this aren't unknown on the Moon," CaIdwell remarked.
"But they are rare enough to prompt our men into taking a closer
look. The inside was a bit of a mess. There had been a
rockfall-maybe several falls; not much room-just a heap of rubble
and dust . . . at first sight, anyway." A new picture on the screen
confirmed this statement. "But when they got to probing
around a bit more, they came across something that was really
unusual. Underneath they found a body-dead!"
The picture changed again to show another view of the interior,
taken from the same angie as the previous one. This time, however,
the subject was the top half of a human figure lying amid the
rubble and debris, apparently at the stage of being half uncovered.
It was clad in a spacesuit which, under the layer of gray-white
dust, appeared to be bright red. The helmet seemed intact, but it
was impossible to make out any details of the face behind the visor
because of the reflected camera light. Caldwell allowed them plenty
of time to study the picture and reflect on these facts before
speaking again.
"That is the body. I'll answer some of the more obvious questions
before you ask. First-no, we don't know who he is-or was- so we
call him Charlie. Second-no, we don't know for sure what killed
him. Third-no, we don't know where he came from." The executive
director caught the puzzled look on Hunt's face and raised his
eyebrows inquiringly.
"Accidents can happen, and it's not always easy to say what caused
them-I'll buy that," Hunt said. "But to not know who he
is. . . ? I
mean, he must have carried some kind of ID card; I'd have thought
he'd have to. And even if he didn't, he must be from one of the UN
bases up there. Someone must have noticed he was missing."
For the first time the flicker of a smile brushed across Caldwell's
face.
"Of course we checked with all the bases, Dr. Hunt. Results
negative. But that was just the beginning. You see, when they got
him back to the labs for a more thorough check, a number of
peculiarities began to emerge which the experts couldn't explain-
and, believe me, we've had enough brains in on this. Even after we
brought him back here, the situation didn't get any better. In
fact, the more we find out, the worse it gets."
"'Back here'? You mean. . .
"Oh, yes. Charlie's been shipped back to Earth. He's over at the
Westwood Biological Institute right now-a few miles from here.
We'll go and have a look at him later on today."
Silence reigned for what seemed like a long time as Hunt and Gray
digested the rapid succession of new facts. At last Gray offered:
~~ayoe someoociy oumpea mm on tor some reasonr~
"No, Mr. Gray, you can forget anything like that." Caldwell waited
a few more seconds. "Let me say that from what little we do know so
far, we can state one or two things with certainty. First, Charlie
did not come from any of the bases established to date on Luna.
Furthermore"-Caldwell's voice slowed to an ominous rumble-"he did
not originate from any nation of the world as we know it today. In
fact, it is by no means certain that he originated from this planet
at all!"
His eyes traveled from Hunt to Gray, then back again, taking in the
incredulous stares that greeted his words. Absolute silence
enveloped the room. A suspense almost audible tore at their nerves.
Caldwell's finger stabbed at the keyboard.
The face leaped out at them from the screen in grotesque closeup,
skull-like, the skin shriveled and darkened like ancient parchment,
and stretched back over the bones to uncover two rows of grinning
teeth. Nothing remained of the eyes but a pair of empty pits,
staring sightlessly out through dry, leathery lids.
Caldwell's voice, now a chilling whisper, hissed through the
fragile air.
"You see, gentlemen-Charlie died over fifty thousand years ago!"
chapter six
Dr. Victor Hunt stared absently down at the bird's-eye view of the
outskirts of Houston sliding by below the UNSA jet. The
mind-numbing impact of Caidwell's revelations had by this time
abated sufficiently for him to begin putting together in his mind
something of a picture of what it all meant.
Of Charlie's age there could be no doubt. All living organisms take
into their bodies known proportions of the radioactive isotopes of
carbon and certain other elements. During life, an organism
maintains a constant ratio of these isotopes to "normal" ones, but
when it dies and intake ceases, the active isotopes are left to
decay in a predictable pattern. This mechanism provides, in effect,
a highly reliable clock, which begins to run at the moment of
death. Analysis of the decay residues enables a reliable figure to
be calculated for how long the clock has been running. Many such
tests had been performed on Charlie, and all the results agreed
within close limits.
Somebody had pointed out that the validity of this method rested on
the assumptions that the composition of whatever Charlie ate, and
the constituents of whatever atmosphere he breathed, were the same
as for modern man on modern Earth. Since Charlie might not be from
Earth, this assumption could not be made. It hadn't taken long,
however, for this point to be settled conclusively. Although the
functions of most of the devices contained in Charlie's backpack
were still to be established, one assembly had been identified as
an ingeniously constructed miniature nuclear power plant. The U235
fuel pellets were easily located and analysis of their decay
products yielded a second, independent answer, although a less
accurate one: The power unit in Charlie's backpack had been made
some fifty thousand years previously. The further implication of
this was that since the first set of test results was thus
substantiated, it seemed to follow that in terms of air and food
supply, there could have been little abnormal about Charlie's
native environment.
Now, Charlie's kind, Hunt told himself, must have evolved to their
human form somewhere. That this "somewhere" was either Earth or not
Earth was fairly obvious, the rules of basic logic admitting no
other possibility. He traced back over what he could recall of the
conventional account of the evolution of terrestrial life forms and
wondered if, despite the generations of painstaking effort and
research that had been devoted to the subject, there might after
all be more to the story than had up until then been so confidently
supposed. Several thousands of millions of years was a long time by
anybody's standards; was it so totally inconceivable that somewhere
in all those gulfs of uncertainty, there could be enough room to
lose an advanced line of human descent which had flourished and
died out long before modem man began his own ascent?
On the other hand, the fact that Charlie was found on the Moon
presupposed a civilization sufficiently advanced technically to
send him there. Surely, on the way toward developing space flight,
they would have evolved a worldwide technological society, and in
doing so would have made machines, erected structures, built
cities, used metals, and left all the other hallmarks of progress.
If such a civilization had once existed on Earth, surely centuries
of exploration and excavation couldn't have avoided stumbling on at
least some traces of it. But not one instance of any such discovery
had ever been recorded. Although the conclusion rested squarely on
negative evidence, Hunt could not, even with his tendency toward
open-mindedness, accept that an explanation along these lines was
even remotely probable.
The only alternative, then, was that Charlie came from somewhere
else. Clearly this could not be the Moon itself: It was too small
to have retained an atmosphere anywhere near long enough for life
to have started at all, let alone reach an advanced level- and of
course, his spacesuit showed he was just as much an alien there as
was man.
That only left some other planet. The problem here lay in Charlie's
undoubted human form, which Caldwell had stressed although he
hadn't elected to go into detail. Hunt knew that the process of
natural evolution was accepted as occurring through selection, over
a long period, from a purely random series of genetic mutations.
All the established rules and principles dictated that the
appearance of two identical end products from two completely
isolated families of evolution, unfolding independently in
different corners of the unive
rse, just couldn't happen. Hence, if
Charlie came from somewhere else, a whole branch of accepted
scientific theory would come crashing down in ruins. So-Charlie
couldn't possibly have come from Earth. Neither could he possibly
have come from anywhere else. Therefore, Charlie couldn't exist.
But he did.
Hunt whistled silently to himself as the full implications of the
thing began to dawn on him. There was enough here to keep the whole
scientific world arguing for decades.
Inside the Westwood Biological Institute, Caldwell, Lyn Garland,
Hunt, and Gray were met by a Professor Christian Danchekker. The
Englishmen recognized him, since Caldwell had introduced them
earlier by vi-phone. On their way to the laboratory section of the
institute, Danchekker briefed them further.
In view of its age, the body was in an excellent state of
preservation. This was due to the environment in which it had been
found
-a germ-free hard vacuum and an abnormally low temperature
sustained, even at Lunar noon, by the insulating mass of the
surrounding rock. These conditions had prevented any onset of
bacterial decay of the soft tissues. No rupture had been found in
the spacesuit. So the currently favored theory regarding cause of
death was that a failure in the life-support system had resulted in
a sudden fall in temperature. The body had undergone deep freezing
in a short space of time with a consequent abrupt cessation of
metabolic processes; ice crystals, formed from body fluids, had
caused widespread laceration of cell membranes. In the course of
time most of the lighter substances had sublimed, mainly from the
outer layers, to leave behind a blackened, shriveled, natural kind
of mummy. The most seriously affected parts were the eyes, which,
composed for the most part of fluids, had collapsed completely,
leaving just a few flaky remnants in their sockets.
A major problem was the extreme fragility of the remains, which
made any attempt at detailed examination next to impossible.
Already the body had undergone some irreparable damage in the
course of being transported to Earth and in the removal of the
spacesuit; only the body's being frozen solid during these
operations had prevented the situation from being even worse. That
was when somebody had thought of Felix Borlan at IDCC and an in-
Giant Series 01 - Inherit the Stars Page 4