Giant Series 01 - Inherit the Stars

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by Inherit the Stars [lit]


  documents, or date stamps on pieces of clothing or other equipment.

  Also, you might be able to find some independent way of arriving at

  the number of days in the year; if it turned out to be seventeen

  hundred, that would be quite a coincidence, wouldn't it?"

  "Anything else?" Caldwell asked.

  "Yes. Computer correlation analysis of this number pattern may show

  hidden superposed periodicities; for all we know, there could have

  been more than one moon. Also, it should be possible to compute

  families of curves giving possible relationships between

  planet-to-satellite mass ratios against mean orbital radii. Later

  on you might know enough more to be able to isolate one of the

  curves. It might describe the Earth-Luna system; then again, it

  might not."

  "Preposterous!" Danchekker exploded.

  "Unbiased?" Hunt suggested.

  "There is something else that may be worth trying," Schorn

  interrupted. "Your calendar, if that's what it is, has so far been

  described in relative terms only-days per month, months per year,

  and so on. There is nothing that gives us any absolute values. Now

  -and this is a long shot-from detailed chemical analysis we are

  making some progress in building a quantitative model of Charlie's

  cell-metabolism cycles and enzyme processes. We may be able to

  calculate the rate of accumulation of waste materials and

  toxins in the blood and tissues, and from these results form an

  estimate of his natural periods of sleep and wakefulness. If, in

  this way, I could provide a figure for the length tf the day, the

  other quantities would follow immediately."

  "If we knew that, then we'd know the planet's orbital period," said

  somebody else. "But could we get an estimate of its mass?"

  "One way might be by doing a structural analysis of Charlie's bone

  and muscle formations and then working out the power- weight

  ratios," another chipped in.

  "That would give us the planet's mean distance from its sun," said

  a third.

  "Only if it was like our Sun."

  "You could get a check on the planet's mass from the glass and

  other crystalline materials in his equipment. From the crystal

  structure, we should be able to figure out the strength of the

  gravitational field they cooled in."

  "How could we get a figure for density?"

  "You still need to know the planetary radius."

  "He's like us, so the surface gravity will be Earthlike."

  "Very probable, but let's prove it."

  "Prove that's a calendar first."

  Remarks began pouring in from all sides. Hunt reflected with some

  satisfaction that at least he had managed to inject some spirit and

  enthusiasm into the proceedings.

  Danchekker remained unimpressed. As the noise abated, he rose again

  to his feet and pointed pityingly to the single sheet of paper,

  still lying in the center of the table.

  "All balderdash!" he spat. "There is the sum total of your

  evidence. There"-he slid his voluminous ifie, bulging with notes

  and papers, across beside it-"is mine, backed by libraries, data

  banks, and archives the world over. Charlie comes from Earth!"

  "Where's his civilization, then?" Hunt demanded. "Removed in an

  enormous celestial garbage truck?"

  Laughter from around the table greeted the return of Danchekker's

  own gibe. The professor darkened and seemed about to say something

  obscene. Caldwell held up a restraining hand, but Schorn saved the

  situation by interrupting in his calm, unruffled tone. "It would

  seem, ladies and gentlemen, that for the moment we must compromise

  by agreeing to a purely hypothetical situation. To keep Professor

  Danchekker happy, we must accept that

  the Lunarians evolved from the same ancestors as ourselves. To keep

  Dr. Hunt happy, we must assume they did it somewhere else. How we

  are to reconcile these two irreconcilables, I would not for one

  moment attempt to predict."

  chapter nine

  Hunt saw less and less of the Trimagniscope during the weeks that

  followed the progress meeting. Caldwell seemed to go out of his way

  to encourage the Englishman to visit the various UNSA labs and

  establishments nearby, to "see what's going on first-hand," or the

  offices in Navcomms HQ to "meet someone you might find

  interesting." Hunt was naturally curious about the Lunarian

  investigations, so these developments suited him admirably. Soon he

  was on familiar terms with most of the engineers and scientists

  involved, at least in the Houston vicinity, and he had a good idea

  of how their work was progressing and what difficulties they were

  encountering. He eventually acquired a broad overview of the

  activity on all fronts and found that, at least at the general

  level, the awareness of the whole picture that he was developing

  was shared by only a few privileged individuals within the

  organization.

  Things were progressing in a number of directions. Calculations of

  structural efficiency, based on measurements of Charlie's skeleton

  and the bulk supported by it, had given a figure for the surface

  gravity of his home planet, which agreed within acceptable margins

  of error with figures deduced separately from tests performed on

  the crystals of his helmet visor and other components formed from a

  molten state. The gravity field at the surface of Charlie's home

  planet seemed to have been not much different from that of Earth;

  possibly it was slightly stronger. These results were accepted as

  being no more than rough approximations. Besides, nobody knew how

  typical Charlie's physical build had been of that of the Lunarians

  in general, so there was no firm indication of whether the planet

  in question had been Earth or somewhere else. The issue was still

  wide open.

  On equipment tags, document headings, and appended to certain

  notes, the Linguistics section had found examples of Lunarian words

  which matched exactly some of the labels on the calendar, just as

  Hunt had suggested they might. While this proved nothing, it

  did add further plausibility to the idea that these words indicated

  dates of some kind.

  Then something else that seemed to connect with the calendar

  appeared from a totally unexpected direction. Site-preparation work

  in progress near Lunar Tycho Base Three turned up fragments of

  metal fabrications and structures. They looked like the ruins of

  some kind of installation. The more thorough probe that followed

  yielded no fewer than fourteen more bodies, or more accurately,

  bits of bodies from which at least fourteen individuals of both

  sexes could be identified. Clearly, none of the bodies was in

  anything approaching the condition of Charlie's. They had all been

  literally blown to pieces. The remains comprised little more than

  splinters of charred bone scattered among scorched tatters of

  spacesuits. Apart from suggesting that besides being physically the

  same as humans, the Lunarians had been every bit as accident-prone,

  these discoveries provided no new informatio
n-until the discovery

  of the wrist unit. About the size of a large cigarette pack, not

  including the wrist bracelet, the device carried on its upper face

  four windows that looked like miniature electronic displays. From

  their size and shape, the windows seemed to have been intended to

  display character data rather than pictures, and the device was

  thought to be a chronometer or a computing-calculating aid; maybe

  it was both-and other things besides. After a perfunctory

  examination at Tycho Three the unit had been shipped to Earth along

  with some other items. It eventually found its way to the Navcomms

  laboratories near Houston, where the gadgets from Charlie's

  backpack were being studied. After some preliminary experimenting

  the casing was safely removed, but detailed inspection of the

  complex molecular circuits inside revealed nothing particularly

  meaningful. Having no better ideas, the Navcomms engineers resorted

  to applying low voltages to random points to see what happened.

  Sure enough, when particular sequences of binary patterns were

  injected into one row of contacts, an assortment of Lunarian

  symbols appeared across the windows. This left nobody any the wiser

  until Hunt, who happened to be visiting the lab, recognized one

  sequence of alphabetic sets as the months that appeared on the

  calendar. Hence, at least one of the functions performed by the

  wrist unit seemed closely related to the table in the diary.

  Whether or not this had anything to do with

  recording the passage of time remained to be seen, but at least odd

  things looked as if they were beginning to tie up.

  The Linguistics section was making steady if less spectacular

  progress toward cracking the language. Many of the world's most

  prominent experts were getting involved, some choosing to move to

  Houston, while others worked via remote data links. As the first

  phase of their assault, they amassed volumes of statistics on word

  and character distributions and matchings, and produced reams of

  tables and charts that looked as meaningless to everybody else as

  the language itself. After that it was largely a matter of

  intuition and guessing games played on computer display screens.

  Every now and again somebody spotted a more meaningful pattern,

  which led to a better guess, which led to a still more meaningful

  pattern-and so on. They produced lists of words in categories

  believed to correspond to nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs,

  and later on added adjectival and adverbial phrases-fairly basic

  requirements for any advanced inflecting language. They began to

  develop a feel for the rules for deriving variants, such as plurals

  and verb tenses, from common roots, and for the conventions that

  governed the formation of word sequences. An appreciation of the

  rudiments of Lunarian grammar was emerging from all this, and the

  experts in Linguistics faced the future with optimism, suddenly

  confident that they were approaching the point where they would

  begin attempting to match the first English equivalents to selected

  samples.

  The Mathematics section, organized on lines similar to Linguistics,

  was also finding things that were interesting. Part of the diary

  was made up of many pages of numeric and tabular material-

  suggesting, perhaps, a reference section of Useful Information. One

  of the pages was divided vertically, columns of numbers alternating

  with columns of words. A researcher noticed that one of the

  numbers, when converted to decimal, came out to 1836-the

  proton-electron mass ratio, a fundamental physical constant that

  would be the same anywhere in the Universe. It was suggested that

  the page might be a listing of equivalent Lunarian units of mass,

  similar to equivalence tables used for converting ounces to grams,

  grams to pounds. . . and so on. If so, they had stumbled on a

  complete record of the Lunarian system of measuring mass. The

  problem was that the whole supposition rested on the slender

  assumption that the figure 1836 did, in fact, denote the pro-

  ton-electron mass ratio and was not merely a coincidental reference

  to something completely different. They needed a second source of

  information to check it against.

  When Hunt talked to the mathematicians one afternoon, he was

  surprised to learn that they were unaware that the chemists and

  anatomists in other departments had computed estimates of surface

  gravity. As soon as he mentioned the fact, everybody saw the

  significance at once. If the Lunarians had adopted the practice

  that was common on Earth-using the same units to express mass and

  weight on their own planet-then the numbers in the table gave

  Lunarian weights. Furthermore, there was available to them at least

  one object whose weight they could estimate accurately:

  Charlie himself. Thus, since they already had an estimate of

  surface gravity, they could easily approximate how much Charlie

  would have weighed in kilograms back home. Only one piece of

  information was missing for a solution to the whole problem: a

  factor to convert kilograms to Lunarian weight units. Then Hunt

  speculated that there could well be among Charlie's personal

  documents an identity card, a medical card-something that recorded

  his weight in his own units. If so, that one number would tell them

  all they needed to know. The discussion ended abruptly, with the

  head of the Mathematics section departing in great haste and a

  state of considerable excitement to talk to the head of the

  Linguistics section. Linguistics agreed to make a special note if

  anything like that turned up. So far nothing had.

  Another small group, tucked away in offices in the top of the

  Navcomms HQ building, was working on what was perhaps the most

  exciting discovery to come out of the books so far. Twenty pages,

  right at the end of the second book, showed a series of maps. They

  were all drawn to an apparently small scale, each one depicting

  extensive areas of the world's surface-but the world so depicted

  bore no resemblance to Earth. Oceans, continents, rivers, lakes,

  islands, and most other geographical features were easily

  distinguishable, but in no way could they be reconciled with

  Earth's surface, even allowing for the passage of fifty thousand

  years- which would have made little difference anyway, aside from

  the size of the polar ice caps.

  Each map carried a rectangular grid of reference lines, similar to

  those of terrestrial latitude and longitude, with the lines spaced

  forty-eight units (decimal) apart. These numbers were presumed

  to denote units of Lunarian circular measure, since nobody could

  think of any other sensible way to dimension coordinates on the

  surface of a sphere. The fourth and sevent~i maps provided the key:

  the zero line of longitude to which all the other lines were

  referenced. The line to the east was tagged "528" and that to the

  west "48," showing that the full Lunarian circle was divided into

  576 Lunarian degrees. The system was consistent wi
th their

  duo-decimal counting method and their convention of reading from

  right to left. The next step was to calculate the percentage of the

  planet's surface that each map represented and to fit them together

  to form the complete globe.

  Already, however, the general scheme was clear. The ice caps were

  far larger than those believed to have existed on Earth during the

  Pleistocene Ice Age, stretching in some places to within twenty

  (Earth) degrees of the equator. Most of the seas around the

  equatorial belt were completely locked in by coastlines and ice. An

  assortment of dots and symbols scattered across the land masses in

  the ice-free belt and, more thinly, over the ice sheets themselves,

  seemed to indicate towns and cities.

  When Hunt received an invitation to come up and have a look at the

  maps, the scientists working on them showed him the scales of

  distance that were printed at the edges. If they could only find

  some way of converting those numbers into miles, they would have

  the diameter of the planet. But nobody had told them about the

  tables the Mathematics section thought might be mass-unit

  conversion factors. Maybe one of the other tables did the same

  thing for units of length and distance? If so, and if they could

  find a reference to Charlie's height among his papers, the simple

  process of measuring him would allow them to work out how many

  Earth meters there were in a Lunarian mile. Since they abeady had a

  figure for the planet's surface gravity, its mass and mean density

  should follow immediately.

  This was all very exciting, but all it proved was that a world had

  existed. It did not prove that Charlie and the Lunarians originated

  there. After all, the fact that a man carries a London street map

  in his pocket doesn't prove him to be a Londoner. So the work of

  relating numbers derived from physical measurements of Charlie's

  body to the numbers on the maps and in the tables could turn out to

  be based on a huge fallacy. If the diary came from the world shown

  on the maps but Charlie came from somewhere else, then the system

  of measurement deduced from the maps and tables in the diary might

  be a totally different system from the one used to record his

  personal characteristics in his papers, since the latter system

  would be the system used in the somewhere else, not in the world

 

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