Giant Series 01 - Inherit the Stars
Page 9
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