interpreting them mathematically.
Hunt remembered having noticed that many of the electrical
subassemblies from Charlie's backpack had small metal labels
mounted adjacent to plugs, sockets, and other input-output
connections. He speculated that some of the symbols engraved on
these labels might represent ratings in units of voltage, current,
power, frequency, and so on. He spent a day in the electronics
labs, produced a full report on these markings, and passed it on to
Mathematics. Nobody had thought to tell them about it sooner.
The electronics technicians located the battery in the wrist unit
from Tycho, took it to pieces, and with the assistance of an
electrochemist from another department, worked out the voltage it
had been designed to produce. Linguistics translated the markings
on the casing, and that gave a figure for the Lunarian unit for
electrical voltage. Well, it was a start.
Professors Danchekker and Schom were in charge of the biological
side of the research. Perhaps surprisingly, Danchekker exhibited no
reluctance to cooperate with Group L and kept them fully updated
with a regular flow of information. This was more
the result of his deeply rooted sense of propriety than of any
change of heart. He was a formalist, and if this procedure was what
the formalities of the arrangement required, he would adhere to it
rigidly. His refusal to budge one inch from his uncompromising
views regarding the origins of the Lunarians, however, was total.
As promised, Schorn had set up investigations to determine the
length of Charlie's natural day from studies of body chemistry and
cell metabolism, but he was running into trouble. He was getting
results, all right, but the results made no sense. Some tests gave
a figure of twenty-four hours, which meant that Charlie could be
from Earth; some gave thirty-five hours, which meant he couldn't
be; and other tests came up with figures in between. Thus, if the
aggregate of these results meant anything at all, it indicated that
Charlie came from a score of different places all at the same time.
Either it was crazy, or there was something wrong with the methods
used, or there was more to the matter than they thought.
Danchekker was more successful in a different direction. From an
analysis of the sizes and shapes of Charlie's blood vessels and
associated muscle tissues, he produced equations describing the
performance of Charlie's circulatory system. From these he then
derived a set of curves that showed the proportions of body heat
that would be retained and lost for any given body temperature and
outside temperature. He came up with a figure for Charlie's normal
body temperature from some of Schorn's figures that were not
suspect and were based on the assumption that, as in the case of
terrestrial mammals, the process of evolution would have led to
Charlie's body regulating its temperature to such a level that the
chemical reactions within its cells would proceed at their most
efficient rates. By substituting this figure back into his original
equations, Danchekker was able to arrive at an estimate of the
outside temperature or, more precisely, the temperature of the
environment in which Charlie seemed best adapted to function.
Allowing for error, it came out at somewhere between two and nine
degrees Celsius.
With Schorn's failure to produce a reliable indication of the
length of the Lunarian day, there was still no way of assigning any
absolute values to the calendar, although sufficient corroborating
evidence had been forthcoming from various sources to verify beyond
reasonable doubt that it was indeed a calendar. As more
clues to Lunarian electrical units were found by Electronics, an
a!ternative approach to obtaining the elusive Luparian unit of time
suggested itself. If Mathematics could untangle the equations of
electrical oscillation, they should be able to manipulate the
quantities involved in such a way as to express the two constants
denoting the dielectric permittivity and magnetic permeability of
free space in Lunarian units. The ratio of these constants would
yield the velocity of light, expressed in Lunarian units of
distance per Lunarian units of time. The units for representing
distance were understood already; therefore, those used for
measuring time would be given automatically.
All this activity in UNSA naturally attracted widespread public
attention. The discovery of a technologically advanced civilization
from fifty thousand years in the past was not something that
happened very often. Some of the headlines flashed around the World
News Grid when the story was released, a few weeks after the
original find, were memorable: MAN ON MOON BEFORE ARMSTRONG; some
were hilarious: EXTINCT CIVILIZATION ON MARS; some were just wrong:
CONTACT MADE WITH ALIEN INTELLIGENCE. But most summed up the
situation fairly well.
In the months that followed, UNSA's public relations office in
Washington, long geared to conducting steady and predictable
dealings with the news media, reeled under a deluge of demands from
hard-pressed editors and producers all over the globe. Washington
struggled valiantly for a while, but in the end did the human
thing, and delegated the problem to Navcomms' local PR department
at Houston. The PR director at Houston found a ready-made
clearinghouse of new information in the form of Group L, right on
his doorstep, so still another dimension was added to Hunt's ever
growing work load. Soon, press conferences, TV documentaries,
ifimed interviews, and reporters became part of his daily routine;
so did the preparation of weekly progress bulletins. Despite the
cold objectivity and meticulous phrasing of these bulletins,
strange things seemed to happen to them between their departure
from the offices of Navcomms and their arrival on the world's
newspaper pages and wall display screens. Even stranger things
happened in the minds of some people who read them.
One of the British Sunday papers presented just about all of the
Old Testament in terms of the interventions of space beings as seen
through the eyes of simple beholders. The plagues of Egypt were
ecological disruptions deliberately brought about as warnings to
the oppressors; flying saucers guided Moses through the Red Sea
while the waters were diverted by nucleonic force fields; and the
manna from heaven was formed from the hydrocarbon combustion
products of thermonuclear propulsion units. A publisher in Paris
observed the results, got the message, and commissioned a
free-lancer to reexamine the life of Christ as a symbolic account
of the apparent miracle workings of a Lunarian returning to Earth
after a forty-eight-thousand-year meditation in the galactic
wilderness.
"Authentic" reports that the Lunarians were still around abounded.
They had built the pyramids, sunk Atlantis, and dug the Bosporus.
There were genuine eyewitness accounts of Luna
rian landings on
Earth in modern times. Somebody had held a conversation with the
pilot of a Lunarian spaceship two years before in the middle of the
Colorado Desert. Every reference ever recorded to supernatural
phenomena, apparitions, visitations, miracles, saints, ghosts,
visions, and witches had a Lunarian connection.
But as the months passed and no dramatic revelations unfolded, the
world began to turn elsewhere for new sensations. Reports of
further findings became confined to the more serious scientific
journals and proceedings of the professional societies. But the
scientists on the project continued their work undisturbed.
Then a UNSA team erecting an optical observatory on the Lunar
Farside detected unusual echoes on ultrasonics from about two
hundred feet below the surface. They sank a shaft and discovered
what appeared to be all that was left of the underground levels of
another Lunarian base, or at any rate, some kind of construction.
It was just a metal-walled box about ten feet high and as broad and
as long as a small house; one end was missing, and about a quarter
of the volume enclosed had filled up with dust and rock debris. In
the space that was left at the end, they found the charred
skeletons of eight more Lunarians, some pieces of furniture, a few
items of technical equipment, and a heap of sealed metal
containers. Whatever had formed the remainder of the structure that
this gallery had been part of was gone without a trace.
The metal containers were later opened by the scientists at
Westwood. Inside the cans was a selection of assorted foodstuffs,
well preserved despite having been cooked. Presumably, whatever had
done the cooking had also cooked the Lunarians. Most of the cans
contained processed vegetables, meats, and sweet preparations; a
few, however, yielded a number of fish, about the size of herrings
and preserved intact.
When Danchekker's assistant dissected one of the fish and began
looking inside, he couldn't make sense of what he found, so he
called the professor down to the lab to ask what he made of it.
Danchekker didn't go home until eight o'clock the next morning. A
week later he announced to an incredulous Vic Hunt: "This specimen
never swam in any of our oceans; it did not evolve from, nor is it
in any way related to, any form of life that has ever existed on
this planet!"
chapter eleven
The Apollo Seventeen Mission, in December 1972, had marked the
successful conclusion to man's first concerted effort to reach and
explore first-hand a world other than his own. After the Apollo
program, NASA activities were restricted, mainly as a result of the
financial pressures exerted on the USA by the economic recessions
that came and went across the Western world throughout that decade,
by the politically inspired oil crisis and various other crises
manufactured in the Middle East and the lower half of Africa, and
by the promotion of the Vietnam War. During the mid and late
seventies, a succession of unmanned probes were dispatched to Mars,
Venus, Mercury, and some of the outer planets. When manned missions
were resumed in the 19 80's, they focused on the development of
various types of space shuttle and on the construction of
permanently manned orbiting laboratories and observatories, the
main objective being the consolidation of a firm jumping-off point
prior to resumed expansion outward. Thus, for a period, the Moon
was left once more on its own, free to continue its billion-year
contemplation of the Universe without further interruption by man.
The information brought back by the Apollo astronauts finally
resolved the conflicting speculations concerning the Moon's nature
and origins that had been mooted by generations of Earth-bound
observers. Soon after the Solar System was formed, 4,500 million
years ago, give or take a few, the Moon became molten to a
considerable depth, possibly halfway to the center; the heat was
generated by the release of gravitational energy as the Moon
continued to accumulate. During the cooling that followed, the
heavier, iron-bearing minerals sank toward the interior, while the
less dense, aluminum-rich ones floated to the surface to form the
highland crust. Continual bombardment by meteorites stirred up the
mixture and complicated the process to some degree but by 4,300
million years ago the formation of the crust was virtually
complete. The bombardment continued until 3,900 million years ago,
by which time most of the familiar surface features already
existed. From then until 3,200 million years ago, basaltic lavas
flowed from the interior, induced in some places by remelting due
to concentrations of radioactive heat sources below the surface, to
fill in the impact basins and create the darker maria. The crust
continued cooling to greater depths until molten material could no
longer penetrate. Thereafter, all remained unchanging through the
ages. Occasionally an additional impact crater appeared and f
alling dust gradually eroded the top millimeter of surface, but
essentially, the Moon became a dead planet.
This history came from detailed observations and limited
explorations of Nearside. Orbital observations of Farside suggested
that much of the same story applied there also, and since this
sequence was consistent with existing theory, nobody doubted its
validity for many years after Apollo. Of course, details remained
to be added, but the broad picture was convincingly clear. However,
when man returned to the Moon in strength and to stay, ground
exploration of Farside threw up a completely different and totally
unexpected story.
Although the surface of Farside looked much the same as Near-side
to the distant observer, it proved at the microscopic level to have
undergone something radically different in its history.
Furthermore, as bases, launch sites, communications installations,
and all the other paraphernalia that accompanied man wherever he
went, began proliferating on Nearside, the methodical surface
coverage that this entailed produced oddities there, too.
All the experiments performed on the rock samples brought back from
the eight sites explored before the mid-seventies gave consistent
results supporting the orthodox theories. When the number of sites
grew to thousands, by far the majority of additional data confirmed
them-but some curious exceptions were noted, exceptions which
seemed to indicate that some of the features on Nearside ought,
rightfully, to be on Farside.
None of the explanations hazarded were really conclusive. This made
little difference to the executives and officers of UNSA, since by
that time the pattern of Lunar activity had progressed from that of
pure scientific research to one of intense engineering operations.
Only the academic fraternity of a few universities found time to
ponder and correspond on the spectral inconsistencies between dust
samples. So for many yea
rs the well-
documented problem of "lunar hemispheric anomalies" remained ified,
along with a million and one other items, in the "Awaiting
Explanation" drawer of science.
A methodical review of the current state of knowledge in any branch
of science that might have a bearing on the Lunarian problem was a
routine part of Group L's business. Anything to do with the Moon
was, naturally, high on the list of things to check up on, and soon
the group had amassed enough information to start a small library
on the subject. Two junior physicists, who didn't duck quickly
enough when Hunt was giving out assignments, were charged with the
Herculean task of sifting through all this data. It took some time
for them to get around to the topic of hemispheric anomalies. When
they did, they found reports of a series of dating experiments
performed some years previously by a nucleologist named Kronski at
the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. The data that appeared in those
reports caused the two physicists to drop everything and seek out
Hunt immediately.
After a long discussion, Hunt made a vi-phone call to a Dr. Saul
Steinfield of the Department of Physics of the University of
Nebraska, who specialized in Lunar phenomena. As a consequence of
that call, Hunt made arrangements for the deputy head of Group L to
take charge for a few days, and he flew north to Omaha early the
next morning. Steinfleld's secretary met Hunt at the airport, and
within an hour Hunt was standing in one of the physics department
laboratories, contemplating a three-foot-diameter model of the
Moon.
"The crust isn't evenly distributed," Steinfield said, waving
toward the modeL "It's a lot thicker on Farside than on Nearside-
something that has been known for a long time, ever since the first
artificial satellites were hung around the Moon in the nineteen
sixties. The center of mass is about two kilometers away from the
geometric center."
"And there's no obvious reason," Hunt mused.
Steinfleld's flailing arm continued to describe wild circles around
the sphere in front of them. "There's no reason for the crust to
solidify a lot thicker on one side, sure, but that doesn't really
matter, because that's not the way it happened. The material that
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