Giant Series 01 - Inherit the Stars

by Inherit the Stars [lit]

  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