makes up the Farside surface is much younger than anything anybody
ever believed existed on the Moon in any quantity
up until about, ah, thirty or so years back-one hell of a lot
younger! But you know that-that's why you're here."
"You don't mean it was formed recently,"~ Hunt stated.
Steinfield shook his head vigorously from side to side, causing the
two tufts of white hair that jutted from the sides of his otherwise
smooth head to wave about in a frenzy. "No. We can tell that it's
about as old as the rest of the Solar System. What I mean is-it
hasn't been where it is very long."
He caught Hunt's shoulder and half turned him to face a wall chart
showing a sectional view through the Lunar center. "You can see it
on this. The red shell is the original outer crust going right
around-it's roughly circular, as you'd expect. On Farside-
here-this blue stuff sits on top of it and wasn't added very long
ago."
"On top of what used to be the surface."
"Exactly. Somebody dumped a couple of billion tons of junk down on
the old crust-but only on this side."
"And that's been verified pretty conclusively?" Hunt asked, just to
be doubly sure.
"Yeah. . . yeah. Enough bore holes and shafts have been sunk all
over Farside to tell us pretty closely where the old surface was.
I'll show you something over here . . ." A major section of the far
wall comprised nothing but rows of small metal drawers, each with
its own neatly lettered label, extending from floor to ceiling.
Steinfield walked across the room, and stooped to scan the labels,
at the same time mumbling to himself semi-intelligibly. With a
sudden "That's it!" he pounced on one of the drawers, opened it,
and returned bearing a closed glass container about the size of a
small pickle jar. It contained a coarse piece of a light gray rocky
substance that glittered faintly in places, mounted on a wire
support.
"This is a fairly common KREEP basalt from Farside. It-"
"'Creep'?"
"Rich in potassium-that is, K-rare earth elements, and phosphorus:
KREEP."
"Oh-I see."
"Compounds like this," Steinfield continued, "make up a lot of the
highlands. This one solidified around 4.1 billion years ago. Now,
by analyzing the isotope products produced by cosmic-ray exposure,
we can tell how long it's been lying on the surface.
Again, the figure for this one comes out at about 4,100 million
years."
Hunt looked slightly puzzled. "But that's normal. It's what you'd
expect, isn't it?"
"If it had been lying on the surface, yes. But this came from the
bottom of a shaft over seven hundred feet deep! In other words, it
was on the surface for all that time-then suddenly it's seven
hundred feet down." Steinfleld gestured toward the wall chart
again. "As I said, we find the same thing all over Farside. We can
estimate how far down the old surface used to be. Below it we find
old rocks and structures that go way back, just like on Nearside;
above it everything's a mess-the rock all got pounded up and lots
of melting took place when the garbage came down, all the way up to
what's now the surface. It's what you'd expect."
Hunt nodded his agreement. The energy released by that amount of
mass being stopped dead in its tracks would have been phenomenal.
"And nobody knows where it came from?" he asked.
Steinfield repeated his head-shaking act. "Some people say that a
big meteorite shower must have got in the way of the Moon. That may
be true-it's never been argued conclusively one way or the other.
The composition of the garbage isn't really like a lot of
meteorites, though-it's closer to the Moon itself. It's as if they
were made out of the same stuff-that's why it looks the same from
higher up. You have to look at the microstructure to see the things
I've been talking about."
Hunt examined the specimen curiously for a while in silence. At
length he laid it carefully on the top of one of the benches.
Steinfield picked it up and returned it to its drawer.
"Okay," Hunt said as Steinfield rejoined him. "Now, what about the
Farside surface?"
"Kronski and company."
"Yes-as we discussed yesterday."
"The Farside surface craters were made by the tail end of the
garbage-dumping process, unlike the Nearside craters, which came
from meteorite impacts oh. . . a few billion years back. In rock
samples from around the rims of Farside craters we find that things
like the activity levels of long half-life elements are very
low-for instance, aluminum twenty-six and chlorine thirty-six; also
the rates of absorption of hydrogen, helium, and inert gases
from the Solar wind. Things like that tell us that those rocks
haven't been lying there very long; and since they got where they
were by being thrown out of the craters, the craters haven't been
there very long, either." Steinfield made an exaggerated
empty-handed gesture. "The rest you know. People like Kronski have
done all the figuring and put them at around fifty thousand years
old-yesterday!" He waited for a few seconds. "There must be a
Lunarian connection somewhere. The number sounds like too much of a
coincidence to me."
Hunt frowned for a while and studied the detail of the Farside
hemisphere of the model. "And yet, you must have known about all
this for years," he said, looking up. "Why the devil did you wait
for us to call you?"
Steinfield showed his hands again and held the pose for a second or
two. "Well, you UNSA people are pretty smart cookies. I figured you
already knew about all this."
"We should have picked it up sooner, I admit," Hunt agreed. "But
we've been rather busy."
"Guess so," Steinfield murmured. "Anyhow, there's even more to it.
I've told you all the consistent things. Now I'll tell you some of
the funny things. . . ." He broke off as if just struck by a new
thought. "I'll tell you about the funny things in a second. How
about a cup of coffee?"
"Great."
Steinfield lit a Bunsen burner, filled a large laboratory beaker
from the nearest tap, and positioned it on a tripod over the flame.
Then he squatted down to rummage in the cupboard beneath the bench
and at last emerged triumphantly with two battered enamel mugs.
"First funny thing: The distribution of samples that we dig up on
Farside that have a history of recent radioactive exposure doesn't
match the distribution or strength of the activity sources. There
ought to be sources clustered in places where there aren't."
"How about the meteorite storm including some, highly active
meteorites?" Hunt suggested.
"No, won't wash," Steinfield answered, looking along a shelf of
glass jars and eventually selecting one that contained a
reddish-brown powder and was labeled "Ferric Oxide." "If there were
meteorites like that, bits of them should still be around. But the
distribution of active element
s in the garbage is pretty even-about
normal for most rocks." He began spooning the powder into the mugs.
Hunt inclined his head apprehensively in the direction of the jar.
"Coffee doesn't seem to last long around here if you leave it lying
around in coffee jars," Steinfield explained. He nodded toward a
door that led into the room next-door and bore the sign "RESEARCH
STUDENTS." Hunt nodded understandingly.
"Vaporized?" Hunt tried.
Again Steinfield shook his head.
"In that case they wouldn't have been in proximity to the rock long
enough to produce the effects observed." He opened another jar
marked "Disodium Hydrogen Phosphate." "Sugar?"
"Second funny thing," Steinfield continued. "Heat balance. We know
how much mass came down, and from the way it fell, we can figure
its kinetic energy. We also know from statistical sampling how much
energy needed to be dissipated to account for the melting and
structural deformations; also, we know how much energy gets
produced by underground radioactivity and where. Problem: The
equations don't balance; you'd need more energy to make what
happened happen than there was available. So, where did the extra
come from? The computer models of this are very complex and there
could be errors in them, but that's the way it looks right now."
Steinfield allowed Hunt to digest this while he picked up the
beaker with a pair of tongs and proceeded to ifil the mugs. Having
safely completed this operation, he began filling his pipe, stifi
silent.
"Any more?" Hunt asked at last, reaching for his own cigarette
case.
Steinfield nodded affirmatively. "Nearside exceptions. Most of the
Nearside craters fit with the classic model: old. However, there
are some scattered around that don't fit the pattern; cosmic-ray
dating puts them at approximately the same age as those on Farside.
The usual explanation is that some strays from the recent Farside
bombardment overshot around to the Nearside. . ." He shrugged. "But
there are peculiarities in some instances that don't really support
that."
"Like?"
"Like some of the glasses and breccia formations show heating
patterns that aren't consistent with recent impact . . . I'll show
you what I mean later."
Hunt turned this new information over in his mind as he lit a
cigarette and sipped his drink. It tasted like coffee, anyway.
"And that's the last funny thing?"
"Yep, that's about the broad outline. No, wait a minute-last funny
thing plus one. How come none of the meteorites in the shower hit
Earth? Plenty of eroded remains of terrestrial meteorite craters
have been identified and dated. All the computer simulations say
that there should be a peak of abnormal activity at around this
time, judging from how big the heap of crud that hit the Moon must
have been. But there aren't any signs of one, even allowing for the
effects of the atmosphere."
Hunt and Steinfield spent the rest of that day and all of the next
sifting through figures and research reports that went back many
years. Hunt did not sleep at all during the following night, but
smoked a pack of cigarettes and consumed a gallon of coffee while
he stared at the walls of his hotel room and twisted the new
information into every contortion his mind could devise.
Fifty thousand years ago the Lunarians were on the Moon. Where they
came from didn't really matter for the time being; that was another
question. At about the same time an intense meteorite storm
obliterated the Farside surface. Did the storm wipe out the
Lunarians on the Moon? Possibly-but that wouldn't have had any
effect on them back on whatever planet they had come from. If all
the UNSA people on Luna were wiped out, it wouldn't make any
lasting difference to Earth. So, what happened to the rest of the
Lunarians? Why hadn't anybody seen them since? Had something else
happened to them that was more widespread than whatever happened on
the Moon? Could the something else have caused the meteorite storm?
Could a second something else have both caused the first and
extinguished the Lunarians in other places? Perhaps there was no
connection? Unlikely.
Then there were the inconsistencies that Steinfield had talked
about. . . . An absurd idea came from nowhere, which Hunt rejected
impatiently. But as the night wore on, it kept coming back again
with growing insistence. Over breakfast he decided that he had to
know the story that lay below those billions of tons of rubble.
There had to be some way of extracting enough information to
reconstruct the characteristics of the surface just before the
bombardment commenced. He put the question to Steinfield later on
that morning, back in the lab.
Steinfield shook his head firmly. 'We tried for over a year to make
a picture like that. We had twelve programmers working on it. They
got nowhere. It's too much of a mess down there-all ploughed up.
All you get is garbage."
"How about a partial picture?" Hunt persisted. Was there any way
that a contour map could be calculated, showing just the
distribution of radiation sources immediately prior to the
bombardment?
"We tried that, too. You do get a degree of statistical clustering,
yes. But there's no way we could tell where each individual sample
was when it got irradiated. They would have been thrown miles by
the impacts; a lot of them would have been bounced all over the
place by repeat impacts. Nobody ever built a computer that could
unscramble all that entropy. You're up against the second law of
thermodynamics; if you ever built one, it wouldn't be a computer at
all-it would be a refrigerator."
"What about a chemical approach? What techniques are available that
might reveal where the prebombardment craters were? Could their
'ghosts' still be detected a thousand feet down below the surface?"
"No way!"
"There has to be some way of reconstructing what the surface used
to look like."
"Did you ever try reconstructing a cow from a truckload of
hamburger?"
They talked about it for another two days and into the nights at
Steinfield's home and Hunt's hotel. Hunt told Steinfield why he
needed the information. Steinfield told Hunt he was crazy. Then one
morning, back at the laboratory, Hunt exclaimed, "The Near-side
exceptions!"
"Huh?"
"The Nearside craters that date from the time of the storm. Some of
them could be right from the beginning of it."
"So?"
"They didn't get buried like the first craters on Farside. They're
intact."
"Sure-but they won't tell you anything new. They're from recent
impacts, same as everything that's on the surface of Farside."
"But you said some of them showed radiation anomalies. That's just
what I want to know more about."
"But nobody ever found any suggestion of 'what you're talking
about."
"Maybe they we
ren't looking for the right things. They never had
any reason to."
The physics department had a comprehensive collection of Lunar rock
samples, a sizeable proportion of which comprised specimens from
the interiors and vicinities of the young, anomalous craters on
Nearside. Under Hunt's persistent coercion, Steinfleld agreed to
conduct a specially devised series of tests on them. He estimated
that he would need a month to complete the work.
Hunt returned to Houston to catch up on developments there and a
month later flew back to Omaha. Steinfield's experiments had
resulted in a series of computer-generated maps showing anomalous
Nearside craters. The craters divided themselves into two classes
on the maps: those with characteristic irradiation patterns and
those without.
"And another thing," Steinfield informed him. "The first class,
those that show the pattern, have also got another thing in common
that the second class hasn't got: glasses from the centers were
formed by a different process. So now we've got anomalous anomalies
on Nearside, too!"
Hunt spent a week in Omaha and then went. directly to Washington to
talk to a group of government scientists and to study the archives
of a department that had ceased to exist more than fifteen years
before. He then returned to Omaha once again and showed his
findings to Steinfleld. Steinfield persuaded the university
authorities to allow selected samples from their collection to be
loaned to the UNSA Mineralogy and Petrology Laboratories in
Pasadena, California, for further testing of an extremely
specialized nature, suitable equipment for which existed at only a
few establishments in the world.
As a direct consequence of these tests, Caldwell authorized the
issue of a top-priority directive to the UNSA bases at Tycho,
Crisium, and some other Lunar locations, to conduct specific
surveys in the areas of certain selected craters. A month after
that, the first samples began arriving at Houston and were
forwarded
immediately to Pasadena; so were the large numbers of samples
collected from deep below the surface of Farside.
The outcome of all this activity was summarized in a memorandum
stamped "SECRET" and written on the anniversary of Hunt's first
arrival in Houston.
9 September 2028
TO: G. Caidwell
Executive Director
Giant Series 01 - Inherit the Stars Page 12