a rectangular section of the skin about eight feet square had been
cut away. "First entry point will be there- approximately
amidships. The outer hull is double layered; both layers have been
penetrated. Inside is an inner hull. . ." For the benefit of the
visitors, he gestured toward a display positioned near the
observation window showing the aperture in close-up.
'Preliminary drilling shows that it's a single layer. The valves
that you can see projecting from the inner hull were inserted to
allow samples of the internal atmosphere to be taken before opening
it up. Also, the cavity behind the access point has been
argon-flooded."
Mills turned to Cameron before going on to describe further details
of the operation. "Lieutenant, carry out a final check of
communications links, please."
"Aye, aye, sir." Cameron walked back to the supervisory console at
the end of the room and scanned the array of screens.
"Ice Hole to Subway. Come in, please."
The face of Commander Stracey, directing activities out near the
hull, moved into view, encased in its helmet. "All checks completed
and go," he reported. "Standing by, ready to proceed."
"Ice Hole to Pithead. Report transmission quality."
"All clear, vision and audio," responded the duty controller from
the dome far above them.
"Ice Hole to Ganymede Main." Cameron addressed screen three, which
showed Foster at Main Base, situated seven hundred miles away to
the south.
"Clear."
"Ice Hole to Jupiter Four. Report, please."
"All channels clear and checking positive." The last acknowledgment
came from the deputy mission director on screen four, speaking from
his nerve center in the heart of the mile-long Jupiter Mission Four
command ship, at that moment orbiting over two thousand miles up
over Ganymede.
"All channels positive and ready to proceed, sir," Cameron called
to Mills.
"Carry on, then, Lieutenant."
"Aye, aye, sir."
Cameron passed the order to Stracey, and out by the hull the
ponderous figures lumbered into action, swinging forward a
rockdrill supported from an overhead gantry. The group by the
window watched in silence as the bit chewed relentlessly into the
inner wall. Eventually the drill was swung back.
"Initial penetration complete," Stracey's voice informed them.
"Nothing visible inside."
An hour later, a pattern of holes adorned the exposed expanse of
metal. When lights were shone through and a TV probe in-
serted, the screen showed snatches of a large compartment crammed
with ducts and machinery. Shortl3~ afterward, Stracey's team began
cutting out the panel with torches. Mills invited Peters and
Stanislow to come and observe the operations first-hand. The trio
left the control room, descended to the lower floor, and a few
minutes later emerged, clad in spacesuits, through the airlock onto
the tunnel floor. As they arrived at the aperture, the rectangle of
metal was just being swung aside.
The spotlights confirmed the general impression obtained via the
drill holes. When preliminary visual examinations were completed,
two sergeants who had been standing by stepped forward.
Communications lines were plugged into their backpacks and they
were handed TV cameras trailing cables, flashlights, and a pouch of
tools and accessories. At the same time, other members of the team
were smoothing over the jagged edges of the hole with pads of
adhesive plastic to prevent tearing of the lines. An extending
aluminum ladder was lowered into the hole and secured. The first
sergeant to enter turned about on the edge of the hole, carefully
located the top rung with his feet, and inch by inch disappeared
down into the chamber. When he had found a firm footing, the second
followed.
For twenty minutes they clambered through the mechanical jungle,
twisting and turning among the chaotic shadows cast by the lights
pouring in through the hole above. Progress was slow; they had
difficulty finding level surfaces to move on, since the ship
appeared to be lying on its side. But foot by foot, the lines
continued to snake spor~dically down into the darkness. Eventually
the sergeants stopped before the noseward bulkhead of the
compartment. The screens outside showed their way barred by a door
leading through to whatever lay forward; it was made of a
steely-gray metal and looked solid. It was also about ten feet high
by four wide. A long conference produced the decision that there
was no alternative but for them to return to where the hole had
been cut to collect drills, torches, and all the other gadgetry
needed to go through the whole drilling, purging, argon-filling,
and cutting routine all over again. From the look of the door, it
could be a long job. Mills, Stanislow, and Peters went back to the
control room, collected the remainder of their party, and went to
the surface installations for lunch. They returned three hours
later.
Behind the bulkhead was another machinery compartment, as
confusing as the first but larger. This one had many doors leading
from it-all closed. The two sergeants selected one at random in the
ceiling above their heads, and while they were cutting through it,
others descended into the first and second compartments to position
rollers for minimizing the drag of their trailing cables, which was
beginning to slow them down appreciably. When the door was cut, a
second team relieved the first.
They used another ladder to climb up through the door and found
themselves standing on what was supposed to be the wall of a long
corridor running toward the nose of the ship. A succession of
closed doors, beneath their feet and over their heads, passed
across the screens outside. Over two hundred feet of cabling had
disappeared into the original entry point.
"We're just passing the fifth bulkhead since entering the
corridor," the commentary on the audio channel informed the
observers. "The walls are smooth, and appear to be metallic, but
covered with a plastic material. It's coming away in most places.
The floor up one side is black and looks rubbery. There are lots of
doors in both walls, all big like the first one. Some have. . ."
"Just a second, Joe," the voice of the speaker's companion broke
in. "Swing the big light down here - . . by your feet. See, the
door you're standing on slides to the side. It's not closed all the
way."
The screens showed a pair of standard-issue heavy-duty UNSA boots,
standing on a metal panel in the middle of a pooi of light. The
boots shuffled to one side to reveal a black gap, about twelve
inches wide, running down one side of the panel. They then stepped
off the panel and onto the surrounding area as their owner
evidently inspected the situation.
"You're right," Joe's voice announced at last. "Let's see if it'll
budge."
There then followed a jumble
d sequence of arms, legs, walls,
ceilings, lightness, and darkness as TV cameras and lamps exchanged
hands and were waved about. When a stable picture resulted, it
showed two heavily clad arms braced across the gap.
Eventually:
"No dice. Stuck solid."
"How about the jack?"
"Yeah, maybe. Pass it down, willya?"
A long dialogue followed during which the jack was maneu
vered into place and expanded. It slipped off. Muttered curses.
Another try. And then:
"It's moving! Come on, baby . . - let's have a bit more light I
think it'll go easy now. . - See if you can get a foot against
it.. ."
On the monitors the gray slab graunched gradually out of the
picture. A black, bottomless pit fell away beneath.
"The door is about two-thirds open," a breathless voice resumed.
"It's gummed up there and won't go any further. We're gonna have a
quick looksee around from up here, then we'll have to come back to
get another ladder. Can somebody have one ready at the door that
leads up into this corridor?"
The camera closed in on the pitch-black oblong. A few seconds later
a circle of light appeared in the scene, picking out part of the
far wall. The light began moving around inside and the camera
followed. Banks of what appeared to be electronic equipment.
corners of cubicles . - . legs of furniture . . . sections of
bulkhead. . . moved through the circle.
"There's a lot of loose junk down at that end . . . Move the
light around a bit . - ." Several colored cylinders in a heap,
about
the size of jelly jars . . . something like a braided belt, lying
in a
tangle . . . a small gray box with buttons on one face .
"What was that? Go over a bit, Jerry. . . No, a bit more to the
left."
Something white. A bar of white.
"Jeez! Look at that! Jerry, will you look at that?"
The skull, grinning up out of the pool of eerie white light,
startled even the watchers out in the tunnel. But it was the size
of the skeleton that stunned them; no man had ever boasted a chest
that compared with those massive hoops of bone. But besides that,
even the most inexpert among the observers could see that whatever
the occupants of this craft had been, they bore no resemblance to
man.
The stream of data taken in by the cameras flashed back to
preprocessors in the low-level control room, and from there via
cable to the surface of Ganymede. After encoding by the computers
in the Site Operations Control building, it was relayed by
microwave repeaters seven hundred miles to Ganymede Main Base,
restored to full strength, and redirected up to the orbiting
command ship. Here, the message was fed into the message exchange
and scheduling processor complex, transformed into high-power laser
modulations, and slotted into the main outgoing signal beam to
Earth. For over an hour the data streaked across the Solar System,
covering 186,000 miles every second, until the sensors of the
long-range relay beacon, standing in Solar orbit not many million
miles outside that of Mars, fished it out of the void, a
microscopic fraction of its original power. Retransmission from
here found the Deep Space Link Station, lodged in Trojan
equilibrium with Earth and Luna, and eventually a synchronous
communications satellite hanging high over the central USA, which
beamed it down to a ground station near San Antonio. A landline
network completed the journey to UNSA Mission Control, Galveston,
where the information was greedily consumed by the computers of
Operational Command Headquarters.
The Jupiter FOur command ship had taken eleven months to reach the
giant planet. Within four hours of the event, the latest
information to be gathered by the mission was safely lodged in the
data banks of UN Space Arm.
chapter fourteen
The discovery of the giant spaceship, frozen under the ice field of
Ganymede, was a sensation but, in a sense, not something totally
unexpected. The scientific world had more or less accepted as fact
that an advanced civilization had once flourished on Minerva;
indeed, if the arguments of the orthodox evolutionists were
accepted, at least two planets-Minerva and Earth-had supported
high-technology civilizations to some extent at about the same
time. It did not come as a complete surprise, therefore, that man's
persistent nosing around the Solar System should uncover more
evidence of its earlier inhabitants. What did surprise everybody
was the obvious anatomical difference between the Ganymeans-as the
beings on board the ship soon came to be called-and the common form
shared by the Lunarians and mankind.
To the still unresolved question of whether the Lunarians and the
Minervans had been one and the same or not, there was immediately
added the further riddle: Where had the Ganymeans come from, and
had they any connection with either? One bemused UNSA scientist
summed up the situation by declaring that it was about time UNSA
established an Alien Civilizations Division to sort out the whole
damn mess!
The pro-Danchekker faction quickly interpreted the new development
as full vindication of evolutionary theory and of the arguments
they had been promoting all along. Clearly, two planets in the
Solar System had evolved intelligent life at around the same period
in the past; the Ganymeans had evolved on Minerva and the Lunarians
had evolved on Earth. They came independently from different lines
and that was why they were different. Lunarian pioneers made
contact with the Ganymeans and settled on Minerva-that was how
Charlie had come to be born there. Extreme hostilities broke out
between the two civilizations at some point, resulting in the
extinction of both and the destruction of Minerva. The reasoning
was consistent, plausible, and convincing. Against it, the single
objection-that no evidence of any Lunarian
civilization on Earth had ever been detected-began to look more
lonely and more feeble every day. Deserters left the
can't-be-of-Earth-origin camp in droves to join Danchekker's
growing legions. Such was his gain in prestige and credibility that
it seemed perfectly natural for his department to assume
responsibility for conducting the preliminary evaluation of the
data coming in from Jupiter.
Despite his earlier skepticism, Hunt too found the case compelling.
He and a large part of Group L's staff spent much time searching
every available archive and record from such fields as archeology
and paleontology for any reference that could be a pointer to the
one-time existence of an advanced race on Earth. They even delved
into the realms of ancient mythology and combed various
pseudoscientific writings to see if anything could be extracted
that was capable of substantiation, that suggested the works of
superbeings in the past. But always the results were negative.
While all this was going
on, things began to happen in an area
where progress had all but ground to a halt for many months.
Linguistics had run into trouble: The meager contents of the
documents found about Charlie's person simply had not contained
enough information to make great inroads into deciphering a whole
new, alien language. Of the two small books, one-that containing
the maps and tables and resembling a handy pocket
reference-together with the loose documents, had been translated in
parts and had yielded most of the fundamental data about Minerva
and quite a lot about Charlie. The second book contained a series
of dated entries in handwritten script, but despite repeated
attempts, it had obstinately defied decoding.
This situation changed dramatically some weeks after the opening up
of the underground remains of the devastated Lunarian base on Lunar
Farside. Among the pieces of equipment included in that find had
been a metal drum, containing a series of glass plates, rather like
the magazines of some slide projectors. Closer examination of the
plates revealed them to be simple projection slides, each holding a
closely packed matrix of nilcrodot images which, under a
microscope, were seen to be pages of printed text Constructing a
system of lamps and lenses to project them onto a screen was
straightforward, and in one fell swoop Linguistics be-
came the owners of a miniature Lunarian library. Results followed
in months.
Don Maddson, head of the Linguistics section, rummaged through the
litter of papers and files that swamped the large table standing
along the left-hand wall of his office, selected a loosely clipped
wad of typed notes, and returned to the chair behind his desk.
"There's a set of these on its way up to you," he said to Hunt, who
was sitting in the chair opposite. "I'll leave you to read the
details for yourself later. For now, I'll just sum up the general
picture."
"Fine," Hunt said. "Fire away."
"Well, for a start, we know a bit more about Charlie. One of the
documents found in a pouch on the backpack appears to be something
like army pay records. It gives an abbreviated history of some of
the things he did and a list of the places he was posted to-that
kind of thing."
"Army? Was he in the army, then?"
Maddson shook his head. "Not exactly. From what we can gather, they
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