The column moved slowly through the desert of scorched gray dust,
and its numbers shrank rapidly as wounds and radiation sickness
took their toll. On Day Twenty-six they encountered a Lambian
ground force and for three hours fought furiously among the crags
and boulders. The battle ended when the remaining Lambian tanks
broke cover and charged straight into the Cerian position, only to
be destroyed right on the perimeter line by Cerian women firing
laser artillery at point-blank range. After the battle there were
165 Cerians left, but not enough vehicles to carry them.
After conferring, the Cerian officers devised a plan to continue
the journey leapfrog fashion. Half the company would be moved half
a day's distance forward and left there with one truck to use as
living accommodation, while the remaining vehicles returned to
collect the group left behind. So it would go on all the way to
Gorda. Charlie and Koriel were among the first group lifted on
ahead.
Day Twenty-eight. Uneventful drive. Set up camp in a shady gorge
and watched the convoy about-face again and begin its long haul
back for the others. They should be back this time tomorrow.
Nothing much to do until then. Two died on the drive, so there are
fifty-eight of us here. We take turns to rest and eat inside the
truck. When it's not your turn, you make yourself as comfortable as
you can sitting among the rocks. Koriel is furious. He's just spent
two hours sitting outside with four of the artillery girls. He says
whoever designed spacesuits should have thought of situations like
that.
The convoy never returned.
Using the single remaining truck, the group continued the same
tactic as before, ferrying one party on ahead, dumping them, and
returning for the rest. By Day Thirty-three, sickness, mishaps, and
one suicide had depleted the numbers such that all the survivors
could be carried in the truck at once, so the leapfrogging was
discontinued. Driving steadily, they estimated they would reach
Gorda on Day Thirty-eight. On Day Thirty-seven, the truck broke
down. The spare parts needed to repair it were not available.
Many were weak. It was clear that an attempt to reach Gorda on foot
would be so slow that nobody would make it.
Day Thirty-seven. Seven of us-four men (myself, Koriel, and two of
the combat troopers) and three girls-are going to make a dash for
Gorda while the others stay put in the truck and wait for a rescue
party. Koriel is cooking a meal before we set out. He has been
saying what he thinks of life in the infantry-doesn't seem to think
much of it at all.
Some hours after they left the truck, one of the troopers climbed a
crag to survey the route ahead. He slipped, gashed his suit, and
died instantly from explosive decompression. Later on, one of the
girls hurt her leg and lagged farther and farther behind as the
pain worsened. The Sun was sinking and there was no time for
slowing down. Everybody in the group wrestled with the same
equation in his mind-one life or twenty-eight?-but said nothing.
She solved the problem for them by quietly closing her air valve
when they stopped to rest.
Day Thirty-eight. Just Koriel and me now-like the old days.
The trooper suddenly doubled up, vomiting violently inside his
helmet. We stood and watched while he died, and could do nothing.
Some hours later, one of the girls collapsed and said she couldn't
go on. The other insisted on staying with her until we sent help
from Gorda. Couldn't really argue-they were sisters. That was some
time ago. We've stopped for a breather; I am getting near my limit.
Koriel is pacing up and down impatiently and wants to get moving.
That man has the strength of twelve .
Later. Stopped at last for a couple of hours sleep. I'm sure Koriel
is a robot-just keeps going and going. Human tank. Sun very low in
sky. Must make Gorda before Lunar night sets in.
Day Thirty-nine. Woke up freezing cold. Had to turn suit heating up
to maximum-still doesn't feel right. Think it's developing a fault.
Koriel says I worry too much. Time to be on the move again. Feel
stiff all over. Seriously wondering if I'll make it. Haven't said
so.
Later. The march has been a nightmare. Kept falling down. Koriel
insisted that the only chance we had was to climb up out of the
valley we were in and try a shortcut over a high ridge. I made it
about halfway up the cleft leading toward the ridge. Every step up
the cleft I could see Minerva sitting right over the middle of the
ridge, gashes of orange and red all over it, like a (macabre?)
face, taunting. Then I collapsed. When I came to, Koriel had
dragged me inside a pilot digging of some sort. Maybe someone wag
going to put an outpost of Gorda here. That was a while ago now.
Koriel has gone on and says help will be back before I know it.
Getting colder all the time. Feet numb and hands stiff. Frost
starting to form in helmet-difficult to see.
Thinking about all the people strung out back there with night
coming down, all like me, wondering if they'll be picked up. if we
can hold out we'll be all right. Koriel will make it. If it were a
thousand miles to Gorda, Koriel would make it.
Thinking about what has happened on Minerva and wondering if, after
all this, our children will live on a sunnier world-and if they do,
if they will ever know what we did.
Thinking about things I've never really thought about before. There
should be better ways for people to spend their lives than in
factories, mines, and army camps. Can't think what, though-that's
all we've ever known. But if there is warmth and color and light
somewhere in this Universe, then maybe something worthwhile will
come out of what we've been through.
Too much thinking for one day. Must sleep for a while now.
Hunt found he had read right through to the end, absorbed in the
pathos of those final days. His voice had fallen to a sober pitch.
A long silence ensued.
"Well, that's it," he concluded, a little more briskly. "Did you
notice that bit right at the end? In the last few lines he was
talking about seeing the surface of Minerva again. Now, they might
have used telescopes earlier on, but in the situation he was in
there, they'd hardly be lugging half an observatory along with
them, would they?"
Maddson's assistant looked thoughtful. "How about that periscope
video gadget that was in the helmet?" he suggested. "Maybe there's
something wrong in the translation. Couldn't he be talking about
seeing a transmission through that?"
Hunt shook his head. "Can't see it. I've heard of people watching
TV in all sorts of funny places, but never halfway up a bloody
mountain. And another thing: He described it as sitting up above
the ridge. That implies it's really out there. If it were a view on
video, he'd never have worded it that way. Right, Don?"
Maddson nodded wearily. "Guess so," he said. "So, where do we go
from here?"
Hunt looked from Maddson to the assistant and back again. He leaned
his elbows on the edge of the table and rubbed his face and
eyeballs with his fingers. Then he sighed and sat back.
"What do we know for sure?" he asked at last. "We know that those
Lunarian spaceships got to our Moon in under two days. We know that
they could accurately aim a weapon, sited on our Moon, at a
Minervan target. We also know that the round trip for
electromagnetic waves was much shorter than it could possibly have
been if we've been talking about the right place. Finally, we can't
prove but we think that Charlie could stand on our Moon and see
quite clearly the surface features of Minerva. Well, what does that
add up to?"
"There's only one place in the Universe that fits all those
numbers," Maddson said numbly.
"Exactly-and we're standing on it! Maybe there was a planet called
Minerva outside Mars, and maybe it had a civilization on it. Maybe
the Ganymeans took a few animals there and maybe they
didn't. But it doesn't really matter any more, does it? Because the
only planet Charlie's ship could possibly have taken off from, and
the only planet they could have aimed that Minihilator at, and the
only planet he could have seen in detail from Luna.-is this one!
"They were from Earth all along!
"Everyone will be jumping off the roof and out of every window in
the building when this gets around Navcomms."
chapter seventeen
With the first comprehensive translation of the handwritten
notebook, the paradox was complete. Now there were two consistent
and apparently irrefutable bodies of evidence, one proving that the
Lunarians must have evolved on Earth, and the other proving that
they couldn't have.
All at once the consternation and disputes broke out afresh. Lights
burned through the night at Houston and elsewhere as the same
inevitable chains of reasoning were reeled out again and yet again,
the same arrays of facts scrutinized for new possibilities or
interpretations. But always the answers came out the same. Only the
notion of the Lunarians having been the product of a parallel line
of evolution appeared to have been abandoned permanently; more than
enough theories were in circulation already without anyone having
to invoke this one. The Navcomms fraternity disintegrated into a
myriad of cliques and strays, scurrying about to ally first with
this idea and then with that. As the turmoil subsided, the final
lines of defense fortified themselves around four main camps.
The Pure Earthists accepted without reservation the deductions from
Charlie's diary, and held that the Lunarian civilization had
developed on Earth, flourished on Earth, and destroyed itself on
Earth and that was that. Thus, all references to Minerva and its
alleged civilization were nonsense; there never had been any
civilization on Minerva apart from that of the Ganymeans, and that
was too far in the remote past to have any bearing on the Lunarian
issue. The world depicted on Charlie's maps was Earth, not Minerva,
so there had to be a gross error somewhere in the calculations that
put it at 250 million miles from the Sun. That this corresponded to
the orbital radius of the Asteroids was just coincidence; the
Asteroids had always been there, and anything from Iliad that said
they hadn't was suspect and needed doublechecking.
That left only one question unexplained: Why didn't Charlie's
maps look like Earth? To answer this one, the Earthists launched a
series of commando raids against the bastions of accepted
geological theory and methods of geological datingi Drawing on the
hypothesis that continents had been formed initially from a single
granitic mass that had been shattered under the weight of immense
ice caps and pushed apart by polar material rushing in to ifil the
gaps, they pointed to the size of the ice caps shown on the maps
and stressed how much larger they were than anything previously
supposed to have existed on Earth. Now, if in fact the maps showed
Earth and not Minerva, that meant that the Ice Age on Earth had
been far more severe than previously thought, and its effects on
surface geography correspondingly more violent. Add to this the
effects of the crustal fractures and vulcanism as described in
Charlie's observations of Earth (not Minerva), and there was,
perhaps, enough in all that to account for the transformation of
Charlie's Earth into modern Earth. So, why were there no traces to
be found today of the Lunarian civilization? Answer: It was clear
from the maps that most of it had been concentrated on the
equatorial belt. Today that region was completely ocean, dense
jungle, or drifting desert-adequate to explain the rapid erasure of
whatever had been left after the war and the climatic cataclysm.
The Pure Earthist faction attracted mainly physicists and
engineers, quite happy to leave the geologists and geographers to
worry about the bothersome details. Their main concern was that the
sacred principle of the constancy of the velocity of light should
not be thrown into the melting pot of suspicion along with
everything else.
By entrenching themselves around the idea of Earth origins, the
Pure Earthists had moved into the positions previously defended
fanatically by the biologists. Now that Danchekker had led the way
by introducing his fleet of Ganymean Noah's Arks, the biologists
abruptly turned about-face and rallied behind their new assertion
of Minervan origin from displaced terrestrial ancestors. What about
Charlie's Minerva-Luna flight time and the loop delay around the
Annihilator fire-control system? Something was screwed up in the
interpretation of Minervan time scales that accounted for both
these. Okay, how could Charlie see Minerva from Luna? Video
transmissions. Okay, how could they aim the Annihilator over that
distance? They couldn't. The dish at Seltar
was only a remote-control tracking station. The weapon itself was
mounted in a satellite orbiting Minerva.
The third flag flew over the Cutoff Colony Theory. According to
this, an early terrestrial civilization had colonized Minerva, and
then declined into a Dark Age during which contact with the colony
was lost. The deteriorating conditions of the Ice Age later
prompted a recovery on both planets, with the difference that
Minerva faced a life-or-death situation and began the struggle to
regain the lost knowledge in order that a return to Earth might be
made. Earth, however, was going through lean times of its own and,
when the advance parties from Minerva eventually made contact,
didn't react favorably to the idea of another planetful of mouths
to feed. Diplomacy having failed, the Minervans set up an invasion
beachhead on Luna. The Annihilator at Seltar had thus been firing
at targets on Earth; the translators had been misled by identical
place-names on both planets-like Boston, New York, Cambridge, and a
hundred other places in the USA, many of the towns on Minerva had
been named after places on Earth when the original colony was first
established.
The defenders of these arguments drew heavily from the claims of
the Pure Earthists to account for the absence of Lunarian relics on
Earth. In addition, they produced further support from the unlikely
domain of the study of fossil corals in the Pacific. It had been
known for a long time that analysis of the daily growth rings of
ancient fossil corals provided a measure of how many days there had
been in the year at various times in the past, and from this how
fast the forces of tidal friction were slowing down the rotation of
the Earth about its axis. These researches showed, for example,
that the year of 350 million years ago contained about four hundred
days. Ten years previously, work conducted at the Darwin Institute
of Oceanography in Australia, using more refined and more accurate
techniques, had revealed that the continuity from ancient to modem
had not been as smooth as supposed. There was a confused period in
the recent past-at about fifty thousand years before-during which
the curve was discontinuous, and a comparatively abrupt lengthening
in the day had occurred. Furthermore, the rate of deceleration was
measurably greater after this discontinuity than it had been
before. Nobody knew why this should have happened, but it seemed to
indicate a period of violent climatic upheaval, as the corals had
taken generations to set-
tie down to a stable growth pattern afterward. The data seemed to
indicate that widespread changes had taken place on Earth around
this mysterious point in time, probably accompanied by global
flooding, and all in all there could be enough behind the story to
explain the complete disappearance of any record of the Lunarians'
existence.
The fourth main theory was that of the Returning Exiles, which
found these attempts to explain the disappearance of the
terrestrial Lunarians artificial and inadequate. The basic tenet of
this theory was that there could be only one satisfactory reason
for the fact that there were no signs of Lunarians on Earth: There
had never been any Lunarians on Earth worth talking about. Thus,
they had evolved on Minerva as Danchekker maintained and had
Giant Series 01 - Inherit the Stars Page 18