Giant Series 01 - Inherit the Stars

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by Inherit the Stars [lit]


  was true.

  And so, quite suddenly, at least one chapter in the early history

  of Minerva had been cleared up. Everything now pointed to the

  Lunarians and their civilization as having developed on Minerva and

  not on Earth. It explained the failure of Schorn's early attempt to

  fix the length of the day in Hunt's calendar by calculating

  Charlie's natural periods of sleep and wakefulness. The ancestors

  of the Lunarians had arrived from Earth carrying a deeply rooted

  metabolic rhythm evolved around a twenty-four-hour cycle. During

  the twenty-five million years that followed, some of the more

  flexible biological processes in their descendants adapted

  successfully to the thirty-five-hour day of Minerva, while others

  changed only partially. By Charlie's time, all the Lunarians'

  physiological clocks had gotten hopelessly out of synchronization;

  no wonder Schorn's results made no sense. But the puzzling numbers

  in Charlie's notebook still remained to be accounted for.

  In Houston, Caldwell read Hunt and Danchekker's joint report with

  deep satisfaction. He had realized long before that to achieve

  results, the abilities of the two scientists would have to be

  combined and focused on the problem at hand instead of being

  dissipated fruitlessly in the friction of personal incompatibility.

  How could he manipulate into being a situation in which the things

  they had in common outweighed their differences? Well, what did

  they have in common? Starting with the simplest and most obvious

  thing-they were both human beings from planet Earth. So where would

  this fundamental truth come to totally overshadow anything else?

  Where but on the barren wastes of the Moon or a hundred

  million miles out in the emptiness of space? Everything seemed to

  be working out better than he had dared hope.

  "It's like I always said," Lyn Garland stated coyly when Hunt's

  assistant showed her a copy of the report. "Gregg's a genius with

  people."

  The arrival in Ganymede orbit of the seven ships from Earth was a

  big moment for the Jupiter Four veterans, especially those whose

  tour of duty was approaching an end and who could now look forward

  to going home soon. In the weeks to come, as the complex program of

  maneuvering supplies and equipment between the ships and the

  surface installations unfolded, the scene above Ganymede would

  become as chaotic as that above Luna had been during departure

  preparations. The two command ships would remain standing off ten

  miles apart for the next two months. Then Jupiter Four, accompanied

  by two of the recently arrived freighters, would move out to take

  up station over Callisto and begin expanding the pilot base already

  set up there. Jupiter Five would remain at Ganymede until joined by

  Saturn Two, which was at that time undergoing final countdown for

  Lunar lift-out and due to arrive in five months. After rendezvous

  above Ganymede, one of the two ships (exactly which was yet to be

  decided) would set course for the ringed planet, on the farthest

  large-scale manned probe yet attempted.

  The long-haul sailing days of Jupiter Four were over. Too slow by

  the standards of the latest designs, it would probably be stripped

  down to become a permanent orbiting base over Callisto. After a few

  years it would suffer the ignoble end of being dismantled and

  cannibalized for surface constructions.

  With all the hustle and traffic congestion that erupted in the

  skies over Ganymede, it was three days before the time came for the

  group of UNSA scientists to be ferried to the surface. After months

  of getting used to the pattern of life and the company aboard the

  ship, Hunt felt a twinge of nostalgia as he packed his belongings

  in his cabin and stood in line waiting to board the Vega moored

  alongside in the cavernous midships docking bay. It was probably

  the last he would see of the inside of this immense city of metal

  alloys; when he returned to Earth, it would be aboard one of the

  small, fast cruisers ferried out with the mission.

  An hour later Jupiter Five, festooned in a web of astronautic

  engineering, was shrinking rapidly on the cabin display in the

  Vega. Then the picture changed suddenly and the sinister frosty

  countenance of Ganymede came swelling up toward them.

  Hunt sat on the edge of his bunk inside a Spartan room in

  number-three barrack block of Ganymede Main Base and methodically

  transferred the contents of his kit bag into the aluminum locker

  beside him. The air-extractor grill above the door was noisy. The

  air drawn in through the vents set into the lower walls was warm,

  and tainted with the smell of engine oil. The steel floor plates

  vibrated to the hum of heavy machinery somewhere below. Propped up

  against a pillow on the bunk opposite, Danchekker was browsing

  through a folder full of facsimiled notes and color illustrations

  and chattering excitedly like a schoolboy on Christmas Eve.

  "Just think of it, Vic, another day and we'll be there. Animals

  that actually walked the Earth twenty-five million years ago! Any

  biologist would give his right arm for an experience like this." He

  held up the folder. "Look at that. I do believe it to be a

  perfectly preserved example of Trilophodon-a four-tusked Miocene

  mammoth over fifteen feet high. Can you imagine anything more

  exciting than that?"

  Hunt scowled sourly across the room at the collection of pin-ups

  adorning the far wall, bequeathed by an earlier UNSA occupant

  "Frankly, yes," he muttered. "But equipped rather differently than

  a bloody Trilophodon."

  "Eh? What's that you said?" Danchekker blinked uncomprehendingly

  through his spectacles. Hunt reached for his cigarette case.

  "It doesn't matter, Chris," he sighed.

  chapter twenty-two

  The flight northward to Pithead lasted just under two hours. On

  arrival, the group from Earth assembled in the officers' mess of

  the control building for coffee, during which scientists from

  Jupiter Four updated them on Ganymean matters.

  The Ganymean ship had almost certainly been destined for a

  large-scale, long-range voyage and not for anything like a limited

  exploratory expedition. Several hundred Ganymeans had died with

  their ship. The quantity and variety of stores, materials,

  equipment, and livestock that they had taken with them indicated

  that wherever they had been bound, they had meant to stay.

  Everything about the ship, especially its instrumentation and

  control systems, revealed a very advanced stage of scientific

  knowledge. Most of the electronics were still a mystery, and some

  of the special-purpose components were unlike anything the UNSA

  engineers had ever seen. Ganymean computers were built using a

  mass-integration technology in which millions of components were

  diffused, layer upon layer, into a single monolithic silicon block.

  The heat dissipated inside was removed by electronic cooling

  networks interwoven with the functional circuitry. In some

  examples, believ
ed to form parts of the navigation system,

  component packing densities approached that of the human brain. A

  physicist held up a slab of what appeared to be silicon, about the

  size of a large dictionary; in terms of raw processing power, he

  claimed, it was capable of outperforming all the computers in the

  Navcomms Headquarters building put together.

  The ship was streamlined and strongly constructed, indicating that

  it was designed to fly through atmospheres and to land on a planet

  without collapsing under its own weight. Ganymean engineering

  appeared to have reached a level where the functions of a Vega and

  a deep-space interorbital transporter were combined in one vessel.

  The propulsion system was revolutionary. There were no large

  exhaust apertures and no obvious reaction points to suggest that

  the ship had been kicked forward by any kind of thermodynamic or

  photonic external thrust. The main fuel-storages system fed a

  succession of convertors and generators designed to deliver

  enormous amounts of electrical and magnetic energy. This supplied a

  series of two-foot-square superconducting busbars and a maze of

  interleaved windings, fabricated from solid copper bars, that

  surrounded what appeared to be the main-drive engines. Nobody was

  sure precisely how this arrangement resulted in motion of the ship,

  although some of the theories were startling.

  Could this have been a true starship? Had the Ganymeans left en

  masse in an interstellar exodus? Had this particular ship foundered

  on its way out of the Solar System, shortly after leaving Minerva?

  These questions and a thousand more remained to be answered. One

  thing was certain, though: If the discovery of Charlie had given

  two years' work to a significant proportion of Navcomms, there was

  enough information here to keep half the scientific world occupied

  for decades, if not centuries.

  The party spent some hours in the recently erected laboratory dome,

  inspecting items brought up from below the ice, including several

  Ganymean skeletons and a score of terrestrial animals. To

  Danchekker's disappointment, his particular favorite-the man-ape

  anthropoid he had shown to Hunt and Caidwell many months before on

  a viewscreen in Houston-was not among them. "Cyril" had been

  transferred to the laboratories of the Jupiter Four command ship

  for detailed examination. The name, graciously bestowed by the UNSA

  biologists, was in honor of the mission's chief scientist.

  After lunch in the base canteen, they walked into the dome that

  covered one of the shaftheads. Fifteen minutes later they were

  standing deep below the surface of the ice field, gazing in awe at

  the ship itself.

  It lay, fully uncovered, in the vast white floodlighted cavern, its

  underside still supported in its mold of ice. The hull cut a clean

  swath through the forest of massive steel jacks and ice pillars

  that carried the weight of the roof. Beneath the framework of ramps

  and scaffolding that clung to its side, whole sections of the hull

  had been removed to reveal the compartments inside. The floor all

  around was littered with pieces of machinery lifted out by overhead

  cranes. The scene reminded Hunt of the time he and Borlan had

  visited Boeing's huge plant near Seattle where they assembled

  the 1017 skyliners-but everything here was on a far vaster scale.

  They toured the network of catwalks and ladders that had been

  laid throughout the ship, from the command 'deck with its

  fifteen-foot-wide display screen, through the control rooms, living

  quarters, and hospital, to the cargo holds and the tiers of cages

  that had contained the animals. The primary energy-convertor and

  generator section was as imposing and as complex as the inside of a

  thermonuclear power station. Beyond it, they passed through a

  bulkhead and found themselves dwarfed beneath the curves of the

  exposed portions of a pair of enormous toroids. The engineer

  leading them pointed up at the immense, sweeping surfaces of metal.

  "The walls of those outer casings are sixteen feet thick," he

  in-formed them. "They're made from an alloy that would cut

  tungsten-carbide steel like cream cheese. The mass concentration

  inside them is phenomenal. We think they provided closed paths in

  which masses of highly concentrated matter were constrained in

  circulating or oscillating resonance, interacting with strong

  fields. It's possible that the high rates of change of gravity

  potential that this produced were somehow harnessed to induce a

  controlled distortion in the space around the ship. In other words,

  it moved by continuously falling into a hole that it created in

  front of itself- kind of like a four-dimensional tank track."

  "You mean it trapped itself inside a space-time bubble, which

  propagated somehow through normal space?" somebody offered.

  "Yes, if you like," the engineer affirmed. "I guess a bubble is as

  good an analogy as any. The interesting point is, if it did work

  that way, every particle of the ship and everything inside it would

  be subjected to exactly the same acceleration. Therefore there

  would be no G effect. You could stop the ship dead from, say, a

  million miles an hour to zero in a millisecond, and nobody inside

  would even know the difference."

  "How about top speed?" someone else asked. 'Would there have been a

  relativistic limit?"

  "We don't know. The theory boys up in Jupiter Four have been losing

  a lot of sleep over that. Conventional mechanics wouldn't apply to

  any movement of the ship itself, since it wouldn't be actually

  moving in the local space inside the bubble. The question of how

  the bubble propagates through normal space is a different ball game

  altogether. A whole new theory of fields has to be

  worked out. Maybe completely new laws of physics apply-as I said

  before, we just don't know. But one thing seems clear: Those

  photon-drive starships they're designing in California might turn

  out to be obsolete before they're even built. If we can figure out

  enough about how this ship worked, the knowledge could put us

  forward a hundred years."

  By the end of the day Hunt's mind was in a whirl. New information

  was coming in faster than he could digest it. The questions in his

  head were multiplying at a rate a thousand times faster than they

  could ever be answered. The riddle of the Ganymean spaceship grew

  more intriguing with every new revelation, but at the back of it

  there was still the Lunarian problem unresolved. He needed time to

  stand back and think, to put his mental house in order and sort the

  jumble into related thoughts that would slot into labeled boxes in

  his mind. Then he would be able to see better which question

  depended on what, and which needed to be tackled first. But the

  jumble was piling up faster than he could pick up the pieces.

  The banter and laughter in the mess after the evening meal soon

  became intolerable. Alone in his room, he found the walls

  claustrophobic. For a while he walked the deserted cor
ridors

  between the domes and buildings. They were oppressive; he had lived

  in metal cans for too long. Eventually he found himself in the

  control tower dome, staring out into the incandescent gray wall

  that was produced by the floodlights around the base soaking

  through the methane-ammonia fog of the Ganymedean night. After a

  while even the presence of the duty controller, his face etched out

  against the darkness by the glow from his console, became an

  intrusion. Hunt stopped by the console on his way to the stairwell.

  "Check me out for surface access."

  The duty controller looked across at him. "You're going outside?"

  "I need some air."

  The controller brought one of his screens to life. "You are who,

  please?"

  "Hunt. Dr. V. Hunt."

  "ID?"

  "730289 C/EX4."

  The controller logged the details, then checked the time and keyed

  it in.

  "Report in by radio in one hour's time if you're not back. Keep a

  receiver channel open permanently on 24.328 megahertz."

  "Will do," Hunt acknowledged. "Good night."

  "Night."

  The controller watched Hunt disappear toward the floor below,

  shrugged to himself, and automatically scanned the displays in

  front of him. It was going to be a quiet night.

  In the surface access anteroom on the ground level, Hunt selected a

  suit from the row of lockers along the right hand wall. A few

  minutes later, suited up and with his helmet secured, he walked to

  the airlock, keyed his name and ID code into the terminal by the

  gate, and waited a couple of seconds for the inner door to slide

  open.

  He emerged into the swirling silver mist and turned right to follow

  the line of the looming black metal cliff of the control building.

  The crunch of his boots in the powder ice sounded faint and far

  away, through the thin vapors. Where the wall ended he continued

  walking slowly in a straight line, out into the open area and

  toward the edge of the base. Phantom shapes of steel emerged and

  disappeared in the silent shadows around him. The gloom ahead grew

  darker as islands of diffuse light passed by on either side. The

  ice began sloping upward. Irregular patches of naked, upthrusting

  rock became more frequent. He walked on as if in a trance.

 

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