Giant Series 01 - Inherit the Stars
Page 22
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.