Inherit the Stars Page 11

"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 elements 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 fill the mugs. Having safely completed this operation, he began filling his pipe, still 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 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. "Is 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 below the surface?"

  "No way!"

&
nbsp; "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 Nearside 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 us 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 suggestions of what you're talking about."

  "Maybe they weren'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, Steinfield 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 Steinfield. 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. Caldwell

  Executive Director

  Navigation and Communications Division

  FROM: Dr. V. Hunt

  Section Head

  Special Assignment Group L

  ANOMALIES OF LUNAR CRATERING

  (1) Hemispheric Anomalies

  For many years, radical differences have been known to exist between the nature and origins of Lunar Nearside and Farside surface features.

  (a) Nearside

  Original Lunar surface from 4 billion years ago. Nearly all surface cratering caused by explosive release of kinetic energy by meteorite impacts. Some younger—e.g., Copernicus, 850 million years old.

  (b) Farside

  Surface comprises large mass of recently added material to average depth circa 300 meters. Craters formed during final phase of this bombardment. Dating of these events coincides with Lunarian presence. Origin of bombardment uncertain.

  (2) Nearside Exceptions

  Known for approx. the last thirty years that some Nearside craters date from same period as those on Farside. Current theory ascribes them to overshoots from Farside bombardment.

  (3) Conclusion From Recent Research at Omaha and Pasadena

  All Nearside exceptions previously attributed to meteoritic impacts. This belief now considered incorrect. Two classes of exceptions now distinguished:

  (a) Class I Exceptions

  Confirmed as meteoritic impacts occurring 50,000 years ago.

  (b) Class II Exceptions

  Differing from Class I in irradiation history, formation of glasses, absence of impact corroboration and positive results to tests for elements hyperium, bonnevillium, genevium. Example: Crater Lunar Catalogue reference MB 3076/K2/E currently classed as meteoritic. Classification erroneous. Crater MB 3076/K2/E was made by a nucleonic bomb. Other cases confirmed. Investigations continuing.

  (4) Farside Subsurface

  Intensive sampling from depths approximating that of the original crust indicate widespread nucleonic detonations prior to meteorite bombardment. Thermonuclear and fission reactions also suspected but impossible to confirm.

  (5) Implications

  (a) Sophisticated weapons used on Luna at or near time of Lunarian presence, mainly on Farside. Lunarian involvement implied but not proved.

  (b) If Lunarians involved, possibility of more widespread conflict embracing Lunarian home planet. Possible cause of Lunarian extinction.

  (c) Charlie was a member of more than a small, isolated expedition to our Moon. A significant Lunarian presence on the Moon is indicated. Mainly concentrated on Farside. Practically all traces since obliterated by meteorite storm.

  Chapter Twelve

  Front page feature of The New York Times, 14 October 2028:

  LUNARIAN PLANET LOCATED

  DID NUCLEAR WAR DESTROY MINERVA?

  Sensational new announcements by UN Space Arm Headquarters, Washington, D.C., at last positively identify the home planet of the Lunarian civilization, known to have achieved space flight and reached Earth's Moon fifty thousand years ago. Information pieced together during more than a year of intense work by teams of scientists based at the UNSA Navigation and Communications Division Headquarters, Houston, Texas, shows conclusively that the Lunarians came from an Earth-like planet that once existed in our own Solar System.

  A tenth planet, christened Minerva after the Roman goddess of wisdom, is now known to have existed approximately 250 million miles from the Sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, in the position now occupied by the Asteroid Belt, and is firmly established as having been the center of the Lunarian civilization.

  In a further startling announcement, a UNSA spokesman stated that data collected recently at the Lunar bases, following research at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, and the UNSA Mineralogy and Petrology Laboratories, Pasadena, California, indicate that a large-scale nuclear conflict took place on the Moon at the time the Lunarians were there. The possibility that Minerva was destroyed in a full-scale nuclear holocaust of interplanetary dimensions cannot be ruled out.

  NUCLEONIC BOMBS USED AT CRISIUM

  Investigations in recent months at the University of Nebraska and Pasadena give positive evidence that nucleonic bombs have caused craters on the Moon previously attributed to meteorite impacts. H-bomb and A-bomb effects are also suspected but cannot be confirmed.

  Dr. Saul Steinfield of the Department of Physics at the University of Nebraska explained: "For many years we have known that Lunar Farside craters are very much younger than most of the craters on Nearside. All the Farside craters, and a few of the Nearside ones, date from about the time of the Lunarians, and have always been thought to be meteoritic. Most of them, including all Farside ones, are. We have now proved, however, that some of the Nearside ones were made by bombs—for example, a few on the northern periphery of Mare Crisiu
m and a couple near Tycho. So far, we've identified twenty-three positively and have a long list to check out."

  Further evidence collected from deep below the Farside surface indicates heavier bombing there than on Nearside. Obliteration of the original Farside surface by a heavy meteorite storm immediately after these events accounts for only meteorite craters being found there today and makes detailed reconstruction of exactly what took place unlikely. "The evidence for higher activity on Farside is mainly statistical," said Steinfield yesterday. "There's no way you could figure anything specific—for example, an actual crater count—under all that garbage."

  The new discoveries do not explain why the meteorite storm happened at this time. Professor Pierre Guillemont of the Hale Observatory commented: "Clearly, there could be a connection with the Lunarian presence. Personally, I would be surprised if the agreement in dates is just a coincidence, although that, of course, is possible. For the time being, it must remain an unanswered question."