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  Hunt sighed and pivoted the flatscreen display around to face him. "It’s us, Chris-Vic and Lyn. You’re expecting us."

  Danchekker’s expression softened, and his mouth compressed itself into a thin line that twitched briefly upward at the ends. "Oh, of course. I do apologize. Come on down. I’m in the dissecting lab on Level E."

  "Are you working alone?" Hunt asked.

  "Yes. We can talk here."

  "We’ll see you in a couple of minutes."

  They walked on through to the elevator bank at the rear of the lobby. "Chris must be working with his animals again," Lyn remarked as they waited.

  "I don’t think he’s come up for air since we got back from Ganymede," Hunt said. "I’m surprised he hasn’t started looking like some of them."

  Danchekker had been with Hunt on Ganymede when the Shapieron reappeared in the solar system. In fact Danchekker had made the major contribution to piecing together what was probably the most astounding part of the whole story, the more sensitive details of which still had not been cleared for publication to an unsuspecting and psychologically unprepared world.

  Not surprisingly, the Ganymeans had made visits to Earth during the period that their civilization had flourished on Minerva-twenty-five million years before. Their scientists had predicted an epoch of deteriorating environmental conditions on Minerva in the form of an increasing concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide, for which they had only a low inherent tolerance, so one of the reasons for their interest in Earth had been to assess it as a possible candidate for migration. But they soon abandoned the idea. The Ganymeans had evolved from ancestors whose biochemistry had precluded the emergence of carnivores, thus inhibiting the development of aggressiveness and ruthlessness together with most of the related traits that had characterized the survival struggle on Earth. The savagery that abounded in the environment of late-Oligocene, early-Miocene Earth made it altogether too inhospitable for the placid Ganymean temperament, and the notion of settling there unthinkable.

  These visits to Earth did, however, have one practical outcome in addition to satisfying the Ganymeans’ scientific curiosity. In the course of their studies of the forms of animal life they discovered, they identified a totally new, gene-based mechanism for absorbing C02 , which gave terrestrial fauna a far higher and more adaptable inherent tolerance. It suggested an alternative approach to solving the problem on Minerva. The Ganymeans imported large numbers of terrestrial animal species back to their own planet to conduct genetic experiments aimed at transplanting the functional terrestrial coding groups into their own species, thereafter to be inbred automatically into their descendants. Some well-preserved specimens of these early terrestrial animals had been recovered from the wrecked ship on Ganymede, and Danchekker had brought many of them back to Westwood for detailed studies.

  The experiments were not successful, and soon afterward the Ganymeans disappeared. The terrestrial species left on Minerva rapidly wiped out the virtually defenseless native forms, adapted and radiated to flourish across the planet, and continued to evolve. . . .

  Almost twenty-five million years later-around fifty thousand years before the current period on Earth-an intelligent, fully human form had established itself on Minerva. This race was named the "Lunarians" after the first traces of their existence came to light in the course of lunar explorations being conducted in 2028, which was when Hunt had first gotten involved and moved from England to join UNSA. The Lunarians were a violent and warlike race who developed advanced technology rapidly and eventually polarized into two superpowers, Cerios and Lambia, which clashed in a final, cataclysmic war fought across the entire surface of Minerva and beyond. In the violence of this conifict Minerva had been destroyed, Pluto and the Asteroids born, and Luna orphaned.

  A few survivors were left stranded on the lunar surface at the end of these events. Somehow, when at last the Moon stabilized in orbit around Earth after being captured, some of these survivors succeeded in reaching the only haven left for them in the entire solar system-the surface of Earth itself. For millennia they clung precariously to the edge of extinction, reverting to barbarism for a period and in the process losing the thread that traced their origins. But in time they grew strong and spread far and wide. They supplanted the Neanderthals, who were descended from the primates that had continued to evolve undisturbed on Earth, and eventually came to dominate the entire planet in the form of Modern Man. Only much later, when at last they rediscovered the sciences and ventured back into space, did they find the evidence to reconstruct the story of their origins.

  They found Danchekker attired in a stained white lab smock, measuring and examining parts taken from a large, brown, furry carcass lying on the dissection table. It was powerfully muscled, and its fearsome, well-developed carnivore’s teeth were exposed where the lower jaw of the snout had been removed. Danchekker informed them that it was an intriguing example of a relative to Daphoenodon of the Lower Miocene. Despite its evidently distinct digitigrade mode of locomotion, moderately long legs, and heavy tail, its three upper molars distinguished it as an ancestor of Amphicyon and through it of all modern bears-unlike Cynodesmus , of which Danchekker also had a specimen, whose upper dentition of two molars put it between Cynodictis and contemporary Canidae . Hunt took his word for it.

  Hunt had practically insisted to Caldwell that if they succeeded in arranging a landing for a ship from Thurien, Danchekker would have to be included in the reception party; he probably knew more about Ganymean biology and psychology than anybody else in the worid’s scientific community. Caldwell had broached the subject confidentially with the Director of the Westwood Institute, who had agreed and advised Danchekker accordingly. Danchekker had not needed very much persuading. He was far from happy at the manner in which the eminent personages responsible for managing Earth’s affairs had been handling things, however.

  "The whole situation is preposterous," Danchekker declared irritably while he was loading the instruments he had been using into a sterilizer on one side of the room. "Politics, cloak-and-dagger theatrics-this is an unprecedented opportunity for the advancement of knowledge and probably for a quantum leap in the progress of the whole human race, yet here we are having to plot and scheme as if we were dealing in illicit narcotics or something. I mean, good God, we can’t even talk about it over the phone! The situation’s intolerable."

  Lyn straightened up from the dissecting table, where she had been curiously studying the exposed innards of Daphoenodon. "I guess the UN feels it has an obligation to humanity to play safe," she said. "It’s a contact with a whole new civilization, and they figure that up front it ought to be handled by the professionals."

  Danchekker closed the sterilizer lid with a bang and walked over to a sink to rinse his hands. "When the Shapieron arrived at Ganymede, the only representatives of Homo sapiens there to meet it were, as I recall, the scientific and engineering personnel of the UNSA Jupiter missions," he pointed out coolly. "They conducted themselves in exemplary fashion and had established a perfectly civilized relationship with the Ganymeans long before the ship came to Earth. That was without any ‘professionals’ being involved at all, apart from sending inane advice from Earth on how the situation should be managed, and which those on the spot simply laughed at and ignored."

  Hunt looked across from a chair by a desk that stood in one corner of the lab, almost surrounded by computer terminal equipment and display screens. "Actually there is something to be said for the UN line," he said. "I don’t think you’ve thought yet just how big a risk we might be taking."

  Danchekker sniffed as he came back around the table. "What are you talking about?"

  "If the State Department wasn’t convinced that if we don’t go it alone and fix a landing the Soviets will, we’d be a lot more cautious too," Hunt told him.

  "I don’t follow you," Danchekker said. "What is there to be cautious about? The Ganymean mind is incapable of conceiving anything that could constitute a threat to our
, or anybody else’s, well-being, as you well know. They simply have not been shaped by the factors that have conditioned Homo sapiens to be what he is." He waved a hand in front of his face before Hunt could reply. "And as for your fears that the Thuriens may have changed in some fundamental way, you may forget that. The fundamental traits that determine human behavior were established, not tens but hundreds of millions of years ago, and I have studied Minervan evolution sufficiently to be satisfied that the same may safely be said of Ganymeans also. On such timescales, twenty-five million years is scarcely significant, and quite incapable of giving rise to changes of the magnitude that your suggestion implies."

  "I know that," Hunt said when he could get a word in. "But you’re going off at a wrong tangent. That’s not the problem. The problem is that we might not be talking to Ganymeans at all."

  Danchekker seemed taken aback for a moment, then frowned as if Hunt should have known better. "That’s absurd," he declared. "Who else could we be talking to? The original transmission from Farside was encoded in Ganymean communications format and understood, was it not? What reason is there to suppose its recipients were anything else?"

  "They’re talking in English now, but it’s not coming from London," Hunt replied.

  "But they are talking from Gistar," Danchekker retorted. "And isn’t that where, from independently derived evidence, we deduced that the Ganymeans went?"

  "We don’t know that those signals are coming from Gistar," Hunt pointed out. "They say they are, but they’ve been saying all kinds of other strange things as well. Our beams are being aimed in the direction of Gistar, but we’ve no idea what’s out there past the edge of the solar system picking them up. It could be some kind of Ganymean relay that transforms signals that our physics knows nothing about into electromagnetic waves, but then again it might not."

  "Surely it’s obvious," Danchekker said, sounding a trifle disdainful. "The Ganymeans left some kind of monitoring device behind when they migrated to Gistar, probably to detect and alert them to any signs of intelligent activity."

  Hunt shook his head. "If that were the case, it would have been triggered by early radio over a hundred years ago. We’d have known about it long before now."

  Danchekker thought about it for a moment, then showed his teeth. "Which proves my point. It responded only to Ganymean codes. We’ve never sent anything out encoded in Ganymean before, have we? Therefore it must be of Ganymean origin."

  "And now it’s talking English. Does that mean it was made by Boeing?"

  "Obviously the language was acquired via their surveillance operation."

  "And maybe they learned Ganymean the same way."

  "You’re being absurd."

  Hunt threw out his arms in appeal. "For Christ’s sake, Chris, all I’m saying is let’s be open-minded for now and accept that we might be letting ourselves in for something we didn’t expect. You’re saying they have to be Ganymeans, and you’re probably right; I’m saying there’s a chance they might not be. That’s all I’m saying."

  "You said yourself that Ganymeans don’t play cloak-and-dagger games and twist facts around, Professor," Lyn injected in a tone that she hoped would calm things a little. "But whoever it is seems to have some funny ideas about how to open up interplanetary relations. . . . And they’ve got some pretty weird ideas on how Earth is coming along these days, so somebody hasn’t been talking straight to somebody somewhere. That hardly sounds like Ganymeans, does it?"

  Danchekker snorted but seemed hard-pressed for a reply. The terminal on a side table by the desk saved him by emitting a calltone. "Excuse me," he muttered, leaning past Hunt to accept. "Yes?" Danchekker inquired.

  It was Ginny, calling from Navcomms HQ. "Hello, Professor Danchekker. I believe Dr. Hunt is with you. I have an urgent message for him. Gregg Caldwell said to find him and let him know right away."

  Danchekker moved back a pace, and Hunt rolled his chair forward in front of the screen. "Hi, Ginny," he acknowledged. "What’s new?"

  "A message has come in for you from Jupiter Five. " She looked down to read something below the edge of the screen. "It’s from the Mission Director-Joseph B. Shannon. It reads, ‘The lab tests worked out just as you hoped. Complete file of results being assembled for transmission now. Good luck’." Ginny looked up again. "Is that what you wanted to know?"

  Hunt’s face was radiating jubilation. "It sure is, Ginny!" he said. "Thanks. . . . a lot." Ginny nodded and tossed him a quick smile; the screen blanked out.

  Hunt swiveled his chair around to find two awed faces confronting him. "I guess we can stop arguing about it," he told them. "It looks as if we’ll know for sure before very much longer."

  Chapter Six

  The main receiver dish at Giordano Bruno was like a gigantic Cyclopean eye-a four-hundred-foot-diameter paraboloid of steel latticework towering into the starry blackness above the lifeless desolation of lunar Farside. It was supported by twin lattice towers moving in diametric opposition around the circular track that formed the most salient surface feature of the observatory and base. As it stood motionless, listening to whispers from distant galaxies, the lines of its lengthening shadow lay draped as a distorted mesh across the domes and lesser constructions huddled around it, spilling over on one side to become indistinct and lost among the boulders and craters scattered beyond.

  Karen Heller stood gazing up at it through the transparent wall of an observation tower protruding from the roof of the two-story Main Block. She had gone there to be alone and recompose herself after yet another acrimonious meeting of the eleven-person UN Farside delegation, which had gotten nowhere. Their latest scare was that the signals might not be coming from Ganymeans at all, which was her own fault for ill-advisedly introducing the thought that Hunt had voiced when she was in Houston a week earlier. She wasn’t sure even now why she had brought that possibility up at all, since with hindsight it provided an opportunity for procrastination that they were bound to latch onto. As she had commented to a surprised Norman Pacey afterward, it had been a badly calculated attempt at a shock tactic to spur any positive reaction, and had misfired. Perhaps in her frustration she hadn’t been thinking too clearly at the time. Anyway it was done now, and the latest transmission sent out toward Gistar had discounted the possibility of any landing in the immediate future and instead talked reams of insignificant detail to do with rank and protocol. Ironically this in itself should have said clearly enough that the aliens, Ganymean or not, harbored no hostile intentions; if they did, they would surely have just arrived, if that was what they wanted to do, without waiting for a cordial invitation. It all made the UN policy more enigmatic and reinforced her suspicions, and the State Department’s, that the Soviets were setting themselves up to go it alone and were manipulating the UN somehow. Nevertheless the U.S. would continue to follow the rules until Houston succeeded in establishing a channel via Jupiter-assuming Houston succeeded. If they did, and if none of the efforts to speed things up at Bruno had borne fruit by that time, the U.S. would feel justified in concluding that its hand had been forced.

  As she gazed up at the lines of metal etched against the blackness by the rays of the setting sun, she marveled at the knowledge and ingenuity that had created an oasis of life in a sterile desert a quarter of a million miles from Earth, and built instruments such as this, which even as she watched might be silently probing the very edges of the universe. One of the scientific advisors from NSF had told her once that all of the energy collected by all the world’s radiotelescopes since the beginnings of that branch of astronomy almost a century earlier was equivalent to no more than that represented by the ash from a cigarette falling through a distance of several feet. And somehow the whole fantastic picture painted by modern cosmology-of collapsed stars, black holes, X-ray-emitting binaries, and a universe consisting of a "gas" of galaxy "molecules"-had all been reconstructed from the information contained in it.

  She had ambivalent views about scientists. On the one hand, their inte
llectual accomplishments were baffling, and at times like this awesome; on the other, she often felt that at a deeper level their retreat into the realm of the inanimate represented an abdication-an escape from the burdens of the world of human affairs within which the expression of knowledge acquired meaning. Even biologists seemed to reduce life to terms of molecules and statistics. Science had created the tools to solve humanity’s problems a century ago, but had stood by helplessly while others took the tools and forged them into means of attaining other ends. It was not until the 2010s, when the UN emerged as a truly coherent global influence to be reckoned with, that strategic disarmament had become fact and the resources of the superpowers were at last mobilized toward building a safer and better world.

  It was all the more tragic and inexplicable that the UN-until so recently the epitome of the world’s commitment to meaningful progress and the realization of the full potential of the human race-should be the obstacle in the road along which the arrow of that progress surely pointed. It seemed a law of history for successful movements and empires to resist further change after the needs that had motivated them into promoting change had been satisfied. Perhaps, she reflected, the UN was already, in keeping with the universally accelerating pace of the times, beginning to show the eventual senility symptom of all empires-stagnation.

  But the planets continued to move in their predicted orbits, and the patterns being revealed by the computers connected to the instruments at Giordano Bruno didn’t change. So was her "reality" an illusion built on shifting sands, and had scientists shunned the illusion for some vaster, unchanging reality that was the only one of permanence that mattered? Somehow she couldn’t picture the Englishman Hunt or the American she had met in Houston as fugitives who would idle their lives away tinkering in ivory towers.

  A moving point of light detached itself from the canopy of stars and enlarged gradually into the shape of the UNSA surface transporter ship due in from Tycho. It came to a halt above the far side of the base, and after pausing for a few seconds sank slowly out of sight between Optical Dome 3 and a clutter of storage tanks and laser transceivers. Aboard it would be the courier with the latest information from Houston via Washington. The experts had decreed that if Ganymean technology was behind the surveillance of Earth’s communications anything was possible, and the ban on using even supposedly secure channels was still being rigidly enforced. Heller turned away and walked across the floor of the dome to call an elevator at the rear wall. A minute or two later she stepped out into a brightly lit, white-walled corridor three levels below the surface and began walking in the direction of the central hub of Bruno’s underground labyrinth.