Inherit the Stars Page 5

  "The backpack is a masterpiece of precision engineering in miniature," Danchekker continued, leading them to another part of the laboratory. "The prime power source for all the equipment and heating had been identified, and is nuclear in nature. In addition, there was a water recirculation plant, life-support system, standby power and communications system, and oxygen liquefaction plant—all in that!" He held up the casing of the stripped-down backpack for them to see, then tossed it back on the bench. "Several other devices were also included, but their purpose is still obscure. Behind you, you will see some personal effects."

  The professor moved around to indicate an array of objects taken from the body and arranged neatly on another bench like museum exhibits.

  "A pen—not dissimilar to a familiar pressurized ballpoint type; the top may be rotated to change color." He picked up a collection of metallic strips that hinged into a casing, like the blades of a pocketknife. "We suspect that these are keys of some kind because they have magnetic codes written on their surfaces."

  To one side was a collection of what looked like crumpled pieces of paper, some with groups of barely discernible symbols written in places. Next to them were two pocket-size books, each about half an inch thick.

  "Assorted oddments," Danchekker said, looking along the bench. "The documents are made from a kind of plasticized fiber. Fragments of print and handwriting are visible in places—quite unintelligible, of course. The material has deteriorated severely and tends to disintegrate at the slightest touch." He nodded toward Hunt. "This is another area where we hope to learn as much as we can with the Trimagniscope before we risk anything else." He pointed to the remaining articles and listed them without further elaboration. "Pen-size torch; some kind of pocket flamethrower, we think; knife; pen-size electric pocket drill with a selection of bits in the handle; food and drink containers—they connect via valves in the tubes inside the lower part of the helmet; pocket folder, like a wallet—too fragile to open; changes of underclothes; articles for personal hygiene; odd pieces of metal, purpose unknown. There were also a few electronic devices in the pockets; they have been sent elsewhere along with the rest."

  The party halted on the way back to the door to gather around the scarlet space suit, which had been reassembled on a life-size dummy standing on a small plinth. At first sight the proportions of the figure seemed to differ subtly from those of an average man, the build being slightly on the stocky side and the limbs a little short for the height of about five feet, six inches. However, since the suit was not designed for a close fit, it was difficult to be sure. Hunt noticed the soles of the boots were surprisingly thick.

  "Sprung interior," Danchekker supplied, following his gaze.

  "What's that?"

  "It's quite ingenious. The mechanical properties of the sole material vary with applied pressure. With the wearer walking at normal speed, the sole would remain mildly flexible. Under impact, however—for example, if he jumped—it assumes the characteristics of a stiff spring. It's an ideal device for kangarooing along in lunar gravity—utilizing conditions of reduced weight but normal inertia to advantage."

  "And now, gentlemen," said Caldwell, who had been following events with evident satisfaction, "the moment I guess you've been waiting for—let's have a look at Charlie himself."

  An elevator took them down to the subterranean levels of the institute. They emerged into a somber corridor of white-tiled walls and white lights, and followed it to a large metal door. Danchekker pressed his thumb against a glass plate set into the wall and the door slid silently aside on recognition of his print. At the same time, a diffuse but brilliant white glow flooded the room inside.

  It was cold. Most of the walls were taken up by control panels, analytical equipment, and glass cabinets containing rows of gleaming instruments. Everything was light green, as in an operating theater, and gave the same impression of surgical cleanliness. A large table, supported by a single central pillar, stood to one side. On top of it was what looked like an oversize glass coffin. Inside that lay the body. Saying nothing, the professor led them across the room, his overshoes squeaking on the rubbery floor as he walked. The small group converged around the table and stared in silent awe at the figure before them.

  It lay half covered by a sheet that stretched from its lower chest to its feet. In these clinical surroundings, the gruesome impact of the sight that had leaped at them from the screen in Caldwell's office earlier in the day was gone. All that remained was an object of scientific curiosity. Hunt found it overwhelming to stand at arm's length from the remains of a being who had lived as part of a civilization, had grown and passed away, before the dawn of history. For what seemed a long time he stared mutely, unable to frame any intelligent question or comment, while speculations tumbled through his mind on the life and times of this strange creature. When he eventually jolted himself back to the present, he realized that the professor was speaking again.

  ". . . Naturally, we are unable to say at this stage if it was simply a genetic accident peculiar to this individual or a general characteristic of the race to which he belonged, but measurements of the eye sockets and certain parts of the skull indicate that, relative to his size, his eyes were somewhat larger than our own. This suggests that he was not accustomed to sunlight as bright as ours. Also, note the length of the nostrils. Allowing for shrinkage with age, they are constructed to provide a longer passage for the prewarming of air. This suggests that he came from a relatively cool climate . . . the same thing can be observed in modern Eskimos."

  Danchekker made a sweeping gesture that took in the whole length of the body. "Again, the rather squat and stocky build is consistent with the idea of a cool native environment. A fat, round object presents less surface area per unit volume than a long, thin one and thus loses less heat. Contrast the compact build of the Eskimo with the long limbs and lean body of the Negro. We know that at the time Charlie was alive the Earth was just entering the last cold period of the Pleistocene Ice Age. Life forms in existence at that time would have had about a million years to adapt to the cold. Also, there is strong reason to believe that ice ages are caused by a reduction in the amount of solar radiation falling on Earth, brought about by the Sun and planets passing through exceptionally dusty patches of space. For example, ice ages occur approximately every two hundred and fifty million years; this is also the period of rotation of our galaxy—surely more than mere coincidence. Thus, this being's evident adaptation to cold, the suggestion of a lower level of daylight, and his established age all correlate well."

  Hunt looked at the professor quizzically. "You're pretty sure already, then, that's he's from Earth?" he said in a tone of mild surprise. "I mean—it's early days yet, surely?"

  Danchekker drew back his head disdainfully and screwed up his eyebrows to convey a shadow of irritation. "Surely it is quite obvious, Dr. Hunt." The tone was that of a professor reproaching an errant student. "Consider the things we have observed: the teeth, the skull, the bones, the types and layout of organs. I have deliberately drawn attention to these details to emphasize his kinship to ourselves. It is clear that his ancestry is the same as ours." He waved his hand to and fro in front of his face. "No, there can be no doubt whatsoever. Charlie evolved from the same stock as modern man and all the other terrestrial primates."

  Gray looked dubious. "Well, I dunno," he said. "I think Vic's got a point. I mean, if his lot did come from Earth, you'd have expected someone to have found out about it before now, wouldn't you."

  Danchekker sighed with an overplay of indifference. "If you wish to doubt my word, you have, of course, every right to do so," he said. "However, as a biologist and an anthropologist, I for my part see more than sufficient evidence to support the conclusions I have stated."

  Hunt seemed far from satisfied and started to speak again, but Caldwell intervened.

  "Cool it, you guys. D'you think we haven't had enough arguments like this around here for the last few weeks?"

  "
I really think it's about time we had some lunch," Lyn Garland interrupted with well-timed tact.

  Danchekker turned abruptly and began walking back toward the door, reciting statistics on the density of body hair and the thickness of subdermal layers of fat, apparently having dismissed the incident from his mind. Hunt paused to survey the body once more before turning to follow, and in doing so, he caught Gray's eyes for an instant. The engineer's mouth twitched briefly at the corners; Hunt gave a barely perceptible shrug. Caldwell, still standing by the foot of the table, observed the brief exchange. He turned his head to look after Danchekker and then back again at the Englishmen, his eyes narrowing thoughtfully. At last he fell in a few paces behind the group, nodding slowly to himself and permitting a faint smile.

  The door slid silently into place and the room was once more plunged into darkness.

  Chapter Seven

  Hunt brought his hands up to his shoulders, stretched his body back over his chair, and emitted a long yawn at the ceiling of the laboratory. He held the position for a few seconds, and then collapsed back with a sigh. Finally he rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, hauled himself upright to face the console in front of him once more, and returned his gaze to the three-foot-high wall of the cylindrical glass tank by his side.

  The image of the Trimagniscope tube was an enlarged view of one of the pocket-size books found on the body, which Danchekker had shown them on their first day in Houston three weeks before. The book itself was enclosed in the scanner module of the machine, on the far side of the room. The scope was adjusted to generate a view that followed the change in density along the boundary surface of the selected page, producing an image of the lower section of the book only; it was as if the upper part had been removed, like a cut deck of cards. Because of the age and condition of the book, however, the characters on the pages thus exposed tended to be of poor quality and in some places were incomplete. The next step would be to scan the image optically with TV cameras and feed the encoded pictures into the Navcomms computer complex. The raw input would then be processed by pattern recognition techniques and statistical techniques to produce a second, enhanced copy with many of the missing character fragments restored.

  Hunt cast his eye over the small monitor screens on his console, each of which showed a magnified view of a selected area of the page, and tapped some instructions into his keyboard.

  "There's an unresolved area on monitor five," he announced. "Cursors read X, twelve hundred to thirteen eighty; Y, nine ninety and, ah, ten seventy-five."

  Rob Gray, seated at another console a few feet away and almost surrounded by screens and control panels, consulted one of the numerical arrays glowing before him.

  "Z mod's linear across the field," he advised. "Try a block elevate?"

  "Can do. Give it a try."

  "Setting Z step two hundred through two ten . . . increment point one . . . step zero point five seconds."

  "Check." Hunt watched the screen as the surface picked out through the volume of the book became distorted locally and the picture on the monitor began to change.

  "Hold it there," he called.

  Gray hit a key. "Okay?"

  Hunt contemplated the modified view for a while.

  "The middle of the element's clear now," he pronounced at last. "Fix the new plane inside forty percent. I still don't like the strip around it, though. Give me a vertical slice through the center point."

  "Which screen d'you want it on?"

  "Ah . . . number seven."

  "Coming up."

  The curve, showing a cross section of the page surface through the small area they were working on, appeared on Hunt's console. He studied it for a while, then called:

  "Run an interpolation across the strip. Set thresholds of, say, minus five and thirty-five percent on Y."

  "Parameters set . . . Interpolator running . . . run complete," Gray recited. "Integrating into scan program now." Again the picture altered subtly. There was a noticeable improvement.

  "Still not right around the edge," Hunt said. "Try weighting the quarter and three-quarter points by plus ten. If that doesn't work, we'll have to break it down into isodepth bands."

  "Plus ten on point two five zero and point seven five zero," Gray repeated as he operated the keys. "Integrated. How's it look?"

  On the element of surface displayed on Hunt's monitor, the fragments of characters had magically assembled themselves into recognizable shapes. Hunt nodded with satisfaction.

  "That'll do. Freeze it in. Okay—that clears that one. There's another messy patch up near the top right. Let's have a go at that next."

  * * *

  Life had been reduced to much this kind of pattern ever since the day the installation of the scope was completed. They had spent the first week obtaining a series of cross-sectional views of the body itself. This exercise had proved memorable on account of the mild discomfort and not so mild inconvenience of having to work in electrically heated suits, following the medical authority's insistence that Charlie be kept in a refrigerated environment. It had proved something of an anticlimax. The net results were that, inside as well as out, Charlie was surprisingly—or not so surprisingly, depending on one's point of view—human. During the second week they had begun examining the articles found on the body, especially the pieces of "paper" and the pocketbooks. This investigation had proved more interesting.

  Of the symbols contained in the documents, numerals were the first to be identified. A team of cryptographers, assembled at Navcomms HQ, soon worked out the counting system, which turned out to be based on twelve digits rather than ten and employed a positional notation with the least significant digit to the left. Deciphering the nonnumeric symbols was proving more difficult. Linguists from institutions and universities in several countries had linked into Houston and, with the aid of batteries of computers, were attempting to make some sense of the language of the Lunarians, as Charlie's race had come to be called in commemoration of his place of discovery. So far their efforts had yielded little more than that the Lunarian alphabet comprised thirty-seven characters, was written horizontally from right to left, and contained the equivalent of upper-case characters.

  Progress, however, was not considered to be bad for so short a time. Most of the people involved were aware that even this much could never have been achieved without the scope, and already the names of the two Englishmen were well-known around the division. The scope attracted a lot of interest among the UNSA technical personnel, and most evenings saw a stream of visitors arriving at the Ocean Hotel, all curious to meet the coinventors of the instrument and to learn more about its principles of operation. Before long, the Ocean became the scene of a regular debating society where anybody who cared to could give free rein to his wildest speculations concerning the Charlie mystery, free from the constraints of professional caution and skepticism that applied during business hours.

  Caldwell, of course, knew everything that was said by anybody at the Ocean and what everybody else thought about it, since Lyn Garland was present on most nights and represented the next best thing to a hot line back to the HQ building. Nobody minded that much—after all, it was only part of her job. They minded even less when she began turning up with some of the other girls from Navcomms in tow, adding a refreshing party atmosphere to the whole proceedings. This development met with the full approval of the visitors from out-of-town; however, it had led to somewhat strained relationships on the domestic front for one or two of the locals.

  * * *

  Hunt jabbed at the keyboard for the last time and sat back to inspect the image of the completed page.

  "Not bad at all," he said. "That one won't need much enhancement."

  "Good," Gray agreed. He lit a cigarette and tossed the pack across to Hunt without being asked. "Optical encoding's finished," he added, glancing at a screen. "That's number sixty-seven tied up." He rose from his chair and moved across to stand beside Hunt's console to get a better view of the image in
the tank. He looked at it for a while without speaking.

  "Columns of numbers," he observed needlessly at last. "Looks like some kind of table."

  "Looks like it . . ." Hunt's voice sounded far away.

  "Mmm . . . rows and columns . . . thick lines and thin lines .,. Could be anything—mileage chart, wire gauges, some sort of timetable. Who knows?"

  Hunt made no reply but continued to blow occasional clouds of smoke at the glass, cocking his head first to one side and then to the other.

  "None of the numbers there are very large," he commented after a while. "Never more than two positions in any place. That gives us what in a duodecimal system? One hundred and forty-three at the most." Then as an afterthought, "I wonder what the biggest is."

  "I've got a table of Lunarian-decimal equivalents somewhere. Any good?"

  "No, don't bother for now. It's too near lunch. Maybe we could have a look at it over a beer tonight at the Ocean."