"Why?"
The question caught Hunt unprepared.
"Oh, I don't know really," he said. "On Earth I suppose things like that would only be accessible to people authorized. . . certainly not freely available to anyone who cared to ask for it. I suppose I. . . just assumed it would be the same."
"The fact that Earthmen are neurotic is no reason for Ganymeans to be furtive," ZORAC told him bluntly.
Hunt grinned and shook his head slowly.
"I guess I asked for that," he sighed.
Chapter Sixteen
The first and most important task that the Ganymeans had faced--that of getting their ship in order again--had now been successfully accomplished. So the focal point of their activities shifted to Pithead, where they commenced working intensively toward their second objective--coming to grips with the computer system of the wrecked ship. Whether the Ganymean race had migrated to another star, and if so which star, had still not been answered. A strong probability remained that this information was sitting waiting to be found, buried somewhere in the intricate molecular circuits and storage banks that went to make up the data-processing complex of a ship that had been built after the answers to these questions were known. The ship might even have been involved in that very migration.
The task turned out to be nowhere near as straightforward as the first one. Although the Pithead ship was of a later and more advanced design than the Shapieron , its main drives worked on similar principles and used components which, although showing certain modifications and refinements in some instances, performed functions that were essentially the same as those of their earlier counterparts. The drive system thus exemplified a mature technology that had not changed radically between the times of the two ships' construction, and the repair of the Shapieron had been possible as a consequence.
The same was not true for the computer systems. After a week of intensive analysis and probing, the Ganymean scientists admitted they were making little headway. The problem was that the system components that they found themselves trying to comprehend were, in most cases, unlike anything they had seen before. The processors themselves consisted of solid crystal blocks inside which millions of separate circuit elements of molecular dimensions were interconnected in three dimensions with complexities that defied the imagination. Only somebody who had been trained and educated in the design and physics of such devices could hope to unravel the coding locked inside them.
Some of the larger processors were completely revolutionary in concept, even to the Ganymeans, and seemed to represent a merging of electronic and gravitic technologies; characteristics of both were inextricably mingled together to form devices in which the physical interconnections between cells holding electronic data could be changed through variable gravitic-bonding links. The hardware configuration itself was programable and could be switched from nanosecond to nanosecond to yield an array in which any and every cell could function as a storage element at one instant or as a processing site the next; processing could, in the ultimate, be performed everywhere in the complex, all at the same time--surely the last word in parallelism. One interested but bemused UNSA engineer described it as "soft hardware. A brain with a billion times the speed. . ."
And every subsystem of the ship--communications, navigation, computation, propulsion control, flight control, and a hundred others--consisted of a network of interconnected processing nodes like that, with all the networks integrated into an impossible web that covered the length and breadth of the vessel.
Without detailed documentation and technical design information there was no way of tackling the problem. But no documentation was available. All the information was locked away inside the same system that they needed the information to get into; it was like having a can with the can opener inside it.
So, at the next progress meeting aboard the Shapieron , the senior Ganymean computer scientist declared himself ready to quit. When somebody commented that the Earthmen wouldn't have given up so easily, he thought about it, agreed with the evaluation and went back to Pithead to try again. After another week he came back again and stated, emphatically and finally, that if anybody thought the Earthmen could do better they'd be welcome to try. He'd quit.
And that, it seemed, was that.
There was nothing further to be achieved on Ganymede. Therefore the aliens at last announced their long-awaited decision to accept the invitation that had been extended to them by the world's governments, and come to Earth. This did not mean that they had also accepted the invitation to settle there. Admittedly there was nowhere else within many light-years for them to go, but many of them still harbored misgivings at what might await them on the Nightmare Planet. But they were rational beings and the rational thing to do was obviously to go and see the place before prejudging it. Any decision as to what to do about the longer-term future would wait until they were in possession of more concrete information on which to base it.
A number of UNSA personnel from the Jupiter missions were at the end of their duty tours and already scheduled to return to Earth as the comings and goings of ships permitted. The Ganymeans offered a ride in the Shapieron to anybody planning on going their way and were almost overwhelmed by the rush to accept.
Fortuitously, Hunt's latest communication from Gregg Caldwell, executive director of UNSA's Navcomms Division and Hunt's immediate chief, had indicated that Hunt's assignment on Ganymede was considered fulfilled and there was other work to be done back at Houston. Arrangements were being put in hand to ship him back. He had no difficulty in getting his name deleted from the UNSA schedule and added to the list of passengers due to go with the Shapieron.
Danchekker's main reason for coming to Ganymede had been to investigate the terrestrial Oligocene animals found in the Pithead ship. The professor persuaded Monchar, second in command of the Ganymean expedition, that there was plenty of room in the Shapieron to carry all the specimens of interest; after that he persuaded his director, at the Westwood Biological Institute, Houston, that the investigations would be carried out more thoroughly back on Earth, where all the facilities needed were available for the asking. The outcome was exactly as he had intended: Danchekker was going too.
And so the time came for Hunt to pack his belongings and take one last look around the tiny room that had been home for so long. Then he made the familiar walk along the well-worn corridor that led to the Domestic Dome to join the handful of others who were shipping out. There they stood a last round of drinks for their friends staying on and made their farewells. After promises to keep in touch and assertions that everybody's paths would cross again one day, they trooped through into the Site Operations Control building where the base commander and some of his staff were waiting in the airlock anteroom to bid them an official adieu. The access tube beyond the airlock took them through into the cabin of the tracked ice crawler that would carry them across to the landing pads, where a transporter ship was waiting.
Hunt's feelings were mixed as he gazed out of one of the crawler's viewing ports at the shadowy snatches of buildings and constructions that came and went among Pithead's swirling, eternal methane-ammonia mist. Going home after a long time away was always a nice feeling of course, but he would miss many aspects of the life he had grown used to in the tightly knit UNSA community here, where everybody shared in everybody else's problems and strangers were unknown. The spirit of comradeship that he had found here, the feeling of belonging, the sense of a common purpose. . . all these things gave a special intimacy to this tiny, manmade haven of survival that had been carved out of the hostile Ganymedean wilderness. The feelings he was experiencing so intensely at that moment would soon be diluted and forgotten when he returned to Earth and again rubbed shoulders every day with faceless millions, all busily living out their different lives in their different ways and with their different aims and values. There, custom and synthetic social barriers served to mark out the lines of demarcation that men needed in order to satisfy their psycho
logical need to identify with definable cultural groups. The colony on Ganymede had not needed to build any artificial walls around itself to set it apart from the rest of the human race; Nature and several hundred million miles of empty space provided all the isolation necessary.
Perhaps, he thought to himself, that was why men pitched camps on the South Cal of Everest, sailed ships across the seven seas, and held reunion dinners year after year to share nostalgic memories of school or army days. The challenges and the hardships that they faced together forged bonds between them that the protective cocoon of normal society could never emulate and awakened an awareness of qualities in themselves and in each other that could never be erased. He knew then that, like the sailor or the mountaineer, he would return time after time to know again the things that he had found on Ganymede.
Danchekker, however, was less of a romantic.
"I don't care if they discover seven-headed monsters on Saturn," the professor said as they boarded the transporter. "Once I get home again I'm staying there. I've lived quite enough of my life already surrounded by these wretched contraptions."
"I bet you find you've developed agoraphobia when you get there," Hunt told him.
At Main there was another round of farewells to go through before they were driven out, now wearing spacesuits, to the Shapieron's lowered entrance section; they could not be flown directly up into the ship's outer bays because the telescopic access tubes that projected from the buildings of the base--affording direct entry to UNSA ships and vehicles--were not designed to mate with the airlocks of Ganymean daughter vessels. Members of the Ganymean crew received them at the foot of the entrance ramp and conducted them up into the stern section, where an elevator was waiting to carry them up into the main body of the ship.
Three hours later loading was complete and the final departure preparations had been made. Garuth and a small Ganymean rear-guard exchanged formal words of parting with the base commander and some of his officers, who had driven out to the ramp for the ceremony. Then the Earthmen boarded their vehicle and returned to the base while the Ganymeans withdrew into the Shapieron and the stern section retracted upward into its flight position.
Hunt was alone in the cabin that had been allocated to him, taking in his last view of Main from a mural videoscreen, when ZORAC announced that takeoff was imminent. There was no sensation of motion at all; the view just started to diminish in size and flatten out as the ground fell away beneath. The Ganymedean landscape flowed inward from the edges of the picture and the surface details rapidly dissolved into a uniform sea of frosty whiteness as the ship gained altitude. Soon even the pinpoint of reflected light that was Main faded into the background, and an arc of blackness began advancing upward across the view as Ganymede's dark side moved into the picture. At the top, the curvature of the moon's sunlit side appeared, ushering in a gaggle of attendant background stars. The bright strip left in the center of the screen continued to narrow steadily, and at last its ends slipped in from beyond the edges of the frame to reveal it as a brilliant crescent hanging in the heavens, and already shrinking as he watched.
Then the crescent and the stars seemed to dissolve into diffuse smudges of light that flowed into one another until the whole screen was reduced to a uniform expanse of featureless, iridescent fog. The ship was now under main drive, he realized, and temporarily shut off from information coming in from the rest of the universe--information carried as electromagnetic waves anyway. He wondered what the Ganymeans used instead--to navigate by, for instance. Here was something he would raise with ZORAC.
But that could wait for now. For the moment he just wanted to relax and prepare his mind for other things. Unlike his voyage out aboard Jupiter Five , the journey to Earth would be measured in days.
Chapter Seventeen
And so the Ganymeans came at last to Earth.
After the failure of the various governments to reach agreement among themselves as to where the aliens should be received in the event of their accepting the invitation to visit, the Parliament of the United States of Europe had voted to go it alone and make their own preparations anyway--just in case. The place they selected was an area of pleasant open country on the Swiss shore of Lake Geneva, where, it was hoped, the climate would prove agreeable to the Ganymean constitution and the historical tradition of nonbelligerence would add a singularly appropriate note.
About halfway between the city of Geneva and Lausanne, they fenced off an area just over a mile square on the edge of the lake, and inside it erected a village of chalets that had been designed for Ganymean occupation; the ceilings were high, the doorways big, the beds strong, and the windows slightly tinted. Communal cooking and dining facilities were provided, along with leisure rooms, terminals linked into the World's integrated entertainments: data/news grid, an outsize swimming pool, a recreation area, and just about anything else which seemed likely to contribute to making life comfortable and could be included in the time available. A huge concrete pad was laid to support the Shapieron and afford parking for vehicles and daughter ships, and accommodation inside the perimeter was provided for delegations of visiting Earthmen, together with conference and social facilities.
When the news came in from Jupiter that the aliens were planning on departing for Earth in just a couple of weeks' time and--even more startling--the journey would take only a few days, it was obvious that the issue of where to receive them had already been decided. By the time the Shapieron appeared from the depths of space and went into Earth orbit, a fleet of suborbital aircraft was converging on Geneva with officials and Heads of State from every corner of the globe, all hurrying to participate in the hastily worked out welcoming formalities. Swarms of buzzing VTOL jets shuttled back and forth between Geneva International Airport and what was now being called Ganyville to convey them to their final destination while traffic on the Geneva/Lausanne highway below deteriorated to a bumper-to-bumper jam, private aircars having been banned from the area. A peppering of colors, becoming denser as the hours went by, appeared on the green inland slopes that overlooked Ganyville, as the first spectators arrived and set up camp with tents, sleeping bags, blankets and picnic stoves, determined to secure and hold a grandstand view. A continuous cordon of jovial but overworked policemen, including some from Italy, France and Germany since the numbers of the tiny Swiss force were simply not up to the task, maintained a clear zone two hundred meters wide between the rapidly growing crowd and the perimeter fence, while on the lakeward side a flotilla of police launches scurried to and fro to keep at bay an armada of boats, yachts and craft of every description. Along the roadsides an instant market came into being as the more entrepreneurial members of the shopkeeping fraternity from the nearby towns loaded their stocks into trucks and brought the business to where the customers were. A lot of small fortunes were made that day, from selling everything from instant meals and woolly sweaters to hiking boots and high-power telescopes.
Several thousand miles above, the Shapieron was not quite away from it all. An assortment of UNSA craft had formed themselves into a ragged escort around the ship, sweeping with it round the Earth every hour and a half. Many of them carried newsmen and camera crews broadcasting live to an enthralled audience via the World News Grid. They had exchanged messages with ZORAC and the Earthmen aboard who had come with the Shapieron from Jupiter, thrilled the viewers below by beaming down views from inside an alien spacecraft, and mixed in constantly updated reports of the latest developments at Lake Geneva. In between, the commentators had described ad nauseam how the ship had first appeared over Ganymede, what had transpired since, where their race had originated in the first place, why the expedition had gone to Iscaris and what had happened there, and anything else they could think of to fill in time before the big event. Half the factories and offices on Earth were estimated to have given it up as a bad job and closed down until after the big event was all over, since the employees who weren't glued to a screen somewhere else were glued to one being
paid out of the firm's money. As one president of a New York company commented to an NBC street interviewer: "I'm not gonna spend thousands to find out all over again what King Canute proved centuries ago--you can't stop the tide once it's made its mind up. I've sent'em all home to get it outa their systems. I guess this year we've got an extra day's public holiday." On being asked what he himself intended doing, he replied with surprise: "Me? I'm going home to watch the landing, of course."
Inside the Shapieron , Hunt and Danchekker were among the mixed group of Ganymeans and Earthmen gathered in the ship's command center--the place to which Hunt had been conducted with Storrel and the others at the time of their momentous first visit from Jupiter Five. A number of eggs had been dispatched from the Shapieron to descend to lower altitudes and obtain, for the aliens' benefit, a bird's-eye preview of different parts of Earth. The Earthmen were explaining the significance of some of the pictures that the eggs were sending back. Already the Ganymeans had gazed incredulously at the teeming density of life in cities such as New York, Tokyo and London, gasped at the spectacles of the Arabian desert and the Amazon jungle--terrain unlike any that had existed on Minerva--and stared in mute, horrified fascination at a telescopic presentation of lions stalking zebra in the African grasslands.
To Hunt, the familiar sights of green continents, sun-drenched plains and blue oceans, after what felt like an eternity of nothing but rock, ice and the blackness of space, were overpowering. As different parts of the mosaic of Earth came and went across the main screen, he detected a steady change in the moods of the Ganymeans too. The earlier misgivings and apprehensions that some of them had felt were being swept away by an almost intoxicating enthusiasm that became contagious as time went by. They were becoming restless and excited--keen to see more, firsthand, of the incredible world where chance had brought them.
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