Giant Series 01 - Inherit the Stars

by Inherit the Stars [lit]

  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 eye 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 on 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 page 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 awhile, 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 began examining the articles found on the body,

  especially the pieces of "paper" and the pocket books. 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 Naycomms

  HO, 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 Hot
el, 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

  Naycomms 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 fortythree 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."

  'I can pick out their one and two," Gray said. "And three and Hey!

  What do you know-look at the right-hand columns of

  those big boxes. Those numbers are in ascending order!"

  "You're right. And look-the same pattern repeats over and over in

  every one. It's some kind of cyclic array." Hunt thought for a

  moment, his face creased in a frown of concentration. "Something

  else, too-see those alphabetic groups down the sides? The same

  groups reappear at intervals all across the page . . ." He broke

  off again and rubbed his chin.

  Gray waited perhaps ten seconds. "Any ideas?"

  "Dunno. . . Sets of numbers starting at one and increasing by one

  every time. Cyclic. . . an alphabetic label tagged on to each

  repeating group. The whole pattern repeating again inside bigger

  groups, and the bigger groups repeat again. Suggests some sort of

  order. Sequence. . ."

  His mumblings were interrupted as the door opened behind them. Lyn

  Garland walked in.

  "Hi, you guys. What's showing today?" She moved over to stand

  between them and peered into the tank. "Say, tables! How about

  that? Where'd they come from, the books?"

  "Hello, lovely," Gray said with a grin. "Yep." He nodded in the

  direction of the scanner.

  "Hi," Hunt answered, at last tearing his eyes away from the image.

  "What can we do for you?"

  She didn't reply at once, but continued staring into the tank.

  "What are they? Any ideas?"

  "Don't know yet. We were just talking about it when you came in."

  She marched across the lab and bent over to peer into the top of

  the scanner. The smooth, tanned curve of her leg and the proud

  thrust of her behind under her thin skirt drew an exchange of

  approving glances from the two English scientists. She came back

  and studied the image once more.

  "Looks like a calendar, if you ask me," she told them. Her voice

  left no room for dissent.

  Gray laughed. "Calendar, eh? You sound pretty sure of it. What's

  this-a demonstration of infaffible feminine intuition or

  something?" He was goading playfully.

  She turned to confront him with out-thrust jaw and hands

  planted firmly on hips. "Listen, Limey-I've got a right to an

  opinion, okay? So, that's what I think it is. That's my opinion."

  "Okay, okay." Gray held up his hands. "Let's not start the War of

  Independence all over again. I'll note it in the lab file: 'Lyn

  thinks it's a-'"

  "Holy Christ!" Hunt cut him off in midsentence. He was staring

  wide-eyed at the tank. "Do you know, she could be right! She could

  just be bloody right!"

  Gray turned back to face the side of the tank. "How come?"

  "Well, look at it. Those larger groups could be something like

  months, and the labeled sets that keep repeating inside them could

  be weeks made up of days. After all, days and years have to be

  natural units in any calendar system. See what I mean?"

  Gray looked dubious. "I'm not so sure," he said slowly. "It's

  nothing like our year, is it? I mean, there's a hell of a lot more

  than three hundred sixty-five numbers in that lot, and a lot more

  than twelve months, or whatever they are-aren't there?"

  "I know. Interesting?"

  "Hey. I'm still here," said a small voice behind them. They moved

  apart and half turned to let her in on the proceedings.

  "Sorry," Hunt said. "Getting carried away." He shook his head and

  regarded her with an expression of disbelief.

  "What on Earth made you say a calendar?"

  She shrugged and pouted her lips. "Don't know, really. The book

  over there looks like a diary. Every diary I ever saw had calendars

  in it. So, it had to be a calendar."

  Hunt sighed. "So much for scientific method. Anyway, let's run a

  shot of it. I'd like to do some sums on it later." He looked back

  at Lyn. "No-on second thought, you run it. This is your discovery."

  She frowned at him suspiciously. "What d'you want me to do?" "Sit

  down there at the master console. That's right. Now activate the

  control keyboard. . . Press the red button-that one."

  "What do I do now?"

  "Type this: FC comma DACCO seven slash PCH dot P sixty-seven slash

  HCU dot one. That means 'functional control mode, data access

  program subsystem number seven selected, access data file reference

  "Project Charlie, Book one," page sixtyseven, optical format,

  output on hard copy unit, one copy."

  "It does? Really? Great!"

  She keyed in the commands as Hunt repeated them more slowly. At


  once a hum started up in the hard copier, which stood next to the

  scanner. A few seconds later a sheet of glossy paper flopped into

  the tray attached to the copier's side. Gray walked over to collect

  it.

  "Perfect," he announced.

  "This makes me a scope expert, too," Lyn informed them brightly.

  Hunt studied the sheet briefly, nodded, and slipped it into a

  folder lying on top of the console.

  "Doing some homework?" she asked.

  "I don't like the wallpaper in my hotel room."

  "He's got the theory of relativity all around the bedroom in his

  flat in Wokingham," Gray confided, ". . . and wave mechanics in the

  kitchen."

  She looked from one to the other curiously. "Do you know, you're

  crazy. Both of you-you're both crazy. I was always too polite to

  mention it before, but somebody has to say it."

  Hunt gave her a solemn look. "You didn't come all the way over here

  to tell us we're crazy," he pronounced.

  "Know something-you're right. I had to be in Westwood anyway. A

  piece of news just came in this morning that I thought might

  interest you. Gregg's been talking to the Soviets. Apparently one

  of their materials labs has been doing tests on some funny pieces

  of metal alloy they got hold of-all sorts of unusual properties

  nobody's ever seen before. And guess what-they dug them up on the

  Moon, somewhere near Mare Imbrium. And-when they ran some dating

  tests, they came up with a figure of about fifty thousand years !

  How about that! Interested?"

  Gray whistled.

  "It had to be just a matter of time before something else turned

  up," Hunt said, nodding. "Know any more details?"

  She shook her head. "Fraid not. But some of the guys might be able

  to fill you in a bit more at the Ocean tonight. Try Hans if he's

  there; he was talking a lot to Gregg about it earlier."

  Hunt looked intrigued but decided there was little point in

  pursuing the matter further for the time being.

  "How is Gregg?" he asked. "Has he tried smiling lately?"

  "Don't be mean," she reproached him. "Gregg's okay. He's

  busy, that's all. D'you think he didn't have enough to worry about

  before all this blew up?"

  Hunt didn't dispute it. During the few weeks that had passed, he

  had seen ample evidence of the massive resources Caldwell was

  marshaling from all around the globe. He couldn't help but be