Giant Series 01 - Inherit the Stars

by Inherit the Stars [lit]

  makes up the Farside surface is much younger than anything anybody

  ever believed existed on the Moon in any quantity

  up until about, ah, thirty or so years back-one hell of a lot

  younger! But you know that-that's why you're here."

  "You don't mean it was formed recently,"~ Hunt stated.

  Steinfield shook his head vigorously from side to side, causing the

  two tufts of white hair that jutted from the sides of his otherwise

  smooth head to wave about in a frenzy. "No. We can tell that it's

  about as old as the rest of the Solar System. What I mean is-it

  hasn't been where it is very long."

  He caught Hunt's shoulder and half turned him to face a wall chart

  showing a sectional view through the Lunar center. "You can see it

  on this. The red shell is the original outer crust going right

  around-it's roughly circular, as you'd expect. On Farside-

  here-this blue stuff sits on top of it and wasn't added very long

  ago."

  "On top of what used to be the surface."

  "Exactly. Somebody dumped a couple of billion tons of junk down on

  the old crust-but only on this side."

  "And that's been verified pretty conclusively?" Hunt asked, just to

  be doubly sure.

  "Yeah. . . yeah. Enough bore holes and shafts have been sunk all

  over Farside to tell us pretty closely where the old surface was.

  I'll show you something over here . . ." A major section of the far

  wall comprised nothing but rows of small metal drawers, each with

  its own neatly lettered label, extending from floor to ceiling.

  Steinfield walked across the room, and stooped to scan the labels,

  at the same time mumbling to himself semi-intelligibly. With a

  sudden "That's it!" he pounced on one of the drawers, opened it,

  and returned bearing a closed glass container about the size of a

  small pickle jar. It contained a coarse piece of a light gray rocky

  substance that glittered faintly in places, mounted on a wire

  support.

  "This is a fairly common KREEP basalt from Farside. It-"

  "'Creep'?"

  "Rich in potassium-that is, K-rare earth elements, and phosphorus:

  KREEP."

  "Oh-I see."

  "Compounds like this," Steinfield continued, "make up a lot of the

  highlands. This one solidified around 4.1 billion years ago. Now,

  by analyzing the isotope products produced by cosmic-ray exposure,

  we can tell how long it's been lying on the surface.

  Again, the figure for this one comes out at about 4,100 million

  years."

  Hunt looked slightly puzzled. "But that's normal. It's what you'd

  expect, isn't it?"

  "If it had been lying on the surface, yes. But this came from the

  bottom of a shaft over seven hundred feet deep! In other words, it

  was on the surface for all that time-then suddenly it's seven

  hundred feet down." Steinfleld gestured toward the wall chart

  again. "As I said, we find the same thing all over Farside. We can

  estimate how far down the old surface used to be. Below it we find

  old rocks and structures that go way back, just like on Nearside;

  above it everything's a mess-the rock all got pounded up and lots

  of melting took place when the garbage came down, all the way up to

  what's now the surface. It's what you'd expect."

  Hunt nodded his agreement. The energy released by that amount of

  mass being stopped dead in its tracks would have been phenomenal.

  "And nobody knows where it came from?" he asked.

  Steinfield repeated his head-shaking act. "Some people say that a

  big meteorite shower must have got in the way of the Moon. That may

  be true-it's never been argued conclusively one way or the other.

  The composition of the garbage isn't really like a lot of

  meteorites, though-it's closer to the Moon itself. It's as if they

  were made out of the same stuff-that's why it looks the same from

  higher up. You have to look at the microstructure to see the things

  I've been talking about."

  Hunt examined the specimen curiously for a while in silence. At

  length he laid it carefully on the top of one of the benches.

  Steinfield picked it up and returned it to its drawer.

  "Okay," Hunt said as Steinfield rejoined him. "Now, what about the

  Farside surface?"

  "Kronski and company."

  "Yes-as we discussed yesterday."

  "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 element
s 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 ifil the mugs. Having

  safely completed this operation, he began filling his pipe, stifi

  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 last 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. Was 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 down below the surface?"

  "No way!"

  "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 Near-side

  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 you 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 suggestion of 'what you're talking

  about."

  "Maybe they we
ren'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, Steinfleld 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 Steinfleld. 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. Caidwell

  Executive Director