Giant Series 01 - Inherit the Stars

by Inherit the Stars [lit]

  The column moved slowly through the desert of scorched gray dust,

  and its numbers shrank rapidly as wounds and radiation sickness

  took their toll. On Day Twenty-six they encountered a Lambian

  ground force and for three hours fought furiously among the crags

  and boulders. The battle ended when the remaining Lambian tanks

  broke cover and charged straight into the Cerian position, only to

  be destroyed right on the perimeter line by Cerian women firing

  laser artillery at point-blank range. After the battle there were

  165 Cerians left, but not enough vehicles to carry them.

  After conferring, the Cerian officers devised a plan to continue

  the journey leapfrog fashion. Half the company would be moved half

  a day's distance forward and left there with one truck to use as

  living accommodation, while the remaining vehicles returned to

  collect the group left behind. So it would go on all the way to

  Gorda. Charlie and Koriel were among the first group lifted on

  ahead.

  Day Twenty-eight. Uneventful drive. Set up camp in a shady gorge

  and watched the convoy about-face again and begin its long haul

  back for the others. They should be back this time tomorrow.

  Nothing much to do until then. Two died on the drive, so there are

  fifty-eight of us here. We take turns to rest and eat inside the

  truck. When it's not your turn, you make yourself as comfortable as

  you can sitting among the rocks. Koriel is furious. He's just spent

  two hours sitting outside with four of the artillery girls. He says

  whoever designed spacesuits should have thought of situations like

  that.

  The convoy never returned.

  Using the single remaining truck, the group continued the same

  tactic as before, ferrying one party on ahead, dumping them, and

  returning for the rest. By Day Thirty-three, sickness, mishaps, and

  one suicide had depleted the numbers such that all the survivors

  could be carried in the truck at once, so the leapfrogging was

  discontinued. Driving steadily, they estimated they would reach

  Gorda on Day Thirty-eight. On Day Thirty-seven, the truck broke

  down. The spare parts needed to repair it were not available.

  Many were weak. It was clear that an attempt to reach Gorda on foot

  would be so slow that nobody would make it.

  Day Thirty-seven. Seven of us-four men (myself, Koriel, and two of

  the combat troopers) and three girls-are going to make a dash for

  Gorda while the others stay put in the truck and wait for a rescue

  party. Koriel is cooking a meal before we set out. He has been

  saying what he thinks of life in the infantry-doesn't seem to think

  much of it at all.

  Some hours after they left the truck, one of the troopers climbed a

  crag to survey the route ahead. He slipped, gashed his suit, and

  died instantly from explosive decompression. Later on, one of the

  girls hurt her leg and lagged farther and farther behind as the

  pain worsened. The Sun was sinking and there was no time for

  slowing down. Everybody in the group wrestled with the same

  equation in his mind-one life or twenty-eight?-but said nothing.

  She solved the problem for them by quietly closing her air valve

  when they stopped to rest.

  Day Thirty-eight. Just Koriel and me now-like the old days.

  The trooper suddenly doubled up, vomiting violently inside his

  helmet. We stood and watched while he died, and could do nothing.

  Some hours later, one of the girls collapsed and said she couldn't

  go on. The other insisted on staying with her until we sent help

  from Gorda. Couldn't really argue-they were sisters. That was some

  time ago. We've stopped for a breather; I am getting near my limit.

  Koriel is pacing up and down impatiently and wants to get moving.

  That man has the strength of twelve .

  Later. Stopped at last for a couple of hours sleep. I'm sure Koriel

  is a robot-just keeps going and going. Human tank. Sun very low in

  sky. Must make Gorda before Lunar night sets in.

  Day Thirty-nine. Woke up freezing cold. Had to turn suit heating up

  to maximum-still doesn't feel right. Think it's developing a fault.

  Koriel says I worry too much. Time to be on the move again. Feel

  stiff all over. Seriously wondering if I'll make it. Haven't said

  so.

  Later. The march has been a nightmare. Kept falling down. Koriel

  insisted that the only chance we had was to climb up out of the

  valley we were in and try a shortcut over a high ridge. I made it

  about halfway up the cleft leading toward the ridge. Every step up

  the cleft I could see Minerva sitting right over the middle of the

  ridge, gashes of orange and red all over it, like a (macabre?)

  face, taunting. Then I collapsed. When I came to, Koriel had

  dragged me inside a pilot digging of some sort. Maybe someone wag

  going to put an outpost of Gorda here. That was a while ago now.

  Koriel has gone on and says help will be back before I know it.

  Getting colder all the time. Feet numb and hands stiff. Frost

  starting to form in helmet-difficult to see.

  Thinking about all the people strung out back there with night

  coming down, all like me, wondering if they'll be picked up. if we

  can hold out we'll be all right. Koriel will make it. If it were a

  thousand miles to Gorda, Koriel would make it.

  Thinking about what has happened on Minerva and wondering if, after

  all this, our children will live on a sunnier world-and if they do,

  if they will ever know what we did.

  Thinking about things I've never really thought about before. There

  should be better ways for people to spend their lives than in

  factories, mines, and army camps. Can't think what, though-that's

  all we've ever known. But if there is warmth and color and light

  somewhere in this Universe, then maybe something worthwhile will

  come out of what we've been through.

  Too much thinking for one day. Must sleep for a while now.

  Hunt found he had read right through to the end, absorbed in the

  pathos of those final days. His voice had fallen to a sober pitch.

  A long silence ensued.

  "Well, that's it," he concluded, a little more briskly. "Did you

  notice that bit right at the end? In the last few lines he was

  talking about seeing the surface of Minerva again. Now, they might

  have used telescopes earlier on, but in the situation he was in

  there, they'd hardly be lugging half an observatory along with

  them, would they?"

  Maddson's assistant looked thoughtful. "How about that periscope

  video gadget that was in the helmet?" he suggested. "Maybe there's

  something wrong in the translation. Couldn't he be talking about

  seeing a transmission through that?"

  Hunt shook his head. "Can't see it. I've heard of people watching

  TV in all sorts of funny places, but never halfway up a bloody

  mountain. And another thing: He described it as sitting up above

  the ridge. That implies it's really out there. If it were a view on

  video, he'd never have worded it that way. Right, Don?"

  Maddson nodded wearily. "Guess so," he said. "So, where do we go


  from here?"

  Hunt looked from Maddson to the assistant and back again. He leaned

  his elbows on the edge of the table and rubbed his face and

  eyeballs with his fingers. Then he sighed and sat back.

  "What do we know for sure?" he asked at last. "We know that those

  Lunarian spaceships got to our Moon in under two days. We know that

  they could accurately aim a weapon, sited on our Moon, at a

  Minervan target. We also know that the round trip for

  electromagnetic waves was much shorter than it could possibly have

  been if we've been talking about the right place. Finally, we can't

  prove but we think that Charlie could stand on our Moon and see

  quite clearly the surface features of Minerva. Well, what does that

  add up to?"

  "There's only one place in the Universe that fits all those

  numbers," Maddson said numbly.

  "Exactly-and we're standing on it! Maybe there was a planet called

  Minerva outside Mars, and maybe it had a civilization on it. Maybe

  the Ganymeans took a few animals there and maybe they

  didn't. But it doesn't really matter any more, does it? Because the

  only planet Charlie's ship could possibly have taken off from, and

  the only planet they could have aimed that Minihilator at, and the

  only planet he could have seen in detail from Luna.-is this one!

  "They were from Earth all along!

  "Everyone will be jumping off the roof and out of every window in

  the building when this gets around Navcomms."

  chapter seventeen

  With the first comprehensive translation of the handwritten

  notebook, the paradox was complete. Now there were two consistent

  and apparently irrefutable bodies of evidence, one proving that the

  Lunarians must have evolved on Earth, and the other proving that

  they couldn't have.

  All at once the consternation and disputes broke out afresh. Lights

  burned through the night at Houston and elsewhere as the same

  inevitable chains of reasoning were reeled out again and yet again,

  the same arrays of facts scrutinized for new possibilities or

  interpretations. But always the answers came out the same. Only the

  notion of the Lunarians having been the product of a parallel line

  of evolution appeared to have been abandoned permanently; more than

  enough theories were in circulation already without anyone having

  to invoke this one. The Navcomms fraternity disintegrated into a

  myriad of cliques and strays, scurrying about to ally first with

  this idea and then with that. As the turmoil subsided, the final

  lines of defense fortified themselves around four main camps.

  The Pure Earthists accepted without reservation the deductions from

  Charlie's diary, and held that the Lunarian civilization had

  developed on Earth, flourished on Earth, and destroyed itself on

  Earth and that was that. Thus, all references to Minerva and its

  alleged civilization were nonsense; there never had been any

  civilization on Minerva apart from that of the Ganymeans, and that

  was too far in the remote past to have any bearing on the Lunarian

  issue. The world depicted on Charlie's maps was Earth, not Minerva,

  so there had to be a gross error somewhere in the calculations that

  put it at 250 million miles from the Sun. That this corresponded to

  the orbital radius of the Asteroids was just coincidence; the

  Asteroids had always been there, and anything from Iliad that said

  they hadn't was suspect and needed doublechecking.

  That left only one question unexplained: Why didn't Charlie's

  maps look like Earth? To answer this one, the Earthists launched a

  series of commando raids against the bastions of accepted

  geological theory and methods of geological datingi Drawing on the

  hypothesis that continents had been formed initially from a single

  granitic mass that had been shattered under the weight of immense

  ice caps and pushed apart by polar material rushing in to ifil the

  gaps, they pointed to the size of the ice caps shown on the maps

  and stressed how much larger they were than anything previously

  supposed to have existed on Earth. Now, if in fact the maps showed

  Earth and not Minerva, that meant that the Ice Age on Earth had

  been far more severe than previously thought, and its effects on

  surface geography correspondingly more violent. Add to this the

  effects of the crustal fractures and vulcanism as described in

  Charlie's observations of Earth (not Minerva), and there was,

  perhaps, enough in all that to account for the transformation of

  Charlie's Earth into modern Earth. So, why were there no traces to

  be found today of the Lunarian civilization? Answer: It was clear

  from the maps that most of it had been concentrated on the

  equatorial belt. Today that region was completely ocean, dense

  jungle, or drifting desert-adequate to explain the rapid erasure of

  whatever had been left after the war and the climatic cataclysm.

  The Pure Earthist faction attracted mainly physicists and

  engineers, quite happy to leave the geologists and geographers to

  worry about the bothersome details. Their main concern was that the

  sacred principle of the constancy of the velocity of light should

  not be thrown into the melting pot of suspicion along with

  everything else.

  By entrenching themselves around the idea of Earth origins, the

  Pure Earthists had moved into the positions previously defended

  fanatically by the biologists. Now that Danchekker had led the way

  by introducing his fleet of Ganymean Noah's Arks, the biologists

  abruptly turned about-face and rallied behind their new assertion

  of Minervan origin from displaced terrestrial ancestors. What about

  Charlie's Minerva-Luna flight time and the loop delay around the

  Annihilator fire-control system? Something was screwed up in the

  interpretation of Minervan time scales that accounted for both

  these. Okay, how could Charlie see Minerva from Luna? Video

  transmissions. Okay, how could they aim the Annihilator over that

  distance? They couldn't. The dish at Seltar

  was only a remote-control tracking station. The weapon itself was

  mounted in a satellite orbiting Minerva.

  The third flag flew over the Cutoff Colony Theory. According to

  this, an early terrestrial civilization had colonized Minerva, and

  then declined into a Dark Age during which contact with the colony

  was lost. The deteriorating conditions of the Ice Age later

  prompted a recovery on both planets, with the difference that

  Minerva faced a life-or-death situation and began the struggle to

  regain the lost knowledge in order that a return to Earth might be

  made. Earth, however, was going through lean times of its own and,

  when the advance parties from Minerva eventually made contact,

  didn't react favorably to the idea of another planetful of mouths

  to feed. Diplomacy having failed, the Minervans set up an invasion

  beachhead on Luna. The Annihilator at Seltar had thus been firing

  at targets on Earth; the translators had been misled by identical

  place-names on both planets-like Boston, New York, Cambridge, and ar />
  hundred other places in the USA, many of the towns on Minerva had

  been named after places on Earth when the original colony was first

  established.

  The defenders of these arguments drew heavily from the claims of

  the Pure Earthists to account for the absence of Lunarian relics on

  Earth. In addition, they produced further support from the unlikely

  domain of the study of fossil corals in the Pacific. It had been

  known for a long time that analysis of the daily growth rings of

  ancient fossil corals provided a measure of how many days there had

  been in the year at various times in the past, and from this how

  fast the forces of tidal friction were slowing down the rotation of

  the Earth about its axis. These researches showed, for example,

  that the year of 350 million years ago contained about four hundred

  days. Ten years previously, work conducted at the Darwin Institute

  of Oceanography in Australia, using more refined and more accurate

  techniques, had revealed that the continuity from ancient to modem

  had not been as smooth as supposed. There was a confused period in

  the recent past-at about fifty thousand years before-during which

  the curve was discontinuous, and a comparatively abrupt lengthening

  in the day had occurred. Furthermore, the rate of deceleration was

  measurably greater after this discontinuity than it had been

  before. Nobody knew why this should have happened, but it seemed to

  indicate a period of violent climatic upheaval, as the corals had

  taken generations to set-

  tie down to a stable growth pattern afterward. The data seemed to

  indicate that widespread changes had taken place on Earth around

  this mysterious point in time, probably accompanied by global

  flooding, and all in all there could be enough behind the story to

  explain the complete disappearance of any record of the Lunarians'

  existence.

  The fourth main theory was that of the Returning Exiles, which

  found these attempts to explain the disappearance of the

  terrestrial Lunarians artificial and inadequate. The basic tenet of

  this theory was that there could be only one satisfactory reason

  for the fact that there were no signs of Lunarians on Earth: There

  had never been any Lunarians on Earth worth talking about. Thus,

  they had evolved on Minerva as Danchekker maintained and had