Inherit the Stars g-1

by James P. Hogan

  "Preliminary drilling shows that it’s a single layer. The valves that you can see projecting from the inner hull were inserted to allow samples of the internal atmosphere to be taken before opening it up. Also, the cavity behind the access point has been argon-flooded."

  Mills turned to Cameron before going on to describe further details of the operation. "Lieutenant, carry out a final check of communications links, please."

  "Aye, aye, sir." Cameron walked back to the supervisory console at the end of the room and scanned the array of screens.

  "Ice Hole to Subway. Come in, please."

  The face of Commander Stracey, directing activities out near the hull, moved into view, encased in its helmet. "All checks completed and go," he reported. "Standing by, ready to proceed."

  "Ice Hole to Pithead. Report transmission quality."

  "All clear, vision and audio," responded the duty controller from the dome far above them.

  "Ice Hole to Ganymede Main." Cameron addressed screen three, which showed Foster at Main Base, situated seven hundred miles away to the south.

  "Clear."

  "Ice Hole to Jupiter Four. Report, please."

  "All channels clear and checking positive." The last acknowledgment came from the deputy mission director on screen four, speaking from his nerve center in the heart of the mile-long Jupiter Mission Four command ship, at that moment orbiting over two thousand miles up over Ganymede.

  "All channels positive and ready to proceed, sir," Cameron called to Mills.

  "Carry on, then, Lieutenant."

  "Aye, aye, sir."

  Cameron passed the order to Stracey, and out by the hull the ponderous figures lumbered into action, swinging forward a rockdrill supported from an overhead gantry. The group by the window watched in silence as the bit chewed relentlessly into the inner wall. Eventually the drill was swung back.

  "Initial penetration complete," Stracey’s voice informed them. "Nothing visible inside."

  An hour later, a pattern of holes adorned the exposed expanse of metal. When lights were shone through and a TV probe inserted, the screen showed snatches of a large compartment crammed with ducts and machinery. Shortly afterward, Stracey’s team began cutting out the panel with torches. Mills invited Peters and Stanislow to come and observe the operations first-hand. The trio left the control room, descended to the lower floor, and a few minutes later emerged, clad in spacesuits, through the airlock onto the tunnel floor. As they arrived at the aperture, the rectangle of metal was just being swung aside.

  The spotlights confirmed the general impression obtained via the drill holes. When preliminary visual examinations were completed, two sergeants who had been standing by stepped forward. Communications lines were plugged into their backpacks and they were handed TV cameras trailing cables, flashlights, and a pouch of tools and accessories. At the same time, other members of the team were smoothing over the jagged edges of the hole with pads of adhesive plastic to prevent tearing of the lines. An extending aluminum ladder was lowered into the hole and secured. The first sergeant to enter turned about on the edge of the hole, carefully located the top rung with his feet, and inch by inch disappeared down into the chamber. When he had found a firm footing, the second followed.

  For twenty minutes they clambered through the mechanical jungle, twisting and turning among the chaotic shadows cast by the lights pouring in through the hole above. Progress was slow; they had difficulty finding level surfaces to move on, since the ship appeared to be lying on its side. But foot by foot, the lines continued to snake sporadically down into the darkness. Eventually the sergeants stopped before the noseward bulkhead of the compartment. The screens outside showed their way barred by a door leading through to whatever lay forward; it was made of a steely-gray metal and looked solid. It was also about ten feet high by four wide. A long conference produced the decision that there was no alternative but for them to return to where the hole had been cut to collect drills, torches, and all the other gadgetry needed to go through the whole drilling, purging, argon-filling, and cutting routine all over again. From the look of the door, it could be a long job. Mills, Stanislow, and Peters went back to the control room, collected the remainder of their party, and went to the surface installations for lunch. They returned three hours later.

  Behind the bulkhead was another machinery compartment, as confusing as the first but larger. This one had many doors leading from it-all closed. The two sergeants selected one at random in the ceiling above their heads, and while they were cutting through it, others descended into the first and second compartments to position rollers for minimizing the drag of their trailing cables, which was beginning to slow them down appreciably. When the door was cut, a second team relieved the first.

  They used another ladder to climb up through the door and found themselves standing on what was supposed to be the wall of a long corridor running toward the nose of the ship. A succession of closed doors, beneath their feet and over their heads, passed across the screens outside. Over two hundred feet of cabling had disappeared into the original entry point.

  "We’re just passing the fifth bulkhead since entering the corridor," the commentary on the audio channel informed the observers. "The walls are smooth, and appear to be metallic, but covered with a plastic material. It’s coming away in most places. The floor up one side is black and looks rubbery. There are lots of doors in both walls, all big like the first one. Some have…"

  "Just a second, Joe," the voice of the speaker’s companion broke in. "Swing the big light down here… by your feet. See, the door you’re standing on slides to the side. It’s not closed all the way."

  The screens showed a pair of standard-issue heavy-duty UNSA boots, standing on a metal panel in the middle of a pool of light. The boots shuffled to one side to reveal a black gap, about twelve inches wide, running down one side of the panel. They then stepped off the panel and onto the surrounding area as their owner evidently inspected the situation.

  "You’re right," Joe’s voice announced at last. "Let’s see if it’ll budge."

  There then followed a jumbled sequence of arms, legs, walls, ceilings, lightness, and darkness as TV cameras and lamps exchanged hands and were waved about. When a stable picture resulted, it showed two heavily clad arms braced across the gap.

  Eventually:

  "No dice. Stuck solid."

  "How about the jack?"

  "Yeah, maybe. Pass it down, willya?"

  A long dialogue followed during which the jack was maneuvered into place and expanded. It slipped off. Muttered curses. Another try. And then:

  "It’s moving! Come on, baby…-let’s have a bit more light I think it’ll go easy now…- See if you can get a foot against it…"

  On the monitors the gray slab graunched gradually out of the picture. A black, bottomless pit fell away beneath.

  "The door is about two-thirds open," a breathless voice resumed. "It’s gummed up there and won’t go any further. We’re gonna have a quick looksee around from up here, then we’ll have to come back to get another ladder. Can somebody have one ready at the door that leads up into this corridor?"

  The camera closed in on the pitch-black oblong. A few seconds later a circle of light appeared in the scene, picking out part of the far wall. The light began moving around inside and the camera followed. Banks of what appeared to be electronic equipment… corners of cubicles… legs of furniture… sections of bulkhead… moved through the circle.

  "There’s a lot of loose junk down at that end… Move the light around a bit…" Several colored cylinders in a heap, about the size of jelly jars… something like a braided belt, lying in a tangle… a small gray box with buttons on one face…

  "What was that? Go over a bit, Jerry… No, a bit more to the left."

  Something white. A bar of white.

  "Jeez! Look at that! Jerry, will you look at that?"

  The skull, grinning up out of the pool of eerie white light, startled even the watchers out in
the tunnel. But it was the size of the skeleton that stunned them; no man had ever boasted a chest that compared with those massive hoops of bone. But besides that, even the most inexpert among the observers could see that whatever the occupants of this craft had been, they bore no resemblance to man.

  The stream of data taken in by the cameras flashed back to preprocessors in the low-level control room, and from there via cable to the surface of Ganymede. After encoding by the computers in the Site Operations Control building, it was relayed by microwave repeaters seven hundred miles to Ganymede Main Base, restored to full strength, and redirected up to the orbiting command ship. Here, the message was fed into the message exchange and scheduling processor complex, transformed into high-power laser modulations, and slotted into the main outgoing signal beam to Earth. For over an hour the data streaked across the Solar System, covering 186,000 miles every second, until the sensors of the long-range relay beacon, standing in Solar orbit not many million miles outside that of Mars, fished it out of the void, a microscopic fraction of its original power. Retransmission from here found the Deep Space Link Station, lodged in Trojan equilibrium with Earth and Luna, and eventually a synchronous communications satellite hanging high over the central USA, which beamed it down to a ground station near San Antonio. A landline network completed the journey to UNSA Mission Control, Galveston, where the information was greedily consumed by the computers of Operational Command Headquarters.

  The Jupiter Four command ship had taken eleven months to reach the giant planet. Within four hours of the event, the latest information to be gathered by the mission was safely lodged in the data banks of UN Space Arm.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The discovery of the giant spaceship, frozen under the ice field of Ganymede, was a sensation but, in a sense, not something totally unexpected. The scientific world had more or less accepted as fact that an advanced civilization had once flourished on Minerva; indeed, if the arguments of the orthodox evolutionists were accepted, at least two planets-Minerva and Earth-had supported high-technology civilizations to some extent at about the same time. It did not come as a complete surprise, therefore, that man’s persistent nosing around the Solar System should uncover more evidence of its earlier inhabitants. What did surprise everybody was the obvious anatomical difference between the Ganymeans-as the beings on board the ship soon came to be called-and the common form shared by the Lunarians and mankind.

  To the still unresolved question of whether the Lunarians and the Minervans had been one and the same or not, there was immediately added the further riddle: Where had the Ganymeans come from, and had they any connection with either? One bemused UNSA scientist summed up the situation by declaring that it was about time UNSA established an Alien Civilizations Division to sort out the whole damn mess!

  The pro-Danchekker faction quickly interpreted the new development as full vindication of evolutionary theory and of the arguments they had been promoting all along. Clearly, two planets in the Solar System had evolved intelligent life at around the same period in the past; the Ganymeans had evolved on Minerva and the Lunarians had evolved on Earth. They came independently from different lines and that was why they were different. Lunarian pioneers made contact with the Ganymeans and settled on Minerva-that was how Charlie had come to be born there. Extreme hostilities broke out between the two civilizations at some point, resulting in the extinction of both and the destruction of Minerva. The reasoning was consistent, plausible, and convincing. Against it, the single objection-that no evidence of any Lunarian civilization on Earth had ever been detected-began to look more lonely and more feeble every day. Deserters left the can’t-be-of-Earth-origin camp in droves to join Danchekker’s growing legions. Such was his gain in prestige and credibility that it seemed perfectly natural for his department to assume responsibility for conducting the preliminary evaluation of the data coming in from Jupiter.

  Despite his earlier skepticism, Hunt too found the case compelling. He and a large part of Group L’s staff spent much time searching every available archive and record from such fields as archeology and paleontology for any reference that could be a pointer to the one-time existence of an advanced race on Earth. They even delved into the realms of ancient mythology and combed various pseudoscientific writings to see if anything could be extracted that was capable of substantiation, that suggested the works of superbeings in the past. But always the results were negative.

  While all this was going on, things began to happen in an area where progress had all but ground to a halt for many months. Linguistics had run into trouble: The meager contents of the documents found about Charlie’s person simply had not contained enough information to make great inroads into deciphering a whole new, alien language. Of the two small books, one-that containing the maps and tables and resembling a handy pocket reference-together with the loose documents, had been translated in parts and had yielded most of the fundamental data about Minerva and quite a lot about Charlie. The second book contained a series of dated entries in handwritten script, but despite repeated attempts, it had obstinately defied decoding.

  This situation changed dramatically some weeks after the opening up of the underground remains of the devastated Lunarian base on Lunar Farside. Among the pieces of equipment included in that find had been a metal drum, containing a series of glass plates, rather like the magazines of some slide projectors. Closer examination of the plates revealed them to be simple projection slides, each holding a closely packed matrix of nilcrodot images which, under a microscope, were seen to be pages of printed text. Constructing a system of lamps and lenses to project them onto a screen was straightforward, and in one fell swoop Linguistics became the owners of a miniature Lunarian library. Results followed in months.

  Don Maddson, head of the Linguistics section, rummaged through the litter of papers and files that swamped the large table standing along the left-hand wall of his office, selected a loosely clipped wad of typed notes, and returned to the chair behind his desk.

  "There’s a set of these on its way up to you," he said to Hunt, who was sitting in the chair opposite. "I’ll leave you to read the details for yourself later. For now, I’ll just sum up the general picture."

  "Fine," Hunt said. "Fire away."

  "Well, for a start, we know a bit more about Charlie. One of the documents found in a pouch on the backpack appears to be something like army pay records. It gives an abbreviated history of some of the things he did and a list of the places he was posted to-that kind of thing."

  "Army? Was he in the army, then?"

  Maddson shook his head. "Not exactly. From what we can gather, they didn’t differentiate much between civilian and military personnel in terms of how their society was structured. It’s more like everybody belonged to different branches of the same big organization."

  "A sort of last word in totalitarianism?"

  "Yeah, that’s about it. The State ran just about everything; it dominated every walk of life and imposed a rigid discipline everywhere. You went where you were sent and did what you were told to do; in most cases, that meant into industry, agriculture, or the military forces. Whatever you did, the State was your boss anyway… that’s what I meant when I said they were all different branches of the same big organization."

  "Okay. Now, about the pay records?"

  "Charlie was born on Minerva, we know that. So were his parents. His father was some kind of machine operator; his mother worked in industry, too, but we can’t make out the exact occupation. The records also tell us where he went to school, for how long, where he took his military training-everybody seemed to go through some kind of military training-and where he learned about electronics. It tells us all the dates, too."

  "So he was something like an electronics engineer, was he?" Hunt asked.

  "Sort of. More of a maintenance engineer than a design or development engineer. He seems to have specialized in military equipment-there’s a long list of postings to combat units. The la
st one is interesting-" Maddson selected a sheet and passed it across to Hunt. "That’s a translation of the last page of postings. The final entry gives the name of a place and, alongside it, a description which, when translated literally, means ‘off-planet.’ That’s probably the Lunarian name for whatever part of our Moon he was sent to."

  "Interesting," Hunt agreed. "You’ve found out quite a lot more about him."

  "Yep, we’ve got him pretty well taped. If you convert their dates into our units, he was about thirty-two years old at the date of his last posting. Anyhow, that’s all really incidental; you can read the details. I was going to run over the picture we’re getting of the kind of world he was born into." Maddson paused to consult his notes again. Then he resumed: "Minerva was a dying world. At the time we’re talking about, the last cold period of the Ice Age was approaching its peak. I’m told that ice ages are Solar System-wide phenomena; Minerva was a lot farther from the Sun than here, so as you can imagine, things were pretty bleak there."

  "You’ve only got to look at the size of those ice caps," Hunt commented.

  "Yes, exactly. And it was getting worse. The Lunarian scientists figured they had less than a hundred years to go before the ice sheets met and blanketed the whole planet completely. Now, as you’d expect, they had studied astronomy for centuries-centuries before Charlie’s time, that is-and they’d known for a long time that things were going to get worse before they got better. So, they’d reached the conclusion, way back, that the only way out was to escape to another world. The problem, of course, was that for generations after they got the idea, nobody knew anything about how to do something about it. The answer had to lie somewhere along the line of better science and better technology. It became kind of a racial goal-the one thing that mattered, that generation after generation worked toward-the development of the sciences that would get them to places they knew existed, before the ice wiped out the whole race."