The progress meeting, in the main conference room of the Navcomms Headquarters building, had been in session for just over two hours. About two dozen persons were seated or sprawled around the large table that stood in the center of the room, by now reduced to a shambles of files, papers, overflowing ashtrays, and half-empty glasses.
Nothing really exciting had emerged so far. Various speakers had reported the results of their latest tests, the sum total of their conclusions being that Charlie’s circulatory, respiratory, nervous, endocrine, lymphatic, digestive, and every other system anybody could think of were as normal as those of anyone sitting around the table. His bones were the same, his body chemistry was the same, his blood was a familiar grouping. His brain capacity and development were within the normal range for Homo sapiens, and evidence suggested that he had been right-handed. The genetic codes carried in his reproductive cells had been analyzed; a computer simulation of combining them with codes donated by an average human female had confirmed that the offspring of such a union would have inherited a perfectly normal set of characteristics.
Hunt tended to remain something of a passive observer of the proceedings, conscious of his status as an unofficial guest and wondering from time to time why he had been invited at all. The only reference made to him so far had been a tribute in Caldwell’s opening remarks to the invaluable aid rendered by the Trimagniscope; apart from the murmur of agreement that had greeted this comment, no further mention had been made of either the instrument or its inventor. Lyn Garland had told him: "The meeting’s on Monday, and Gregg wants you to be there to answer detailed questions on the scope." So here he was. Thus far, nobody had wanted to know anything detailed about the scope—only about the data it produced. Something gave him the uneasy feeling there was an ulterior motive lurking somewhere.
After dwelling on Charlie’s computerized, mathematical sex life, the chair considered a suggestion, put forward by a Texas planetologist sitting opposite Hunt, that perhaps the Lunarians came from Mars. Mars had reached a later phase of planetary evolution than Earth and possibly had evolved intelligent life earlier, too. Then the arguments started. Martian exploration went right back to the 1970s; UNSA had been surveying the surface from satellites and manned bases for years. How come no sign of any Lunarian civilization had showed up? Answer: We’ve been on the Moon a hell of a lot longer than that and the first traces have only just shown up there. So you could expect discovery to occur later on Mars. Objection: If they came from Mars, then their civilization developed on Mars. Signs of a whole civilization should be far more obvious than signs of visits to a place like Earth’s Moon—therefore the Lunarians should have been detected a lot sooner on Mars. Answer: Think about the rate of erosion on the Martian surface. The signs could be largely wiped out or buried. At least that could account for there not being any signs on Earth. Somebody then pointed out that this did not solve the problem—all it did was shift it to another place. If the Lunarians came from Mars, evolutionary theory was still in just as big a mess as ever.
So the discussion went on.
Hunt wondered how Rob Gray was getting on back at Westwood. They now had a training schedule to fit in on top of their normal daily data-collection routine. A week or so before, Caldwell had informed them that he wanted four engineers from Navcomms fully trained as Trimagniscope operators. His explanation, that this would allow round-the-clock operation of the scope and hence better productivity from it, had not left Hunt convinced; neither had his further assertion that Navcomms was going to buy itself some of the instruments but needed to get some in-house expertise while they had the opportunity.
Maybe Caldwell intended setting up Navcomms as an independent and self-sufficient scope-operating facility. Why would he do that? Was Forsyth-Scott or somebody else exerting pressure to get Hunt back to England? If this was a prelude to shipping him back, the scope would obviously stay in Houston. That meant that the first thing he’d be pressed into when he got back would be a panic to get the second prototype working. Big deal!
The meeting eventually accepted that the Martian-origin theory created more problems than it solved and, anyway, was pure speculation. Last rites in the form of "No substantiating evidence offered" were pronounced, and the corpse was quietly laid to rest under the epitaph In Abeyance, penned in the "Action" columns of the memoranda sheets around the table.
A cryptologist then delivered a long rambling account of the patterns of character groupings that occurred in Charlie’s personal documents. They had already completed preliminary processing of all the individual papers, the contents of the wallet, and one of the books; they were about half way through the second. There were many tables, but nobody knew yet what they meant; some structured lines of symbols suggested mathematical formulas; certain page and section headings matched entries in the text. Some character strings appeared with high frequency, some with less; some were concentrated on a few pages, while others were evenly spread throughout. There were lots of figures and statistics. Despite the enthusiasm of the speaker, the mood of the room grew heavy and the questions fewer. They knew he was a bright guy; they wished he’d stop telling them.
At length, Danchekker, who had been noticeably silent through most of the proceedings and appeared to be growing increasingly impatient as they continued, obtained leave from the chair to address the meeting. He rose to his feet, clasped his lapels, and cleared his throat. "We have devoted as much time as can be excused to exploring improbable and far-flung suggestions which, as we have seen, turn out to be fallacious." He spoke confidently, taking in the length of the table with side-to-side swings of his body. "The time has surely come, gentlemen, for us to dally no longer, but to concentrate our efforts on what must be the only viable line of reasoning open to us. I state, quite categorically, that the race of beings to whom we have come to refer as the Lunarians originated here, on Earth, as did the rest of us. Forget all your fantasies of visitors from other worlds, interstellar travelers, and the like. The Lunarians were simply products of a civilization that developed here on our own planet and died out for reasons we have yet to determine. What, after all, is so strange about that? Civilizations have grown and passed away in the brief span of our more orthodox history, and no doubt others will continue the pattern. This conclusion follows from comprehensive and consistent evidence and from the proven principles of the various natural sciences. It requires no invention, fabrication, or supposition, but derives directly from unquestionable facts and the straightforward application of established methods of inference!" He paused and cast his eyes around the table to invite comment.
Nobody commented. They already knew his arguments. Danchekker, however, seemed about to go through it all again. Evidently he had concluded that attempts to make them see the obvious by appealing to their powers of reason alone were not enough; his only resort then was insistent repetition until they either concurred or went insane.
Hunt leaned back in his chair, took a cigarette from a box lying nearby on the table, and tossed his pen down on his pad. He still had reservations about the professor’s dogmatic attitude, but at the same time he was aware that Danchekker’s record of academic distinction was matched by those of few people alive at the time. Besides, this wasn’t Hunt’s field. His main objection was something else, a truth he accepted for what it was and made no attempt to fool himself by rationalizing: Everything about Danchekker irritated him. Danchekker was too thin; his clothes were too old-fashioned—he carried them as if they had been hung on to dry. His anachronistic gold-rimmed spectacles were ridiculous. His speech was too formal. He had probably never laughed in his life. A skull vacuum-packed in skin, Hunt thought to himself.
"Allow me to recapitulate," Danchekker continued. "Homo sapiens—modern man—belongs to the phylum Vertebrata. So, also, do all the mammals, fish, birds, amphibians, and reptiles that have ever walked, crawled, flown, slithered, or swum in every corner of the Earth. All vertebrates share a common pattern of basic architecture, which has remained unchanged over millions of years despite the superficial, specialized adaptations that on first consideration might seem to divide the countless species we see around us.
"The basic vertebrate pattern is as follows: an internal skeleton of bone or cartilage and a vertebral column. The vertebrate has two pairs of appendages, which may be highly developed or degenerate, likewise a tail. It has a centrally located heart, divided into two or more chambers, and a closed circulatory system of blood made up of red cells containing hemoglobin. It has a dorsal nerve cord which bulges at one end into a five-part brain contamed in a head. It also has a body cavity that contains most of its vital organs and its digestive system. All vertebrates conform to these rules and are thereby related."
The professor paused and looked around as if the conclusion were too obvious to require summarizing. "In other words, Charlie’s whole structure shows him to be directly related to a million and one terrestrial animal species, extinct, alive, or yet to come. Furthermore, all terrestrial vertebrates, including ourselves and Charlie, can be traced back through an unbroken succession of intermediate fossils as having inherited their common pattern from the earliest recorded ancestors of the vertebrate line"—Danchekker’s voice rose to a crescendo—"from the first boned fish that appeared in the oceans of the Devonian period of the Paleozoic era, over four hundred million years ago!" He paused for this last to take hold and then continued. "Charlie is as human as you or I in every respect. Can there be any doubt, then, that he shares our vertebrate heritage and therefore our ancestry? And if he shares our ancestry, then there is no doubt that he also shares our place of origin. Charlie is a native of planet Earth."
Danchekker sat down and poured himself a glass of water. A hubbub of mixed murmurings and mutterings ensued, punctuated by the rustling of papers and the clink of water glasses. Here and there, chairs creaked as cramped limbs eased themselves into more comfortable positions. A metallurgist at one end of the table was gesturing to the man seated next to her. The man shrugged, showed his empty palms, and nodded his head in Danchekker’s direction. She turned and called to the professor. "Professor Danchekker . . . Professor . . ." Her voice made itself heard. The background noise died away. Danchekker looked up. "We’ve been having a little argument here-maybe you’d like to comment Why couldn’t Charlie have come from a parallel line of evolution somewhere else?"
"I was wondering that, too," came another voice. Danchekker frowned for a moment before replying.
"No. The point you are overlooking here, I think, is that the evolutionary process is fundamentally made up of random events. Every living organism that exists today is the product of a chain of successive mutations that has continued over millions of years. The most important fact to grasp is that each discrete mutation is in itself a purely random event, brought about by aberrations in genetic coding and the mixing of the sex cells from different parents. The environment into which the mutant is born dictates whether it will survive to reproduce its kind or whether it will die out. Thus, some new characteristics are selected for further miprovement, while others are promptly eradicated and still others are diluted away by interbreeding.
"There are still people who find this principle difficult to accept—primarily, I suspect, because they are incapable of visualizing the implications of numbers and time scales beyond the ranges that occur in everyday life. Remember we are talking about billions of billions of combinations coming together over millions of years.
"A game of chess begins with only twenty playable moves to choose from. At every move the choice available to the player is restricted, and yet, the number of legitimate positions that the board could assume after only ten moves is astronomical. Imagine, then, the number of permutations that could arise when the game continues for a billion moves and at each move the player has a billion choices open to him. This is the game of evolution. To suppose that two such independent sequences could result in end products that are identical would surely be demanding too much of our credulity. The laws of chance and statistics are quite firm when applied to sufficiently large numbers of samples. The laws of thermodynamics, for example, are nothing more than expressions of the probable behavior of gas molecules, yet the numbers involved are so large that we feel quite safe in accepting the postulates as rigid rules; no significant departure from them has ever been observed. The probability of the parallel line of evolution that you suggest is less than the probability of heat flowing from the kettle to the fire, or of all the air molecules in this room crowding into one corner at the same time, causing us all to explode spontaneously. Mathematically speaking, yes—the possibility of parallelism is finite, but so indescribably remote that we need consider it no further."
A young electronics engineer took the argument up at this point
"Couldn’t God get a look in?" he asked. "Or at least, some kind of guiding force or principle that we don’t yet comprehend? Couldn’t the same design be produced via different lines in different places?"
Danchekker shook his head and smiled almost benevolently.
"We are scientists, not mystics," he replied. "One of the fundamental principles of scientific method is that new and speculative hypotheses do not warrant consideration as long as the facts that are observed are adequately accounted for by the theories that already exist. Nothing resembling a universal guiding force has ever been revealed by generations of investigation, and since the facts observed are adequately explained by the accepted principles I have outlined, there is no necessity to invoke or invent additional causes. Notions of guiding forces and grand designs exist only in the mind of the misguided observer, not in the facts he observes."
"But suppose it turns out that Charlie came from somewhere else," the metallurgist insisted. "What then?"
"Ah! Now, that would be an entirely different matter. If it should be proved by some other means that Charlie did indeed evolve somewhere else, then we would be forced to accept that parallel evolution had occurred as an observed and unquestionable fact. Since this could not be explained within the framework of contemporary theory, our theories would be shown to be woefully inadequate. That would be the time to speculate on additional influences. Then, perhaps, your universal guiding force might find a rightful place. To entertain such concepts at this stage, however, would be to put the cart fairly and squarely before the horse. In so doing, we would be guilty of a breach of one of the most fundamental of scientific principles."
Somebody else tried to push the professor from a different angle.
"How about convergent lines rather than parallel lines? Maybe the selection principles work in such a way that different lines of development converge toward the same optimum end product. In other words, although they start out in different directions, they will both eventually hit on the same, best final design. Like . . ." He sought for an analogy. "Like sharks are fish and dolphins are mammals. They both came from different origins but ended up hitting on the same general shape."
Danchekker again shook his head firmly. "Forget the idea of perfection and best end products," he said. "You are unwittingly falling into this trap of assuming a grand design again. The human form is not nearly as perfect as you perhaps imagine. Nature does not produce best solutions—it will try any solution. The only test applied is that it be good enough to survive and reproduce itself. Far more species have proved unsuccessful and become extinct than have survived—far, far more. It is easy to contemplate a kind of preordained striving toward something perfect when this fundamental fact is overlooked—when looking back down the tree, as it were, with the benefit of hindsight from our particular successful branch and forgetting the countless other branches that got nowhere.
"No, forget this idea of perfection. The developments we see in the natural world are simply cases of something good enough to do the job. Usually, many conceivable alternatives would be as good, and some better.
"Take as an example the cusp pattern on the first lower molar tooth of man. It is made up of a group of five main cusps with a complex of intervening grooves and ridges that help to grind up food. There is no reason to suppose that this particular pattern is any more efficient than any one of many more that might be considered. This particular pattern, however, first occurred as a mutation somewhere along the ancestral line leading toward man and has been passed on ever since. The same pattern is also found on the teeth of the great apes, indicating that we both inherited it from some early common ancestor where it happened through pure chance.
"Charlie has human cusp patterns on all his teeth.
"Many of our adaptations are far from perfect. The arrangement of internal organs leaves much to be desired, owing to our inheriting a system originally developed to suit a horizontal and not an upright posture. In our respiratory system, for example, we find that the wastes and dirt that accumulate in the throat and nasal regions drain inside and not outside, as happened originally, a prime cause of many bronchial and chest complaints not suffered by four-footed animals. That’s hardly perfection, is it?" Danchekker took a sip of water and made an appealing gesture to the room in general.
"So, we see that any idea of convergence toward the ideal is not supported by the facts. Charlie exhibits all our faults and imperfections as well as our improvements. No, I’m sorry—I appreciate that these questions are voiced in the best tradition of leaving no possibility unprobed and I commend you for them, but really, we must dismiss them."
Silence enveloped the room at his concluding words. On all sides, everybody seemed to be staring thoughtfully through the table, through the walls, or through the ceiling.
Caldwell placed his hands on the table and looked around until satisfied that nobody had anything to add.
"Looks like evolution stays put for a while longer," he grunted. "Thank you, Professor."
Danchekker nodded without looking up.
"However," Caldwell continued, "the object of these meetings is to give everyone a chance to talk freely as well as listen. So far, some people haven’t had much to say—especially one or two of the newcomers." Hunt realized with a start that Caldwell was looking straight at him. "Our English visitor, for example, whom most of you already know. Dr. Hunt, do you have any views that we ought to hear about. . . ?"
Next to Caldwell, Lyn Garland was making no attempt to conceal a wide smile. Hunt took a long draw at his cigarette and used the delay to collect his thoughts. In the time it took for him to coolly emit one long, diffuse cloud of smoke and flick his hand at the ashtray, all the pieces clicked together in his brain with the smooth precision of the binary regiments parading through the registers of the computers downstairs. Lyn’s persistent cross-examinations, her visits to the Ocean, his presence here—Caldwell had found a catalyst.
Hunt surveyed the array of attentive faces. "Most of what’s been said reasserts the accepted principles of comparative anatomy and evolutionary theory. Just to clear the record for anyone with misleading ideas, I’ve no intention of questioning them. However, the conclusion could be summed up by saying that since Charlie comes from the same ancestors as we do, he must have evolved on Earth the same as we did."
"That is so," threw in Danchekker.
"Fine," Hunt replied. "Now, all this is really your problem, not mine, but since you’ve asked me what I think, I’ll state the conclusion another way. Since Charlie evolved on Earth, the civilization he was from evolved on Earth. The indications are that his culture was about as advanced as ours, maybe in one or two areas slightly more advanced. So, we ought to find no end of traces of his people. We don’t. Why not?"
All heads turned toward Danchekker.
The professor sighed. "The only conclusion left open to us is that whatever traces were left have been erased by the natural processes of weathering and erosion," he said wearily. "There are several possibilities: A catastrophe of some sort could have wiped them out to the extent that there were no traces; or possibly their civilization existed in regions which today are submerged beneath the oceans. Further searching will no doubt produce solutions to this question."
"If any catastrophe as violent as that occurred so recently, we would already know about it," Hunt pointed out. "Most of what was land then is still land today, so I can’t see them sinking into the ocean somewhere, either; besides, you’ve only to look at our civilization to see it’s not confined to localized areas—it’s spread all over the globe. And how is it that in spite of all the junk that keeps turning up with no trouble at all from primitive races from around the same time—bones, spears, clubs, and so on—nobody has ever found a single example of anything related to this supposed technologically advanced culture? Not a screw, or a piece of wire, or a plastic washer. To me, that doesn’t make sense."
More murmuring broke out to mark the end of Hunt’s critique. "Professor?" Caldwell invited comment with a neutral voice.
Danchekker compressed his mouth into a grimace. "Oh, I agree, I agree. It is surprising—very surprising. But what alternative are you proposing?" His voice took on a note of sarcasm. "Do you suggest that man and all the animals came to Earth in some enormous celestial Noah’s Ark?" He laughed. "If so, the fossil record of a hundred million years disproves you."
"Impasse." The comment came from Professor Schorn, an authority on comparative anatomy, who had arrived from Stuttgart a few days before.
"Looks like it," Caldwell agreed.
Danchekker, however, was not through. "Would Dr. Hunt care to answer my question?" he challenged. "Precisely what other place of origin is he suggesting?"
"I’m not suggesting anywhere in particular," Hunt replied evenly. "What I am suggesting is that perhaps a more openminded approach might be appropriate at this stage. After all, we’ve only just found Charlie. This business will go on for years yet; there’s bound to be a lot more information surfacing that we don’t have right now. I think it’s too early to be jumping ahead and predicting what the answers might be. Better just to keep on plodding along and using every scrap of data we’ve got to put together a picture of the place Charlie came from. It might turn out to be Earth. Then again, it might not."
Caldwell led him on further. "How would you suggest we go about that?"
Hunt wondered if this was a direct cue. He decided to risk it. "You could try taking a closer look at this." He drew a sheet of paper out from the folder in front of him and slid it across to the center of the table. The paper showed a complicated tabular arrangement of Lunarian numerals.
"What’s that?" asked a voice.
"It’s from one of the pocket books," Hunt replied. "I think the book is something not unlike a diary. I also believe that that"—he pointed at the sheet—"could well be a calendar." He caught a sly wink from Lyn Garland and returned it.
"Calendar?"
"How d’you figure that one?"
"It’s all gobbledygook."
Danchekker stared hard at the paper for a few seconds. "Can you prove it’s a calendar?" he demanded.
"No, I can’t. But I have analyzed the number pattern and can state that it’s made up of ascending groups that repeat in sets and subsets. Also, the alphabetic groups that seem to label the major sets correspond to the headings of groups of pages further on—remarkably like the layout of a diary."
"Hmmph! More likely some form of tabular page index."
"Could be," Hunt granted. "But why not wait and see? Once the language has unraveled a bit more, it should be possible to cross-check a lot of what’s here with items from other sources. This is the kind of thing that maybe we ought to be a little more open-minded about. You say Charlie comes from Earth; I say he might. You say this is not a calendar; I say it might be. In my estimation, an attitude like yours is too inflexible to permit an unbiased appraisal of the problem. You’ve already made up your mind what you want the answers to be."
"Hear, hear!" a voice at the end of the table called.
Danchekker colored visibly, but Caldwell spoke before he could reply.
"You’ve analyzed the numbers—right?"
"Right."
"Okay, supposing for now it’s a calendar—what more can you tell us?"
Hunt leaned forward across the table and pointed at the sheet with his pen.
"First, two assumptions. One: the natural unit of time on any world is the day—that is, the time it takes the planet to rotate on its axis. . ."
"Assuming it rotates," somebody tossed in.
"That was my second assumption. But the only cases we know of where there’s no rotation—or where the orbital period equals the axial period, which amounts to the same thing—occur when a small body orbits close to a far more massive one and is swamped by gravitational tidal effects, like our Moon. For that to happen to a body the size of a planet, the planet would have to orbit very close to its parent star—too close for it to support any life comparable to our own."
"Seems reasonable," Caldwell said, looking around the table. Various heads were nodding assent. "Where do we go from there?"
"Okay," Hunt resumed. "Assuming it rotates and the day is its natural unit of time—if this complete table represents one full orbit around its sun, there are seventeen hundred days in its year, one entry for each."
"Pretty long," someone hazarded.
"To us, yes: at least, the year-to-day ratio is big. It could mean the orbit is large, the rotational period short, or perhaps a bit of both. Now look at the major number groups—the ones tagged with the heavy alphabetic labels. There are forty-seven of them. Most contain thirty-six numbers, but nine of them have thirty-seven—the first, sixth, twelfth, eighteenth, twenty-fourth, thirtieth, thirty-sixth, forty-second, and forty-seventh. That seems a bit odd at first sight, but so would our system to someone unfamiliar with it. It suggests that maybe somebody had to do a bit of fiddling with it to make it work."
"Mmm. . . like with our months."
"Exactly. This is just the sort of juggling you have to do to get a sensible fit of our months into our year. It happens because there’s no simple relationship between the orbital periods of planet and satellite; there’s no reason why there should be. I’m guessing that if this is a calendar that relates to some other planet, then the reason for this odd mix of thirty-sixes and thirty-sevens is the same as the one that causes problems with our calendar: That planet had a moon."
"So these groups are months," Caldwell stated.
"If it’s a calendar—yes. Each group is divided into three subgroups—weeks, if you like. Normally there are twelve days in each, but there are nine long months, in which the middle week has thirteen days."
Danchekker looked for a long time at the sheet of paper, an expression of pained disbelief spreading slowly across his face.
"Are you proposing this as a serious scientific theory?" he queried in a strained voice.
"Of course not," Hunt replied. "This is all pure speculation. But it does indicate some of the avenues that could be explored. These alphabetic groups, for example, might correspond to references that the language people might dig from other sources—such as dates on documents, or date stamps on pieces of clothing or other equipment. Also, you might be able to find some independent way of arriving at the number of days in the year; if it turned out to be seventeen hundred, that would be quite a coincidence, wouldn’t it?"
"Anything else?" Caldwell asked.
"Yes. Computer correlation analysis of this number pattern may show hidden superposed periodicities; for all we know, there could have been more than one moon. Also, it should be possible to compute families of curves giving possible relationships between planet-to-satellite mass ratios against mean orbital radii. Later on you might know enough more to be able to isolate one of the curves. It might describe the Earth-Luna system; then again, it might not."
"Preposterous!" Danchekker exploded.
"Unbiased?" Hunt suggested.
"There is something else that may be worth trying," Schorn interrupted. "Your calendar, if that’s what it is, has so far been described in relative terms only—days per month, months per year, and so on. There is nothing that gives us any absolute values. Now—and this is a long shot—from detailed chemical analysis we are making some progress in building a quantitative model of Charlie’s cell-metabolism cycles and enzyme processes. We may be able to calculate the rate of accumulation of waste materials and toxins in the blood and tissues, and from these results form an estimate of his natural periods of sleep and wakefulness. If, in this way, I could provide a figure for the length tf the day, the other quantities would follow immediately."
"If we knew that, then we’d know the planet’s orbital period," said somebody else. "But could we get an estimate of its mass?"
"One way might be by doing a structural analysis of Charlie’s bone and muscle formations and then working out the power—weight ratios," another chipped in.
"That would give us the planet’s mean distance from its sun," said a third.
"Only if it was like our Sun."
"You could get a check on the planet’s mass from the glass and other crystalline materials in his equipment. From the crystal structure, we should be able to figure out the strength of the gravitational field they cooled in."
"How could we get a figure for density?"
"You still need to know the planetary radius."
"He’s like us, so the surface gravity will be Earthlike."
"Very probable, but let’s prove it."
"Prove that’s a calendar first."
Remarks began pouring in from all sides. Hunt reflected with some satisfaction that at least he had managed to inject some spirit and enthusiasm into the proceedings.
Danchekker remained unimpressed. As the noise abated, he rose again to his feet and pointed pityingly to the single sheet of paper, still lying in the center of the table.
"All balderdash!" he spat. "There is the sum total of your evidence. There"—he slid his voluminous file, bulging with notes and papers, across beside it—"is mine, backed by libraries, data banks, and archives the world over. Charlie comes from Earth!"
"Where’s his civilization, then?" Hunt demanded. "Removed in an enormous celestial garbage truck?"
Laughter from around the table greeted the return of Danchekker’s own gibe. The professor darkened and seemed about to say something obscene. Caldwell held up a restraining hand, but Schorn saved the situation by interrupting in his calm, unruffled tone. "It would seem, ladies and gentlemen, that for the moment we must compromise by agreeing to a purely hypothetical situation. To keep Professor Danchekker happy, we must accept that the Lunarians evolved from the same ancestors as ourselves. To keep Dr. Hunt happy, we must assume they did it somewhere else. How we are to reconcile these two irreconcilables, I would not for one moment attempt to predict."