"We have conducted surveillance of Earth since the beginning of human civilization," Calazar declared. "For most of that time the operation has been entrusted to a race within our society known as the Jevlenese, which until now we have not brought to your attention. As you appear to have deduced for yourselves already, the Jevlenese are fully human in form."
"Homo sapiens are somewhat . . . volatile," Frenua Showm added, as if feeling that some additional explanation was called for. "Humans possess an intense instinct for rivalry. We felt that the issue was potentially sensitive. It could always be revealed tomorrow, but never unsaid again once said today."
"You see," Danchekker pronounced, looking toward Hunt with some evident satisfaction from where he was standing on the far side of Karen Heller. "As I maintained—an independent hominid line descended from ancestral primates taken to Thurien at the time of the migration from Minerva."
"Er. . . . no," Calazar said apologetically.
Danchekker blinked and stared at the alien as if he had just uttered a blasphemy. "I beg your pardon."
"The Jevlenese are far more closely related to Homo sapiens than that. In fact they are descended from the same Lunarian ancestors as yourselves—of fifty thousand years ago." Calazar glanced anxiously at Showm, then looked back at the Terrans to await their reactions. Garuth and Shilohin waited in silence; they knew the whole story already.
Hunt and Danchekker looked at each other, equally confused, and then at the Ganymeans again. The Lunarian survivors had reached Earth from the Moon; how could any of them have got to Thurien? The only possible way was if the Thuriens had taken them there. But where could the Thuriens have taken them from? There couldn’t have been any survivors on Minerva itself. All of a sudden so many questions began boiling inside Hunt’s head that he didn’t know where to begin. Danchekker seemed to be having the same problem.
Eventually Karen Heller said, "Let’s go back to the start of it all and check some of the basics." She was still looking at Calazar and directing her words to him. "We’ve been assuming that the Lunarians evolved on Minerva from terrestrial ancestors that you left behind when you went to Thurien. Is that correct, or have you been leaving out something?"
"No, that is correct," Calazar replied. "And by fifty thousand years ago they had developed to the level of a fairly advanced technological civilization very much as you supposed. Up to that point all was as you reconstructed."
"That’s good to know, anyhow." Heller nodded and sounded relieved. "So why don’t you take the story from there and fill in what happened after that, in the order it happened," she suggested. "That’ll save a lot of questions."
"A good idea," Calazar agreed. He paused to collect his thoughts, then looked from side to side to address all three of them, and went on, "When the Ganymeans migrated to Thurien, they left behind an observation system to monitor developments on Minerva. At that time they did not possess the sophisticated communications that we have today, so the information they received was somewhat sporadic and incomplete. But it was enough to give a reasonably complete account of what took place. Perhaps you would like to see Minerva as captured by the sensors operating at that time." He gave an instruction to VISAR, moved back a few paces, and looked expectantly at the center of the floor. A large image appeared, looking solid and real enough to touch. It was an image of a planet.
Hunt knew every coastal outline and surface feature of Minerva by heart. One of the most memorable discoveries of recent years—in fact the one that had started off the investigations which had culminated in proof of Minerva’s and the Ganymeans’ existence even before the Shapieron appeared—had been that of "Charlie," a spacesuit-clad Lunarian corpse uncovered in the course of excavations on the Moon. From maps found on Charlie, the researchers at Navcomms had been able to reconstruct a six-foot-diameter model of the planet. But the image that Hunt was examining now did not exhibit the enormous ice caps and narrow equatorial belt that Hunt remembered from the model. The two land masses were there, though changed appreciably in outline, but as parts of a more extensive system of continents that stretched north and south to ice caps much smaller—not much larger than those of contemporary Earth. For this was not the Minerva of the Lunarians of fifty thousand years back; it was the Minerva of twenty-five million years before the Lunarians existed. And it was captured live, as it had been; it was no mere model reconstructed from maps. Hunt looked around at Danchekker, but the professor was too spellbound to respond.
For the next ten minutes they watched and listened as Calazar replayed a series of close-ups captured from orbit that showed the imported terrestrial animal species evolving and spreading, extinguishing the native Minervan forms, adapting and radiating at the rate of over two million years per minute, until eventually the first social man-apes emerged from a line that had begun with an artificially modified type of the originally imported primates.
The pattern was very much as had been conjectured for many years on Earth, except that until 2028 it had all been assumed to have taken place on the wrong planet, or at least the fossils discovered from the pre-fifty-thousand-less-a-bit years B.C. period had been attributed to the wrong hominid family. But there was a completely unexpected phase that had never appeared in the story put together by the anthropologists on Earth: early in the man-ape era, the species had returned for a period to a semiaquatic environment, mainly as a consequence of not being equipped physically to deal with predators on land. Thus they had commenced the path that whales and other aquatic mammals had taken, but they reversed it and came out of the water again when their increasing intelligence provided them with other means of protecting themselves, which happened before any significant physical adaptations had developed. This phase accounted for their upright posture, loss of body hair, rudimentary webbing between thumb and index finger, the salt-excreting function of their tear ducts, and several other peculiarities that experts on Earth had been arguing about for years. Danchekker would have spent the rest of the week talking about that alone, but Hunt persuaded him to take it up again with Eesyan at some other time.
After that came the discovery of tools and fire, tribalization, and the sequence of evolving social order that led from primitive hunter-gatherer economies through agriculture and city-building to the discovery of the sciences and the beginnings of industrialization. And there was something about this part of their history too that set them apart from terrestrial humans in Hunt’s eyes: the practical and realistic approach that the Lunarians had adopted to everything they did. They had exploited their resources and talents efficiently, without drifting off into fruitless reliance on superstitions and magic to solve their problems as had so many millennia of Earth people. For the early hunters, better weapons and greater skill decided success, not the whims of imaginary gods who needed to be placated. For the crop growers, better knowledge of plants, the land, and the elements improved yields; rituals and incantations did not, and were soon abandoned. And not very long afterward it was measurement, observation, and the powers of reason that uncovered the laws governing the universe and opened up new horizons for the harnessing of energy and the creation of wealth. As a result the Lunarian sciences and industries had mushroomed almost overnight in comparison with the halting, faltering groping toward enlightenment that had come later when the same general pattern repeated itself on Earth.
The scientists on Earth who had recovered the information on the Lunarians had pictured them as an incurably aggressive and warlike breed whose discoveries of advanced technology had inevitably spelled their eventual self-destruction. Hunt and the others now learned that this picture was not really accurate. There had been some feuding and fighting in the earlier periods of Lunarian history, it was true, but by the time of the early industrial period such things had become rare. A greater common cause had united the Minervan nations. Their scientists recognized the deteriorating conditions that were descending with the coming Ice Age, and the whole race embarked on a feverish development of the sciences that would enable them to move to a warmer planet in the centuries ahead. The astronomers of the time singled out Mars and Earth as the most promising candidates. The stakes were survival, and there were no resources to be squandered on internal conflicts, until. . .
About two hundred years before the final, catastrophic war, something happened to change all that. Calazar explained, "It could have been a result of extreme genetic instabilities still inherent in the race. At about the time they had learned to harness steam and were just beginning to explore electricity, a superbreed of Lunarians appeared quite suddenly and advanced a quantum leap ahead of anything else in existence anywhere on the planet. Exactly where or when they appeared we don’t know. Numerically they were few to begin with, but they spread and consolidated rapidly."
"Was that when the planet started to polarize?" Heller asked.
"Yes," Calazar replied. "The superbreed became the Lambians. They were totally ruthless. They militarized and formed a totalitarian regime that imposed itself by force on a large portion of the planet before the other nations could muster the strength to resist. Their aim was to gain control of Minerva’s industrial and technical capabilities totally and exclusively to guarantee their own move to Earth, which meant taking over the nations that had been pursuing that goal collectively. Submission would have meant extinction. The other nations had no choice but to unite, arm, and defend their security. They became the Cerians. The course was set irrevocably toward a struggle to the death between the two factions."
Hunt watched more scenes showing the gradual transformation of Minerva into one enormous military and manufacturing machine dedicated to preparations for war. The tragedy of what had happened appalled him. There had been no need for it. More effort had gone into armaments than would have been needed to move the whole Lunarian race to Earth twice over. If the Lambians hadn’t appeared on the scene when they did, the people on Minerva would have done it. After millennia they had gotten to within two hundred years of achieving the goal that would have saved them from extinction and preserved their civilization, and then they had thrown it all away.
VISAR began showing scenes from the war itself. A world quaked under the shocks of miles-high fireballs that vaporized cities; oceans boiled, and forests flared into carpets of sterile ash writhing and twisting in an atmosphere in turmoil. Then blankets of smoke and dust blotted out the surface and turned the planet into a murky ball of black and brown. Spots of red and slowly pulsating yellow appeared, isolated and glowing dimly at first, but becoming brighter and spreading, then merging as continents ruptured and the planet’s interior exploded through and hurled fragments of crust into the void. The asteroids were being born, and what would eventually become Pluto was being carved into a tombstone for a whole race, destined to drift forever far from the Sun. Although Garuth and Shilohin had watched these scenes before, they became very quiet; they alone among all those present had known Minerva as home.
Calazar waited awhile for the mood to lighten, then resumed, "The Ganymeans had long been troubled by their consciences over their genetic interference with the early Lunarian ancestors. Therefore their policy toward Minerva had been one of nonintervention in its affairs. You’ve just seen the result of that. After the calamity a few survivors were left stranded on the Moon with no hope of survival. By that time Thurien had perfected the black-hole technology that made instant communications and transfers of objects possible, so the Ganymeans were aware of events in realtime, and they were in a position to intervene. After witnessing the results of their policy, they could not simply stand aside and allow the survivors to perish. Accordingly, they organized a rescue mission and sent several large vessels to the close vicinity of Luna and Minerva."
It took Hunt a few seconds to see the implications of what Calazar had just said. He stared at the Ganymean in sudden surprise. "Not outside the solar system?" he queried. "I thought you said you didn’t establish large toroids inside planetary systems."
"It was an emergency," Calazar replied. "The Ganymeans decided to forget their rules for once. They didn’t have any time to spare."
Hunt’s eyes opened wider as the implication hit him: that was how Pluto had gotten to where it was! And that was what had broken the gravitational coupling between Minerva and its moon. One simple statement had put half his people at Navcomms out of business.
"So the Lunarian ancestors of the human race never came to Earth with the Moon at all," Karen Heller said. "They were taken there—by the Ganymeans. The Moon only showed up later."
"Yes," Calazar replied simply.
That answered another mystery. All the math models of the process had required a long transit time for the Moon to get from Minerva to the orbit of Earth. A lot of doubt had been expressed that a handful of Lunarian survivors could have lasted for any length of time at all, let alone with the resources necessary to reach Earth. But with Ganymean intervention added into the equation, all that changed. With some Ganymean help that handful would have established a secure settlement for themselves and been able to make a viable start at rebuilding their culture. So why had they plunged back into a barbarism that had taken tens of thousands of years to recover from? The only answer could be the upheavals caused by Luna being captured later. The truth was so ironic, Hunt thought: if they hadn’t been stabbed in the back by their own Moon, they could have been back into space by 45,000 B.C., if not sooner.
"But not all were taken to Earth," Danchekker concluded. "Another group was taken back to Thurien, and have since become the Jevlenese."
"It was so," Calazar confirmed.
"Even after all that had happened," Showm explained, "the Cerians and the Lambians were unmixable. Since the Lambians had been the cause of the trouble, the Ganymeans of that time considered that more good would come out of the Lambians being taken to Thurien and—it was hoped—being integrated into Ganymean ways and society. The Cerians were taken to Earth at their own request. They were offered ongoing aid to rebuild, but they declined. So a surveillance system was set up instead to keep an eye on them—as much for their own protection as anything." Hunt was surprised. If the surveillance system had been in place that long, the Ganymeans would have known about the collapse of the colony which they themselves had helped found. Why had they let it happen?
"So how did the others make out—the Lambians?" Heller asked. "They couldn’t have been running the surveillance that far back. How did they get their hands on it?"
Calazar emitted a heavy sigh. "They caused a lot of problems for the Thuriens of that time, so much so that when Luna came to be captured by Earth and caused widespread catastrophes that demolished the fragile beginnings of the new Cerian society that had started to take root there, it was decided to leave things be. With troubles of their own at home, the Thuriens were not eager to see another human civilization rushing headlong toward advancement, perhaps to repeat the Minervan disaster." He shrugged as if to say that right or wrong, that was the way it had been, then resumed, "But as time went by and further generations of Lambians came and went, the situation seemed to improve. Signs appeared that they could be integrated fully into Ganymean society, so the Ganymean leaders adopted a policy of appeasement in an attempt to accelerate the process. As a result the Jevlenese, as the descendants of the Lambians were called by then, acquired control of the surveillance program."
"A mistake," Showm commented. "They should have been exiled."
"With hindsight, I think I agree," Calazar said. "But that was long before either my time or yours."
"How about telling us something about this system," Hunt suggested. "How does it work?"
Eesyan answered. "Mostly from space. Until about a century ago, it was comparatively simple. Since Earth entered its electronics and space era, the Jevlenese have had to be more careful. Their devices are very small and virtually undetectable. Most of their information comes from intercepting and retransmitting your communications, such as the laser links between Jupiter and Earth. At one time in the early years of your space program they manufactured instrument packages to resemble pieces of your own space debris, but they had to stop when you started clearing things up. That experiment had its uses though; that was where we got the idea of building a perceptron that looked like a Boeing."
"But how could they fake the reports as well as they did?" Hunt asked. "They must have something of their own like VISAR. No Mickey Mouse computer did that."
"They have," Eesyan told him. "Long ago, when there seemed reason to feel optimistic about the Jevlenese, the Thuriens helped them establish their own autonomous world. It’s called Jevlen, on the fringe of our developed region of space, and it’s equipped with a system known as JEVEX, which is VISAR-like but independent of VISAR. Like VISAR, JEVEX operates across its own system of many stars. The surveillance system from Earth is coupled into JEVEX, and the reports that we receive are transmitted indirectly from JEVEX through VISAR."
"So it isn’t difficult to understand how the fabrications and distortions were engineered," Showm said. "So much for philanthropy. They should never have been allowed to operate such a system."
"But why did they do it?" Karen Heller asked. "We still don’t have an answer. Their reports were pretty accurate up until about the time of World War II. The problems of the late twentieth century were somewhat exaggerated, but for the last thirty years it’s turned into pure fiction. Why would they want you to think we were still heading for World War III?"
"Who can understand the contortions of human minds?" Showm asked, using the general term unconsciously.
Hunt just caught the look that she flashed involuntarily at Calazar as she spoke. There was something more behind it all, he realized—something that the Thuriens were not divulging even now. Whatever it was, he was just as certain in that same split second that Garuth and Shilohin didn’t know about it, either. But he didn’t feel this was the time to force a confrontation. Instead he steered the discussion back into technicalities as he remembered something else. "What kind of archives does JEVEX have?" he asked. "Do they go all the way back to the Ganymean civilization on Minerva, like VISAR’s?"
"No," Eesyan replied. "JEVEX is of much more recent vintage. There was no need to load it with VISAR’s complete archives, which concerned only Ganymeans." He studied Hunt curiously for a few seconds. "Are you thinking about the anomalies in the displacements of background stars that VISAR noticed in the shots of the Shapieron?"
Hunt nodded. "That explains it, doesn’t it? JEVEX couldn’t have known about the displacements. VISAR had access to the original design data for the ship; JEVEX didn’t."
"Correct," Eesyan said. "There were a few other anomalies too, but all similar—all to do with an old Ganymean technology that JEVEX couldn’t have known very much about. That was when we became suspicious." At which point everything that had ever come from JEVEX would be suspect, Hunt saw. But there would have been no way of checking any of the rest without bypassing the Jevlenese completely and going straight to the source of the information—Earth. And that was precisely what the Thuriens had done.
Calazar seemed anxious to move them away from the whole topic. When a lull presented itself, he said, "Garuth wanted me to show you another sequence that he thought you would find interesting. VISAR, show us the Ganymean landing at Gorda."
Hunt jerked his head up in surprise. The name was familiar. Danchekker was looking incredulous as well. Heller was looking from one to the other of the men with a puzzled frown; she was less conversant with Charlie’s story than they were.
Don Maddson’s linguistics team at Navcomms had eventually succeeded in deciphering a notebook of Charlie’s that had remained a mystery for a long time. It gave a day-by-day account of Charlie’s experiences as one member of a rapidly diminishing band of Cerian survivors making a desperate trek across the lunar surface to reach a base that offered their last hope of escape from the Moon, if any hope remained at all. The account had covered events up to the point of Charlie’s arrival at the place at which he had been found, by which time attrition of various kinds had reduced his band to just two—him, and a companion whose name had been Koriel. Charlie had collapsed there from the effects of a malfunctioning life-support system, and Koriel had left on a lone bid to reach the base. Apparently he had never returned. The base was called Gorda.
A new image appeared above the center of the floor. It was of a wilderness of dust and boulders etched harshly beneath a black sky thick with stars. The landscape had been seared and churned by forces of unimaginable violence to leave just the twisted and mutilated wreckage of what could once have been a vast base. Amid the desolation stood a single structure that appeared to have survived almost intact—a squat, armored dome or turret of some kind, blown open on one side. Its interior was in darkness.
"That was all that was left of Gorda," Calazar commented. "The view you are seeing is from a Thurien ship that had landed a few minutes before."
A small vehicle, roughly rectangular but with pods and other protuberances cluttering its outside, moved slowly into view from behind the camera, flying twenty feet or so above the ground. It landed near the dome, and a group of Ganymeans wearing spacesuits emerged and began moving cautiously through the wreckage toward the opening. Then they stopped suddenly. There were movements in the shadows ahead of them.
A light came on from somewhere behind to light up the opening. It revealed more figures, also in suits, standing in front of what looked like an entrance leading down to an underground section of whatever the dome had been part of. Their suits were different, and they stood a full head and shoulders shorter than the Ganymeans facing them from a few yards away. They were carrying weapons, but they appeared unsure of themselves as they looked nervously at one another and at the Ganymeans. None of them seemed to know what to do or what to expect. None of them, except one.
He was standing in front of the others in a blue spacesuit that was plastered with dust and grotesquely discolored by scorch marks, his feet planted firmly astride, and a riflelike weapon held unwaveringly in one hand to cover the leading Ganymean. With his free arm he made a gesture behind him to wave the others forward. The movement was decisive and commanding. They obeyed, some moving up to stand on either side of him, others moving out to cover the aliens from protected positions among the surrounding debris. He was taller than the others and heavy in build, and the lips of the face behind his visor were drawn back in a snarl to reveal white teeth that contrasted sharply with his dark, unshaven chin and cheeks. Something unintelligible came through on audio. Although the words meant nothing, the tone of challenge and defiance was unmistakable.
"Our surveillance methods were not as comprehensive then," Calazar commented. "The language was not known."
In the scene before them, the Ganymean leader was replying in his own tongue, evidently relying on intonation and gesture to dispel alarm. As the exchange continued, the tension seemed to ease. Eventually the human giant lowered his weapon, and the others who had taken cover began emerging again. He beckoned for the Ganymeans to follow, and as the ranks behind him opened to make way, he turned away to lead them down into the inner entrance.
"That was Koriel," Garuth said.
Hunt had already guessed that. For some reason he felt very relieved.
"He succeeded!" Danchekker breathed. Elation was showing on his face, and he swallowed visibly. "He did get to Gorda. I’m—I’m glad to know that."
"Yes," Garuth said, reading the further question written across Hunt’s face. "We have studied the ship’s log. They did return, but Koriel’s companion had already died. They left him as they found him. They did manage to rescue some of the others who had been left strung out along the way, however."
"And after that?" Danchekker queried. "Another thing we have often wondered is whether or not Koriel was among those who finally reached Earth. It seems now that he may well have been. Do you happen to know if he in fact was?"
In reply Calazar called up another image. It was a view of a settlement formed from a dozen or so portable buildings of unfamiliar design, situated on a river bank against a background of semitropical forest with the hazy outline of mountains rising in the distance beyond. On one side was what looked like a supply dump, with rows of stacked crates, drums, and other containers. A crowd of two or three hundred figures was assembled in the foreground—human figures, dressed mainly in simple but serviceable-looking shirts and pants, and many of them carrying weapons either holstered at the waist or slung across the shoulder.
Koriel was standing ahead of them, huge, broad-shouldered, with dense, black hair, unsmiling features, and his thumbs hooked loosely in his belt. Two lieutenants were standing one either side and a pace behind him. Some of the arms in the crowd began rising in a farewell salutation.
Then the view began to fall away and tilt. The settlement shrank quickly and lost itself among a carpet of treetops, which in turn faded to become just a hazy area of green on a patchwork of colors taking form as the scale reduced and more of the surrounding landscape flowed into view from the sides. "The last view from the ship as it departed from Earth to return to Thurien," Calazar said. A coastline that was recognizable as part of the Red Sea moved into the picture and shrank to become part of a familiar section of Middle East geography despite being distorted at the periphery by perspective. Finally the edge of the planet itself appeared, already looking distinctly curved.
They watched in silence for a long time. Eventually Danchekker murmured, "Imagine . . . the whole human race began with that tiny handful. After all that they had endured, they conquered a whole world. What an extraordinary race they must have been."
This was one of the few occasions on which Hunt had seen Danchekker genuinely moved. And he felt it too. He thought back again to the scenes from the Lunarian war and the visions that the Jevlenese had created of Earth stampeding toward exactly the same catastrophe. And yet it had almost come true. It had been close—far too close. If Earth had not changed course when it did, just two or three decades more would have made that come true. And then Charlie, Koriel, Gorda, the efforts of the Thuriens, the struggles of the handful of survivors that he had just seen—and all that they endured after that—would have been for nothing.
It brought to mind Wellington’s words after Waterloo: "It was a close-run thing, a damned close-run thing—the closest-run thing you ever saw in your life."