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
