the table. 'See those dots on the ice sheets? Most of them were a combination of fortress and mining town. They dug right down through the ice to get at the deposits, and the army was there to make sure they kept the stuff.'
'And that was the way life was. Mean people, eh?'
'Yeah, for generation after generation.' Maddson shrugged. 'Who knows? Maybe if we were freezing over fast, we’d be forced in the same direction. Anyhow, the situation had complications. They had the problem of having to divide their efforts and resources between two different demands all the time: first, developing a technology that would support mass interplanetary travel and, second, armaments and the defense organization to protect it-and there weren’t a lot of resources to divide in the first place. Now, how would you solve a problem like that?'
Hunt pondered for a while. 'Cooperate?' he tried.
'Forget it. They didn’t think that way.'
'Only one other strategy possible, then: Wipe out the opposition first and then concentrate everything on the main objective.'
Maddson nodded solidly. 'That is exactly what they did. War, or near war, was pretty well a natural way of life all through their history. Gradually the smaller fish were eliminated until, by the time we get to Charlie, there are only two superpowers left, each dominating one of the two big equatorial continental land masses…' He pointed at the map again. '… Cerios and Lambia. From various references, we know Charlie was a Cerian.'
'All set for the big showdown, then.'
'Check. The whole planet was one big fortress-factory. Every inch of surface was covered by hostile missiles; the sky was full of orbiting bombs that could be dropped anywhere. We get the impression that relative to the pattern of our own civilization, their armaments programs had taken a bigger share than space research and had progressed faster.' Maddson shrugged again. 'The rest you can guess.'
Hunt nodded slowly and thoughtfully. 'It all fits,' he mused. 'It must have been a huge con, though. I mean, even from whichever side won, only a handful would have been able to get away in the end; I suppose they’d have been the ruling clique and its minions. Christ! No wonder they needed good propaganda; they-'
Hunt stopped in midsentence and looked at Maddson with a curious expression. 'Just a minute-there’s something else in all this that doesn’t add up.' He paused to collect his thoughts. 'They had already developed interplanetary travel-how else did they get to our Moon?'
'We wondered that,' Maddson said. 'The only thing we could think of was that maybe they’d already figured on making for Earth eventually-that had to be the obvious choice. Maybe they were capable of sending a scouting group to stake the place out, but didn’t have full-scale mass-transportation capacity yet. Probably they weren’t too far away from their goal when they blew it. Perhaps if they’d pooled their marbles at that point instead of starting a crazy war over it, things might have been different.'
'Sounds plausible,' Hunt agreed. 'So Charlie could have been part of a reconnaissance mission sent on ahead, only the opposition had the same idea and they bumped into each other. Then they started blowing holes in our Moon. Disgraceful.'
A short silence ensued.
'There’s another thing I don’t get, either,' Hunt said, rubbing his chin.
'What’s that?'
'Well, the opposition-the Lambians. Everybody in Navcomms is going around saying that the war that clobbered Minerva was fought between colonists from Earth-that must be Charlie’s lot, the Cerians-and an alien race that belonged to Minerva-the Ganymeans, who, from what you said, would be the Lambians. We said a moment ago that this idea of the Cerians being from Earth doesn’t make sense, because if they had originated there, they wouldn’t be trying to develop space flight. We can’t be one hundred percent certain of that because something unusual could have happened, such as the colony being cut off for a few thousand years for some reason. But you can’t say that about the Lambians; they couldn’t have been neck-and-neck rivals trying to develop space flight.'
'They already had it, for sure,' Maddson completed for him. 'We sure as hell found them on Ganymede.'
'Quite. And that ship was no beginner’s first attempt, either. You know, I’m beginning to think that whoever the Lambians were, they weren’t Ganymeans.'
'I think you’re right,' Maddson confirmed. 'The Ganymeans were a totally different biological species. Wouldn’t you expect that if they were the opposition in Lambia, somehow it would show up in the Lunarian writings? But it doesn’t. Everything we’ve examined suggests that the Cerians and the Lambians were simply different nations of the same race. For example, we’ve found extracts from what appear to be Cerian newspapers, which included political cartoons showing Lambian figures; the figures are drawn as human forms. That wouldn’t be so if the Lambians looked anything like the Ganymeans must have looked.'
'So it appears the Ganymeans had nothing to do with the war,' Hunt concluded.
'Right.'
'So where do they fit in?'
Maddson showed his empty palms. 'That’s the funny thing. They don’t seem to fit anywhere-at least, we haven’t even found anything that looks like a reference to them.'
'Maybe they’re just a big red herring, then. I mean, we’ve only supposed that they came from Minerva; nothing actually demonstrates that they did. Perhaps they never had anything to do with the place at all.'
'Could well be. But I can’t help feeling that…'
The chime on Maddson’s desk display console interrupted the discussion. He excused himself and touched a button to accept the call.
'Hi, Don,' said the face of Hunt’s assistant, upstairs in Group L’s offices. 'Is Vic there?' He sounded excited. Maddson swiveled the unit around to point in Hunt’s direction.
'It’s for you,' he said needlessly.
'Vic,' said the face without preamble. 'I’ve just had a look at the reports of the latest tests that came in from Jupiter Four two hours ago. That ship under the ice and the big guys inside it-they’ve completed the dating tests.' He drew a deep breath. 'It looks like maybe we can forget the Ganymeans in all this Charlie business. Vic, if all the figures are right, that ship has been sitting there for something like twenty-five million years!'
Chapter Fifteen
Caldwell moved a step closer to inspect more carefully the nine-foot-high plastic model standing in the middle of one of the laboratories of the Westwood Biological Institute. Danchekker gave him plenty of time to take in the details before continuing.
'A full-size replica of a Ganymean skeleton,' he said. 'Built on the strength of the data beamed back from Jupiter. The first indisputable form of intelligent alien life ever to be studied by man.' Caldwell looked up at the towering frame, pursed his lips in a silent whistle, and walked in a slow circle around and back to where the professor was standing. Hunt simply stood and swept his eyes up and down the full length of the model in wordless fascination.
'That structure is in no way related to that of any animal ever studied on Earth, living or extinct,' Danchekker informed them. He gestured toward it. 'It is based on a bony internal skeleton, walks upright as a biped, and has a head on top-as you can see; but apart from such superficial similarities, it has clearly evolved from completely unfamiliar origins. Take the head as an obvious example. The arrangement of the skull cannot be reconciled in any way with that of known vertebrates. The face has not receded back into the lower skull, but remains a long, down- pointing snout that widens at the top to provide a broad spacing for the eyes and ears. Also, the back of the skull has enlarged to accommodate a developing brain, as in the case of man, but instead of assuming a rounded contour, it bulges back above the neck to counterbalance the protruding face and jaw. And look at the opening through the skull in the center of the forehead; I believe that this could have housed a sense organ that we do not possess-possibly an infrared detector inherited from a nocturnal, carnivorous ancestor.'
Hunt moved forward to stand next to Caldwell and peered intently at the shoulders. 'These are unlike anything I’ve ever come across, too,' he commented. 'They’re made up of… kind of overlapping plates of bone. Nothing like ours at all.'
'Quite,' Danchekker confirmed. 'Probably adapted from the remains of ancestral armor. And the rest of the
