climb up out of the valley we were in and try a shortcut over a high ridge. I made it about halfway up the cleft leading toward the ridge. Every step up the cleft I could see Minerva sitting right over the middle of the ridge, gashes of orange and red all over it, like a (macabre?) face, taunting. Then I collapsed. When I came to, Koriel had dragged me inside a pilot digging of some sort. Maybe someone wag going to put an outpost of Gorda here. That was a while ago now. Koriel has gone on and says help will be back before I know it. Getting colder all the time. Feet numb and hands stiff. Frost starting to form in helmet-difficult to see.
Thinking about all the people strung out back there with night coming down, all like me, wondering if they’ll be picked up. if we can hold out we’ll be all right. Koriel will make it. If it were a thousand miles to Gorda, Koriel would make it.
Thinking about what has happened on Minerva and wondering if, after all this, our children will live on a sunnier world-and if they do, if they will ever know what we did.
Thinking about things I’ve never really thought about before. There should be better ways for people to spend their lives than in factories, mines, and army camps. Can’t think what, though-that’s all we’ve ever known. But if there is warmth and color and light somewhere in this Universe, then maybe something worthwhile will come out of what we’ve been through.
Too much thinking for one day. Must sleep for a while now.
Hunt found he had read right through to the end, absorbed in the pathos of those final days. His voice had fallen to a sober pitch. A long silence ensued.
'Well, that’s it,' he concluded, a little more briskly. 'Did you notice that bit right at the end? In the last few lines he was talking about seeing the surface of Minerva again. Now, they might have used telescopes earlier on, but in the situation he was in there, they’d hardly be lugging half an observatory along with them, would they?'
Maddson’s assistant looked thoughtful. 'How about that periscope video gadget that was in the helmet?' he suggested. 'Maybe there’s something wrong in the translation. Couldn’t he be talking about seeing a transmission through that?'
Hunt shook his head. 'Can’t see it. I’ve heard of people watching TV in all sorts of funny places, but never halfway up a bloody mountain. And another thing: He described it as sitting up above the ridge. That implies it’s really out there. If it were a view on video, he’d never have worded it that way. Right, Don?'
Maddson nodded wearily. 'Guess so,' he said. 'So, where do we go from here?'
Hunt looked from Maddson to the assistant and back again. He leaned his elbows on the edge of the table and rubbed his face and eyeballs with his fingers. Then he sighed and sat back.
'What do we know for sure?' he asked at last. 'We know that those Lunarian spaceships got to our Moon in under two days. We know that they could accurately aim a weapon, sited on our Moon, at a Minervan target. We also know that the round trip for electromagnetic waves was much shorter than it could possibly have been if we’ve been talking about the right place. Finally, we can’t prove but we think that Charlie could stand on our Moon and see quite clearly the surface features of Minerva. Well, what does that add up to?'
'There’s only one place in the Universe that fits all those numbers,' Maddson said numbly.
'Exactly-and we’re standing on it! Maybe there was a planet called Minerva outside Mars, and maybe it had a civilization on it. Maybe the Ganymeans took a few animals there and maybe they didn’t. But it doesn’t really matter any more, does it? Because the only planet Charlie’s ship could possibly have taken off from, and the only planet they could have aimed that Annihilator at, and the only planet he could have seen in detail from Luna-is this one!
'They were from Earth all along!
'Everyone will be jumping off the roof and out of every window in the building when this gets around Navcomms.'
Chapter Seventeen
With the first comprehensive translation of the handwritten notebook, the paradox was complete. Now there were two consistent and apparently irrefutable bodies of evidence, one proving that the Lunarians must have evolved on Earth, and the other proving that they couldn’t have.
All at once the consternation and disputes broke out afresh. Lights burned through the night at Houston and elsewhere as the same inevitable chains of reasoning were reeled out again and yet again, the same arrays of facts scrutinized for new possibilities or interpretations. But always the answers came out the same. Only the notion of the Lunarians having been the product of a parallel line of evolution appeared to have been abandoned permanently; more than enough theories were in circulation already without anyone having to invoke this one. The Navcomms fraternity disintegrated into a myriad of cliques and strays, scurrying about to ally first with this idea and then with that. As the turmoil subsided, the final lines of defense fortified themselves around four main camps.
The Pure Earthists accepted without reservation the deductions from Charlie’s diary, and held that the Lunarian civilization had developed on Earth, flourished on Earth, and destroyed itself on Earth and that was that. Thus, all references to Minerva and its alleged civilization were nonsense; there never had been any civilization on Minerva apart from that of the Ganymeans, and that was too far in the remote past to have any bearing on the Lunarian issue. The world depicted on Charlie’s maps was Earth, not Minerva, so there had to be a gross error somewhere in the calculations that put it at 250 million miles from the Sun. That this corresponded to the orbital radius of the Asteroids was just coincidence; the Asteroids had always been there, and anything from Iliad that said they hadn’t was suspect and needed double checking.
That left only one question unexplained: Why didn’t Charlie’s maps look like Earth? To answer this one, the Earthists launched a series of commando raids against the bastions of accepted geological theory and methods of geological dating. Drawing on the hypothesis that continents had been formed initially from a single granitic mass that had been shattered under the weight of immense ice caps and pushed apart by polar material rushing in to ifil the gaps, they pointed to the size of the ice caps shown on the maps and stressed how much larger they were than anything previously supposed to have existed on Earth. Now, if in fact the maps showed Earth and not Minerva, that meant that the Ice Age on Earth had been far more severe than previously thought, and its effects on surface geography correspondingly more violent. Add to this the effects of the crustal fractures and vulcanism as described in Charlie’s observations of Earth (not Minerva), and there was, perhaps, enough in all that to account for the transformation of Charlie’s Earth into modern Earth. So, why were there no traces to be found today of the Lunarian civilization? Answer: It was clear from the maps that most of it had been concentrated on the equatorial belt. Today that region was completely ocean, dense jungle, or drifting desert-adequate to explain the rapid erasure of whatever had been left after the war and the climatic cataclysm.
The Pure Earthist faction attracted mainly physicists and engineers, quite happy to leave the geologists and geographers to worry about the bothersome details. Their main concern was that the sacred principle of the constancy of the velocity of light should not be thrown into the melting pot of suspicion along with everything else.
By entrenching themselves around the idea of Earth origins, the Pure Earthists had moved into the positions previously defended fanatically by the biologists. Now that Danchekker had led the way by introducing his fleet of Ganymean Noah’s Arks, the biologists abruptly turned about-face and rallied behind their new assertion of Minervan origin from displaced terrestrial ancestors. What about Charlie’s Minerva-Luna flight time and the loop delay around the Annihilator fire-control system? Something was screwed up in the interpretation of Minervan time scales that accounted for both these. Okay, how could Charlie see Minerva from Luna? Video transmissions. Okay, how could they aim the Annihilator over that distance? They couldn’t. The dish at Seltar was only a remote-control tracking station. The weapon itself was mounted in a satellite orbiting Minerva.
The third flag flew over the Cutoff Colony Theory. According to this, an early terrestrial civilization had colonized Minerva, and then declined into a Dark Age during which contact with the colony was lost. The deteriorating conditions of the Ice Age later prompted a recovery on both planets, with the difference that Minerva faced a life-or-death situation and began the struggle to regain the lost knowledge in order that a return to Earth might be made. Earth, however, was going through lean times of its own and, when the advance parties from Minerva eventually made contact, didn’t react favorably to the idea of another planetful of mouths to feed. Diplomacy having failed, the Minervans set up an invasion beachhead on Luna. The Annihilator at Seltar had thus
