Fortuitously, Hunt #146;s latest communication from Gregg Caldwell, executive director of UNSA #146;s Navcomms Division and Hunt #146;s immediate chief, had indicated that Hunt #146;s assignment on Ganymede was considered fulfilled and there was other work to be done back at Houston. Arrangements were being put in hand to ship him back. He had no difficulty in getting his name deleted from the UNSA schedule and added to the list of passengers due to go with the
Danchekker #146;s main reason for coming to Ganymede had been to investigate the terrestrial Oligocene animals found in the Pithead ship. The professor persuaded Monchar, second in command of the Ganymean expedition, that there was plenty of room in the
And so the time came for Hunt to pack his belongings and take one last look around the tiny room that had been home for so long. Then he made the familiar walk along the well-worn corridor that led to the Domestic Dome to join the handful of others who were shipping out. There they stood a last round of drinks for their friends staying on and made their farewells. After promises to keep in touch and assertions that everybody #146;s paths would cross again one day, they trooped through into the Site Operations Control building where the base commander and some of his staff were waiting in the airlock anteroom to bid them an official adieu. The access tube beyond the airlock took them through into the cabin of the tracked ice crawler that would carry them across to the landing pads, where a transporter ship was waiting.
Hunt #146;s feelings were mixed as he gazed out of one of the crawler #146;s viewing ports at the shadowy snatches of buildings and constructions that came and went among Pithead #146;s swirling, eternal methane- ammonia mist. Going home after a long time away was always a nice feeling of course, but he would miss many aspects of the life he had grown used to in the tightly knit UNSA community here, where everybody shared in everybody else #146;s problems and strangers were unknown. The spirit of comradeship that he had found here, the feeling of belonging, the sense of a common purpose. . . all these things gave a special intimacy to this tiny, manmade haven of survival that had been carved out of the hostile Ganymedean wilderness. The feelings he was experiencing so intensely at that moment would soon be diluted and forgotten when he returned to Earth and again rubbed shoulders every day with faceless millions, all busily living out their different lives in their different ways and with their different aims and values. There, custom and synthetic social barriers served to mark out the lines of demarcation that men needed in order to satisfy their psychological need to identify with definable cultural groups. The colony on Ganymede had not needed to build any artificial walls around itself to set it apart from the rest of the human race; Nature and several hundred million miles of empty space provided all the isolation necessary.
Perhaps, he thought to himself, that was why men pitched camps on the South Cal of Everest, sailed ships across the seven seas, and held reunion dinners year after year to share nostalgic memories of school or army days. The challenges and the hardships that they faced together forged bonds between them that the protective cocoon of normal society could never emulate and awakened an awareness of qualities in themselves and in each other that could never be erased. He knew then that, like the sailor or the mountaineer, he would return time after time to know again the things that he had found on Ganymede.
Danchekker, however, was less of a romantic.
'I don #146;t care if they discover seven-headed monsters on Saturn,' the professor said as they boarded the transporter. 'Once I get home again I #146;m staying there. I #146;ve lived quite enough of my life already surrounded by these wretched contraptions.'
'I bet you find you #146;ve developed agoraphobia when you get there,' Hunt told him.
At Main there was another round of farewells to go through before they were driven out, now wearing spacesuits, to the
Three hours later loading was complete and the final departure preparations had been made. Garuth and a small Ganymean rear-guard exchanged formal words of parting with the base commander and some of his officers, who had driven out to the ramp for the ceremony. Then the Earthmen boarded their vehicle and returned to the base while the Ganymeans withdrew into the
Hunt was alone in the cabin that had been allocated to him, taking in his last view of Main from a mural videoscreen, when ZORAC announced that takeoff was imminent. There was no sensation of motion at all; the view just started to diminish in size and flatten out as the ground fell away beneath. The Ganymedean landscape flowed inward from the edges of the picture and the surface details rapidly dissolved into a uniform sea of frosty whiteness as the ship gained altitude. Soon even the pinpoint of reflected light that was Main faded into the background, and an arc of blackness began advancing upward across the view as Ganymede #146;s dark side moved into the picture. At the top, the curvature of the moon #146;s sunlit side appeared, ushering in a gaggle of attendant background stars. The bright strip left in the center of the screen continued to narrow steadily, and at last its ends slipped in from beyond the edges of the frame to reveal it as a brilliant crescent hanging in the heavens, and already shrinking as he watched.
Then the crescent and the stars seemed to dissolve into diffuse smudges of light that flowed into one another until the whole screen was reduced to a uniform expanse of featureless, iridescent fog. The ship was now under main drive, he realized, and temporarily shut off from information coming in from the rest of the universe #151;information carried as electromagnetic waves anyway. He wondered what the Ganymeans used instead #151;to navigate by, for instance. Here was something he would raise with ZORAC.
But that could wait for now. For the moment he just wanted to relax and prepare his mind for other things. Unlike his voyage out aboard
Chapter Seventeen
And so the Ganymeans came at last to Earth.
After the failure of the various governments to reach agreement among themselves as to where the aliens should be received in the event of their accepting the invitation to visit, the Parliament of the United States of Europe had voted to go it alone and make their own preparations anyway #151;just in case. The place they selected was an area of pleasant open country on the Swiss shore of Lake Geneva, where, it was hoped, the climate would prove agreeable to the Ganymean constitution and the historical tradition of nonbelligerence would add a singularly appropriate note.
About halfway between the city of Geneva and Lausanne, they fenced off an area just over a mile square on the edge of the lake, and inside it erected a village of chalets that had been designed for Ganymean occupation; the ceilings were high, the doorways big, the beds strong, and the windows slightly tinted. Communal cooking and dining facilities were provided, along with leisure rooms, terminals linked into the World #146;s integrated entertainments: data/news grid, an outsize swimming pool, a recreation area, and just about anything else which seemed likely to contribute to making life comfortable and could be included in the time available. A huge concrete pad was laid to support the
When the news came in from Jupiter that the aliens were planning on departing for Earth in just a couple of weeks #146; time and #151;even more startling #151;the journey would take only a few days, it was obvious that the issue of where to receive them had already been decided. By the time the
