There was nothing to stop them. And with their aggressive streak unleashed as well. . . a whole race of runaway mutants. . . psychological Frankenstein monsters. . . .'
'Which is, of course, where the Lunarians came from,' Danchekker said. His voice was grave. 'By rights they shouldn #146;t have survived. All the theories and models of the Ganymean scientists said that they would inevitably destroy themselves. They almost did. They turned a whole planet into one vast fortress and by the time they had developed technology their lives revolved around unceasing warfare and the ruthless, uncompromising determination to exterminate all other rival states. They were capable of conceiving no other formula to solve their problems. In the end they did indeed destroy themselves and Minerva along with them, at least, they destroyed their civilization, if that is the correct term for it. They should have destroyed themselves totally, but, by a million- to-one chance, it did not quite happen. . . .' Danchekker looked up and left Hunt to fill in the rest.
But Hunt just sat and stared, overwhelmed. After the nuclear holocaust between the opposing forces of the two remaining Lunarian superstates had altered permanently the face of Minerva #146;s moon and Minerva had disintegrated, the moon fell inward toward the Sun to be captured by Earth. The tiny band of survivors carried with it had possessed the resources to set off one last, desperate journey #151;to the surface of the new world that now hung in the sky above their heads. For forty thousand years the descendants of those survivors had merged into the survival struggle of Earth, but eventually they had spread all over the planet and emerged as an adversary as formidable as their ancestors had been on Minerva.
At last, Danchekker resumed quietly. 'We have speculated for some time now that the Lunarians, and hence Man, originated from an unprecedented mutation that must have occurred somewhere along the primate line that was isolated on Minerva. Also, we have noted that somewhere along his line of ancestry, Man has somehow abandoned the self-immunization process that other animals have in common. Now we see not only proof that these things were true, but also how they came about. In fact, many species went along that same path, but all bar one were destroyed when Minerva was destroyed. Only one #151;Man in the form of the Lunarians #151;came back again.' Danchekker paused and took a long breath. 'An unprecedented mutation did indeed occur on Minerva, but it was not a natural mutation. Modern Man exhibits fewer of the extremes that drove the Lunarians to their doom, thankfully, but all the same the legacy of our ancestry is written through the pages of our history.
'The Ganymeans believe that Man is slowly but surely recovering from the instability and compulsive violence that destroyed the Lunarians. Let us hope they are right.'
Neither man said anything more for a long time. It was ironic, Hunt thought, that after all the Ganymeans had said, their own kind should turn out to be the prime cause of all the things that had come to pass over the last twenty-five miffion years. And throughout all that time, while primates evolved into sapient beings on Minerva, and the Lunarian civilization came and went, and fifty thousand years of human history were being acted out on Earth, the
'An unsuccessful series of Ganymean genetic experiments,' Hunt echoed Danchekker. 'They started the whole thing. They came back to find us flying spaceships and building fusion plants, and they thought our rate of progress was miraculous. And all the time they #146;d started the whole thing off in their own labs, twenty-five million years ago. . . and given it up as a bad job! It #146;s funny when you think about it, Chris. It #146;s damned funny. And now they #146;ve gone for good. I wonder what they would have said if they #146;d only known what we know now.'
Danchekker did not reply at once, but stared thoughtfully at the top of his desk for a while, as if weighing whether or not to say what was going through his head. In the end he stretched an arm forward and began toying idly with a pen. When he spoke he did not engage Hunt #146;s eyes directly but continued to watch the pen tumbling over and over between his fingers.
'You know, Vic, in the last months before they went, the Ganymeans became very interested in all aspects of terrestrial biochemistry, including all our available data on Charlie, Man, and the Oligocene animals from Pithead. For a long time they were bubbling over with curiosity and ZORAC couldn #146;t find enough questions to ask about such matters. And then, about a month ago, they suddenly became very quiet about it all. They hadn #146;t even mentioned it since.'
The professor looked up and confronted Hunt with a direct and candid stare.
'I think I know why,' he said, very softly. 'You see, Vic, they knew all right. They knew. They knew that they had brought a pathetically deformed creature into a hostile universe and left it to fend for itself against odds that were hopeless, and they returned and saw what that creature had become #151;a proud and triumphant conqueror that laughs its defiance at anything the universe cares to throw at it. That is why they are gone. They believe that they owe it to Man to leave him free to perfect the world that he has built for himself in whatever way he chooses. They know what we were and they see what we have made of ourselves since. They feel that we have suffered enough interference in the past and have shown ourselves to be the better managers of our own destiny.'
Danchekker tossed the pen aside, gazed up and concluded:
'And somehow, Vic, I don #146;t think that we will let them down. The worst is over now.'
Epilogue
The signal transmitted by the huge radio dish at the observatory on Lunar Farside streaked outward from the fringe of the Solar System and into the vast gulfs of empty space beyond. Its whisper brushed the sensors of a sentinel that had been maintaining an unbroken vigil for a long, long time. The circuits inside the robot understood and responded to the Ganymean code that had been used to assemble the signal.
Other equipment inside the robot transformed the signal into vibrations of forces and fields that obeyed laws of physics unknown to Man, and dispatched it into a realm of existence of which the universe of space and time were mere shadowy projections. In another part of the shadow universe, on a warm, bright planet that orbited a cheerful star, other machines received and interpreted the message.
The builders of the machines were informed and were at once filled with wonder at the things that were reported to them.
The sentinel extracted their reply from the superstructure of space, transformed it back into electromagnetic waves, and beamed it back toward the satellite of the third planet from the Sun.
The astronomers at the Lunar Farside observatory were completely at a loss to explain the information coming from the instruments connected to their receivers; there was nothing within light-years of them from which a reply could have been evoked, but a reply was coming in hours after they had commenced transmitting. The officials at UNSA were equally bemused and time went by while scientists used the information that had been transferred from ZORAC #146;s data banks to translate the message from Ganymean communications code into the Ganymean language. But still it meant nothing to anybody.
Then somebody thought of involving Dr. Victor Hunt of Navcomms Division. Hunt immediately remembered Don Maddson #146;s study of the Ganymean language and sent the text down to Linguistics to see what they could make of it. Forty-eight hours passed by while Maddson and his assistant worked. The task was not one that they had practiced and, without ZORAC on tap to guide them, not one that could be accomplished readily. But the message was concise and eventually a red-eyed but triumphant Maddson presented Hunt with a single sheet of paper on which was typed:
There were also some numbers and mathematical symbols that others in Navcomms had decoded, and which identified
What physical processes might have been instrumental was something that Hunt could not even begin to guess
