The Gentle Giants of Ganymede

seemed to bring him nearer to Earth and to things that were familiar. In a sense he was home. This tiny, manmade world, an island of light and life and warmth drifting through an infinite ocean of emptiness, was no longer the cold and alien shell that he had boarded high above Luna more than a year ago. It now seemed to him a part of Earth itself.

Hunt spent the second day paying social calls on some of J5 #146;s scientific personnel, exercising in one of the ship #146;s lavishly equipped gymnasiums and cooling off afterward with a swim. A little while later, enjoying a well-earned beer in one of the bars and debating with himself what to do about dinner, he found himself talking to a medical officer who was snatching a quick refresher after coming off duty. Her name was Shirley. To their mutual surprise it turned out that Shirley had studied at Cambridge, England, and had rented a flat not two minutes #146; walk from Hunt #146;s own student-day lodgings. Before very long one of those instant friendships that springs up out of nowhere was bursting into full bloom. They dined together and spent the rest of the evening talking and laughing and drinking, and drinking and laughing and talking. By midnight it had become evident that there would be no sudden parting of the ways. Next morning he felt better than he had for what he was sure was an unhealthily long time. That, he told himself, was surely what medical officers were supposed to make people feel like.

On the following day he rejoined Danchekker. The results of the two years of work that Hunt and Danchekker had spearheaded were by now a subject of worldwide acclaim, and the names of the two scientists had been in the limelight as a consequence. The Jupiter Five Mission director, Joseph B. Shannon, an Air Force colonel prior to world demilitarization fifteen years earlier, had been informed of their presence on the ship and had invited them to join him for lunch. Accordingly, halfway through the official day, they found themselves sitting at a table in the director #146;s dining room, savoring the mellow euphoria that comes with cigars and brandy after the final course and obliging Shannon with their personal accounts of the other sensational discovery that had rocked the scientific world during those two years #151;the discovery of Charlie and the Lunarians. It ranked in sensationalism with that of the Ganymeans.

The Ganymeans had turned up later, when the shafts driven down into the ice below Pithead had penetrated to the Ganymean spacecraft. Some time before that discovery, exploration of the Lunar surface had yielded traces of yet another technologically advanced civilization that had flourished in the Solar System long before that of Man. This race was given the name 'Lunarians,' again to commemorate the place where the first finds had been made, and was known to have reached its peak some fifty thousand years before #151;during the final cold period of the Pleistocene Ice Age. Charlie, a spacesuited corpse found well-preserved beneath debris and rubble not far from Copernicus, had constituted the first find of all and had provided the clues that marked the starting point from which the story of the Lunarians was eventually reconstructed.

The Lunarians had proved to be fully human in every detail. Once this fact was established, the problem that presented itself was that of explaining where the Lunarians had come from. Either they had originated on Earth itself as a till-then unsuspected civilization that had emerged prior to the existence of modern Man, or they had originated somewhere else. There were no other possibilities open to consideration.

But for a long time both possibilities seemed to be ruled out. If an advanced society had once flourished on Earth, surely centuries of archaeological excavation should have produced abundant evidence of it. On the other hand, to suppose that they had originated elsewhere would require a process of parallel evolution #151;a violation of the accepted principles of random mutation and natural selection. The Lunarians therefore, being neither from Earth nor from anywhere else, couldn #146;t exist. But they did. The unraveling of this seemingly insoluble mystery had brought Hunt and Danchekker together and had occupied them, along with hundreds of experts from just about all the world #146;s major scientific institutions, for over two years.

'Chris insisted right from the beginning that Charlie, and presumably all the rest of the Lunarians too, could only have descended from the same ancestors as we did.' Hunt spoke through a swirling tobacco haze while Shannon listened intently. 'I didn #146;t want to argue with him on that, but I couldn #146;t go along with the conclusion that seemed to go with it #151;that they must, therefore, have originated on Earth. There would have to be traces of them around, and there weren #146;t.'

Danchekker smiled ruefully to himself as he sipped his drink. 'Yes, indeed,' he said. 'As I recall, our meetings in those early days were characterized by what might be described as, ah, somewhat direct and acrimonious exchanges.'

Shannon #146;s eyes twinkled briefly as he pictured the months of heated argument and dissent that were implied by Danchekker #146;s careful choice of euphemisms.

'I remember reading about it at the time,' he said, nodding. 'But there were so many different reports flying around and so many journalists getting their stories confused, that we never could get a really clear idea of exactly what was going on behind it all. When did you first figure out for sure that the Lunarians came from Minerva?'

'That #146;s a long story,' Hunt answered. 'The whole thing was an unbelievable mess for a long time. The more we found out, the more everything seemed to contradict itself. Let me see now. . .' He paused and rubbed his chin for a second. 'People all over were getting snippets of information from all kinds of tests on the Lunarian remains and relics that started to turn up after Charlie. Then too, there was Charlie himself, his spacesuit, backpack and so on, and all the things with them. . . then the other bits and pieces from around Tycho and places. The clues eventually started fitting together and out of it all we gradually built up a surprisingly complete picture of Minerva and managed to work out fairly accurately where Minerva must have been.'

'I was with UNSA at Galveston when you joined Navcomms,' Shannon informed Hunt. 'That part of the story received a lot of coverage. Time did a feature on you called #145;The Sherlock Holmes of Houston. #146; But tell me something #151;what you #146;ve just said doesn #146;t seem to sort out the problem; if you managed to track them down to Minerva, how did that answer the question of parallel evolution? I #146;m afraid I still don #146;t see that.'

'Quite right,' Hunt confirmed. 'All it proved was that a planet existed. It didn #146;t prove that the Lunarians evolved on it. As you say, there was still the problem of parallel evolution.' He flicked his cigar at the ashtray and shook his head with a sigh. 'All kinds of theories were in circulation. Some talked about a civilization from the distant past that had colonized Minerva and had somehow gotten cut off from home; others said they had evolved there from scratch by some kind of convergent process that wasn #146;t properly understood. . . . Life was becoming crazy.'

'But at that point we encountered an extraordinary piece of luck,' Danchekker came in. 'Your colleagues from Jupiter Four discovered the Ganymean spaceship #151;here, on Ganymede. Once the cargo was identified as terrestrial animals from about twenty-five million years ago, an explanation suggested itself that could account adequately for the whole situation. The conclusion was incredible, but it fit.'

Shannon nodded vigorously, indicating that this answer had confirmed what he had already suspected.

'Yes, it had to be the animals,' he said. 'That #146;s what I thought. Until you established that the ancestors of the Lunarians had been shipped from Earth to Minerva by the Ganymeans, you had no way of connecting the Lunarians with Minerva. Right?'

'Almost, but not quite,' Hunt replied. 'We #146;d already managed to connect the Lunarians with Minerva #151;in other words we knew they #146;d been involved with the planet somehow #151;but we couldn #146;t account for how they could have evolved there. You #146;re right, though, in saying that the animals that the Ganymeans shipped there long before solved that one in the end. But first we had to connect the Ganymeans with Minerva. At first, you see, all we knew was that one of their ships conked out on Ganymede. No way of knowing where it came from.'

'Of course. That #146;s right. There wouldn #146;t have been anything to indicate that the Ganymeans had anything to do with Minerva, would there? So what finally pointed you in the right direction?'

'Another stroke of luck, I must confess,' Danchekker said. 'Some perfectly preserved fish were found among the food stocks in the remains of a devastated Lunarian base on Luna. We succeeded in proving that the fish were native to Minerva and had been brought to Luna by the Lunarians. Furthermore, the fish were shown to be anatomically related to Ganymean skeletons. This, of course, implied that the Ganymeans too must have evolved from the same evolutionary line as the fish. Since the fish were from Minerva, the Ganymeans also had to be from Minerva.'

'So that was where the ship must have come from,' Hunt pointed out.

'And where the animals must have come from,' Danchekker added.

'And the only way they could have got there is if the Ganymeans took them there,' Hunt finished.