Giant Series 01 - Inherit the Stars Read online

  navigation than it had with communication. The down-turned corners

  of Caidwell's mouth shifted back slightly in something that almost

  approached a smile of anticipation. So, the knives were being

  sharpened, were they? That was okay by him; he could do with a

  fight. After more than twenty years of hustling his way to the top

  of one of the biggest divisions of the Space Arm, he was a seasoned

  veteran at infighting-and he hadn't lost a drop of blood yet. Maybe

  this was an area in which Navcomms hadn't had much involvement

  before; maybe the whole thing was bigger than Navcomms could

  handle; maybe it was bigger than UNSA could handle; but- that was

  the way it was. It had chosen to fall into Navcomms' lap and that

  was where it was going to stay. If anyone wanted to help out, that

  was fine-but the project was stamped as Navcomms-controlled. If

  they didn't like it, let them try to change it. Man-let 'em try!

  His thoughts were interrupted by the chime of the console built

  into the desk behind him. He turned around, flipped a switch, and

  answered in a voice of baritone granite:

  "Caldwell."

  Lyn Garland, his personal assistant, greeted him from the screen.

  She was twenty-eight, pretty, and had long red hair and big, brown,

  intelligent eyes.

  "Message from Reception. Your two visitors from IDCC are here-Dr.

  Hunt and Mr. Gray."

  "Bring them straight up. Pour some coffee. You'd better sit in with

  us."

  "Will do."

  Ten minutes later formalities had been exchanged and everyone was

  seated. Caidwell regarded the Englishmen in silence for a few

  seconds, his lips pursed and his bushy brows gnarled in a knot

  across his forehead. He leaned forward and interlaced his fingers

  on the desk in front of him.

  "About three weeks ago I attended a meeting at one of our Lunar

  survey bases-Copernicus Three," he said. "A lot of excavation and

  site-survey work is going on in that area, much of it in connection

  with new construction programs. The meeting was attended by

  scientists from Earth and from some of the bases up there, a few

  people on the engineering side and certain members of the uniformed

  branches of the Space Arm. It was called following some strange

  discoveries there-discoveries that make even less sense now than

  they did then."

  He paused to gaze from one to the other. Hunt and Gray returned the

  look without speaking. Caldwell continued: "A team from one of the

  survey units was engaged in mapping out possible sites for

  clearance radars. They were operating in a remote sector, well away

  from the main area being leveled. .

  As he spoke, Caidwell began operating the keyboard recessed into

  one side of his desk. With a nod of his head he indicated the far

  wall, which was made up of a battery of display screens. One of the

  screens came to life to show the title sheet of a file, marked

  obliquely with the word RESTRICTED in red. This disappeared to be

  replaced by a contour map of what looked like a rugged and broken

  stretch of terrain. A slowly pulsing point of light appeared in the

  center of the picture and began moving across the map as Caldwell

  rotated a tracker ball set into the panel that held the keyboard.

  The light halted at a point where the contours indicated the

  junction of a steep-sided cleft valley with a wider gorge. The

  cleft valley was narrow and seemed to branch off from the gorge in

  a rising curve.

  "This map shows the area in question," the director resumed. "The

  cursor shows where a minor cleft joins the main fault running down

  toward the left. The survey boys left their vehicle at this point

  and proceeded on up to the cleft on foot, looking for a way to the

  top of that large rock mass-the one tagged 'five sixty." As

  Caidwell spoke, the pulsing light moved slowly along between the

  minor sets of contours, tracing out the path taken by the UN team.

  They watched it negotiate the bend above the mouth of the cleft and

  proceed some distance farther. The light approached the side of the

  cleft and touched it at a place where the contours merged into a

  single heavy line. There it stopped.

  "Here the side was a sheer cliff about sixty feet high. That was

  where they came across the first thing that was unusual-a hole in

  the base of the rock wall. The sergeant leading the group described

  it as being like a cave. That strike you as odd?"

  Hunt raised his eyebrows and shrugged. "Caves don't grow on moons,"

  he said simply.

  "Exactly."

  The screen now showed a photo view of the area, apparently taken

  from the spot at which the survey vehicle had been parked. They

  recognized the break in the wall of the gorge where the cleft

  joined it. The cleft was higher up than had been obvious from the

  map and was approached by a ramp of loose rubble. In the background

  they could see a squat tower of rock flattened on top- presumably

  the one marked "560" on the map. Caldwell allowed them some time to

  reconcile the picture with the map before bringing up the second

  frame. It showed a view taken high up, this time looking into the

  mouth of the cleft. A series of shots then followed, progressing up

  to and beyond the bend. "These are stills from a movie record,"

  Caidwell commented. "I won't bother with the whole set." The final

  frame in the sequence showed a hole in the rock about five feet

  across.

  "Holes like this aren't unknown on the Moon," CaIdwell remarked.

  "But they are rare enough to prompt our men into taking a closer

  look. The inside was a bit of a mess. There had been a

  rockfall-maybe several falls; not much room-just a heap of rubble

  and dust . . . at first sight, anyway." A new picture on the screen

  confirmed this statement. "But when they got to probing

  around a bit more, they came across something that was really

  unusual. Underneath they found a body-dead!"

  The picture changed again to show another view of the interior,

  taken from the same angie as the previous one. This time, however,

  the subject was the top half of a human figure lying amid the

  rubble and debris, apparently at the stage of being half uncovered.

  It was clad in a spacesuit which, under the layer of gray-white

  dust, appeared to be bright red. The helmet seemed intact, but it

  was impossible to make out any details of the face behind the visor

  because of the reflected camera light. Caldwell allowed them plenty

  of time to study the picture and reflect on these facts before

  speaking again.

  "That is the body. I'll answer some of the more obvious questions

  before you ask. First-no, we don't know who he is-or was- so we

  call him Charlie. Second-no, we don't know for sure what killed

  him. Third-no, we don't know where he came from." The executive

  director caught the puzzled look on Hunt's face and raised his

  eyebrows inquiringly.

  "Accidents can happen, and it's not always easy to say what caused

  them-I'll buy that," Hunt said. "But to not know who he
is. . . ? I

  mean, he must have carried some kind of ID card; I'd have thought

  he'd have to. And even if he didn't, he must be from one of the UN

  bases up there. Someone must have noticed he was missing."

  For the first time the flicker of a smile brushed across Caldwell's

  face.

  "Of course we checked with all the bases, Dr. Hunt. Results

  negative. But that was just the beginning. You see, when they got

  him back to the labs for a more thorough check, a number of

  peculiarities began to emerge which the experts couldn't explain-

  and, believe me, we've had enough brains in on this. Even after we

  brought him back here, the situation didn't get any better. In

  fact, the more we find out, the worse it gets."

  "'Back here'? You mean. . .

  "Oh, yes. Charlie's been shipped back to Earth. He's over at the

  Westwood Biological Institute right now-a few miles from here.

  We'll go and have a look at him later on today."

  Silence reigned for what seemed like a long time as Hunt and Gray

  digested the rapid succession of new facts. At last Gray offered:

  ~~ayoe someoociy oumpea mm on tor some reasonr~

  "No, Mr. Gray, you can forget anything like that." Caldwell waited

  a few more seconds. "Let me say that from what little we do know so

  far, we can state one or two things with certainty. First, Charlie

  did not come from any of the bases established to date on Luna.

  Furthermore"-Caldwell's voice slowed to an ominous rumble-"he did

  not originate from any nation of the world as we know it today. In

  fact, it is by no means certain that he originated from this planet

  at all!"

  His eyes traveled from Hunt to Gray, then back again, taking in the

  incredulous stares that greeted his words. Absolute silence

  enveloped the room. A suspense almost audible tore at their nerves.

  Caldwell's finger stabbed at the keyboard.

  The face leaped out at them from the screen in grotesque closeup,

  skull-like, the skin shriveled and darkened like ancient parchment,

  and stretched back over the bones to uncover two rows of grinning

  teeth. Nothing remained of the eyes but a pair of empty pits,

  staring sightlessly out through dry, leathery lids.

  Caldwell's voice, now a chilling whisper, hissed through the

  fragile air.

  "You see, gentlemen-Charlie died over fifty thousand years ago!"

  chapter six

  Dr. Victor Hunt stared absently down at the bird's-eye view of the

  outskirts of Houston sliding by below the UNSA jet. The

  mind-numbing impact of Caidwell's revelations had by this time

  abated sufficiently for him to begin putting together in his mind

  something of a picture of what it all meant.

  Of Charlie's age there could be no doubt. All living organisms take

  into their bodies known proportions of the radioactive isotopes of

  carbon and certain other elements. During life, an organism

  maintains a constant ratio of these isotopes to "normal" ones, but

  when it dies and intake ceases, the active isotopes are left to

  decay in a predictable pattern. This mechanism provides, in effect,

  a highly reliable clock, which begins to run at the moment of

  death. Analysis of the decay residues enables a reliable figure to

  be calculated for how long the clock has been running. Many such

  tests had been performed on Charlie, and all the results agreed

  within close limits.

  Somebody had pointed out that the validity of this method rested on

  the assumptions that the composition of whatever Charlie ate, and

  the constituents of whatever atmosphere he breathed, were the same

  as for modern man on modern Earth. Since Charlie might not be from

  Earth, this assumption could not be made. It hadn't taken long,

  however, for this point to be settled conclusively. Although the

  functions of most of the devices contained in Charlie's backpack

  were still to be established, one assembly had been identified as

  an ingeniously constructed miniature nuclear power plant. The U235

  fuel pellets were easily located and analysis of their decay

  products yielded a second, independent answer, although a less

  accurate one: The power unit in Charlie's backpack had been made

  some fifty thousand years previously. The further implication of

  this was that since the first set of test results was thus

  substantiated, it seemed to follow that in terms of air and food

  supply, there could have been little abnormal about Charlie's

  native environment.

  Now, Charlie's kind, Hunt told himself, must have evolved to their

  human form somewhere. That this "somewhere" was either Earth or not

  Earth was fairly obvious, the rules of basic logic admitting no

  other possibility. He traced back over what he could recall of the

  conventional account of the evolution of terrestrial life forms and

  wondered if, despite the generations of painstaking effort and

  research that had been devoted to the subject, there might after

  all be more to the story than had up until then been so confidently

  supposed. Several thousands of millions of years was a long time by

  anybody's standards; was it so totally inconceivable that somewhere

  in all those gulfs of uncertainty, there could be enough room to

  lose an advanced line of human descent which had flourished and

  died out long before modem man began his own ascent?

  On the other hand, the fact that Charlie was found on the Moon

  presupposed a civilization sufficiently advanced technically to

  send him there. Surely, on the way toward developing space flight,

  they would have evolved a worldwide technological society, and in

  doing so would have made machines, erected structures, built

  cities, used metals, and left all the other hallmarks of progress.

  If such a civilization had once existed on Earth, surely centuries

  of exploration and excavation couldn't have avoided stumbling on at

  least some traces of it. But not one instance of any such discovery

  had ever been recorded. Although the conclusion rested squarely on

  negative evidence, Hunt could not, even with his tendency toward

  open-mindedness, accept that an explanation along these lines was

  even remotely probable.

  The only alternative, then, was that Charlie came from somewhere

  else. Clearly this could not be the Moon itself: It was too small

  to have retained an atmosphere anywhere near long enough for life

  to have started at all, let alone reach an advanced level- and of

  course, his spacesuit showed he was just as much an alien there as

  was man.

  That only left some other planet. The problem here lay in Charlie's

  undoubted human form, which Caldwell had stressed although he

  hadn't elected to go into detail. Hunt knew that the process of

  natural evolution was accepted as occurring through selection, over

  a long period, from a purely random series of genetic mutations.

  All the established rules and principles dictated that the

  appearance of two identical end products from two completely

  isolated families of evolution, unfolding independently in

  different corners of the unive
rse, just couldn't happen. Hence, if

  Charlie came from somewhere else, a whole branch of accepted

  scientific theory would come crashing down in ruins. So-Charlie

  couldn't possibly have come from Earth. Neither could he possibly

  have come from anywhere else. Therefore, Charlie couldn't exist.

  But he did.

  Hunt whistled silently to himself as the full implications of the

  thing began to dawn on him. There was enough here to keep the whole

  scientific world arguing for decades.

  Inside the Westwood Biological Institute, Caldwell, Lyn Garland,

  Hunt, and Gray were met by a Professor Christian Danchekker. The

  Englishmen recognized him, since Caldwell had introduced them

  earlier by vi-phone. On their way to the laboratory section of the

  institute, Danchekker briefed them further.

  In view of its age, the body was in an excellent state of

  preservation. This was due to the environment in which it had been

  found

  -a germ-free hard vacuum and an abnormally low temperature

  sustained, even at Lunar noon, by the insulating mass of the

  surrounding rock. These conditions had prevented any onset of

  bacterial decay of the soft tissues. No rupture had been found in

  the spacesuit. So the currently favored theory regarding cause of

  death was that a failure in the life-support system had resulted in

  a sudden fall in temperature. The body had undergone deep freezing

  in a short space of time with a consequent abrupt cessation of

  metabolic processes; ice crystals, formed from body fluids, had

  caused widespread laceration of cell membranes. In the course of

  time most of the lighter substances had sublimed, mainly from the

  outer layers, to leave behind a blackened, shriveled, natural kind

  of mummy. The most seriously affected parts were the eyes, which,

  composed for the most part of fluids, had collapsed completely,

  leaving just a few flaky remnants in their sockets.

  A major problem was the extreme fragility of the remains, which

  made any attempt at detailed examination next to impossible.

  Already the body had undergone some irreparable damage in the

  course of being transported to Earth and in the removal of the

  spacesuit; only the body's being frozen solid during these

  operations had prevented the situation from being even worse. That

  was when somebody had thought of Felix Borlan at IDCC and an in-