Calazar was already nodding. “I would have thought so. Eesyan is really the person we should talk to about that.” He looked across at the view coming from the Command Deck of the S/iapieron. “Isn’t he free yet? What’s happening there?”
Consternation was breaking out among the Ganymeans crowded below the main screen in the image. At the same time a
chorus of shouts erupted from the other image, showing the view from Earth, in which Hunt and the others were bumping into each other in their haste to get back across the room to the terminal that connected them to the Thurien ship at Uttan. Danchekker, Calazar, and the others with them forgot their conversation of a few moments earlier and stared in astonishment. Hunt was almost incoherent with excitement as he got to the screen. “We’ve found them! zoit&c reprocessed the planet. We know where they went. It’s impossible!”
Danchekker blinked at him. “Vie, what are you babbling about? Kindly calm down, and simply say whatever it is that you’re trying to say.”
Hunt recomposed himself with some effort. “The five Jevlenese ships. We know what happened to them.” He paused for a second to get his breath back, then turned his head away to call over the people behind him to the terminal connecting them to the Slurpieron. “zoi~c, pass that shot over to VISAR, would you? Tell VISAR to display it at Uttan.” In the ship where Danchekker was, an image appeared of the final shot of the Jevlenese vessels sent back by the Shapieron’s probe just before the tunnel caved in. “Have you got it?” Hunt asked.
Danchekker nodded. “Yes. What about it?”
“The spot in the upper right-hand corner is a planet,” Hunt said. “We asked zoi~c if there was any way it could reprocess that part of the image and enhance it to give us a better look at it. It did. We know what planet it is.”
“Well?” Danchekker asked, puzzled, after a second or two. “Where is it?”
“A better question would be when?” Hunt told him.
Danchekker frowned and looked around him only to be met by expressions as confused as his own. “Vie, what are you talking about?” he asked.
“VISAR, show them,” Hunt said in reply.
The speck enlarged in an instant to become a full disk occupying the whole frame. It was a world shining brightly against the stars with cloud formations and oceans. The resolution was not good, but there were continental outhnes discernible on its surface. Calazar and Showm froze. A split second later, Danchekker realized why.
What he was looking at was not unfamiliar. Like Hunt, he had
studied every island, isthmus, estuary, and coastline sandwiched between the two enormous ice caps of that planet many times-at Houston, in the course of the Lunarian investigations over two years earlier. He looked away. Calazar and Showm were still staring in silent awe, and now Caidwell too was wide-eyed with disbelief. Danchekker slowly turned his head to follow their gaze once again. It was still there. He hadn’t imagined it.
The planet was Minerva.
chapter forty
Nobody could say for certain exactly how it had come about in those final few seconds as VISAR and the projector at Uttan fought for control of the same speck of spacetime light-years away, and many believed that nobody ever would. But Hunt was forced at last to accept the truth of the claim that Paul Shelling had made at Houston on the day that Karen Heller and Norman Pacey had come to talk to Caidwell: the Ganymean physical equations that described the possibility of point-to-point transfers through space had solutions that admitted transfers through time too. Or both. For somehow the five Jevlenese ships had been hurled across light-years of space and backward through tens of thousands of years of time to emerge in the solar system when Minerva was stifi in existence. In fact, by careful measurement of the positions of background stars, the Ganymean scientists determined to a high degree of accuracy when; it came out to be about two hundred years before the final Lunarian war.
And that, of course, explained where the superbreed of Lambians, who had emerged seemingly overnight with a technology far in advance of anything else anywhere on the planet, had come from. And it explained why a planet that had, by and large, mended its warlike ways and commenced working constructively and cooperatively toward an eventual migration to Earth became divided into the two rival factions that in the end had destroyed each other. The Cerians were native, having evolved from the terrestrial primates transported to Minerva twenty-five million years earlier by the Ganymeans, while the Lambians were from Jevien and fifty thousand years in the future. The Lambians never emerged at all; they arrived.