“He must have been an insurance salesman,” Hunt murmured after a short silence.
“Who?”
“Murphy. ‘Everything’s going to screw up-sign the application now.’ Who else but an insurance salesman would have thought of saying something like that?”
The buildings ahead grew to take on the smooth, clean lines of the Westwood Biological Institute of UNSA’s Life Sciences Division. The vehicle slowed to a halt and hovered fifty feet above the roof of the Biochemistry building, which with Neurosciences and Physiology formed a trio facing the elongated bulk of Adminis
tration and Central Facilities across a plaza of colorful mosaic paving broken up by lawns and a bevy of fountains playing in the sun. Hunt checked the landing area visually, then cleared the computer to complete the descent sequence. Minutes later he and Lyn were checking in at the reception desk in the building’s top-floor lobby.
“Professor Danchekker isn’t in his office,” the receptionist in-formed them as she consulted her screen. “The route-through code entered against his number is for one of the basement labs. I’ll try there.” She keyed in another code, and after a short delay the characters on the screen vanished in a blur of colors which immediately assembled themselves into the features of a lean, balding man wearing a pair of anachronistic gold-rimmed spectacles perched at the top of a thin, somewhat aquiline nose. His skin gave the impression of having been stretched over his bones as an afterthought, with barely enough left over to cover his defiant, outthrust chin. He didn’t seem too pleased at the interruption.
“Yes?”
“Professor Danchekker, top lobby here. I have two visitors for you.”
“I am extremely busy,” he replied curtly. “Who are they and what do they want?”
Hunt sighed and pivoted the flatscreen display around to face him. “It’s us, Chris-Vic and Lyn. You’re expecting us.”
Danchekker’s expression softened, and his mouth compressed itself into a thin line that twitched briefly upward at the ends. “Oh, of course. I do apologize. Come on down. I’m in the dissecting lab on Level E.”
“Are you working alone?” Hunt asked.
“Yes. We can talk here.”
“We’ll see you in a couple of minutes.”
They walked on through to the elevator bank at the rear of the lobby. “Chris must be working with his animals again,” Lyn remarked as they waited.
“I don’t think he’s come up for air since we got back from Ganymede,” Hunt said. “I’m surprised he hasn’t started looking like some of them.”
Danchekker had been with Hunt on Ganymede when the Shapieron reappeared in the solar system. In fact Danchekker had made the major contribution to piecing together what was proba
bly the most astounding part of the whole story, the more sensitive details of which still had not been cleared for publication to an unsuspecting and psychologically unprepared world.
Not surprisingly, the Ganymeans had made visits to Earth during the period that their civilization had flourished on Minerva- twenty-five million years before. Their scientists had predicted an epoch of deteriorating environmental conditions on Minerva in the form of an increasing concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide, for which they had only a low inherent tolerance, so one of the reasons for their interest in Earth had been to assess it as a possible candidate for migration. But they soon abandoned the idea. The Ganymeans had evolved from ancestors whose biochemistry had precluded the emergence of carnivores, thus inhibiting the development of aggressiveness and ruthlessness together with most of the related traits that had characterized the survival struggle on Earth. The savagery that abounded in the environment of late-Oligocene, early-Miocene Earth made it altogether too inhospitable for the placid Ganymean temperament, and the notion of settling there unthinkable.
These visits to Earth did, however, have one practical outcome in addition to satisfying the Ganymeans’ scientific curiosity. In the course of their studies of the forms of animal life they discovered, they identified a totally new, gene-based mechanism for absorbing C02, which gave terrestrial fauna a far higher and more adaptable inherent tolerance. It suggested an alternative approach to solving the problem on Minerva. The Ganymeans imported large numbers of terrestrial animal species back to their own planet to conduct genetic experiments aimed at transplanting the functional terrestrial coding groups into their own species, thereafter to be inbred automatically into their descendants. Some well-preserved specimens of these early terrestrial animals had been recovered from the wrecked ship on Ganymede, and Danchekker had brought many of them back to Westwood for detailed studies.
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