“Perhaps your original hypothesis deserved more consideration than I was prepared to give it at the time.”
Hunt waited for a few seconds, but nothing further happened. “What hypothesis?” he asked at last.
“That perhaps we are not dealing with Ganymeans at all.” Danchekker’s voice was distant. A short silence fell. Hunt and Heller looked at each other. Heller frowned; Hunt shrugged. Of course they were dealing with Ganymeans. They looked back at Danchekker expectantly. He wheeled around to face them suddenly and brought his hands up to clasp his lapels. “Consider the facts,” he invited. “We are confronted by a pattern of behavior that is totally inconsistent with what we know to be true of the Ganymean nature. That pattern concerns the relationship between two groups of beings. One of these groups we have met and know to be Ganymean. The other group we have not been permitted to meet, and the reasons that have been offered, I have no hesitation in dismissing as pretexts. A logical conclusion to draw, therefore,
would be that the second group is not Ganymean-would it not?” Hunt just stared back at him blankly. The conclusion was so
obvious that there was nothing to be said. They had all been assuming that the “organization” was Ganymean, and the Thuriens had said nothing to change their minds. But the Thunens had never said anything to confirm it either.
“And consider this,” Danchekker went on. “The structural organizations and patterns of neural activity at the symbolic level in human and Ganymean brains are quite dissimilar. I find it impossible to accept that an equipment designed to interact in a close-coupled mode with one form would be capable of functioning at all with the other. In other words, the devices inside that vessel standing out on the apron cannot be standard models designed for use by Ganymeans, which, purely by good fortune, happen to operate effectively with human brains too. Such a situation is impossible. The only way in which those devices could operate as they do is by virtue of having been specifically constructed to couple with the human central nervous system in the first place! Therefore the designers must have been intimately familiar with the most detailed inner workings of that system-far more so than they could have been by any amount of study of contemporary terrestrial medical science through their surveillance activities. Therefore that knowledge could only have been acquired on Thurien itself.”
Hunt looked across at him incredulously. “What are you saying, Chris?” he asked in a strained voice, although it was already plain enough. “That there are humans on Thurien as well as Ganymeans?”
Danchekker nodded emphatically. “Exactly. When we first entered the perceptron, VISAR was able, in a matter of mere seconds, to adjust its parameters to produce normal levels of sensory stimulation and to decode the feedback commands from the motor areas of our nervous systems. But how did it know what stimulation levels were normal for humans? How did it know what patterns of feedback were correct? The only possible explanation is that VISAR already possessed extensive prior experience in operating with human organisms.” He looked from one to the other to invite comment.
“It could be,” Karen Heller breathed, nodding her head slowly as she digested what be had said. “And maybe that explains why
the Ganymeans haven’t exactly been rushing themselves to tell us about it until they’ve got a better feel for how we might react- especially with the accounts they’ve been getting of what we’re like. And it could make sense that if they are human, they got the job of running a surveillance program to keep an eye on Earth.” She thought over what she had said and nodded again to herself, then frowned as something else occurred to her. She looked up at Danchekker. “But how could they have gotten there? Could they be from some independent family of evolution that already existed on Thurien before the Ganymeans got there. . . something like that maybe?”
“Oh, that’s quite impossible,” Danchekker said impatiently. Heller looked mildly taken aback and opened her mouth to object, but Hunt shot her a warning glance and gave a barely perceptible shake of his head. If she got Danchekker into a lecture on evolution, they’d be listening all day. She signaled her acceptance with a slight raising of an eyebrow and let it go at that.