“Is that Chris Danchekker? Let me talk to him.” Karen Heller’s voice sounded distantly from somewhere in the background. A few seconds later the controller moved off one side of the screen, and she came into view. “Hello, Professor. Vic got fed up waiting for Lyn to get back from Washington with some news, so he called Houston. Gregg is back there, but Lyn isn’t. Vic’s gone to find out what’s going on. That’s really about all I can tell you.”
“Oh, I see,” Danchekker said. “How strange.”
“There was something else that I wanted to talk to you about,” Heller went on. “I’ve been doing a lot of looking into some parts of Lunarian history with Calazar and Showm, and it’s becoming rather interesting. We’ve some questions I’d like your answers to. How soon do you think you’ll be back?”
Dancheklçer muttered under his breath and looked wistfully around the Ganymean laboratory, then realized that he was getting signals through wsAi~ that his body was getting hungry again. “Actually I’ll be coming back now,” he replied. “Perhaps I could talk to you in the canteen, ten minutes from now, say?”
“I’ll see you there,” Heller agreed and disappeared with the image of the screen.
Ten minutes later Danchekker was heartily demolishing a plate of bacon, eggs, sausage, and hash browns at McClusky while Heller talked over a sandwich from the opposite side of the table. Most of the UNSA people were busy refitting one of the other buildings to afford more permanent storage facilities, and apart from some clatterings and bangings from the adjoining kitchen there were no signs of life in their immediate vicinity.
“We’ve been analyzing the rates of development of the Lu-
narian civilization and Earth’s,” she said. “The difference is staggering. They were into steam power and machines in a matter of a few thousand years after starting to use stone tools. We took something like ten times as long. Why do you think that was?”
Danchekker frowned while he finished chewing. “I thought that the factors responsible for the accelerated advancement of the Lunarians were already quite obvious,” he replied. “For one thing, they were closer chronologically to the original Ganymean genetic experiments. Therefore they possessed a greater genetic instability, and with it a tendency to a more extreme form of mutation. The sudden emergence of the Lambians is doubtless a case in point.”
“I’m not convinced that it explains it,” Heller replied slowly. “You’ve said yourself a few times that tens of thousands of years isn’t enough to make a lot of difference. I got ~JSAR to do some calculations based on human genetic data that zoi~c acquired when the Shapieron was on Earth. The results seem to bear it out. And the pattern was already established long before the Lambians appeared. That was only two hundred years before the war.”
Danchekker sniffed as he buttered a piece of toast. Politicians had no business playing at being scientists. “The Lunarians would have found a profusion of remnants of the earlier Ganymean civilization on Minerva,” he suggested. “The knowledge gained from sources of that nature gave them a flying start over Earth.”
“But the Cerians who came to Earth were from a civilization that was already advanced,” Heller pointed out. “So that balances. What else made the difference?”
Danchekker wrinkled his nose up and scowled. Female politicians playing at being scientists were intolerable. “The Lunarian culture developed during the deteriorating environmental conditions of the approaching Ice Age,” he said. “That provided additional pressures.”
“The Ice Age was here when the Cerians arrived, and it lasted for a long time afterward,” Heller reminded him. “So that balances too. So again-what caused the difference?”
Danchekker stabbed his fork into his meal in a show of exasperation. “If you wish to doubt my word as a biologist and an anthropologist, you have of course every right to do so, madam,” he said airily. “For my part, I see no justification whatsoever for elaborating any hypothesis beyond the simple minimum required
to account for the facts. And what we already know is perfectly adequate for that purpose.”
Heller seemed to have been expecting something like that, and didn’t react. “Maybe you’re thinking too much like a biologist,” she suggested. “Try looking at it from a sociological angle, and asking the question the other way around.”