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