fuel pellets were easily located and analysis of their decay
products yielded a second, independent answer, although a less
accurate one: The power unit in Charlie’s backpack had been made
some fifty thousand years previously. The further implication of
this was that since the first set of test results was thus
substantiated, it seemed to follow that in terms of air and food
supply, there could have been little abnormal about Charlie’s
native environment.
Now, Charlie’s kind, Hunt told himself, must have evolved to their
human form somewhere. That this “somewhere” was either Earth or not
Earth was fairly obvious, the rules of basic logic admitting no
other possibility. He traced back over what he could recall of the
conventional account of the evolution of terrestrial life forms and
wondered if, despite the generations of painstaking effort and
research that had been devoted to the subject, there might after
all be more to the story than had up until then been so confidently
supposed. Several thousands of millions of years was a long time by
anybody’s standards; was it so totally inconceivable that somewhere
in all those gulfs of uncertainty, there could be enough room to
lose an advanced line of human descent which had flourished and
died out long before modem man began his own ascent?
On the other hand, the fact that Charlie was found on the Moon
presupposed a civilization sufficiently advanced technically to
send him there. Surely, on the way toward developing space flight,
they would have evolved a worldwide technological society, and in
doing so would have made machines, erected structures, built
cities, used metals, and left all the other hallmarks of progress.
If such a civilization had once existed on Earth, surely centuries
of exploration and excavation couldn’t have avoided stumbling on at
least some traces of it. But not one instance of any such discovery
had ever been recorded. Although the conclusion rested squarely on
negative evidence, Hunt could not, even with his tendency toward
open-mindedness, accept that an explanation along these lines was
even remotely probable.
The only alternative, then, was that Charlie came from somewhere
else. Clearly this could not be the Moon itself: It was too small
to have retained an atmosphere anywhere near long enough for life
to have started at all, let alone reach an advanced level- and of
course, his spacesuit showed he was just as much an alien there as
was man.
That only left some other planet. The problem here lay in Charlie’s
undoubted human form, which Caldwell had stressed although he
hadn’t elected to go into detail. Hunt knew that the process of
natural evolution was accepted as occurring through selection, over
a long period, from a purely random series of genetic mutations.
All the established rules and principles dictated that the
appearance of two identical end products from two completely
isolated families of evolution, unfolding independently in
different corners of the universe, just couldn’t happen. Hence, if
Charlie came from somewhere else, a whole branch of accepted
scientific theory would come crashing down in ruins. So-Charlie
couldn’t possibly have come from Earth. Neither could he possibly
have come from anywhere else. Therefore, Charlie couldn’t exist.
But he did.
Hunt whistled silently to himself as the full implications of the
thing began to dawn on him. There was enough here to keep the whole
scientific world arguing for decades.
Inside the Westwood Biological Institute, Caldwell, Lyn Garland,
Hunt, and Gray were met by a Professor Christian Danchekker. The
Englishmen recognized him, since Caldwell had introduced them
earlier by vi-phone. On their way to the laboratory section of the
institute, Danchekker briefed them further.
In view of its age, the body was in an excellent state of
preservation. This was due to the environment in which it had been
found
-a germ-free hard vacuum and an abnormally low temperature
sustained, even at Lunar noon, by the insulating mass of the
surrounding rock. These conditions had prevented any onset of
bacterial decay of the soft tissues. No rupture had been found in
the spacesuit. So the currently favored theory regarding cause of
death was that a failure in the life-support system had resulted in
a sudden fall in temperature. The body had undergone deep freezing