Danchekker compressed his mouth into a grimace. “Oh, I agree, I
agree. It is surprising-very surprising. But what alternative are
you proposing?” His voice took on a note of sarcasm. “Do you
suggest that man and all the animals came to Earth in some enormous
celestial Noah’s Ark?” He laughed. “If so, the fossil record of a
hundred million years disproves you.”
“Impasse.” The comment came from Professor Schorn, an authority on
comparative anatomy, who had arrived from Stuttgart a few days
before.
“Looks like it,” Caldwell agreed.
Danchekker, however, was not through. “Would Dr. Hunt care to
answer my question?” he challenged. “Precisely what other place of
origin is he suggesting?”
“I’m not suggesting anywhere in particular,” Hunt replied evenly.
“What I am suggesting is that perhaps a more openminded approach
might be appropriate at this stage. After all, we’ve only just
found Charlie. This business will go on for years yet; there’s
bound to be a lot more information surfacing that we don’t have
right now. I think it’s too early to be jumping ahead and
predicting what the answers might be. Better just to keep on
plodding along and using every scrap of data we’ve got to put
together a picture of the place Charlie came from. It might turn
out to be Earth. Then again, it might not.”
Caldwell led him on further. “How would you suggest we go about
that?”
Hunt wondered if this was a direct cue. He decided to risk it. “You
could try taking a closer look at this.” He drew a sheet of paper
out from the folder in front of him and slid it across to the
center of the table. The paper showed a complicated tabular
arrangement of Lunarian numerals.
“What’s that?” asked a voice.
“It’s from one of the pocket books,” Hunt replied. “I think the
book is something not unlike a diary. I also believe that that”-he
pointed at the sheet-“could well be a calendar.” He caught a sly
wink from Lyn Garland and returned it.
“Calendar?”
“How d’you figure that one?”
“It’s all gobbledygook.”
Danchekker stared hard at the paper for a few seconds. “Can you
prove it’s a calendar?” he demanded.
“No, I can’t. But I have analyzed the number pattern and can state
that it’s made up of ascending groups that repeat in sets and
subsets. Also, the alphabetic groups that seem to label the major
sets correspond to the headings of groups of pages further on-
remarkably like the layout of a diary.”
“Hmmph! More likely some form of tabular page index.”
“Could be,” Hunt granted. “But why not wait and see? Once the
language has unraveled a bit more, it should be possible to
cross-check a lot of what’s here with items from other sources.
This is the kind of thing that maybe we ought to be a little more
open-minded about. You say Charlie comes from Earth; I say he
might. You say this is not a calendar; I say it might be. In my
estimation, an attitude like yours is too inflexible to permit an
unbiased appraisal of the problem. You’ve already made up your mind
what you want the answers to be.”
“Hear, hear!” a voice at the end of the table called.
Danchekker colored visibly, but Caldwell spoke before he could
reply.
“You’ve analyzed the numbers-right?”
“Right.”
~uicay, supposing for now its a calendar-wnat more can you tell
us?”
Hunt leaned forward across the table and pointed at the sheet with
his pen.
“First, two assumptions. One: the natural unit of time on any world
is the day-that is, the time it takes the planet to rotate on its
axis. . .”
“Assuming it rotates,” somebody tossed in.
“That was my second assumption. But the only cases we know of where
there’s no rotation-or where the orbital period equals the axial
period, which amounts to the same thing-occur when a small body
orbits close to a far more massive one and is swamped by
gravitational tidal effects, like our Moon. For that to happen to a
body the size of a planet, the planet would have to orbit very
close to its parent star-too close for it to support any life