reasonable doubt that it was indeed a calendar. As more
clues to Lunarian electrical units were found by Electronics, an
a!ternative approach to obtaining the elusive Luparian unit of time
suggested itself. If Mathematics could untangle the equations of
electrical oscillation, they should be able to manipulate the
quantities involved in such a way as to express the two constants
denoting the dielectric permittivity and magnetic permeability of
free space in Lunarian units. The ratio of these constants would
yield the velocity of light, expressed in Lunarian units of
distance per Lunarian units of time. The units for representing
distance were understood already; therefore, those used for
measuring time would be given automatically.
All this activity in UNSA naturally attracted widespread public
attention. The discovery of a technologically advanced civilization
from fifty thousand years in the past was not something that
happened very often. Some of the headlines flashed around the World
News Grid when the story was released, a few weeks after the
original find, were memorable: MAN ON MOON BEFORE ARMSTRONG; some
were hilarious: EXTINCT CIVILIZATION ON MARS; some were just wrong:
CONTACT MADE WITH ALIEN INTELLIGENCE. But most summed up the
situation fairly well.
In the months that followed, UNSA’s public relations office in
Washington, long geared to conducting steady and predictable
dealings with the news media, reeled under a deluge of demands from
hard-pressed editors and producers all over the globe. Washington
struggled valiantly for a while, but in the end did the human
thing, and delegated the problem to Navcomms’ local PR department
at Houston. The PR director at Houston found a ready-made
clearinghouse of new information in the form of Group L, right on
his doorstep, so still another dimension was added to Hunt’s ever
growing work load. Soon, press conferences, TV documentaries,
ifimed interviews, and reporters became part of his daily routine;
so did the preparation of weekly progress bulletins. Despite the
cold objectivity and meticulous phrasing of these bulletins,
strange things seemed to happen to them between their departure
from the offices of Navcomms and their arrival on the world’s
newspaper pages and wall display screens. Even stranger things
happened in the minds of some people who read them.
One of the British Sunday papers presented just about all of the
Old Testament in terms of the interventions of space beings as seen
through the eyes of simple beholders. The plagues of Egypt were
ecological disruptions deliberately brought about as warnings to
the oppressors; flying saucers guided Moses through the Red Sea
while the waters were diverted by nucleonic force fields; and the
manna from heaven was formed from the hydrocarbon combustion
products of thermonuclear propulsion units. A publisher in Paris
observed the results, got the message, and commissioned a
free-lancer to reexamine the life of Christ as a symbolic account
of the apparent miracle workings of a Lunarian returning to Earth
after a forty-eight-thousand-year meditation in the galactic
wilderness.
“Authentic” reports that the Lunarians were still around abounded.
They had built the pyramids, sunk Atlantis, and dug the Bosporus.
There were genuine eyewitness accounts of Lunarian landings on
Earth in modern times. Somebody had held a conversation with the
pilot of a Lunarian spaceship two years before in the middle of the
Colorado Desert. Every reference ever recorded to supernatural
phenomena, apparitions, visitations, miracles, saints, ghosts,
visions, and witches had a Lunarian connection.
But as the months passed and no dramatic revelations unfolded, the
world began to turn elsewhere for new sensations. Reports of
further findings became confined to the more serious scientific
journals and proceedings of the professional societies. But the
scientists on the project continued their work undisturbed.
Then a UNSA team erecting an optical observatory on the Lunar
Farside detected unusual echoes on ultrasonics from about two
hundred feet below the surface. They sank a shaft and discovered
what appeared to be all that was left of the underground levels of
another Lunarian base, or at any rate, some kind of construction.
It was just a metal-walled box about ten feet high and as broad and
as long as a small house; one end was missing, and about a quarter
of the volume enclosed had filled up with dust and rock debris. In