Hunt turned this new information over in his mind as he lit a
cigarette and sipped his drink. It tasted like coffee, anyway.
“And that’s the last funny thing?”
“Yep, that’s about the broad outline. No, wait a minute-last funny
thing plus one. How come none of the meteorites in the shower hit
Earth? Plenty of eroded remains of terrestrial meteorite craters
have been identified and dated. All the computer simulations say
that there should be a peak of abnormal activity at around this
time, judging from how big the heap of crud that hit the Moon must
have been. But there aren’t any signs of one, even allowing for the
effects of the atmosphere.”
Hunt and Steinfield spent the rest of that day and all of the next
sifting through figures and research reports that went back many
years. Hunt did not sleep at all during the following night, but
smoked a pack of cigarettes and consumed a gallon of coffee while
he stared at the walls of his hotel room and twisted the new
information into every contortion his mind could devise.
Fifty thousand years ago the Lunarians were on the Moon. Where they
came from didn’t really matter for the time being; that was another
question. At about the same time an intense meteorite storm
obliterated the Farside surface. Did the storm wipe out the
Lunarians on the Moon? Possibly-but that wouldn’t have had any
effect on them back on whatever planet they had come from. If all
the UNSA people on Luna were wiped out, it wouldn’t make any
lasting difference to Earth. So, what happened to the rest of the
Lunarians? Why hadn’t anybody seen them since? Had something else
happened to them that was more widespread than whatever happened on
the Moon? Could the something else have caused the meteorite storm?
Could a second something else have both caused the first and
extinguished the Lunarians in other places? Perhaps there was no
connection? Unlikely.
Then there were the inconsistencies that Steinfield had talked
about. . . . An absurd idea came from nowhere, which Hunt rejected
impatiently. But as the night wore on, it kept coming back again
with growing insistence. Over breakfast he decided that he had to
know the story that lay below those billions of tons of rubble.
There had to be some way of extracting enough information to
reconstruct the characteristics of the surface just before the
bombardment commenced. He put the question to Steinfield later on
that morning, back in the lab.
Steinfield shook his head firmly. ‘We tried for over a year to make
a picture like that. We had twelve programmers working on it. They
got nowhere. It’s too much of a mess down there-all ploughed up.
All you get is garbage.”
“How about a partial picture?” Hunt persisted. Was there any way
that a contour map could be calculated, showing just the
distribution of radiation sources immediately prior to the
bombardment?
“We tried that, too. You do get a degree of statistical clustering,
yes. But there’s no way we could tell where each individual sample
was when it got irradiated. They would have been thrown miles by
the impacts; a lot of them would have been bounced all over the
place by repeat impacts. Nobody ever built a computer that could
unscramble all that entropy. You’re up against the second law of
thermodynamics; if you ever built one, it wouldn’t be a computer at
all-it would be a refrigerator.”
“What about a chemical approach? What techniques are available that
might reveal where the prebombardment craters were? Could their
‘ghosts’ still be detected a thousand feet down below the surface?”
“No way!”
“There has to be some way of reconstructing what the surface used
to look like.”
“Did you ever try reconstructing a cow from a truckload of
hamburger?”
They talked about it for another two days and into the nights at
Steinfield’s home and Hunt’s hotel. Hunt told Steinfield why he
needed the information. Steinfield told Hunt he was crazy. Then one
morning, back at the laboratory, Hunt exclaimed, “The Near-side
exceptions!”
“Huh?”
“The Nearside craters that date from the time of the storm. Some of
them could be right from the beginning of it.”