a circle of light appeared in the scene, picking out part of the
far wall. The light began moving around inside and the camera
followed. Banks of what appeared to be electronic equipment.
corners of cubicles . – . legs of furniture . . . sections of
bulkhead. . . moved through the circle.
“There’s a lot of loose junk down at that end . . . Move the
light around a bit . – .” Several colored cylinders in a heap,
about
the size of jelly jars . . . something like a braided belt, lying
in a
tangle . . . a small gray box with buttons on one face .
“What was that? Go over a bit, Jerry. . . No, a bit more to the
left.”
Something white. A bar of white.
“Jeez! Look at that! Jerry, will you look at that?”
The skull, grinning up out of the pool of eerie white light,
startled even the watchers out in the tunnel. But it was the size
of the skeleton that stunned them; no man had ever boasted a chest
that compared with those massive hoops of bone. But besides that,
even the most inexpert among the observers could see that whatever
the occupants of this craft had been, they bore no resemblance to
man.
The stream of data taken in by the cameras flashed back to
preprocessors in the low-level control room, and from there via
cable to the surface of Ganymede. After encoding by the computers
in the Site Operations Control building, it was relayed by
microwave repeaters seven hundred miles to Ganymede Main Base,
restored to full strength, and redirected up to the orbiting
command ship. Here, the message was fed into the message exchange
and scheduling processor complex, transformed into high-power laser
modulations, and slotted into the main outgoing signal beam to
Earth. For over an hour the data streaked across the Solar System,
covering 186,000 miles every second, until the sensors of the
long-range relay beacon, standing in Solar orbit not many million
miles outside that of Mars, fished it out of the void, a
microscopic fraction of its original power. Retransmission from
here found the Deep Space Link Station, lodged in Trojan
equilibrium with Earth and Luna, and eventually a synchronous
communications satellite hanging high over the central USA, which
beamed it down to a ground station near San Antonio. A landline
network completed the journey to UNSA Mission Control, Galveston,
where the information was greedily consumed by the computers of
Operational Command Headquarters.
The Jupiter FOur command ship had taken eleven months to reach the
giant planet. Within four hours of the event, the latest
information to be gathered by the mission was safely lodged in the
data banks of UN Space Arm.
chapter fourteen
The discovery of the giant spaceship, frozen under the ice field of
Ganymede, was a sensation but, in a sense, not something totally
unexpected. The scientific world had more or less accepted as fact
that an advanced civilization had once flourished on Minerva;
indeed, if the arguments of the orthodox evolutionists were
accepted, at least two planets-Minerva and Earth-had supported
high-technology civilizations to some extent at about the same
time. It did not come as a complete surprise, therefore, that man’s
persistent nosing around the Solar System should uncover more
evidence of its earlier inhabitants. What did surprise everybody
was the obvious anatomical difference between the Ganymeans-as the
beings on board the ship soon came to be called-and the common form
shared by the Lunarians and mankind.
To the still unresolved question of whether the Lunarians and the
Minervans had been one and the same or not, there was immediately
added the further riddle: Where had the Ganymeans come from, and
had they any connection with either? One bemused UNSA scientist
summed up the situation by declaring that it was about time UNSA
established an Alien Civilizations Division to sort out the whole
damn mess!
The pro-Danchekker faction quickly interpreted the new development
as full vindication of evolutionary theory and of the arguments
they had been promoting all along. Clearly, two planets in the
Solar System had evolved intelligent life at around the same period