in the past; the Ganymeans had evolved on Minerva and the Lunarians
had evolved on Earth. They came independently from different lines
and that was why they were different. Lunarian pioneers made
contact with the Ganymeans and settled on Minerva-that was how
Charlie had come to be born there. Extreme hostilities broke out
between the two civilizations at some point, resulting in the
extinction of both and the destruction of Minerva. The reasoning
was consistent, plausible, and convincing. Against it, the single
objection-that no evidence of any Lunarian
civilization on Earth had ever been detected-began to look more
lonely and more feeble every day. Deserters left the
can’t-be-of-Earth-origin camp in droves to join Danchekker’s
growing legions. Such was his gain in prestige and credibility that
it seemed perfectly natural for his department to assume
responsibility for conducting the preliminary evaluation of the
data coming in from Jupiter.
Despite his earlier skepticism, Hunt too found the case compelling.
He and a large part of Group L’s staff spent much time searching
every available archive and record from such fields as archeology
and paleontology for any reference that could be a pointer to the
one-time existence of an advanced race on Earth. They even delved
into the realms of ancient mythology and combed various
pseudoscientific writings to see if anything could be extracted
that was capable of substantiation, that suggested the works of
superbeings in the past. But always the results were negative.
While all this was going on, things began to happen in an area
where progress had all but ground to a halt for many months.
Linguistics had run into trouble: The meager contents of the
documents found about Charlie’s person simply had not contained
enough information to make great inroads into deciphering a whole
new, alien language. Of the two small books, one-that containing
the maps and tables and resembling a handy pocket
reference-together with the loose documents, had been translated in
parts and had yielded most of the fundamental data about Minerva
and quite a lot about Charlie. The second book contained a series
of dated entries in handwritten script, but despite repeated
attempts, it had obstinately defied decoding.
This situation changed dramatically some weeks after the opening up
of the underground remains of the devastated Lunarian base on Lunar
Farside. Among the pieces of equipment included in that find had
been a metal drum, containing a series of glass plates, rather like
the magazines of some slide projectors. Closer examination of the
plates revealed them to be simple projection slides, each holding a
closely packed matrix of nilcrodot images which, under a
microscope, were seen to be pages of printed text Constructing a
system of lamps and lenses to project them onto a screen was
straightforward, and in one fell swoop Linguistics be-
came the owners of a miniature Lunarian library. Results followed
in months.
Don Maddson, head of the Linguistics section, rummaged through the
litter of papers and files that swamped the large table standing
along the left-hand wall of his office, selected a loosely clipped
wad of typed notes, and returned to the chair behind his desk.
“There’s a set of these on its way up to you,” he said to Hunt, who
was sitting in the chair opposite. “I’ll leave you to read the
details for yourself later. For now, I’ll just sum up the general
picture.”
“Fine,” Hunt said. “Fire away.”
“Well, for a start, we know a bit more about Charlie. One of the
documents found in a pouch on the backpack appears to be something
like army pay records. It gives an abbreviated history of some of
the things he did and a list of the places he was posted to-that
kind of thing.”
“Army? Was he in the army, then?”
Maddson shook his head. “Not exactly. From what we can gather, they
didn’t differentiate much between civilian and military personnel
in terms of how their society was structured. It’s more like
everybody belonged to different branches of the same big
organization.”
“A sort of last word in totalitarianism?”
“Yeah, that’s about it. The State ran just about everything; it
dominated every walk of life and imposed a rigid discipline
everywhere. You went where you were sent and did what you were told