James P Hogan. Inherit The Stars. Giant Series #1

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

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