them, would they?”
Maddson’s assistant looked thoughtful. “How about that periscope
video gadget that was in the helmet?” he suggested. “Maybe there’s
something wrong in the translation. Couldn’t he be talking about
seeing a transmission through that?”
Hunt shook his head. “Can’t see it. I’ve heard of people watching
TV in all sorts of funny places, but never halfway up a bloody
mountain. And another thing: He described it as sitting up above
the ridge. That implies it’s really out there. If it were a view on
video, he’d never have worded it that way. Right, Don?”
Maddson nodded wearily. “Guess so,” he said. “So, where do we go
from here?”
Hunt looked from Maddson to the assistant and back again. He leaned
his elbows on the edge of the table and rubbed his face and
eyeballs with his fingers. Then he sighed and sat back.
“What do we know for sure?” he asked at last. “We know that those
Lunarian spaceships got to our Moon in under two days. We know that
they could accurately aim a weapon, sited on our Moon, at a
Minervan target. We also know that the round trip for
electromagnetic waves was much shorter than it could possibly have
been if we’ve been talking about the right place. Finally, we can’t
prove but we think that Charlie could stand on our Moon and see
quite clearly the surface features of Minerva. Well, what does that
add up to?”
“There’s only one place in the Universe that fits all those
numbers,” Maddson said numbly.
“Exactly-and we’re standing on it! Maybe there was a planet called
Minerva outside Mars, and maybe it had a civilization on it. Maybe
the Ganymeans took a few animals there and maybe they
didn’t. But it doesn’t really matter any more, does it? Because the
only planet Charlie’s ship could possibly have taken off from, and
the only planet they could have aimed that Minihilator at, and the
only planet he could have seen in detail from Luna.-is this one!
“They were from Earth all along!
“Everyone will be jumping off the roof and out of every window in
the building when this gets around Navcomms.”
chapter seventeen
With the first comprehensive translation of the handwritten
notebook, the paradox was complete. Now there were two consistent
and apparently irrefutable bodies of evidence, one proving that the
Lunarians must have evolved on Earth, and the other proving that
they couldn’t have.
All at once the consternation and disputes broke out afresh. Lights
burned through the night at Houston and elsewhere as the same
inevitable chains of reasoning were reeled out again and yet again,
the same arrays of facts scrutinized for new possibilities or
interpretations. But always the answers came out the same. Only the
notion of the Lunarians having been the product of a parallel line
of evolution appeared to have been abandoned permanently; more than
enough theories were in circulation already without anyone having
to invoke this one. The Navcomms fraternity disintegrated into a
myriad of cliques and strays, scurrying about to ally first with
this idea and then with that. As the turmoil subsided, the final
lines of defense fortified themselves around four main camps.
The Pure Earthists accepted without reservation the deductions from
Charlie’s diary, and held that the Lunarian civilization had
developed on Earth, flourished on Earth, and destroyed itself on
Earth and that was that. Thus, all references to Minerva and its
alleged civilization were nonsense; there never had been any
civilization on Minerva apart from that of the Ganymeans, and that
was too far in the remote past to have any bearing on the Lunarian
issue. The world depicted on Charlie’s maps was Earth, not Minerva,
so there had to be a gross error somewhere in the calculations that
put it at 250 million miles from the Sun. That this corresponded to
the orbital radius of the Asteroids was just coincidence; the
Asteroids had always been there, and anything from Iliad that said
they hadn’t was suspect and needed doublechecking.
That left only one question unexplained: Why didn’t Charlie’s
maps look like Earth? To answer this one, the Earthists launched a
series of commando raids against the bastions of accepted