geological theory and methods of geological datingi Drawing on the
hypothesis that continents had been formed initially from a single
granitic mass that had been shattered under the weight of immense
ice caps and pushed apart by polar material rushing in to ifil the
gaps, they pointed to the size of the ice caps shown on the maps
and stressed how much larger they were than anything previously
supposed to have existed on Earth. Now, if in fact the maps showed
Earth and not Minerva, that meant that the Ice Age on Earth had
been far more severe than previously thought, and its effects on
surface geography correspondingly more violent. Add to this the
effects of the crustal fractures and vulcanism as described in
Charlie’s observations of Earth (not Minerva), and there was,
perhaps, enough in all that to account for the transformation of
Charlie’s Earth into modern Earth. So, why were there no traces to
be found today of the Lunarian civilization? Answer: It was clear
from the maps that most of it had been concentrated on the
equatorial belt. Today that region was completely ocean, dense
jungle, or drifting desert-adequate to explain the rapid erasure of
whatever had been left after the war and the climatic cataclysm.
The Pure Earthist faction attracted mainly physicists and
engineers, quite happy to leave the geologists and geographers to
worry about the bothersome details. Their main concern was that the
sacred principle of the constancy of the velocity of light should
not be thrown into the melting pot of suspicion along with
everything else.
By entrenching themselves around the idea of Earth origins, the
Pure Earthists had moved into the positions previously defended
fanatically by the biologists. Now that Danchekker had led the way
by introducing his fleet of Ganymean Noah’s Arks, the biologists
abruptly turned about-face and rallied behind their new assertion
of Minervan origin from displaced terrestrial ancestors. What about
Charlie’s Minerva-Luna flight time and the loop delay around the
Annihilator fire-control system? Something was screwed up in the
interpretation of Minervan time scales that accounted for both
these. Okay, how could Charlie see Minerva from Luna? Video
transmissions. Okay, how could they aim the Annihilator over that
distance? They couldn’t. The dish at Seltar
was only a remote-control tracking station. The weapon itself was
mounted in a satellite orbiting Minerva.
The third flag flew over the Cutoff Colony Theory. According to
this, an early terrestrial civilization had colonized Minerva, and
then declined into a Dark Age during which contact with the colony
was lost. The deteriorating conditions of the Ice Age later
prompted a recovery on both planets, with the difference that
Minerva faced a life-or-death situation and began the struggle to
regain the lost knowledge in order that a return to Earth might be
made. Earth, however, was going through lean times of its own and,
when the advance parties from Minerva eventually made contact,
didn’t react favorably to the idea of another planetful of mouths
to feed. Diplomacy having failed, the Minervans set up an invasion
beachhead on Luna. The Annihilator at Seltar had thus been firing
at targets on Earth; the translators had been misled by identical
place-names on both planets-like Boston, New York, Cambridge, and a
hundred other places in the USA, many of the towns on Minerva had
been named after places on Earth when the original colony was first
established.
The defenders of these arguments drew heavily from the claims of
the Pure Earthists to account for the absence of Lunarian relics on
Earth. In addition, they produced further support from the unlikely
domain of the study of fossil corals in the Pacific. It had been
known for a long time that analysis of the daily growth rings of
ancient fossil corals provided a measure of how many days there had
been in the year at various times in the past, and from this how
fast the forces of tidal friction were slowing down the rotation of
the Earth about its axis. These researches showed, for example,
that the year of 350 million years ago contained about four hundred
days. Ten years previously, work conducted at the Darwin Institute
of Oceanography in Australia, using more refined and more accurate