“Oh?”
“There’s a funny word that crops up in a number of places that
doesn’t have a direct English equivalent; it means something
between ‘manlike’ and ‘man-related.’ They used it to describe many
animal types.”
“Probably the animals descended from the imported types and related
to themselves,” Danchekker suggested.
“Yes, exactly. But they also used the saute word in a totally
different context-to mean ‘ashore,’ ‘on land’. . . anything to do
with dry land. Now, why should a word become synonymous with two
such different meanings?”
Danchekker stopped eating again and furrowed his brow.
“I really can’t imagine. Is it important?”
“Neither could I, and I think it is. I’ve done a lot of
cross-checking with Linguistics on this, and it all adds up to a
very peculiar thing: ‘Manlike’ and ‘dry-land’ became synonymous on
Minerva because they did in fact mean the same thing. All the land
animals on Minerva were new models. We coined the word terrestoid
to describe them in English.”
“A ii of them? You mean that by Charlie’s time there were none of
the original Minervan species left at all?” Danchekker sounded
amazed.
“That’s what we think-not on land, anyway. There was a full fossil
record of plenty of types all the way up to, and including the
Ganymeans, but nothing after that-just terrestoids.”
“And in the sea?”
“That was different. The old Minervan types continued right
through-hence your fish.”
Danchekker gazed at Hunt with an expression that almost betrayed
open disbelief.
“How extraordinary!” he exclaimed.
The professor’s arm had suddenly become paralyzed and was holding a
fork in midair with half a roast potato impaled on the end. “You
mean that all the native Minervan land life disappeared
-just like that?”
“Well, during a fairly short time, anyway. We’ve been asking for a
long time what happened to the Ganymeans. Now it looks more as if
the question should be phrased in even broader terms:
What happened to the Ganymeans and all their land-dwelling
relatives?”
chapter twenty-one
For weeks the two scientists debated the mystery of the abrupt
disappearance of the native Minervan land dwellers. They ruled out
physical catastrophe on the assumption that anything of that kind
would have destroyed the terrestoid types as well. The same
conclusion applied to climatic cataclysm.
For a while they considered the possibility of an epidemic caused
by microorganisms imported with the immigrant animals, one against
which the native species enjoyed no inherited, in-built immunity.
In the end they dismissed this idea as unlikely on two counts;
first, an epidemic sufficiently virulent in its effects to wipe out
each and every species of what must have numbered millions, was
hard to imagine; second, all information received so far from
Ganymede suggested that the Ganymeans had been considerably farther
ahead in technical knowledge than either the Lunarians or
mankind-surely they could never have made such a blunder.
A variation on this theme supposed that germ warfare had broken
out, escalated, and got out of control. Both the previous
objections carried less weight when viewed in this context; in the
end, this explanation was accepted as possible. That left only one
other possibility: some kind of chemical change in the Minervan
atmosphere to which the native species hadn’t been capable of
adapting but the terrestoids had. But what?
While the pros and cons of these alternatives were still being
evaluated on Jupiter Five, the laser link to Earth brought details
of a new row that had broken out in Navcomms. A faction of Pure
Earthists had produced calculations showing that the Lunarians
could never have survived on Minerva at all, let alone flourished
there; at that distance from the Sun it would simply have been too
cold. They also insisted that water could never have existed on the
surface in a liquid state and held this fact as proof that wherever
the world shown on Charlie’s maps had been, it couldn’t have been
anywhere near the Asteroids.
Against this attack the various camps of Minerva-ists concluded
a hasty alliance and opened counterfire with calculations of their
own, which invoked the greenhouse effect of atmospheric carbon
dioxide to show that a substantially higher temperature could have
been sustained. They demonstrated further that the percentage of