the control building for coffee, during which scientists from
Jupiter Four updated them on Ganymean matters.
The Ganymean ship had almost certainly been destined for a
large-scale, long-range voyage and not for anything like a limited
exploratory expedition. Several hundred Ganymeans had died with
their ship. The quantity and variety of stores, materials,
equipment, and livestock that they had taken with them indicated
that wherever they had been bound, they had meant to stay.
Everything about the ship, especially its instrumentation and
control systems, revealed a very advanced stage of scientific
knowledge. Most of the electronics were still a mystery, and some
of the special-purpose components were unlike anything the UNSA
engineers had ever seen. Ganymean computers were built using a
mass-integration technology in which millions of components were
diffused, layer upon layer, into a single monolithic silicon block.
The heat dissipated inside was removed by electronic cooling
networks interwoven with the functional circuitry. In some
examples, believed to form parts of the navigation system,
component packing densities approached that of the human brain. A
physicist held up a slab of what appeared to be silicon, about the
size of a large dictionary; in terms of raw processing power, he
claimed, it was capable of outperforming all the computers in the
Navcomms Headquarters building put together.
The ship was streamlined and strongly constructed, indicating that
it was designed to fly through atmospheres and to land on a planet
without collapsing under its own weight. Ganymean engineering
appeared to have reached a level where the functions of a Vega and
a deep-space interorbital transporter were combined in one vessel.
The propulsion system was revolutionary. There were no large
exhaust apertures and no obvious reaction points to suggest that
the ship had been kicked forward by any kind of thermodynamic or
photonic external thrust. The main fuel-storages system fed a
succession of convertors and generators designed to deliver
enormous amounts of electrical and magnetic energy. This supplied a
series of two-foot-square superconducting busbars and a maze of
interleaved windings, fabricated from solid copper bars, that
surrounded what appeared to be the main-drive engines. Nobody was
sure precisely how this arrangement resulted in motion of the ship,
although some of the theories were startling.
Could this have been a true starship? Had the Ganymeans left en
masse in an interstellar exodus? Had this particular ship foundered
on its way out of the Solar System, shortly after leaving Minerva?
These questions and a thousand more remained to be answered. One
thing was certain, though: If the discovery of Charlie had given
two years’ work to a significant proportion of Navcomms, there was
enough information here to keep half the scientific world occupied
for decades, if not centuries.
The party spent some hours in the recently erected laboratory dome,
inspecting items brought up from below the ice, including several
Ganymean skeletons and a score of terrestrial animals. To
Danchekker’s disappointment, his particular favorite-the man-ape
anthropoid he had shown to Hunt and Caidwell many months before on
a viewscreen in Houston-was not among them. “Cyril” had been
transferred to the laboratories of the Jupiter Four command ship
for detailed examination. The name, graciously bestowed by the UNSA
biologists, was in honor of the mission’s chief scientist.
After lunch in the base canteen, they walked into the dome that
covered one of the shaftheads. Fifteen minutes later they were
standing deep below the surface of the ice field, gazing in awe at
the ship itself.
It lay, fully uncovered, in the vast white floodlighted cavern, its
underside still supported in its mold of ice. The hull cut a clean
swath through the forest of massive steel jacks and ice pillars
that carried the weight of the roof. Beneath the framework of ramps
and scaffolding that clung to its side, whole sections of the hull
had been removed to reveal the compartments inside. The floor all
around was littered with pieces of machinery lifted out by overhead
cranes. The scene reminded Hunt of the time he and Borlan had
visited Boeing’s huge plant near Seattle where they assembled
the 1017 skyliners-but everything here was on a far vaster scale.
They toured the network of catwalks and ladders that had been