“Charlie. . .” Hunt sensed that Danchekker was at last hinting at something he had been building up to all along. “Charlie,” Hunt repeated. “You found that same enzyme in him too, didn’t you?”
‘We did, but in a somewhat degenerate form. . as if it were in the last phases of fading away completely. It did fade away of course, since Man no longer possesses it. . . . But the interesting point, as you say, is that Charlie had it and so, presumably, did the rest of the Lunarians.”
“And there was only one place for it to come from. . .”
“Precisely.”
Hunt raised a hand to his brow as the full import of these revelations hit him. He turned slowly to meet Danchekker’s solemn gaze and then slowly, his features knotted into a mask of disbelief that strove to reject the things that reason now stripped bare, sank weakly down onto an arm of the nearest chair. Danchekker said nothing, waiting for Hunt to put the pieces together for himself.
“The population on Minerva included samples of the latest Oligocene primates,” Hunt said after a while. “They were almost certainly as advanced as anything that Earth had produced at the time, and with the greatest potential for advancing further. The Ganymeans had unwittingly removed the inhibition on further brain development. . . .” He looked up and met Danchekker’s imperturbable stare again. “They’d have raced ahead from there. There was nothing to stop them. And with their aggressive streak unleashed as well. . . a whole race of runaway mutants. . . psychological Frankenstein monsters. . . .”
“Which is, of course, where the Lunarians came from,” Danchekker said. His voice was grave. “By rights they shouldn’t have survived. All the theories and models of the Ganymean scientists said that they would inevitably destroy themselves. They almost did. They turned a whole planet into one vast fortress and by the time they had developed technology their lives revolved around unceasing warfare and the ruthless, uncompromising determination to exterminate all other rival states. They were capable of conceiving no other formula to solve their problems. In the end they did indeed destroy themselves and Minerva along with them
at least, they destroyed their civilization, if that is the correct term for it. They should have destroyed themselves totally, but, by a million-to-one chance, it did not quite happen. . . .” Danchekker looked up and left Hunt to fill in the rest.
But Hunt just sat and stared, overwhelmed. After the nuclear holocaust between the opposing forces of the two remaining Lunarian superstates had altered permanently the face of Minerva’s
moon and Minerva had disintegrated, the moon fell inward toward the Sun to be captured by Earth. The tiny band of survivors carried with it had possessed the resources to set off one last, desperate journey-to the surface of the new world that now hung in the sky above their heads. For forty thousand years the descendants of those survivors had merged into the survival struggle of Earth, but eventually they had spread all over the planet and emerged as an adversary as formidable as their ancestors had been on Minerva.
At last, Danchekker resumed quietly. “We have speculated for some time now that the Lunarians, and hence Man, originated from an unprecedented mutation that must have occurred somewhere along the primate line that was isolated on Minerva. Also, we have noted that somewhere along his line of ancestry, Man has somehow abandoned the self-immunization process that other animals have in common. Now we see not only proof that these things were true, but also how they came about. In fact many species went along that same path, but all bar one were destroyed when Minerva was destroyed. Only one-Man in the form of the Lunarians-came back again.” Danchekker paused and took a long breath. “An unprecedented mutation did indeed occur on Minerva, but it was not a natural mutation. Modern Man exhibits fewer of the extremes that drove the Lunarians to their doom, thankfully, but all the same the legacy of our ancestry is written through the pages of our history. Homo sapiens is the end-product of an unsuccessful series of Ganymean genetic experiments!