“The Ganymeans believe that Man is slowly but surely recovering from the instability and compulsive violence that destroyed the Lunarians. Let us hope they are right.”
Neither man said anything more for a long time. It was ironic, Hunt thought, that after all the Ganymeans had said, their own kind should turn out to be the prime cause of all the things that had come to pass over the last twenty-five miffion years. And throughout all that time, while primates evolved into sapient beings on Minerva, and the Lunarian civilization came and went, and fifty thousand years of human history were being acted out on Earth, the Shapieron had been out there in the void, preserved by the mysterious workings of the laws that distort time and space.
“An unsuccessful series of Ganymean genetic experiments,”
Hunt echoed Danchekker. “They started the whole thing. They came back to find us flying spaceships and building fusion plants, and they thought our rate of progress was miraculous. And all the time they’d started the whole thing off in their own labs, twenty-five million years ago. . . and given it up as a bad job! It’s funny when you think about it, Chris. It’s damned funny. And now they’ve gone for good. I wonder what they would have said if they’d only known what we know now.”
Danchekker did not reply at once, but stared thoughtfully at the top of his desk for a while, as if weighing whether or not to say what was going through his head. In the end he stretched an arm forward and began toying idly with a pen. When he spoke he did not engage Hunt’s eyes directly but continued to watch the pen tumbling over and over between his fingers.
“You know, Vic, in the last months before they went, the Ganymeans became very interested in all aspects of terrestrial biochemistry, including all our available data on Charlie, Man and the Oligocene animals from Pithead. For a long time they were bubbling over with curiosity and ZORAC couldn’t find enough questions to ask about such matters. And then, about a month ago, they suddenly became very quiet about it all. They haven’t even mentioned it since.”
The professor looked up and confronted Hunt with a direct and candid stare.
“I think I know why,” he said, very softly. “You see, Vic.
they knew all right. They knew. They knew that they had brought a pathetically deformed creature into a hostile universe and left it to fend for itself against odds that were hopeless, and they returned and saw what that creature had become-a proud and triumphant conqueror that laughs its defiance at anything the universe cares to throw at it. That is why they are gone. They believe that they owe it to Man to leave him free to perfect the world that he has built for himself in whatever way he chooses. They know what we were and they see what we have made of ourselves since. They feel that we have suffered enough interference in the past and have shown ourselves to be the better managers of our own destiny.”
Danchekker tossed the pen aside, gazed up and concluded:
“And somehow, Vic, I don’t think that we will let them down. The worst is over now.”
epilogue
The signal transmitted by the huge radio dish at the observatory on Lunar Farside streaked outward from the fringe of the Solar System and into the vast gulfs of empty space beyond. Its whisper brushed the sensors of a sentinel that had been maintaining an unbroken vigil for a long, long time. The circuits inside the robot understood and responded to the Ganymean code that had been used to assemble the signal.
Other equipment inside the robot transformed the signal into vibrations of forces and fields that obeyed laws of physics unknown to Man, and dispatched it into a realm of existence of which the universe of space and time were mere shadowy projections. In another part of the shadow universe, on a warm, bright planet that orbited a cheerful star, other machines received and interpreted the message.
The builders of the machines were informed and were at once filled with wonder at the things that were reported to them.