The Ganymeans had turned up later, when the shafts driven down into the ice below Pithead had penetrated to the Ganymean spacecraft. Some time before that discovery, exploration of the Lunar surface had yielded traces of yet another technologically advanced civilization that had flourished in the Solar System long before that of Man. This race was given the name “Lunarians,” again to commemorate the place where the first finds had been made, and was known to have reached its peak some fifty thousand years before-during the final cold period of the Pleistocene Ice Age. Charlie, a spacesuited corpse found well-preserved beneath debris and rubble not far from Copernicus, had constituted the first find of all and had provided the clues that marked the starting point from which the story of the Lunarians was eventually reconstructed.
The Lunarians had proved to be fully human in every detail. Once this fact was established, the problem that presented itself was that of explaining where the Lunarians had come from. Either they had originated on Earth itself as a till-then unsuspected civilization that had emerged prior to the existence of modern Man, or they had originated somewhere else. There were no other possibilities open to consideration.
But for a long time both possibilities seemed to be ruled out. If an advanced society had once flourished on Earth, surely centuries of archaeological excavation should have produced abundant evidence of it. On the other hand, to suppose that they had originated elsewhere would require a process of parallel evolution
-a violation of the accepted principles of random mutation and natural selection. The Lunarians therefore, being neither from Earth nor from anywhere else, couldn’t exist. But they did. The unraveling of this seemingly insoluble mystery had brought Hunt and Danchekker together and had occupied them, along with hundreds of experts from just about all the world’s major scientific institutions, for over two years.
“Chris insisted right from the beginning that Charlie, and presumably all the rest of the Lunarians too, could only have descended from the same ancestors as we did.” Hunt spoke through a swirling tobacco haze while Shannon listened intently. “I didn’t want to argue with him on that, but I couldn’t go along with the conclusion that seemed to go with it-that they must, therefore,
have originated on Earth. There would have to be traces of them around, and there weren’t.”
Danchekker smiled ruefully to himself as he sipped his drink. “Yes, indeed,” he said. “As I recall, our meetings in those early days were characterized by what might be described as, ah, somewhat direct and acrimonious exchanges.”
Shannon’s eyes twinkled briefly as he pictured the months of heated argument and dissent that were implied by Danchekker’s careful choice of euphemisms.
“I remember reading about it at the time,” he said, nodding. “But there were so many different reports flying around and so many journalists getting their stories confused, that we never could get a really clear idea of exactly what was going on behind it all. When did you first figure out for sure that the Lunarians came from Minerva?”
“That’s a long story,” Hunt answered. “The whole thing was an unbelievable mess for a long time. The more we found out, the more everything seemed to contradict itself. Let me see now. . .” He paused and rubbed his chin for a second. “People all over were getting snippets of information from all kinds of tests on the Lunarian remains and relics that started to turn up after Charlie. Then too, there was Charlie himself, his spacesuit, backpack and so on, and all the things with them. . . then the other bits and pieces from around Tycho and places. The clues eventually started fitting together and out of it all we gradually built up a surprisingly complete picture of Minerva and managed to work out fairly ac
curately where Minerva must have been.” –
“I was with UNSA at Galveston when you joined Navcomms,” Shannon informed Hunt. “That part of the story received a lot of coverage. Time did a feature on you called ‘The Sherlock Holmes of Houston.’ But tell me something-what you’ve just said doesn’t seem to sort out the problem; if you managed to track them down to Minerva, how did that answer the question of parallel evolution? I’m afraid I still don’t see that.”