“You can imagine then how, when civilization eventually began to develop, the early Ganymean thinkers looked upon the world that they saw about them. They marveled at the way in which Natare, in its infinite wisdom, had imposed a strict natural order upon all living things: the soil fed the plants and the plants fed the
animals. The Ganymeans accepted this as the natural order of the universe.”
“Like a divinely ordained plan,” somebody near the bar suggested. “Sounds like a religious outlook.”
“You’re right,” Shilohin agreed, turning to face the speaker. “In the early history of our civilization religious notions did prevail widely. Before scientific principles were better understood, our people attributed many of the mysteries that they were unable to explain to the workings of some omnipotent agency . . . not unlike your God. The early teachings held that the natural order of living things was the ultimate expression of this guiding wisdom
I suppose you would say: The will of God.”
“Except in the deep-ocean basins,” Hunt commented.
“Well, that fitted in quite well too,” Shilohin replied. “The early religious thinkers of our race saw that as a punishment. In the seas, way back before history, the law had been defied. As a punishment for that, the lawbreakers had been banished permanently to the deepest and darkest depths of the oceans and never emerged to enjoy sunlight.”
Danchekker leaned toward Hunt and whispered, “Rather like the Fall from Eden. An interesting parallel, don’t you think?”
“Mmm. . . with a T-bone steak in place of an apple,” Hunt murmured.
Shilohin paused to push her glass across the bar and waited for the steward to reffil it. The room remained quiet while the Earthmen digested the things she had been saying. At last she sipped her drink, and then resumed.
“And so, you see, to the Ganymean, Nature was indeed perfect in all its harmony, and beautiful in its perfection. As the sciences were discovered and the Ganymeans learned more about the universe in which they lived, they never doubted that however far among the stars their knowledge might take them and however far they might one day probe toward infinity, Nature and its natural law would everywhere reign supreme. What reason had they even to imagine otherwise? They were unable even to conceive how things could be otherwise.”
She stopped for a moment and swept her eyes slowly around the room, as if trying to weigh up the expressions on the circle of faces.
“You asked me to be frank,” she said, then paused again. “At
last, we realized a dream that we had been nurturing for generations-to go out into space and discover the wonders of other worlds. When at last the Ganymeans, still with their idyllic convictions, came to the jungles and savagery of Earth, the effect on them was shattering. We called it the Nightmare Planet.”
chapter twelve
The Ganymean engineers announced that the ship beneath Pithead would provide the parts needed to repair the drive system of the Shapieron and that the work would take three to four weeks. A shuttle service between Pithead and Main came into being as technicians and scientists of both races cooperated in the venture. The Ganymeans, of course, directed and carried out the technical side of the operation while the Earthmen took care of the transportation, logistics, and domestic arrangements. Parties of UNSA experts were invited aboard the Shapieron to observe the work in progress and to stand in spellbound fascination as some of the mysteries and intricacies of Ganymean science were explained. One eminent authority on nuclear engineering from Jupiter Five declared later that the experience made him feel like “an unapprenticed plumber’s mate being shown around a fusion plant.”
While all this was going on, a team of UNSA specialists at Main worked out a schedule to give ZORAC a crash course on terrestrial computer science and technology. The result of this exercise was the construction of a code-conversion and interface system, most of the details of which were worked out by ZORAC itself, to couple the Ganymean computer directly into the communications network at Main and thus into the computer complex of J5. This gave ZORAC, and through it the Ganymeans as well, direct access to IS’s data banks and opened up a mine of information on many aspects of the ways of life, history, geography and sciences of Earth-for which the aliens had insatiable appetites.