good thing too.”
“That’s nice to know anyway,” she said, sounding suddenly more at ease. “I was beginning to feel a little worried about it.”
“I don’t think anybody’s very worried about that side of it,” Hunt commented. “Certainly the scientists aren’t. They’re more worried about having the laws of physics collapse around their ears. I don’t think you’ve realized yet what a stir you’ve started. Some of our most basic convictions are going to have to be rethought-right from square one. We thought we had just a few more pages to add to the story; now it looks as if we might have to rewrite the whole book.”
“That’s true I suppose,” she conceded. “But at least you won’t have to go all the way back as far as the Ganymean scientists did.” She noted his look of interest. “Oh yes, believe me, Dr. Hunt, we went through the same process ourselves. The discovery
of relativity and quantum mechanics turned all of our classical ideas upside down just as happened in your own science in the early twentieth century. And then when the things we were talking about earlier began fitting together, we had another major scientific upheaval; all the concepts that had survived the first time and were regarded as absolute turned out to be wrong-all the ingrained beliefs had to be changed.”
She turned to look at him and made a Ganymean gesture of resignation. “Your science would have reached the same point eventually even if we hadn’t arrived, and not all that far in the future either if my judgment is anything to go by. As things are, you’ll dodge the worst since we can show you most of what’s involved anyway. Fifty years from now you’ll be flying ships like this one.”
“I wonder.” Hunt’s voice was far away. It sounded incredible, but then he thought of the history of aviation; how many of the colonial territories of the 1920s would have believed that fifty years later they would be independent states running their own jet fleets? How many Americans would have believed that the same time span would take them from wooden biplanes to Apollo?
“And what happens after that?” he murmured, half to himself. “Will there be more scientific upheavals waiting . . . things that even you people don’t know about yet either?”
“Who knows?” she replied. “I did outline where research had got to when we left Minerva; anything could have happened afterward. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that we know everything, even within our existing framework of knowledge. We’ve had our surprises too, you know-since we came to Ganymede. The Earthmen have taught us some things we didn’t know.”
This was news to Hunt.
“How do you mean?” he asked, naturally intrigued. “What kind of things?”
She sipped her drink slowly to collect her thoughts. “Well, let’s take this question of carnivorism, for example. As you know, it was unknown on Minerva, apart from in certain deep-sea species that only scientists were interested in and most other Ganymeans preferred to forget.”
“Yes, I know that.”
“Well, Ganymean biologists had, of course, studied the workings of evolution and reconstructed the story of how their own race originated. Although layman’s thinking was largely governed
by the concept of some divinely ordained natural order, as I mentioned earlier, many scientists recognized the chance aspect of the scheme that had established itself on our world. Purely from the scientific viewpoint, they could see no reason why things had to be the way they were. So, being scientists, they began to ask what might have happened if things had been different. . . for example, if carnivorous fish had not migrated to niidocean depths, but had remained in coastal waters.”
“You mean if amphibian and land-dwelling carnivores had evolved,” Hunt supplied.
“Exactly. Some scientists maintained that it was just a quirk of fate that led to Minerva being the way it was-nothing to do with any divine laws at all. So they began constructing hypothetical models of ecological systems that included carnivores . . . more as intellectual exercise, I suppose.”
“Mmm . . . interesting. How did they turn out?”
“They were hopelessly wrong,” Shilohin told him. She made a gesture of emphasis. “Most of the models predicted the whole evolutionary system slowing down and degenerating into a stagnant dead end, much as happened in our own oceans. They hadn’t managed to separate out the limitations imposed by an aquatic environment, and attributed the result to the fundamentally destructive nature of the way of life there. You can imagine their surprise when the first Ganymean expedition reached Earth and found just such a land-based ecology in action. They were amazed at how advanced and how specialized the animals had become. . . and the birds! That was something none of them had dreamed of. Now you can see why many of us were stunned by the sight of the animals that you showed us at Pithead. We had heard of such creatures, but none of us had actually seen one.”