And every subsystem of the ship-communications, navigation, computation, propulsion control, flight control, and a hundred others-consisted of a network of interconnected processing nodes like that, with all the networks integrated into an impossible web that covered the length and breadth of the vessel.
Without detailed documentation and technical design information there was no way of tackling the problem. But no documentation was available. All the information was locked away inside the same system that they needed the information to get into; it was like having a can with the can opener inside it.
So, at the next progress meeting aboard the Shapieron, the senior Ganymean computer scientist declared himself ready to quit. When somebody commented that the Earthmen wouldn’t have given up so easily, he thought about it, agreed with the evaluation and went back to Pithead to try again. After – another week he came back again and stated, emphatically and finally, that if anybody thought the Earthmen could do better they’d be welcome to try. He’d quit.
And that, it seemed, was that.
There was nothing further to be achieved on Ganymede. Therefore the aliens at last announced their long-awaited decision to accept the invitation that had been extended to them by the world’s governments, and come to Earth. This did not mean that they had
also accepted the invitation to settle there. Admittedly there was nowhere else within many light-years for them to go, but many of them still harbored misgivings at what might await them on the Nightmare Planet. But they were rational beings and the rational thing to do was obviously to go and see the place before prejudging it. Any decision as to what to do about the longer-term future would wait until they were in possession of more concrete information on which to base it.
A number of UNSA personnel from the Jupiter missions were at the end of their duty tours and already scheduled to return to Earth as the comings and goings of ships permitted. The Ganymeans offered a ride in the Shapieron to anybody planning on going their way and were almost overwhelmed by the rush to accept.
Fortuitously, Hunt’s latest communication from Gregg Caldwell, executive director of UNSA’s Navcomms Division and Hunt’s immediate chief, had indicated that Hunt’s assignment on Ganymede was considered fulfilled and there was other work to be done back at Houston~ Arrangements were being put in hand to ship him back. He had no difficulty in getting his name deleted from the UNSA schedule and added to the list of passengers due to go with the Shapieron.
Danchekker’s main reason for coming to Ganymede had been to investigate the terrestrial Oligocene animals found in the Pithead ship. The professor persuaded Monchar, second in command of the Ganymean expedition, that there was plenty of room in the Shapieron to carry all the specimens of interest; after that he persuaded his director, at the Westwood Biological Institute, Houston, that the investigations would be carried out more thoroughly back on Earth, where all the facilities needed were available for the asking. The outcome was exactly as he had intended: Danchekker was going too.
And so the time came for Hunt to pack his belongings and take one last look around the tiny room that had been home for so long. Then he made the familiar walk along the well-worn corridor that led to the Domestic Dome to join the handful of others who were shipping out. There they stood a last round of drinks for their friends staying on and made their farewells. After promises to keep in touch and assertions that everybody’s paths would cross again one day, they trooped through into the Site Operations Con-
trol building where the base commander and some of his staff were waiting in the airlock anteroom to bid them an official adieu. The access tube beyond the airlock took them through into the cabin of the tracked ice crawler that would carry them across to the landing pads, where a transporter ship was waiting.
Hunt’s feelings were mixed as he gazed out of one of the crawler’s viewing ports at the shadowy snatches of buildings and constructions that came and went among Pithead’s swirling, eternal methane-ammonia mist. Going home after a long time away was always a nice feeling of course, but he would miss many aspects of the life he had grown used to in the tightly knit UNSA community here, where everybody shared in everybody else’s problems and strangers were unknown. The spirit of comradeship that he had found here, the feeling of belonging, the sense of a common purpose. . . all these things gave a special intimacy to this tiny, manmade haven of survival that had been carved out of the hostile Ganymedean wilderness. The feelings he was experiencing so intensely at that moment would soon be diluted and forgotten when he returned to Earth and again rubbed shoulders every day with faceless millions, all busily living out their different lives in their different ways and with their different aims and values. There, custom and synthetic social barriers served to mark out the lines of demarcation that men needed in order to satisfy their psychological need to identify with definable cultural groups. The colony on Ganymede had not needed to build any artificial walls around itself to set it apart from the rest of the human race; Nature and several hundred million miles of empty space provided all the isolation necessary.