“Not at all,” Hunt said. “But why don’t we save all that for lunch? Maybe some of the others might like to join us and then I’ll only need to say it all to everybody once; otherwise I might end up getting tired of it, and that wouldn’t do.”
“Great idea,” Maddson agreed. “We’ll reserve the topic for lunch. In the meantime, have a guess what we’re into now?”
“Who?”
“Us. . . the section. . . Linguistics.”
“What?”
Maddson took a deep breath, stared Hunt straight in the eye and proceeded to deliver a string of utterly meaningless syllables in a deep, guttural voice. Then he sat back and beamed proudly, his expression inviting Hunt to accept the implied challenge.
“What the hell was that all about?” Hunt asked, as if doubting his own ears.
“Even you don’t know?”
“Why should I?”
Maddson was evidently enjoying himself. “That, my friend, was Ganymean,” he said.
“Ganymean?”
“Ganymean!”
Hunt stared at him in astonishment. “How in God’s name did you learn that?”
Maddson waited a moment longer to make the most of Hunt’s surprise, then gestured toward the display unit standing on one side of his desk.
“We’ve got ourselves a channel through to ZORAC,” he said. “There’s been a pretty fantastic demand for access into it ever since it was hooked into the Earthnet, just as you’d imagine. But
being UNSA we qualify for high priority. That sure is one hell of a machine.”
Hunt was duly impressed. “So, ZORAC’s been teaching you Ganymean, eh,” he said. “It fits. I should have guessed you wouldn’t let a chance like that slip by.”
“It’s an interesting language,” Maddson commented. “It’s obviously matured over a long period of time and been rationalized extensively-hardly any irregular forms or ambiguities at all. Actually, it’s pretty straightforward to learn structurewise, but the pitch and vocal inflections don’t come naturally to a human. That’s the most difficult part.” He made a throwing-away motion in the air. “It’s only of academic interest I guess. . . but as you say, a chance we couldn’t resist.”
“How about the Lunarian texts from Tycho,” Hunt asked. “Been making progress on the rest of those too?”
“You bet.” Maddson waved toward the piles of papers covering the desk and the table standing against the wall on one side of his office. “We’ve been pretty busy here all around.”
Maddson proceeded to describe some of the details his team of linguists had been able to fill in during Hunt’s absence, concerning the Lunarian culture and the way in which it had been organized on the Minerva of fifty thousand years before. There was a thumbnail sketch of the war-torn history of the Lunarian civilization; some detailed maps of parts of the planet’s surface with accounts of geographic, climatic, agricultural and industrial characteristics; a treatise on~the citizen’s obligations and duties toward the State in the totalitarian fortress-factory that was Minerva; a description of native Minervan life forms as reconstructed from fossil remains and some speculations on the possible causes of their abrupt extinction twenty-five million years before. There were numerous references to the earlier race that had inhabited the planet before the Lunanians themselves had emerged; obviously, a civilization such as that of the Ganymeans could never have passed away without leaving ample traces of itself behind for posterity. The Lunanians had marveled at the ruins of Ganymean cities, examined their awesome machines without growing much the wiser, and reconstructed a fairly comprehensive picture of how their world had once looked. In most of their writings, the Lunanians had referred to the Ganymeans simply as the Giants.
Then, more than an hour after they had begun talking, Madd
son drew out a set of charts from below some other papers and spread them out for Hunt’s inspection. They were views of the heavens at night, showing the stars in groupings that were not immediately recognizable. Captions, which Hunt identified as being written in Lunarian, were scattered across the charts and below each caption, in smaller print, a translation appeared in English.
“These might interest you, Vic,” Maddson said, still bubbling with enthusiasm. “Star charts drawn by Lunanan astronomers fifty thousand years ago. When you’ve looked at them for a little while, you’ll pick out all the familiar constellations. They’re a bit distorted from the ones we see today because the relative displacements have altered a little with time, of course. In fact, we passed these on to some astronomers at Hale who were able to calculate from the distortions exactly how long ago these charts were drawn. It doesn’t come out at too far off fifty thousand years at all.”