James Hogan - Giant's Star

"Maybe." Danchekker’s voice was noncommittal. He had been noticeably quiet since breakfast.

"It would save Gregg a lot of charges from Transportation Services."

"I suppose so."

"How about wiring up Navcomms HQ and Westwood? Then we’d be able to go straight to Thurien from the office and be back for lunch."

"Mmm. . ."

They turned and began walking back toward the mess hall. Hunt glanced sideways to give the professor a curious look, but Danchekker appeared not to notice and kept walking.

Inside they found Karen Heller hunched over a pile of communications transcripts and notes she had made while at Bruno. She pushed the papers away and sat back in her chair as they entered. Danchekker moved over to a window and stared silently out at the perceptron; Hunt turned a chair around and straddled it to face the room from a corner. "I just don’t know what to make of this," Heller said with a sigh. "There just isn’t any way that some of this information could have been known to anybody here or on the Moon except us-unless they’ve been in contact with Calazar’s ‘organization.’ Could that be possible?"

"I wondered the same thing," Hunt replied. "How about the coded signals? Maybe Moscow wasn’t transmitting to Calazar’s bunch at all."

"No, I’ve checked." Heller gestured toward the papers around her. "Every one that we picked up was sent by Calazar’s aide. They’re all accounted for."

Hunt shook his head and folded his arms on the backrest of the chair. "It’s got me beat too. Let’s wait and see what they find out from Norman when he gets back." A silence descended. Lost in thoughts of his own, Danchekker continued staring out through the window. After a while Hunt said, "You know, it’s funny-sometimes when things become so confusing that you think you’ll never make any kind of sense out of them, it just needs one simple, obvious thing that everybody’s overlooked to make everything come together. Remember a couple of years back when we were trying to figure out where the Lunarians came from. Nothing added up until we realized that the Moon must have moved. Yet looking back, that should have been obvious all along."

"I hope you’re right," Heller said as she collected papers and returned them to their folders. "Something else I don’t understand is all this secrecy. I thought Ganymeans weren’t supposed to be like that. Yet here we are with one group doing one thing, another doing something else, and neither wanting to let the other know anything about it. You know them better than most people. What do you make of it?"

"I don’t know," Hunt confessed. "And who bombed the relay? Calazar’s bunch didn’t, so it must have been the other bunch. If so, they must have found out about it despite all the precautions, but why would they want to bomb it, anyway? It’s definitely a strange way for Ganymeans to be carrying on, all right. . . . or at least, it is for the kind of Ganymeans that existed twenty-five million years ago." He turned his head unconsciously and directed his last words at Danchekker, who still had his back to them. Hunt had not yet been convinced that such a span of time couldn’t have been sufficient to bring about some fundamental change in Ganymean nature, but Danchekker had remained intractable. He thought that Danchekker hadn’t heard, but after a few seconds the professor replied without moving his head.

"Perhaps your original hypothesis deserved more consideration than I was prepared to give it at the time."

Hunt waited for a few seconds, but nothing further happened. "What hypothesis?" he asked at last.

"That perhaps we are not dealing with Ganymeans at all." Danchekker’s voice was distant. A short silence fell. Hunt and Heller looked at each other. Heller frowned; Hunt shrugged. Of course they were dealing with Ganymeans. They looked back at Danchekker expectantly. He wheeled around to face them suddenly and brought his hands up to clasp his lapels. "Consider the facts," he invited. "We are confronted by a pattern of behavior that is totally inconsistent with what we know to be true of the Ganymean nature. That pattern concerns the relationship between two groups of beings. One of these groups we have met and know to be Ganymean. The other group we have not been permitted to meet, and the reasons that have been offered, I have no hesitation in dismissing as pretexts. A logical conclusion to draw, therefore, would be that the second group is not Ganymean-would it not?" Hunt just stared back at him blankly. The conclusion was so obvious that there was nothing to be said. They had all been assuming that the "organization" was Ganymean, and the Thuriens had said nothing to change their minds. But the Thuriens had never said anything to confirm it either.

"And consider this," Danchekker went on. "The structural organizations and patterns of neural activity at the symbolic level in human and Ganymean brains are quite dissimilar. I find it impossible to accept that an equipment designed to interact in a close-coupled mode with one form would be capable of functioning at all with the other. In other words, the devices inside that vessel standing out on the apron cannot be standard models designed for use by Ganymeans, which, purely by good fortune, happen to operate effectively with human brains too. Such a situation is impossible. The only way in which those devices could operate as they do is by virtue of having been specifically constructed to couple with the human central nervous system in the first place! Therefore the designers must have been intimately familiar with the most detailed inner workings of that system-far more so than they could have been by any amount of study of contemporary terrestrial medical science through their surveillance activities. Therefore that knowledge could only have been acquired on Thurien itself."

Hunt looked across at him incredulously. "What are you saying, Chris?" he asked in a strained voice, although it was already plain enough. "That there are humans on Thurien as well as Ganymeans?"

Danchekker nodded emphatically. "Exactly. When we first entered the perceptron, VISAR was able, in a matter of mere seconds, to adjust its parameters to produce normal levels of sensory stimulation and to decode the feedback commands from the motor areas of our nervous systems. But how did it know what stimulation levels were normal for humans? How did it know what patterns of feedback were correct? The only possible explanation is that VISAR already possessed extensive prior experience in operating with human organisms." He looked from one to the other to invite comment.

"It could be," Karen Heller breathed, nodding her head slowly as she digested what he had said. "And maybe that explains why the Ganymeans haven’t exactly been rushing themselves to tell us about it until they’ve got a better feel for how we might react-especially with the accounts they’ve been getting of what we’re like. And it could make sense that if they are human, they got the job of running a surveillance program to keep an eye on Earth." She thought over what she had said and nodded again to herself, then frowned as something else occurred to her. She looked up at Danchekker. "But how could they have gotten there? Could they be from some independent family of evolution that already existed on Thurien before the Ganymeans got there. . . . something like that maybe?"

"Oh, that’s quite impossible," Danchekker said impatiently. Heller looked mildly taken aback and opened her mouth to object, but Hunt shot her a warning glance and gave a barely perceptible shake of his head. If she got Danchekker into a lecture on evolution, they’d be listening all day. She signaled her acceptance with a slight raising of an eyebrow and let it go at that.

"I don’t think we have to search very far for the answer to that question," Danchekker informed them airily, drawing himself upright and tightening his hold on his lapels. "We know that the Ganymeans migrated to Thurien from Minerva approximately twenty-five million years ago. We also know that by then they had acquired numerous species of terrestrial life, including primates as advanced as any of the period. Indeed we discovered some of them ourselves in the craft on Ganymede, which we have every reason to believe was involved in that very migration." He paused for a moment as if doubting that the rest needed spelling out, then continued. "Evidently they took with them some representatives of early prehuman hominids, the descendants of which have since evolved and increased to become a human population enjoying full co-citizenship within the society of Thurien, as is evidenced by the fact that VISAR accommodates both them and Ganymeans equally." Danchekker dropped his hands to clasp them behind his back and thrust his chin out with evident satisfaction. "And that, Dr. Hunt, unless I am very much mistaken, would appear to be the simple and obvious missing factor that you were looking for," he concluded.