James Hogan - Giant's Star

"Oh, er. . . . yes, if you would," Danchekker said.

An image of a communications screen appeared in midair a couple of feet in front of Danchekker’s face, framing the features of the duty controller at McClusky. "Hello, Professor," the controller acknowledged. "What can I do for you?"

"VISAR just told me that Vic has left for somewhere," Danchekker replied. "I wondered what was happening."

"He left a message for you saying he’s gone to Houston for the morning. It doesn’t go into any details, though."

"Is that Chris Danchekker? Let me talk to him." Karen Heller’s voice sounded distantly from somewhere in the background. A few seconds later the controller moved off one side of the screen, and she came into view. "Hello, Professor. Vic got fed up waiting for Lyn to get back from Washington with some news, so he called Houston. Gregg is back there, but Lyn isn’t. Vic’s gone to find out what’s going on. That’s really about all I can tell you."

"Oh, I see," Danchekker said. "How strange."

"There was something else that I wanted to talk to you about," Heller went on. "I’ve been doing a lot of looking into some parts of Lunarian history with Calazar and Showm, and it’s becoming rather interesting. We’ve some questions I’d like your answers to. How soon do you think you’ll be back?"

Danchekker muttered under his breath and looked wistfully around the Ganymean laboratory, then realized that he was getting signals through VISAR that his body was getting hungry again. "Actually I’ll be coming back now," he replied. "Perhaps I could talk to you in the canteen, ten minutes from now, say?"

"I’ll see you there," Heller agreed and disappeared with the image of the screen.

Ten minutes later Danchekker was heartily demolishing a plate of bacon, eggs, sausage, and hash browns at McClusky while Heller talked over a sandwich from the opposite side of the table. Most of the UNSA people were busy refitting one of the other buildings to afford more permanent storage facilities, and apart from some clatterings and bangings from the adjoining kitchen there were no signs of life in their immediate vicinity.

"We’ve been analyzing the rates of development of the Lunarian civilization and Earth’s," she said. "The difference is staggering. They were into steam power and machines in a matter of a few thousand years after starting to use stone tools. We took something like ten times as long. Why do you think that was?"

Danchekker frowned while he finished chewing. "I thought that the factors responsible for the accelerated advancement of the Lunarians were already quite obvious," he replied. "For one thing, they were closer chronologically to the original Ganymean genetic experiments. Therefore they possessed a greater genetic instability, and with it a tendency to a more extreme form of mutation. The sudden emergence of the Lambians is doubtless a case in point."

"I’m not convinced that it explains it," Heller replied slowly. "You’ve said yourself a few times that tens of thousands of years isn’t enough to make a lot of difference. I got VISAR to do some calculations based on human genetic data that ZORAC acquired when the Shapieron was on Earth. The results seem to bear it out. And the pattern was already established long before the Lambians appeared. That was only two hundred years before the war."

Danchekker sniffed as he buttered a piece of toast. Politicians had no business playing at being scientists. "The Lunarians would have found a profusion of remnants of the earlier Ganymean civilization on Minerva," he suggested. "The knowledge gained from sources of that nature gave them a flying start over Earth."

"But the Cerians who came to Earth were from a civilization that was already advanced," Heller pointed out. "So that balances. What else made the difference?"

Danchekker wrinkled his nose up and scowled. Female politicians playing at being scientists were intolerable. "The Lunarian culture developed during the deteriorating environmental conditions of the approaching Ice Age," he said. "That provided additional pressures."

"The Ice Age was here when the Cerians arrived, and it lasted for a long time afterward," Heller reminded him. "So that balances too. So again-what caused the difference?"

Danchekker stabbed his fork into his meal in a show of exasperation. "If you wish to doubt my word as a biologist and an anthropologist, you have of course every right to do so, madam," he said airily. "For my part, I see no justification whatsoever for elaborating any hypothesis beyond the simple minimum required to account for the facts. And what we already know is perfectly adequate for that purpose."

Heller seemed to have been expecting something like that, and didn’t react. "Maybe you’re thinking too much like a biologist," she suggested. "Try looking at it from a sociological angle, and asking the question the other way around."

Danchekker’s expression said that there couldn’t be any other way around. "What do you mean?" he demanded.

"Instead of telling me what speeded the Lunarians up, try asking what slowed Earth down."

Danchekker stared darkly down at his plate for a few seconds, then raised his head and showed his teeth. "The upheavals caused by the Moon’s capture," he pronounced.

Hdller looked at him in open disbelief. "And regressed them to a point that needed tens of thousands of years to recover from? No way! A few centuries at the most, maybe, but not that much. I couldn’t buy it. Neither could Showm. Neither could Calazar."

"I see." Danchekker looked a bit taken aback. He attacked his bacon in silence for a while and then said, "And what alternative explanation, if any, are you offering, might I ask?"

"Something you haven’t mentioned so far," Heller answered. "The Lunarians developed rational, scientific thinking early on, and relied on it totally from the beginnings of their civilization. By contrast Earth went off into thousands of years of believing that magic, mysticism, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy would solve its problems. It only started to change comparatively recently, and even today there’s still a lot of that around. We got VISAR to estimate the effects, and it eclipses all the other factors put together. That’s what caused the difference!"

Danchekker thought about it for a while, then replied a trifle grudgingly, "Very well." He thrust his chin out defensively. "But I fail to see the need for any melodramatic suggestion that it poses a different question. It’s as valid to argue that the early adoption of rational methods accelerated one race as it is to say that its absence retarded the other. What point are you making?"

"I’ve been thinking a lot about it since I talked to Calazar and Showm, and asking what the reason was. Vic says everything has to have a reason, even if it takes some digging to find it. So what would the reason be for a whole planet clinging obstinately to a lot of nonsense and superstitions for thousands of years when even a little bit of observation and common sense should have shown it doesn’t work?"

"I think perhaps you underestimate the complexities of scientific method," Danchekker told her. "It takes centuries-scores of generations to evolve the techniques necessary to distinguish reliably between facts and fallacies, and truth and myth. Certainly it couldn’t happen overnight. What else did you expect?"

"So why didn’t that stop the Lunarians?"

"I have no idea. Have you?"

"That was the question I was leading up to." Heller leaned forward to look at him intently across the table. "What do you think of this for a suggestion: The reason that belief in myths and magic became so deeply rooted in Earth’s cultures and persisted for so long could be that, in the earliest stage of our first civilizations, it did work?"