The Pure Earthist faction attracted mainly physicists and engineers, quite happy to leave the geologists and geographers to worry about the bothersome details. Their main concern was that the sacred principle of the constancy of the velocity of light should not be thrown into the melting pot of suspicion along with everything else.
By entrenching themselves around the idea of Earth origins, the Pure Earthists had moved into the positions previously defended fanatically by the biologists. Now that Danchekker had led the way by introducing his fleet of Ganymean Noah’s Arks, the biologists abruptly turned about-face and rallied behind their new assertion of Minervan origin from displaced terrestrial ancestors. What about Charlie’s Minerva-Luna flight time and the loop delay around the Annihilator fire-control system? Something was screwed up in the interpretation of Minervan time scales that accounted for both these. Okay, how could Charlie see Minerva from Luna? Video transmissions. Okay, how could they aim the Annihilator over that distance? They couldn’t. The dish at Seltar was only a remote-control tracking station. The weapon itself was mounted in a satellite orbiting Minerva.
The third flag flew over the Cutoff Colony Theory. According to this, an early terrestrial civilization had colonized Minerva, and then declined into a Dark Age during which contact with the colony was lost. The deteriorating conditions of the Ice Age later prompted a recovery on both planets, with the difference that Minerva faced a life-or-death situation and began the struggle to regain the lost knowledge in order that a return to Earth might be made. Earth, however, was going through lean times of its own and, when the advance parties from Minerva eventually made contact, didn’t react favorably to the idea of another planetful of mouths to feed. Diplomacy having failed, the Minervans set up an invasion beachhead on Luna. The Annihilator at Seltar had thus been firing at targets on Earth; the translators had been misled by identical place-names on both planets-like Boston, New York, Cambridge, and a hundred other places in the USA, many of the towns on Minerva had been named after places on Earth when the original colony was first established.
The defenders of these arguments drew heavily from the claims of the Pure Earthists to account for the absence of Lunarian relics on Earth. In addition, they produced further support from the unlikely domain of the study of fossil corals in the Pacific. It had been known for a long time that analysis of the daily growth rings of ancient fossil corals provided a measure of how many days there had been in the year at various times in the past, and from this how fast the forces of tidal friction were slowing down the rotation of the Earth about its axis. These researches showed, for example, that the year of 350 million years ago contained about four hundred days. Ten years previously, work conducted at the Darwin Institute of Oceanography in Australia, using more refined and more accurate techniques, had revealed that the continuity from ancient to modem had not been as smooth as supposed. There was a confused period in the recent past-at about fifty thousand years before-during which the curve was discontinuous, and a comparatively abrupt lengthening in the day had occurred. Furthermore, the rate of deceleration was measurably greater after this discontinuity than it had been before. Nobody knew why this should have happened, but it seemed to indicate a period of violent climatic upheaval, as the corals had taken generations to settle down to a stable growth pattern afterward. The data seemed to indicate that widespread changes had taken place on Earth around this mysterious point in time, probably accompanied by global flooding, and all in all there could be enough behind the story to explain the complete disappearance of any record of the Lunarians’ existence.
The fourth main theory was that of the Returning Exiles, which found these attempts to explain the disappearance of the terrestrial Lunarians artificial and inadequate. The basic tenet of this theory was that there could be only one satisfactory reason for the fact that there were no signs of Lunarians on Earth: There had never been any Lunarians on Earth worth talking about. Thus, they had evolved on Minerva as Danchekker maintained and had evolved an advanced civilization, unlike their contemporary brothers on Earth, who remained backward. Eventually, compelled by the Ice Age threat of extinction, the two superpowers of Cerios and Lambia had emerged and begun the race toward the Sun in the way described by Linguistics. Where Linguistics had gone wrong, however, was that by the time of Charlie’s narrative, these events were already historical; the goal was already achieved. The Lambians had drawn ahead by a small margin and had already commenced building settlements on Earth, several of them named after their own towns on Minerva. The Cerians followed hard on their heels and established a fire base on Luna, the objective of course being to knock out the Lambian outposts on Earth before moving in themselves.
This theory did not explain the flight time of Charlie’s ship, but its supporters attributed the difficulty to unknown differences between Minervan and local (Lunar) dating systems. On the other hand, it required only a few pilot Lambian bases to have been set up on Earth by the time of the war; thus, whatever remained of these after the Cerian assault, could credibly have vanished in fifty thousand years.
And as the battle lines were drawn up and the first ranging shots started whistling up and down the corridors of Navcomms, in no-man’s-land sat Hunt. Somehow, he was convinced, everybody was right. He knew the competence of the people around him and had no doubt in their ability to get their figures right. If, after weeks or months of patient effort, one of them pronounced that x was 2, then he was quite prepared to believe that, in all probability, it would turn out to be. Therefore, the paradox had to be an illusion. To try to argue which side was right and which was wrong was missing the whole point. Somewhere in the maze, probably so fundamental that nobody had even thought to question it, there had to be a fallacy-some wrong assumption that seemed so obvious they didn’t even realize they were making it. If they could just get back to fundamentals and identify that single fallacy, the paradox would vanish and everything that was being argued would slide smoothly into a consistent, unified whole.
Chapter Eighteen
"You want me to go to Jupiter?" Hunt repeated slowly, making sure he had heard correctly.
Caldwell stared back over his desk impassively. "The Jupiter Five Mission will depart from Luna in six weeks time," he stated. "Danchekker has gone about as far as he can go with Charlie. What details are left to be found out can be taken care of by his staff at Westwood. He’s got better things he’d like to be doing on Ganymede. There’s a whole collection of alien skeletons there, plus a shipload of zoology from way back that nobody’s ever seen the like of before. It’s got him excited. He wants to get his hands on them. Jupiter Five is going right there, so he’s getting together a biological team to go with it."
Hunt already knew all this. Nevertheless, he went through the motions of digesting the information and checking through it for any point he might have missed. After an appropriate pause he replied: