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microscope, were seen to be pages of printed text Constructing a
system of lamps and lenses to project them onto a screen was
straightforward, and in one fell swoop Linguistics be-
came the owners of a miniature Lunarian library. Results followed
in months.
Don Maddson, head of the Linguistics section, rummaged through the
litter of papers and files that swamped the large table standing
along the left-hand wall of his office, selected a loosely clipped
wad of typed notes, and returned to the chair behind his desk.
"There's a set of these on its way up to you," he said to Hunt, who
was sitting in the chair opposite. "I'll leave you to read the
details for yourself later. For now, I'll just sum up the general
picture."
"Fine," Hunt said. "Fire away."
"Well, for a start, we know a bit more about Charlie. One of the
documents found in a pouch on the backpack appears to be something
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like army pay records. It gives an abbreviated history of some of
the things he did and a list of the places he was posted to-that
kind of thing."
"Army? Was he in the army, then?"
Maddson shook his head. "Not exactly. From what we can gather, they
didn't differentiate much between civilian and military personnel
in terms of how their society was structured. It's more like
everybody belonged to different branches of the same big
organization."
"A sort of last word in totalitarianism?"
"Yeah, that's about it. The State ran just about everything; it
dominated every walk of life and imposed a rigid discipline
everywhere. You went where you were sent and did what you were told
to do; in most cases, that meant into industry, agriculture, or the
military forces. Whatever you did, the State was your boss anyway
..-that's what I meant when I said they were all different branches
of the same big organization."
"Okay. Now, about the pay records?"
"Charlie was born on Minerva, we know that. So were his parents.
His father was some kind of machine operator; his mother worked in
industry, too, but we can't make out the exact occupation. The
records also tell us where he went to school, for how long, where
he took his military training-everybody seemed to go through some
kind of military training-and where he learned about electronics.
It tells us all the dates, too."
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"So he was something like an electronics engineer, was he?" Hunt
asked.
"Sort of. More of a maintenance engineer than a design or
development engineer. He seems to have specialized in military
equipment-there's a long list of postings to combat units. The last
one is interesting - ." Maddson selected a sheet and passed it
across to Hunt. "That's a translation of the last page of postings.
The final entry gives the name of a place and, alongside it, a
description which, when translated literally, means 'off-planet.'
That's probably the Lunarian name for whatever part of our Moon he
was sent to."
"Interesting," Hunt agreed. "You've found out quite a lot more
about him."
"Yep, we've got him pretty well taped. If you convert their dates
into our units, he was about thirty-two years old at the date of
his last posting. Anyhow, that's all really incidental; you can
read the details. I was going to run over the picture we're getting
of the kind of world he was born into." Maddson paused to con-suit
his notes again. Then he resumed: "Minerva was a dying world. At
the time we're talking about, the last cold period of the Ice Age
was approaching its peak. I'm told that ice ages are
Solar-System-wide phenomena; Minerva was a lot farther from the Sun
than here, so as you can imagine, things were pretty bleak there."
"You've only got to look at the size of those ice caps," Hunt
commented.
"Yes, exactly. And it was getting worse. The Lunarian scientists
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figured they had less than a hundred years to go before the ice
sheets met and blanketed the whole planet completely. Now, as you'd
expect, they had studied astronomy for centuries-centuries before
Charlie's time, that is-and they'd known for a long time that
things were going to get worse before they got better. So, they'd
reached the conclusion, way back, that the only way out was to
escape to another world. The problem, of course, was that for
generations after they got the idea, nobody knew anything about how [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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