Part 26 (1/2)
Ducem Palver's blue eyes widened slightly and a faint look of puzzlement came over his cherubic face. ”But I understood that you were working on pre-Imperial civilization.”
Dr. Nikol Buth smiled tolerantly. ”That's right, Mr. Palver. Pre-First-Imperial. We're digging back more than thirty thousand years; we're looking for the origin of the human race.”
Palver's face regained its pleasant impa.s.sivity. ”I see. Hm-m-m.”
”Do you know anything of the Origin Question, Mr. Palver?” Buth asked.
”Some,” admitted Palver. ”I believe there are two schools of thought, aren't there?”
Buth nodded. ”The Merger Theory, and the Radiation Theory. According to the Merger Theory, mankind is the natural product of evolution on all worlds with a water-oxygen chemistry and the propertemperatures and gravitational intensities. But according to the Radiation Theory, mankind evolved on only one planet in the galaxy and spread out from that planet after the invention of the first crude hypers.p.a.ce drive. I might point but that the Merger Theory has been all but abandoned by modern scholars.”
”And yourself?” Palver asked.
”I agree. The Merger Theory is too improbable; it requires too many impossible coincidences. The Radiation Theory is the only probable-one might almost say the only possible-explanation for the existence of Man in the galaxy.”
Palver leaned over and picked up the carrying case which he had placed beside his chair. ”I transdeveloped a copy of your 'Transformations of Symbolic Psychology and Their Application to Human Migration” It was, in fact, this particular work which decided me to come here to Sol III. I'm not much of a mathematician, myself, you understand, but this reminded me so much of the old legends that...well, I was interested.”
Dr. Buth chuckled. ”There have been, I recall, legends of invisibility, too-you know, devices which would render a human being invisible to the human eye so that he could go where he pleased, undetected. If you had heard that I had written a paper on the transparency of gla.s.s, would you be interested?”
”I see the connection, of course,” said Ducem Palver. ”Just how does it apply here?”
”The legend,” Buth said, puffing vigorously on his cigar, ”concerns a mathematical system which can predict the actions of vast ma.s.ses of people-the entire population of the galaxy.
”My work has nothing to do with prediction whatever-unless you want to call it prediction in reverse. I evolved the” system in order to work backwards, into the past; to discover, not what the human race was going to do, but what it had done. You see, there is one fatal flaw in any mathematical prediction system; if people know what they are supposed to do, they will invariably try to do something else, and that can't be taken into account in the system. It becomes a positive feedback which automatically destroys the system, you see.”
Palver nodded wordlessly, waiting for Dr. Buth to continue.
”But that flaw doesn't apply to my work because there can't be any such feedback into the past.
What I have done is trace the human race backwards in time-back more than thirty millennia, through the vast migrations, the movements through the galaxy from one star to another, taking every lead and tracing them all back to their single focal point.”
”'And have you found that focal point?” Palver asked.
”I have. It is here-Sol III. My system shows positively that this is-must be-the birthplace of the human race.”
Ducem Palver looked out the transparent wall at one end of the room. ”I understand that archaeologists have always supposed the Origin Planet to be somewhere here in the Sirius Sector, but I wouldn't have thought such a bleak planet as this would be the one. Still”-he laughed pleasantly-”'perhaps that's why they left.”
Dr. Buth allowed his gaze to follow that of his visitor to the windswept, snow-covered terrain outside. ”It wasn't always like this,” he said. '”For reasons we haven't nailed down exactly as yet, this planet shows a definitely cyclic climate. There appear to be long ice ages, followed by short periods of warmth. Perhaps, in the long run, the cycle itself is cyclic; we're not too sure on that score. At any rate, we're quite sure that it was fairly warm here, thirty to fifty thousand years ago.”
”And before that?” Palver asked.
Buth frowned. ”Before that, another ice age, we think. We've just barely started, of course. There is a great deal of work yet to be done.”
”No doubt. Ah-what have you uncovered, so far?”
Dr. Buth stood up from his chair. ”Would you like to see? I'll show you the lab, if you'd like.”
”Thank you,” said Ducem Palver, rising. ”I'd like very much to see it.”
A well-equipped, operating archaeological laboratory is like no other laboratory in the galaxy. This one was, if the term can be used, more than typical. Huge radio dating machines lined one wall, and chemical a.n.a.lyzers filled another. Between them were other instruments of all sizes and shapes and purposes.
The place was busy; machines hummed with power, and some technicians labored over bits of material while others watched recorders attached to the machines in use.
Dr. Buth led his visitor through the room, explaining the function of each instrument briefly. At the end of the room, he opened a door marked: SPECIMEN CHAMBER and led Ducem Palver inside. He waved a hand. ”Here are our specimens-the artifacts we've dug up.”
The room looked, literally, like a junk bin, except that each bit of junk was carefully tagged and wrapped in a transparent film.
”All these things are artifacts of Man's pre-s.p.a.ce days?” Palver asked.
Buth laughed shortly. ”Hardly, Mr. Palver. This planet was a part of the First Empire, you know.
These things date back only ten or eleven thousand years. They prove nothing. They are all from the upper layers of the planet's strata. They've been duly recorded and identified and will doubtlessly be forgotten.
”No, these are not important; it is only below the D-stratum that we'll find anything of interest.”
”The D-stratum?”
”We call it that. D for Destruction. There is an almost continuous layer over the land of this planet, as far as we've tested it. It was caused, we believe, by atomic bombardment.”
”Atomic bombardment? Allover the planet?” Ducem Palver looked shocked.
”That's right. It looks as though uncontrolled atomic reactions were set off allover the planet at once. Why? We don't know. But we do know that the layer is nearly twenty-five thousand years old, and that it does not antedate s.p.a.ce travel.”
”How so?”
”Obviously,” Buth said dryly, ”if such a thing had happened before mankind discovered the hypers.p.a.ce drive, there would be no human race today. Man would have died right here and would never have been heard of again.”
”Of course, of course. And what have you found below that...uh...D-stratum?”
A frown came over the archaeologist's dark eyes. ”Hardly anything, as yet. Come over here.”
Ducem Palver followed his host across the room to a pair of squat objects that reposed on the floor. They looked like pieces of grayish, pitted rock, crudely dome-shaped, sitting on their flat sides.
From the top of the irregular dome projected a chimney of the same material. They were, Palver estimated, about thirty-six centimeters high, and not quite that big in diameter at their base.
”We haven't worked on these two yet,” Dr. Buth said, ”but they'll probably turn out the same as the one we've already sectioned.”
”What are they?” Palver asked.
Buth shook his head slowly. ”We don't know. We have no idea what their function might have been. They're hollow, you notice-you can see the clay in that chimney, which was deposited there during the millennia it lay in the ground.
”See this f.l.a.n.g.e around the bottom? That's hollow, too. It's a channel that leads to the interior; it's connected with this hole back here.” He pointed to another hole, about the same size as that in the top of the chimney, but located down near the base. It was perhaps seven centimeters in diameter.
”And you haven't any definite idea what they were used for?” Palver said.
Buth spread his hands in a gesture of temporary bafflement. ”Not yet. Ober Sutt, one of my a.s.sistants, thinks it may have been some sort of combustion chamber. He thinks that gases-hydrogen and oxygen, for instance-might have been fed into it, and the heat utilized for something. Or perhaps they were used to synthesize some product at high temperatures-a rather crude method, but it might have been effective for making...oh, ammonia, maybe. I'm not a chemist, and Sutt knows more about that end of it than I do.” ”Why does he think it's a high-temperature reaction chamber? I mean, why high-temperature, specifically?”