Hogan, James P Giants 1 Inherit the Stars

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whole. The raw mutation that made the Lunarians what they were was
too extreme and resulted in their downfall. Improvement has taken
the form of a dilution, which results in a greater psychological
stability of the race. Thus, we survive where they perished."
Danchekker paused to finish his drink. The statues remained
statues.
"What an incredible race they must have been," he said. "Consider
in particular the handful who were destined to become the
forefathers of mankind. They had endured a holocaust unlike
anything we can even begin to imagine. They had watched their world
and everything that was familiar explode in the skies above their
heads. After this, abandoned in an airless, waterless, lifeless,
radioactive desert, they were slaughtered beneath the billions of
tons of Minervan debris that crashed down from the skies to
complete the ruin of all their hopes and the total destruction of
all they had achieved.
"A few survived to emerge onto the surface after the bombardment.
They knew that they could live only for as long as their supplies
and their machines lasted. There was nowhere they could go, nothing
they could plan for. They did not give in. They did not know how to
give in. They must have existed for months before they realized
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that, by a quirk of fate, a slim chance of survival existed.
"Can you imagine the feelings of that last tiny band of Lunarians
as they stood amid the Lunar desolation, gazing up at the new world
that shone in the sky above their heads, with nothing else alive
around them and, for all they knew, nothing else alive in the
Universe? What did it take to attempt that one-way journey into the
unknown? We can try to imagine, but we will never know. Whatever it
took, they grasped at the straw that was offered and set off on
that journey.
"Even this was only the beginning. When they stepped out of their
ships onto the alien world, they found themselves in the midst of
one of the most ruthless periods of competition and extinction in
the history of the Earth. Nature ruled with an uncompromising hand.
Savage beasts roamed the planet; the climate was in turmoil
following the gravitational upheavals caused by the arrival of the
Moon; possibly they were decimated by unknown diseases. It was an
environment that none of their experience had prepared them for.
Still they refused to yield. They learned the ways of the new
world: They learned to feed by hunting and trapping, to fight with
spear and club; they learned how to shelter from the elements, to
read and interpret the language of the wild. And as they became
proficient in these new arts they grew stronger and ventured
farther afield. The spark that they had brought with them and which
had carried them through on the very edge of extinction began to
glow bright once again. Finally that glow erupted into the flame
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that had swept all before it on Minerva; they emerged as an
adversary more fearsome and more formidable than anything the Earth
had ever known. The Neanderthals never stood a chance-they were
doomed the moment the first Lunarian foot made contact with the
soil of Earth.
"The outcome you see all around you today. We stand undisputed
masters of the Solar System and poised on the edge of interstellar
space itself, just as they did fifty thousand years ago."
Danchekker placed his glass carefully on the table and moved slowly
toward the center of the room. His sober gaze shifted from eye to
eye. He concluded: "And so, gentlemen, we inherit the stars.
"Let us go out, then, and claim our inheritance. We belong to a
tradition in which the concept of defeat has no meaning. Today the
stars and tomorrow the galaxies. No force exists in the Universe
that can stop us."
epilogue
Professor Hans Jacob Zeiblemann, of the Department of Paleontology
of the University of Geneva, finished his entry for the day in his
diary, closed the book with a grunt, and returned it to its place
in the tin box underneath his bed. He hoisted his twohundred-pound
bulk to its feet and, drawing his pipe from the breast pocket of
his bush shirt, moved a pace across the tent to knock out the ash
on the metal pole by the~ door. As he stood packing a new fill of
tobacco into the bowl, he gazed out over the arid landscape of
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northern Sudan. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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