"Yes," Calazar replied. "The superbreed became the Lambians. They were totally ruthless. They militarized and formed a totalitarian regime that imposed itself by force on a large portion of the planet before the other nations could muster the strength to resist. Their aim was to gain control of Minerva’s industrial and technical capabilities totally and exclusively to guarantee their own move to Earth, which meant taking over the nations that had been pursuing that goal collectively. Submission would have meant extinction. The other nations had no choice but to unite, arm, and defend their security. They became the Cerians. The course was set irrevocably toward a struggle to the death between the two factions."
Hunt watched more scenes showing the gradual transformation of Minerva into one enormous military and manufacturing machine dedicated to preparations for war. The tragedy of what had happened appalled him. There had been no need for it. More effort had gone into armaments than would have been needed to move the whole Lunarian race to Earth twice over. If the Lambians hadn’t appeared on the scene when they did, the people on Minerva would have done it. After millennia they had gotten to within two hundred years of achieving the goal that would have saved them from extinction and preserved their civilization, and then they had thrown it all away.
VISAR began showing scenes from the war itself. A world quaked under the shocks of miles-high fireballs that vaporized cities; oceans boiled, and forests flared into carpets of sterile ash writhing and twisting in an atmosphere in turmoil. Then blankets of smoke and dust blotted out the surface and turned the planet into a murky ball of black and brown. Spots of red and slowly pulsating yellow appeared, isolated and glowing dimly at first, but becoming brighter and spreading, then merging as continents ruptured and the planet’s interior exploded through and hurled fragments of crust into the void. The asteroids were being born, and what would eventually become Pluto was being carved into a tombstone for a whole race, destined to drift forever far from the Sun. Although Garuth and Shilohin had watched these scenes before, they became very quiet; they alone among all those present had known Minerva as home.
Calazar waited awhile for the mood to lighten, then resumed, "The Ganymeans had long been troubled by their consciences over their genetic interference with the early Lunarian ancestors. Therefore their policy toward Minerva had been one of nonintervention in its affairs. You’ve just seen the result of that. After the calamity a few survivors were left stranded on the Moon with no hope of survival. By that time Thurien had perfected the black-hole technology that made instant communications and transfers of objects possible, so the Ganymeans were aware of events in realtime, and they were in a position to intervene. After witnessing the results of their policy, they could not simply stand aside and allow the survivors to perish. Accordingly, they organized a rescue mission and sent several large vessels to the close vicinity of Luna and Minerva."
It took Hunt a few seconds to see the implications of what Calazar had just said. He stared at the Ganymean in sudden surprise. "Not outside the solar system?" he queried. "I thought you said you didn’t establish large toroids inside planetary systems."
"It was an emergency," Calazar replied. "The Ganymeans decided to forget their rules for once. They didn’t have any time to spare."
Hunt’s eyes opened wider as the implication hit him: that was how Pluto had gotten to where it was! And that was what had broken the gravitational coupling between Minerva and its moon. One simple statement had put half his people at Navcomms out of business.
"So the Lunarian ancestors of the human race never came to Earth with the Moon at all," Karen Heller said. "They were taken there-by the Ganymeans. The Moon only showed up later."
"Yes," Calazar replied simply.
That answered another mystery. All the math models of the process had required a long transit time for the Moon to get from Minerva to the orbit of Earth. A lot of doubt had been expressed that a handful of Lunarian survivors could have lasted for any length of time at all, let alone with the resources necessary to reach Earth. But with Ganymean intervention added into the equation, all that changed. With some Ganymean help that handful would have established a secure settlement for themselves and been able to make a viable start at rebuilding their culture. So why had they plunged back into a barbarism that had taken tens of thousands of years to recover from? The only answer could be the upheavals caused by Luna being captured later. The truth was so ironic, Hunt thought: if they hadn’t been stabbed in the back by their own Moon, they could have been back into space by 45,000 B.C., if not sooner.
"But not all were taken to Earth," Danchekker concluded. "Another group was taken back to Thurien, and have since become the Jevlenese."
"It was so," Calazar confirmed.
"Even after all that had happened," Showm explained, "the Cerians and the Lambians were unmixable. Since the Lambians had been the cause of the trouble, the Ganymeans of that time considered that more good would come out of the Lambians being taken to Thurien and-it was hoped-being integrated into Ganymean ways and society. The Cerians were taken to Earth at their own request. They were offered ongoing aid to rebuild, but they declined. So a surveillance system was set up instead to keep an eye on them-as much for their own protection as anything." Hunt was surprised. If the surveillance system had been in place that long, the Ganymeans would have known about the collapse of the colony which they themselves had helped found. Why had they let it happen?
"So how did the others make out-the Lambians?" Heller asked. "They couldn’t have been running the surveillance that far back. How did they get their hands on it?"
Calazar emitted a heavy sigh. "They caused a lot of problems for the Thuriens of that time, so much so that when Luna came to be captured by Earth and caused widespread catastrophes that demolished the fragile beginnings of the new Cerian society that had started to take root there, it was decided to leave things be. With troubles of their own at home, the Thuriens were not eager to see another human civilization rushing headlong toward advancement, perhaps to repeat the Minervan disaster." He shrugged as if to say that right or wrong, that was the way it had been, then resumed, "But as time went by and further generations of Lambians came and went, the situation seemed to improve. Signs appeared that they could be integrated fully into Ganymean society, so the Ganymean leaders adopted a policy of appeasement in an attempt to accelerate the process. As a result the Jevlenese, as the descendants of the Lambians were called by then, acquired control of the surveillance program."
"A mistake," Showm commented. "They should have been exiled."
"With hindsight, I think I agree," Calazar said. "But that was long before either my time or yours."
"How about telling us something about this system," Hunt suggested. "How does it work?"
Eesyan answered. "Mostly from space. Until about a century ago, it was comparatively simple. Since Earth entered its electronics and space era, the Jevlenese have had to be more careful. Their devices are very small and virtually undetectable. Most of their information comes from intercepting and retransmitting your communications, such as the laser links between Jupiter and Earth. At one time in the early years of your space program they manufactured instrument packages to resemble pieces of your own space debris, but they had to stop when you started clearing things up. That experiment had its uses though; that was where we got the idea of building a perceptron that looked like a Boeing."
"But how could they fake the reports as well as they did?" Hunt asked. "They must have something of their own like VISAR. No Mickey Mouse computer did that."