James P. Hogan - Giants 3 - Giant's Star

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Giant's Star -- James P. Hogan
(Version 1.0 -- 12/08/2001)
Prologue
By the beginning of the fourth decade of the twenty-first century, it seemed that the
human race was finally beginning to learn to live together and that it was on its way to the
stars. Having abandoned the crippling arms race and disbanded the bulk of their strategic forces,
the superpowers were instead pouring their billions into a massive transfer of Western technology
and know-how to the nations of the Third World. With the increased wealth and living standards
that came universally with global industrializalion, and the security and variety that accompanied
more affluent life-styles, population became self-limiting, and hunger, poverty, along with most
of mankind's other traditional age-old scourges, at last looked as if they were on the brink of
being eradicated permanently. While the U.S. -- U.S.S.R. rivalry transformed itself into a war of
wits and diplomacy for economic and political influence among the stabilizing nation-states, Man's
adventure lust found its expression in a revitalized, multinational space program, which burst
outward across the solar system in a new wave of exploration and expansion coordinated under a
specially formed UN Space Arm. Lunar development and exploitation proceeded rapidly, permanent
bases appeared on Mars and in orbit above Venus, and a series of large-scale manned missions
reached the outer planets.
But probably the greatest revolution of the times was the upheaval in science that had
followed some of the discoveries made on the Moon and out at Jupiter in the course of these
explorations. In the space of just a few years, a series of astonishing discoveries had toppled
beliefs unquestioned since the beginnings of science, forced a complete rewriting of the history
of the solar system itself, and culminated in Man's first encounter with an advanced alien
species.
A hitherto unknown planet, christened Minerva by the investigators who unraveled its
story, had once occupied the position between Mars and Jupiter in the solar system as originally
formed,
and had been inhabited by an advanced race of eight-foot-tall aliens who came to be known
as the "Ganymeans" after the first evidence of their existence came to light on Ganymede, largest
of the Jovian moons. The Ganymean civilization, which flourished up until twenty-five million
years before the present, vanished abruptly. Some of Earth's scientists believed that
deteriorating environinental conditions on Minerva might have forced the "Giants" to migrate to
some other star system, but the matter had not been settled conclusively. Much later-some fifty
thousand years prior to the current period in Earth's history-Minerva was destroyed. The bulk of
its mass, thrown outward into an eccentric orbit on the edge of the solar system, became Pluto.
The remainder of the debris was dispersed by Jupiter's tidal effect and formed the Asteroid Belt.
While the pieces of this puzzle were still being fitted together, a starship from the
ancient Ganymean civilization returned. Having undergone a relativistic time dilation that was
compounded by a technical problem in the vessel's spacetime-distorting drive system, the net
result was that an elapsed time of twenty-odd years for the ship corresponded to the passing of
something on the order of a million times that number on Earth. The Shapieron had departed from
Minerva before the onset of whatever had befallen the rest of the Ganymean race, and its occupants
were therefore unable to either confirm or refute the theories of the terrestrial researchers
involved with the subject. The Giants stayed for six months, combining their efforts with those of
Earth's scientists in a search for more clues and mingling harmoniously into Earth's society.
Mankind had found a friend, and the remnants of the Ganymean race had, it was assumed, found a
home.
But it was not to be. Investigations uncovered a hint that the Ganymean civilization had
migrated to a star located near the constellation of Taurus-a star that came to be called the
"Giants' Star"; there was no guarantee, but there was hope. Shortly afterward the Shapieron
departed, leaving behind a sad, but in many ways wiser, world.
Radio observatories on lunar Farside beamed a signal toward the Giants' Star to forewarn
of the Shapieron's coming. Though the signal would take years to cover the distance, it would
still arrive well ahead of the ship. To the astonishment of the scientists who composed the
transmission, a reply purporting to have come
from the Giants' Star and confirming that it was indeed the new home of the Ganymeans was
received only hours after they first began sending. But by that time the Shapieron had already
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left, and news of the message could not be relayed to it because of the spacetime distortion
induced around the craft by its drive, which prevented electromagnetic signals from being received
coherently. There was nothing more that the scientists on Earth could do; the Shapieron had
vanished back into the void from whence it had come, and many more years of uncertainty would pass
before the Ganymeans aboard it would know whether or not their quest was in vain.
The transmitters on lunar Farside continued sending intermittently during the three months
that followed, but no further reply was evoked.
Chapter One
Dr. Victor Hunt finished combing his hair, buttoned on a clean shirt, and paused to
contemplate the somewhat sleepy-eyed but otherwise presentable image staring back at him from the
bathroom mirror. He detected a couple of gray strands here and there among his full head of dark
brown waves, but somebody would have had to be looking for them to notice them. His skin had an
acceptably healthy tone to it; the lines of his cheeks and jaw were solid and firm, and his belt
still rested loosely on his hips to serve its intended purpose of keeping his pants up and not to
keep his waistline in. All in all, he decided, he wasn't doing too badly for thirty-nine. The face
in the mirror frowned suddenly as the ritual reminded him of a typical specimen of middle-age male
wreckage in a TV commercial; all it wanted now was for the mentally defective, bottle-brandishing
wife to appear in the doorway behind to deliver the message on baldness cures, body deodorants,
remedies for bad breath, or whatever. Shuddering at the thought, he tossed the comb into the
medicine cabinet above the sink, closed the door, and ambled through into the apartment's kitchen.
"Are you through in the bathroom, Vie?" Lyn's voice called from the open door of the
bedroom. It sounded bright and cheerful, and should have been illegal at that time in the morning.
"Go ahead." Hunt tapped a code into the kitchen terminal to summon a breakfast menu onto
its screen, studied the display for a few seconds, then entered an order to the robochef for
scrambled eggs, bacon (crisp), toast with marmalade, and coffee, twice. Lyn appeared in the
hallway outside, Hunt's bathrobe hanging loosely on her shoulders and doing little to hide her
long, slim legs and golden-tanned body. She flashed him a smile, then vanished into the bathroom
in a swirl of the red hair that hung halfway down her back.
"It's coming up," Hunt called after her.
"The usual," her voice threw back from the doorway.
"You guessed?"
"The English are creatures of habit."
"Why make life complicated?"
The screen presented a list of grocery items that were getting low, and Hunt okayed the
computer to transmit an order to Albertson's for delivery later that day. The sound of the shower
being turned on greeted him as he emerged from the kitchen and walked through into the living
room, wondering how a world that accepted as normal the nightly spectacle of people discussing
their constipation, hemorrhoids, dandruff, and indigestion in front of an audience of a million
strangers could possibly find something obscene in the sight of pretty girls taking their clothes
off. "There's now't so strange as folk," his grandmother from Yorkshire would have said, he
thought to himself.
It wouldn't have needed a Sherlock Holmes to read the story of the night before from the
scene that confronted him in the living room. The half-fflled coffee cup, empty cigarette pack,
and the remains of a pepperoni pizza surrounded by scientific papers and notes strewn untidily in
front of the desk terminal told of an evening that had begun with the best and purest of
intentions to explore another approach to the Pluto problem. Lyn's shoulder bag on the table by
the door, her coat draped across one end of the couch, the empty Chablis bottle, and the white
cardboard box containing traces of a beef-curry dinner-to-go all added up to an interruption in
the form of an unexpected but not exactly unwelcome arrival. The crumpled cushions and the two
pairs of shoes lying where they had fallen between the couch and the coffee table said the rest.
Oh well, Hunt told himself, it wouldn't make much difference to the rest of the world if the
solution to how Pluto had wound up where it was had to wait an extra twenty-four hours.
He walked over to the desk and interrogated the terminal for any mail that might have come
in overnight. There was a draft of a paper being put together by Mike Barrow's team at Lawrence
Livermore Labs, suggesting that an aspect of Ganymean physics that they had been studying implied
the possibility of achieving fusion at low temperatures. Hunt scanned it briefly and rerouted it
to his office for closer reading there. A couple of bifis and statements of account...file away
and present again at the end of the month. Videorecording from Uncle William in Nigeria; Hunt
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entered a command for a replay and stood back to watch. Beyond
the closed door the shower noises stopped, then Lyn sauntered back into the bedroom.
William and the family had enjoyed having Vie over on vacation recently and had especially
liked hearing his personal account of his experiences at Jupiter and later back on Earth with the
Ganymeans...Cousin Jenny had gotten an admin job at the nuclear steelmaking complex that was just
going into operation outside Lagos...News from the family in London was that all were well, except
for Vie's older brother, George, who had been charged with threatening behavior after an argument
about politics at his local pub...The postgraduate students at Lagos University had been
enthralled by Hunt's lecture about the Shapieron and were sending on a list of questions that they
hoped he'd find time to reply to.
Just as the recording was finishing, Lyn came out of the bedroom wearing her chocolate
blouse and ivory crepe skirt from the night before, then disappeared again into the kitchen.
"Who's that?" she called, to the accompaniment of cupboard doors being opened and closed and
plates being set down on a working surface.
"Uncle Billy."
"The one in Africa that you visited a few weeks ago?"
"Uh huh."
"So how are they doing?"
"He looks~fine. Jenny's got herself fixed up at the new nuplex I told you about, and
brother George is in trouble again."
"Uh-oh. What flow?"
"Doing his pub lawyer act by the sound of it. Somebody didn't agree that the government
ought to guarantee paychecks to anybody on strike."
"What is he-some kind of nut?"
"Runs in the family."
"You said it, not me."
Hunt grinned. "So never say you weren't warned."
"I'll remember that...Food's ready."
Hunt flipped off the terminal and walked into the kitchen. Lyn, perched on a stool at the
breakfast bar that divided the room in two, had already started eating. Hunt sat down opposite
her, drank some coffee, then picked up his fork. "Why the rush?" he asked. "It's still early.
We're not pushed for time."
"I'm not coming straight in. I ought to go home first and change."
"You look okay to me-in fact, not a bad piece of womanry at all."
"Flattery will get you anywhere you like. No...Gregg's got some special visitors coming
down from Washington today. I don't want to look 'groped' and spoil the Navcomms image." She
smiled and mimicked an English accent. "One must maintain standards, you know."
Hunt snorted derisively. "It needs more practice. Who are the visitors?"
"All I know is they're from the State Department. Some hush-hush stuff that Gregg's been
mixed up with lately...lots of calls coming in on secure channels, and couriers showing up with
for-your-eyes-only things in sealed bags. Don't ask me what it's about."
"He hasn't let you in on it?" Hunt sounded surprised.
She shook her head and shrugged. "Maybe it's because I associate with crazy, unreliable
foreigners."
"But you're his personal assistant," Hunt said. "I thought you knew about everything that
happens around Navcomms."
Lyn shrugged again. "Not this time...at least, not so far. I've got a feeling I might find
out today, though. Gregg's been dropping hints."
"Mmm...odd..." Hunt returned his attention to his plate and thought about the situation.
Gregg Caldwell, Executive Director of the Navigation and Communications Division of the UN Space
Arm, was Hunt's immediate chief. Through a combination of circumstances, under Caldwell's
direction Navcomms had played a leading role in piecing together the story of Minerva and the
Ganymeans, and Hunt had been intimately involved in the saga both before and during the Ganymeans'
stay on Earth. Since their departure, Hunt's main task at Navcomms had been to head up a group
that was coordinating the researches being conducted in various places into the volume of
scientific information bequeathed by the aliens to Earth. Although not all the findings and
speculations had been made public, the working atmosphere inside Navcomms was generally pretty
frank and open, so security precautions taken to the extreme that Lyn had described were virtually
unheard of. Something odd was going on, all right.
He leaned against the backrest of the bar chair to light a cigarette, and watched Lyn as
she poured two more coffees. There was something about the way her gray-green eyes never quite
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lost their mischievous twinkle and about the hint of a pout that was always dancing elusively
around her mouth that he found both amusing and exciting -- "cute," he supposed an American would
have said. He thought back over the three months that had elapsed since the Shapieron left, and
tried to pinpoint what had happened to turn somebody who had been just a smart-headed, good-
looking girl at the office into somebody he had breakfast with fairly regularly at one apartment
or the other. But there didn't seem to be any particular where or when; it was just something that
had happened somehow, somewhere along the line. He wasn't complaining.
She glanced up as she set the pot down and saw him looking at her. "See, I'm quite nice to
have around, really. Wouldn't the morning be dull with only the viscreen to stare at." She was at
it again...playfully, but only if he didn't want to take it seriously. One rent made more sense
than two, one set of utility bills was cheaper, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
"I'll pay the bills," Hunt said. He opened his hands appealingly. "You said it yourself
earlier-Englishmen are creatures of habit. Anyhow, I'm maintaining standards."
"You sound like an endangered species," she told him.
"I am-chauvinists. Somebody's got to make a last stand somewhere."
"You don't need me?"
"Of course not. Good Lord, what a thought!" He scowled across the bar while Lyn returned
an impish smile. Maybe the world could wait another forty-eight hours to find out about Pluto.
"What are you up to tonight-anything special?" he asked.
"I got invited to a dinner party over in Hanwell...that marketing guy I told you about and
his wife. They're having a big crowd of people in, and it sounded as if it could be fun. They told
me to bring a friend, but I didn't think you'd be all that interested."
Hunt wrinkled his nose and frowned. "Isn't that the ESP-andpyramid bunch?"
"Right. They're all excited because they've got a superpsychic going there tonight. He
predicted everything about Minerva and
the Ganymeans years ago. It has to be true-Amazing Supernature magazine said so."
Hunt knew she was teasing but couldn't suppress his irritation. "Oh for Christ's sake...I
thought there was supposed to be an educational system in this bloody country! Don't they have any
critical faculties at all?" He drained the last of his coffee and banged the mug down on the bar.
"If he predicted it years ago, why didn't anybody hear about it years ago? Why do we only hear
about it after science has told him what he was supposed to predict? Ask him what the Shapieron
will find when it gets to the Giants' Star and make him write it down. I bet that never gets into
Amazing Supernature magazine."
"That would be taking it too seriously," Lyn said lightly. "I only go there for the
laughs. There's no point in trying to explain Occam's Razor to people who believe that UFOs are
timeships from another century. Besides, apart from all that, they're nice people."
Hunt wondered how this kind of thing could still go on after the Ganymeans, who flew
starships, created life in laboratories, and built self-aware computers, had affirmed repeatedly
that they saw no reason to postulate the existence of any powers existing in the universe beyond
those revealed by science and rational thinking. But people still wasted their lives away with
daydreams.
He was becoming too serious, he decided, and dismissed the matter with a wave of his hand
and a grin. "Come on. We'd better do something about sending you on your way."
Lyn headed for the living room to collect her shoes, bag, and coat, then met him again at
the front door of the apartment. They kissed and squeezed each other. "I'll see you later, then,"
she whispered.
"See you later. Watch out for those crazies."
He waited until she had disappeared into the elevator, then closed the door and spent five
minutes clearing the kitchen and restoring some semblance of decency to the rest of the place.
Finally he put on a jacket, stuffed some items from the desk into his briefcase, and left in an
elevator heading for the roof. Minutes later his airmobile was at two thousand feet and climbing
to merge into an eastbound traffic corridor with the rainbow towers of Houston gleaming in the
sunlight on the skyline ahead.
Chapter Two
Ginny, Hunt's slightly plump, middle-aged meticulous secretary, was already busy when he
sauntered into the reception area of his office, high in the skyscraper of Navcomms Headquarters
in the center of Houston. She had three sons, all in their late teens, and she hurled herself into
her work with a dedication that Hunt sometimes thought might represent a gesture of atonement for
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having inflicted them on society. Women like Ginny always did a good job, he had found. Long-
legged blondes were all very nice, but when it came to getting things done properly and on time,
he'd settle for the older mommas any day.
"Good morning, Dr. Hunt," she greeted him. One thing he had never been able to persuade
her to accept fully was that Englishmen didn't expect, or really want, to be addressed formally
all the time.
"Hi, Ginny. How are you today?"
"Oh, just fine, I guess."
"Any news about the dog?"
"Good n~ws. The vet called last night and said its pelvis isn't fractured after all. A few
weeks of rest and it should be fine."
"That's good. So what's new this morning? Anything panicky?"
"Not really. Professor Speehan from MIT called a few minutes ago and would like you to
call back before lunch. I'm just finishing going through the mail now. There are a couple of
things I think you'll be interested in. The draft paper from Livermore, I guess you've already
seen."
They spent the next half-hour checking the mail and organizing the day's schedule. By that
time the offices that formed Hunt's see-lion of Navcomms were filling up, and he left to update
himself on a couple of the projects in progress.
Duncan Watt, Hunt's deputy, a theoretical physicist who had transferred from UNSA's
Materials and Structures Division a year and a half earlier, was collecting results on the Pluto
problem from a number of research groups around the country. Compari
Sons of the current solar system with records from the Shapieron of how it had looked
twenty-five million years before established beyond doubt that most of what had been Minerva had
ended up as Pluto. Earth had been formed originally without a sateffite, and Luna had orbited as
the single moon of Minerva. When Minerva broke up, its moon fell inward, toward the Sun, and by a
freak chance was captured by Earth, about which it had orbited stably ever since. The problem was
that so far no mathematical model of the dynamics involved had been able to explain how Pluto
could have acquired enough energy to be lifted against solar gravitation to the position it now
occupied. Astronomers and specialists in celestial mechanics from all over the world had tried all
manner of approaches to the problem but without success, which was not all that surprising since
the Ganymeans themselves had been unable to produce a satisfactory solution.
"The only way you can get it to work is by postulating a threebody reaction," Duncan said,
tossing up his hands in exasperation. "Maybe the war had nothing to do with it. Maybe what broke
Minerva up was something else passing through the solar system."
Thirty minutes later and a few doors farther along the corridor, Hunt found Marie, Jeff,
and two of the students on loan from Princeton, excitedly discussing the set of partial-
differential tensor functions being displayed on a large mural graphics screen.
"It's the latest from Mike Barrow's team at Livermore," Marie told him.
"I've already seen it," Hunt said. "Haven't had a chance to go through it yet, though.
Something about cold fusion, isn't it?"
"What it seems to be saying is that the Ganymeans didn't have to generate high thermal
energies to overcome proton-proton repulsion," Jeff chipped in.
"How'd they do it then?" Hunt asked.
"Sneakily. They started off with the particles being neutrons so there wasn't any
repulsion. Then, when the particles were inside the range of the strong force, they increased the
energy gradient at the particle surfaces sufficiently to initiate pair production. The neutrons
absorbed the positrons to become protons, and the electrons were drawn off. So there you've got it-
two protons strongly coupled. Pow! Fusion."
Hunt was impressed, although he had seen too much of Gany
mean physics by that time to be astounded. "And they could control events like that down
at that level?" he asked.
"That's what Mike's people reckon."
Shortly afterward, an argument developed over one of the details, and Hunt left the group
as they were in the process of placing a call to Livermore for clarification.
It seemed as if the information left by the Ganymeans was all starting to bear fruit at
once, causing something new to break out every day. Caidwell's idea of using Hunt's section as an
international clearinghouse for the research into Ganymean sciences was starting to produce
results. When the first clues concerning Minerva and the Ganymeans were coming to light, Caidwell
had set up Hunt's original pilot group to do exactly this kind of thing. The organization had
proved well suited to the task, and now it formed a ready-made group for tackling the latest
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file:///F|/rah/James%20P.%20Hogan/Hogan,%20James%20P%20-%20Giant's%20Sta\r.txtGiant'sStar--JamesP.Hogan(Version1.0--12/08/2001)PrologueBythebeginningofthefourthdecadeofthetwenty-firstcentur\y,itseemedthatthehumanracewasfinallybeginningtolearntolivetogetherandthatitw\asonitswaytothestars.Havingabando...

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