"I must protest!" Garuth exclaimed. "We regard them as close friends. If it hadn’t been for their help, we would never have reached Thurien at all. We cannot simply disregard them. It would be an insult to every Ganymean on the Shapieron. "

Before Calazar could reply, VISAR interrupted with another announcement. "Excuse me again, but Porthik Eesyan is asking to join you. He says it’s urgent."

"Well, we’re not going to resolve this in minutes," Calazar said. "Very well, VISAR. We will receive him."

Eesyan materialized at once. "I’ve just left Hunt and Danchekker at Thurien," he said. The Thuriens took VISAR so much for granted that they never bothered with preliminaries. "I was half expecting it-they’ve found out about the Jevlenese. They’re demanding to talk to us all about them."

Calazar stared at him in astonishment. The others looked equally taken aback. "How?" Calazar asked. "How could they? VISAR has been censoring all references to them from the data-stream beamed to Earth. They couldn’t have witnessed one scene with a single Jevlenese in it."

"They’ve deduced that humans are here," Eesyan replied, modifying his previous statement. "They’ve worked out that the surveillance has to have been run by humans. We’ll have to do something. I don’t think I can stall them much longer-especially Danchekker."

Garuth turned toward Calazar and Showm, at the same time spreading his hands wide. "I hate to say I told you so, but it is as I said-you can’t keep secrets from Terrans. Now you’ve got to talk to them." Calazar looked inquiringly at Showm.

Showm searched her mind for an alternative but couldn’t find one. "Very well," she agreed wearily. "If it must be. Let’s bring them here while we’re together and tell them the facts."

"What about Karen Heller, VISAR?" Calazar asked. "Is she coupled into the system at this moment too?"

"She’s at Thurien examining surveillance reports from earlier years," VISAR replied.

"In that case invite her to join us," Calazar instructed. "Then bring them all here as soon as they’re ready."

"One second." A short pause followed. Then, "She’s just finishing hard-copying some notes through to McClusky. She’ll be here in half a minute." Simultaneously Hunt and Danchekker materialized in the middle of the floor.

"I still say I’ll never get used to this," Garuth muttered to Shilohin.

"We have conducted surveillance of Earth since the beginning of human civilization," Calazar declared. "For most of that time the operation has been entrusted to a race within our society known as the Jevlenese, which until now we have not brought to your attention. As you appear to have deduced for yourselves already, the Jevlenese are fully human in form."

"Homo sapiens are somewhat . . . volatile," Frenua Showm added, as if feeling that some additional explanation was called for. "Humans possess an intense instinct for rivalry. We felt that the issue was potentially sensitive. It could always be revealed tomorrow, but never unsaid again once said today."

"You see," Danchekker pronounced, looking toward Hunt with some evident satisfaction from where he was standing on the far side of Karen Heller. "As I maintained-an independent hominid line descended from ancestral primates taken to Thurien at the time of the migration from Minerva."

"Er. . . . no," Calazar said apologetically.

Danchekker blinked and stared at the alien as if he had just uttered a blasphemy. "I beg your pardon."

"The Jevlenese are far more closely related to Homo sapiens than that. In fact they are descended from the same Lunarian ancestors as yourselves-of fifty thousand years ago." Calazar glanced anxiously at Showm, then looked back at the Terrans to await their reactions. Garuth and Shilohin waited in silence; they knew the whole story already.

Hunt and Danchekker looked at each other, equally confused, and then at the Ganymeans again. The Lunarian survivors had reached Earth from the Moon; how could any of them have got to Thurien? The only possible way was if the Thuriens had taken them there. But where could the Thuriens have taken them from? There couldn’t have been any survivors on Minerva itself. All of a sudden so many questions began boiling inside Hunt’s head that he didn’t know where to begin. Danchekker seemed to be having the same problem.

Eventually Karen Heller said, "Let’s go back to the start of it all and check some of the basics." She was still looking at Calazar and directing her words to him. "We’ve been assuming that the Lunarians evolved on Minerva from terrestrial ancestors that you left behind when you went to Thurien. Is that correct, or have you been leaving out something?"

"No, that is correct," Calazar replied. "And by fifty thousand years ago they had developed to the level of a fairly advanced technological civilization very much as you supposed. Up to that point all was as you reconstructed."

"That’s good to know, anyhow." Heller nodded and sounded relieved. "So why don’t you take the story from there and fill in what happened after that, in the order it happened," she suggested. "That’ll save a lot of questions."

"A good idea," Calazar agreed. He paused to collect his thoughts, then looked from side to side to address all three of them, and went on, "When the Ganymeans migrated to Thurien, they left behind an observation system to monitor developments on Minerva. At that time they did not possess the sophisticated communications that we have today, so the information they received was somewhat sporadic and incomplete. But it was enough to give a reasonably complete account of what took place. Perhaps you would like to see Minerva as captured by the sensors operating at that time." He gave an instruction to VISAR, moved back a few paces, and looked expectantly at the center of the floor. A large image appeared, looking solid and real enough to touch. It was an image of a planet.

Hunt knew every coastal outline and surface feature of Minerva by heart. One of the most memorable discoveries of recent years-in fact the one that had started off the investigations which had culminated in proof of Minerva’s and the Ganymeans’ existence even before the Shapieron appeared-had been that of "Charlie," a spacesuit-clad Lunarian corpse uncovered in the course of excavations on the Moon. From maps found on Charlie, the researchers at Navcomms had been able to reconstruct a six-foot-diameter model of the planet. But the image that Hunt was examining now did not exhibit the enormous ice caps and narrow equatorial belt that Hunt remembered from the model. The two land masses were there, though changed appreciably in outline, but as parts of a more extensive system of continents that stretched north and south to ice caps much smaller-not much larger than those of contemporary Earth. For this was not the Minerva of the Lunarians of fifty thousand years back; it was the Minerva of twenty-five million years before the Lunarians existed. And it was captured live, as it had been; it was no mere model reconstructed from maps. Hunt looked around at Danchekker, but the professor was too spellbound to respond.

For the next ten minutes they watched and listened as Calazar replayed a series of close-ups captured from orbit that showed the imported terrestrial animal species evolving and spreading, extinguishing the native Minervan forms, adapting and radiating at the rate of over two million years per minute, until eventually the first social man-apes emerged from a line that had begun with an artificially modified type of the originally imported primates.

The pattern was very much as had been conjectured for many years on Earth, except that until 2028 it had all been assumed to have taken place on the wrong planet, or at least the fossils discovered from the pre-fifty-thousand-less-a-bit years B.C. period had been attributed to the wrong hominid family. But there was a completely unexpected phase that had never appeared in the story put together by the anthropologists on Earth: early in the man-ape era, the species had returned for a period to a semiaquatic environment, mainly as a consequence of not being equipped physically to deal with predators on land. Thus they had commenced the path that whales and other aquatic mammals had taken, but they reversed it and came out of the water again when their increasing intelligence provided them with other means of protecting themselves, which happened before any significant physical adaptations had developed. This phase accounted for their upright posture, loss of body hair, rudimentary webbing between thumb and index finger, the salt-excreting function of their tear ducts, and several other peculiarities that experts on Earth had been arguing about for years. Danchekker would have spent the rest of the week talking about that alone, but Hunt persuaded him to take it up again with Eesyan at some other time.