After that came the discovery of tools and fire, tribalization, and the sequence of evolving social order that led from primitive hunter-gatherer economies through agriculture and city-building to the discovery of the sciences and the beginnings of industrialization. And there was something about this part of their history too that set them apart from terrestrial humans in Hunt’s eyes: the practical and realistic approach that the Lunarians had adopted to everything they did. They had exploited their resources and talents efficiently, without drifting off into fruitless reliance on superstitions and magic to solve their problems as had so many millennia of Earth people. For the early hunters, better weapons and greater skill decided success, not the whims of imaginary gods who needed to be placated. For the crop growers, better knowledge of plants, the land, and the elements improved yields; rituals and incantations did not, and were soon abandoned. And not very long afterward it was measurement, observation, and the powers of reason that uncovered the laws governing the universe and opened up new horizons for the harnessing of energy and the creation of wealth. As a result the Lunarian sciences and industries had mushroomed almost overnight in comparison with the halting, faltering groping toward enlightenment that had come later when the same general pattern repeated itself on Earth.
The scientists on Earth who had recovered the information on the Lunarians had pictured them as an incurably aggressive and warlike breed whose discoveries of advanced technology had inevitably spelled their eventual self-destruction. Hunt and the others now learned that this picture was not really accurate. There had been some feuding and fighting in the earlier periods of Lunarian history, it was true, but by the time of the early industrial period such things had become rare. A greater common cause had united the Minervan nations. Their scientists recognized the deteriorating conditions that were descending with the coming Ice Age, and the whole race embarked on a feverish development of the sciences that would enable them to move to a warmer planet in the centuries ahead. The astronomers of the time singled out Mars and Earth as the most promising candidates. The stakes were survival, and there were no resources to be squandered on internal conflicts, until. . .
About two hundred years before the final, catastrophic war, something happened to change all that. Calazar explained, "It could have been a result of extreme genetic instabilities still inherent in the race. At about the time they had learned to harness steam and were just beginning to explore electricity, a superbreed of Lunarians appeared quite suddenly and advanced a quantum leap ahead of anything else in existence anywhere on the planet. Exactly where or when they appeared we don’t know. Numerically they were few to begin with, but they spread and consolidated rapidly."
"Was that when the planet started to polarize?" Heller asked.
"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.