"James P. Hogan - Giants 2 - The Gentle Giants of Ganymede" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

and neither have any of the ancestors they've descended from."
"Same problem," Fichter muttered, shaking his head.
"What problem?" she asked.
"The fact that the same enzyme was found in many different and
nonrelated Oligocene species," Danchekker said. "Yes, I'll grant that
differences in the Minervan environment could mutate some strain of enzyme
brought in from Earth into something like that." He pointed at the screen
again. "But many different species were brought in from Earth -- different
species each with its own characteristic metabolism and particular groups of
enzyme strains. Now suppose that something in the Minervan environment caused
those enzymes -- different enzymes -- to mutate. Are you seriously suggesting
that they would all mutate independently into the same end-product?" He waited
for a second. "Because that is exactly the situation that confronts us. The
Ganymean ship contained many preserved specimens of different species, but
every one of those species possessed precisely the same enzyme. Now do you
want to reconsider your suggestion?"
The woman looked helplessly at the table for a second, then made a
gesture of resignation. "Okay...If you put it like that, I guess it doesn't
make sense."
"Thank you," Danchekker acknowledged stonily.
Henri Rousson leaned forward and poured himself a glass of water from
the pitcher standing in the center of the table. He took a long drink while
the others continued to stare thoughtfully through the walls or at the
ceiling.
"Let's go back to basics for a second and see if that gets us anywhere,"
he said. 'We know that the Ganymeans evolved on Minerva -- right?" The heads
around him nodded in assent. "We also know that the Ganymeans must have
visited Earth because there's no other way they could have ended up with
terrestrial animals on board their ship -- unless we're going to invent
another hypothetical alien race and I'm sure not going to do that because
there's no reason to. Also, we know that the ship found here on Ganymede had
come to Ganymede from Minerva, not directly from Earth. If the ship came from
Minerva, the terrestrial animals must have come from Minerva too. That
supports the idea we've already got that the Ganymeans were shipping all kinds
of life forms from Earth to Minerva for some reason."
Paul Carpenter held up a hand. "Hang on a second. How do we know that
the ship downstairs came here from Minerva?"
"The plants," Fichter reminded him.
"Oh yeah, the plants. I forgot..." Carpenter subsided into silence.
The pens and animal cages in the Ganymean ship had contained vegetable
feed and floor-covering materials that had remained perfectly preserved under
the ice coating formed when the ship's atmosphere froze and the moisture
condensed out. Using seeds recovered from this material, Danchekker had
succeeded in cultivating live plants completely different from anything that
had ever grown on Earth, presumed to be examples of native Minervan botany.
The leaves were very dark -- almost black -- and absorbed every available
scrap of sunlight, right across the visible spectrum. This seemed to tie in
nicely with independently obtained evidence of Minerva's great distance from
the Sun.
 "How far," Rousson asked, "have we got in figuring out why the Ganymeans