Danchekker looked at Hunt dumbfounded, raised his head again to take in the scene above, then looked at Hunt once more. Hunt just stared back glassy-eyed.
visar continued, "The stressors induce a zone of enhanced space-time curvature that increases in intensity toward the center until, right at the focus, it collapses into a back hole." A bright red circle, obviously superposed on their visual inputs by visar, appeared from nowhere to surround the hazy region. "The hole is in the center of the circle," visar told them. "The halo effect is distorted light from background stars—the region acts like a gravitic lens. The hole itself is about ten thousand miles from you, and the space you're in is actually highly distorted. But I can censor confusing data, so you feel and act normal.
"Behind the shell defined by the stressors are batteries of projectors that create intense beams of energy by matter annihilation and direct them between the sensors and into the hole. From there the energy is redirected and distributed through a higher-order dimension grid and extracted back into ordinary space wherever it's needed. In other words this whole arrangement forms the input into an h-space distribution grid that delivers to anywhere you like, instantaneously, and over interstellar distances. Like it?"
A while went by before Hunt found his voice. "What kinds of things hook on the other end?" he asked. "I mean, would this feed a whole planet . . . or what?"
"The distribution pattern is very complex," visar replied. "Several planets are being fed from Garfalang, which is what the place you're at is called. So are a number of high-energy projects that the Thuriens are engaged in at various places. But you can hook smaller units into the grid wherever they happen to be, such as spacecraft, other vehicles, machines, dwellings—anything that uses power. The local equipment needed to tap into the grid is not large in size. For instance the perceptron that we landed in Alaska was powered from the grid on the conventional stage from its exit port to Earth. It would have had to be much larger if it carried its own onboard propulsion source. Hardly any of our machines have local, self-contained power sources. They don't need them. The grid feeds everything from large centralized generators and redirectors, like the one you're in, located far out in space."
"This is unbelievable," Danchekker breathed. "And to imagine, fifty years ago people were frightened of their energy sources being exhausted. This is stupefying . . . quite stupefying."
"What's the prime source?" Hunt asked. "You said the input beams were produced by matter annihilation. What gets annihilated?"
"Mainly the cores of burned-out stars," visar answered. "Part of the energy generated is tapped off to drive a network of transfer ports for conveying material from the remote sites, where the cores are dismantled, to the annihilator batteries. The net production of useful energy fed into the grid from Garfalang is equivalent to about one lunar mass per day. But there's plenty of fuel around. We're a long way from any crisis. Don't worry about it."
"And you can concentrate the energy from here across light-years of space through some kind of . . . hyperdimension and create a transfer toroid remotely," Hunt said. "Is it always as elaborate as the operation we watched?"
"No. That was a special case that required exceptionally precise control and timing. An ordinary transfer is pretty simple by comparison, and just routine."
Hunt fell silent while he took in more of the spectacle overhead, and went back in his mind over the details of the operation he had witnessed.
Calazar had decided to go ahead with the interception of the Shapieron without further delay when a baffling message, signed personally by Norman Pacey, came in from Bruno to warn of a possibility that the ship could be in some kind of danger. How Pacey could have known about a risk that had been recognized on Thurien only with the benefit of information that Pacey couldn't possibly have possessed was a mystery.
Apparently the "organization" possessed equipment capable of tracking the Shapieron just as Calazar's people did, and Calazar had been unwilling to reveal his actions by simply allowing the ship to vanish from the course it had been following. Therefore he had called upon Eesyan's engineers to modify the operation to cover not only the fishing of a vessel out of the void twenty light-years away, but also the substitution of a dummy object constructed to give identical readings on the "organization's" tracking instruments. There was a risk that the gravitational disturbance produced in the process might itself be detected, but since continuous monitoring was not practicable for technical reasons, there was a good chance that the substitution could be made invisible provided the operation was pulled off in minimum time. As planned, the switch had gone quickly and smoothly, and if all had gone well the "organization" would by now be receiving tracking-data updates originating from the decoy while the Shapieron was in fact light-years away and almost at Thurien. Time would no doubt tell if the switch had gone quickly and smoothly enough.
Hunt didn't know what to make of this game of deception and counterdeception between two, possibly rival, groups of Ganymeans. As Danchekker had maintained from the beginning, the response simply did not fit with the way Ganymean minds worked. Hunt had tried several times to squeeze a hint of what was behind it all out of visar, but the machine, evidently acting under a directive not to discuss the matter, merely reaffirmed that Calazar would broach the subject himself at the appropriate time.
But whatever the reasons, the Shapieron had not been attacked or interfered with in whatever way Pacey had feared, and it was now in safe hands. The only conclusion Hunt could draw was that Pacey had misinterpreted something and overreacted, which seemed strange for the kind of person Hunt had judged Pacey to be. To be fair, Hunt conceded as he thought about it again, Pacey hadn't actually said for certain that it was the Shapieron that was threatened; what he had said was that he had reason to believe that something well out in space was in danger of destruction, and he had expressed concern that it might be the Shapieron. Calazar had decided not to take any chances, and Hunt couldn't blame him for that. What the warning did seem to indicate was that Pacey had been hopelessly wrong about something. Or had he? Hunt wondered.
Suddenly Hunt realized he was feeling physically uncomfortable. Surely not, he thought. Surely the package of sensations that made up his computer-simulated body couldn't be that complete. What would be the point?
He looked around him instinctively and discovered he was back in his own body in the recliner inside the perceptron. "Facing you at the back end of the corridor," visar's voice informed him. Hunt sat up, shaking his head in wonder. As always, the Ganymeans had thought of everything. So that was what the mysterious door was for.
He was back at Gistar a few minutes later, and found Danchekker waiting for him wearing a grave expression. "Some alarming news has come through while you were absent," the professor informed him. "It appears that our friend at Giordano Bruno was not quite as mistaken as we had supposed."
"What's happened?" Hunt asked.
"The device that has been relaying the communications between Farside and Thurien has ceased operating. According to visar, indications are that something destroyed it."
Chapter Seventeen
How could Norman Pacey, isolated and incommunicado on lunar Farside, have known that the relay was about to be destroyed? His only source of information from outside the solar system was the signals coming in from the Thuriens at Gistar, and the Thuriens themselves hadn't known about it. And why had Pacey apparently acted independently of the official UN delegation on Farside in sending the warning? Furthermore, how had he gained access to the equipment there, and how had he been able to operate it? In short, just what was going on at Farside?
Jerol Packard requested from the Thuriens a complete set of their versions of all the messages that had been exchanged with Earth since the whole business began. Calazar agreed to supply them, and visar hard-copied them through to McClusky by means of equipment contained in the perceptron. When the team there compared the Thuriens' transcripts with their own, some peculiar discrepanci
es emerged.
The first set comprised one-way traffic from Earth and were from the period immediately following the Shapieron's departure, when scientists at Bruno had resisted UN pressure and continued transmitting in the hope of renewing the dialogue that the first brief, unexpected signal from the Giants' Star had initiated. These messages contained information regarding Earth's civilization and state of scientific progress that over the months had begun adding up to form a picture which was not at all consistent with that reported to the Thuriens for years by the still mysterious and undefined "organization." Perhaps these inconsistencies had been the cause of the Thuriens becoming suspicious about the reports in the first place. In any event, the two sets of transcripts of these messages matched perfectly.
The next group of exchanges dated from the time that Thurien began talking again, and the UN stepped in to handle Earth's end. At this point the tone of the transmissions from Farside took on a distinctly different flavor. As Karen Heller had told Hunt at his first meeting with her in Houston, and as he had verified for himself since, the messages became negative and ambivalent, doing little to dispel the Thuriens' notions of a militarized Earth and rejecting their overtures for a landing and direct talks. Among these transmissions the first discrepancies appeared.
Every one of the communications sent during the period in which Heller was on Farside was reproduced faithfully in the Thuriens' records. But there were two additional ones—identifiable by their format and header conventions as having undoubtedly originated from Bruno—that she had never seen before. What made these even more mysterious was that their contents were overtly belligerent and hostile to a degree that the UN delegation would never have condoned even with its negative attitude. Some of the things they said were simply untrue, the gist of them being that Earth was capable of managing its own affairs, didn't want and wouldn't tolerate alien interference, and would respond with force if any landing was attempted. More inexplicable still was the fact that some of the details correlated with and reinforced the falsified picture of Earth that Hunt and the others had learned of only after meeting the Thuriens. How could anyone at Bruno have known anything about that?
Then Hunt's signals had started coming in from Jupiter—coded in Ganymean, welcoming the suggestion for a landing, suggesting a suitable location, and projecting a different image completely. No wonder the Thuriens had been confused!
After that came the Soviet signals, complete with details of the security code to be used for replies. Packard had persuaded Calazar to include them by playing up the grilling that the Terrans had been put through and especially its effect on him personally. The Soviets, too, had expressed interest in a landing, though in a manner distinctly more cautious than Hunt's messages from Jupiter. This theme traced consistently through most of the Soviet signals, but again there were some, in this case three, that stood out as exceptions and conveyed similar sentiments to those of the "unofficial" transmissions from Bruno. And even more amazingly, they tallied in some significant details with the Bruno exceptions in ways that couldn't have been coincidental.
How could the Soviets have known about unofficial signals from Bruno that even Karen Heller hadn't known about when she was there? The only way, surely, was if the Soviets were responsible for them. Did that mean that the Kremlin was so dominating the UN that the whole Bruno operation had been simply a sham to distract the U.S. and other prominent nations that knew about Gistar, and that the delegation's ostensibly mild but nevertheless counterproductive actions had been secretly derailed, presumably by somebody put there for the purpose—perhaps in the form of Sobroskin? That the Director of Astronomy at Bruno was also a Russian gave further credibility to the thought, but against it was the unavoidable fact that the Soviets' own effort had been sabotaged in exactly the same manner. Again nothing made sense.
Later a third unofficial message from Bruno, sent after Karen Heller had left, reached a new peak of aggressiveness, announcing that Earth was severing relations and had taken steps to insure that the dialogue would be discontinued permanently. Finally there was Norman Pacey's warning of something about to be destroyed out in space, and shortly afterward the relay had ceased operating.
The answers to these riddles would not be found in Alaska. Packard waited until a State Department courier arrived at McClusky with the official news that communications with Gistar had ceased and the UN delegation was returning to Earth, and then left for Washington with Caldwell. Lyn went with them for the purpose of returning to McClusky with an update as soon as they had talked to Pacey.
Hunt and Danchekker stood on the apron at McClusky, watching the UNSA jet that had just lifted off to take Packard, Caldwell, and Lyn to Washington turn and begin climbing away steeply toward the south. Not far from them, a ground crew was busy shoveling snow over the holes in the concrete left by the landing gear of the perceptron, which had moved itself into line with the other UNSA aircraft parked along one side of the apron in order to provide a more natural scene for the "organization's" surveillance instruments. Although the black hole contained in the vessel's communications system was microscopic, it still had the equivalent mass of a small mountain; McClusky's apron hadn't been designed for that.
"It's funny when you think about it," Hunt remarked as the plane shrank to a dot above the distant ridgeline. "It's twenty light-years from Vranix to Washington, but the last four thousand miles take all the time. Maybe when we get this business cleared up, we could think about wiring a few parts of this planet into visar."
"Maybe." Danchekker's voice was noncommittal. He had been noticeably quiet since breakfast.
"It would save Gregg a lot of charges from Transportation Services."
"I suppose so."
"How about wiring up Navcomms HQ and Westwood? Then we'd be able to go straight to Thurien from the office and be back for lunch."
"Mmm . . ."
They turned and began walking back toward the mess hall. Hunt glanced sideways to give the professor a curious look, but Danchekker appeared not to notice and kept walking.
Inside they found Karen Heller hunched over a pile of communications transcripts and notes she had made while at Bruno. She pushed the papers away and sat back in her chair as they entered. Danchekker moved over to a window and stared silently out at the perceptron; Hunt turned a chair around and straddled it to face the room from a corner. "I just don't know what to make of this," Heller said with a sigh. "There just isn't any way that some of this information could have been known to anybody here or on the Moon except us—unless they've been in contact with Calazar's `organization.' Could that be possible?"
"I wondered the same thing," Hunt replied. "How about the coded signals? Maybe Moscow wasn't transmitting to Calazar's bunch at all."
"No, I've checked." Heller gestured toward the papers around her. "Every one that we picked up was sent by Calazar's aide. They're all accounted for."
Hunt shook his head and folded his arms on the backrest of the chair. "It's got me beat too. Let's wait and see what they find out from Norman when he gets back." A silence descended. Lost in thoughts of his own, Danchekker continued staring out through the window. After a while Hunt said, "You know, it's funny—sometimes when things become so confusing that you think you'll never make any kind of sense out of them, it just needs one simple, obvious thing that everybody's overlooked to make everything come together. Remember a couple of years back when we were trying to figure out where the Lunarians came from. Nothing added up until we realized that the Moon must have moved. Yet looking back, that should have been obvious all along."
"I hope you're right," Heller said as she collected papers and returned them to their folders. "Something else I don't understand is all this secrecy. I thought Ganymeans weren't supposed to be like that. Yet here we are with one group doing one thing, another doing something else, and neither wanting to let the other know anything about it. You know them better than most people. What do you make of it?"
"I don'
t know," Hunt confessed. "And who bombed the relay? Calazar's bunch didn't, so it must have been the other bunch. If so, they must have found out about it despite all the precautions, but why would they want to bomb it, anyway? It's definitely a strange way for Ganymeans to be carrying on, all right . . . or at least, it is for the kind of Ganymeans that existed twenty-five million years ago." He turned his head unconsciously and directed his last words at Danchekker, who still had his back to them. Hunt had not yet been convinced that such a span of time couldn't have been sufficient to bring about some fundamental change in Ganymean nature, but Danchekker had remained intractable. He thought that Danchekker hadn't heard, but after a few seconds the professor replied without moving his head.
"Perhaps your original hypothesis deserved more consideration than I was prepared to give it at the time."
Hunt waited for a few seconds, but nothing further happened. "What hypothesis?" he asked at last
"That perhaps we are not dealing with Ganymeans at all." Danchekker's voice was distant. A short silence fell. Hunt and Heller looked at each other. Heller frowned; Hunt shrugged. Of course they were dealing with Ganymeans. They looked back at Danchekker expectantly. He wheeled around to face them suddenly and brought his hands up to clasp his lapels. "Consider the fact," he invited. "We are confronted by a pattern of behavior that is totally inconsistent with what we know to be true of the Ganymean nature. That pattern concerns the relationship between two groups of beings. One of these groups we have met and know to be Ganymean. The other group we have not been permitted to meet, and the reasons that have been offered, I have no hesitation in dismissing as pretexts. A logical conclusion to draw, therefore, would be that the second group is not Ganymean—would it not?"
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