The Two Worlds Page 12

  Heller sighed wearily. "I don't know," she admitted. "Perhaps they're wary of the possible consequences of colliding with an advanced alien culture."

  "And so it might be with some of our own race," Calazar said. It seemed unlikely since Earth was hardly advanced by Thurien standards, but strange things were possible, Hunt supposed.

  "So maybe we should insist on talking to that organization directly," Showm suggested pointedly. There was no response to that.

  There was still something Hunt didn't understand when he sat back and tried to reconstruct in his mind the probable sequence of events as the Thuriens would have perceived them. For some time they had been building up a picture of a belligerent and militarized Earth from the accounts forwarded by the mysterious "organization," none of which had mentioned the Shapieron. Then a signal, coded in Ganymean, had suddenly come in direct to Calazar's side of the operation, advising that the ship was on its way home. After that, the further transmissions from Farside would have accumulated to hint of an Earth significantly different from that which the surveillance reports had described. But why had it been so important for the Thuriens to establish which version was correct? The measures that they had employed to find out said very clearly that the issue had been taken much more seriously than could be explained by mere academic curiosity or the need to straighten out some internal management problems.

  "Let's start at the beginning with this relay device—or whatever you'd call it—that you've got outside the Solar System," he suggested when he had that much clear in his head.

  "It's not ours," Eesyan said at once from his position next to Calazar, opposite Showm. "We don't know what it is, either. You see, we didn't put it there."

  "But you must have," Hunt protested. "It uses your instant communications technology. It responded to Ganymean protocols."

  "Nevertheless it's a mystery," Eesyan replied. "Our guess is that it must be a piece of surveillance hardware, not operated by us but by the organization responsible for that activity, which malfunctioned in some way and routed the signal through to our equipment instead of to its intended destination."

  "But you replied to it," Hunt pointed out.

  "At the time we were under the impression it was from the Shapieron itself," Calazar answered. "Our immediate concern was to let its people know that their message had been received, that they had correctly identified Gistar, and that they were heading for the right place." Hunt nodded. He would have done the same thing.

  Caldwell frowned in a way that said he still wasn't clear about something. "Okay, but getting back to this relay—why didn't you find out what it was? You can send stuff from Thurien to Earth in a day. Why couldn't you send something to check it out?"

  "If it was a piece of surveillance hardware that had gone faulty and given us a direct line, we didn't want to draw attention to it," Eesyan replied. "We were getting some interesting information through it."

  "You didn't want this—`organization' to know about it?" Heller queried, looking puzzled.

  "Correct."

  "But they already knew about it. The reply from Gistar was all over Earth's newsgrid. They must have known about it if they run the surveillance."

  "But they weren't picking up your signals to the relay," Eesyan said. "We would have known if they were." Suddenly Hunt realized why Gistar hadn't responded to the Farside transmissions that had continued for months after the Shapieron's departure: the Thuriens didn't want to reveal their direct line via Earth's news network. That fitted in with their insistence on nothing being communicated via the net when at last they had elected to reopen the dialogue.

  Heller paused for a moment and brought her hand up to her brow while she collected her thoughts. "But they couldn't have left it at that," she said, looking up. "From what they had picked up out of the newsgrid, they would have known that you knew about the Shapieron—something they hadn't been telling you about. They couldn't have just done nothing . . . not without arousing suspicion. They'd have to tell you about it at that point, because they knew if they didn't you'd be going to them and asking some awkward questions."

  "Which is exactly what they did," Calazar confirmed.

  "So didn't you ask them why they hadn't gotten around to it earlier?" Caldwell asked. "I mean—hell, the ship had been there for six months."

  "Yes, we did," Calazar replied. "The reason they gave was that they were concerned for the Shapieron's safety, and feared that attempts to interfere with the situation might only jeopardize it further. Rightly or wrongly, they had come to the decision that it would be better for us to know only after it was out of the Solar System."

  Caldwell snorted, obviously not impressed by the mysterious "organization's" excuse. "Didn't you ask to see the records they had acquired through their surveillance?"

  "We did," Caldwell answered. "And they produced ones that had every appearance of justifying their fears for the Shapieron completely."

  Now Hunt knew where the phony depictions that he had witnessed of the Shapieron's arrival at Ganymede had come from: the "organization" had faked them just as they had been faking their reports of Earth all along. Those were the versions that Calazar's people had been shown. If those scenes with their frighteningly authentic blending of reality and fantasy were typical of what had been going on, it was no wonder that the deception had gone unsuspected for years.

  "I've seen some of those records," Hunt said. He sounded incredulous. "How did you ever come to suspect that they might not be genuine? They're unbelievable."

  "We didn't," Eesyan told him. "visar did. As you may be aware, the drive method of the Shapieron creates a space-time deformation around the ship. It is most pronounced when main drive is operating, but exists to some extent even under auxiliary drive—sufficient to displace the apparent positions of background stars close to the vessel's outline by a measurable amount. visar noticed that the predicted displacements were present in some of the views we were shown, but completely missing from others. Hence the reports of the Shapieron were suspect."

  "And not only those," Calazar said. "By implication, every other report that we had ever received of Earth was in doubt too, but we had no comparable way of testing them." He moved his eyes solemnly along the row of Terran faces. "Perhaps now you can see why we were concerned. We had two conflicting impressions of Earth, and no way of knowing how much of each might be true. But suppose that Earth was as aggressive and as irrational as we had been led to believe for years, and that the occupants of the Shapieron had indeed been received and treated in the ways described to us. . . ." He left the sentence unfinished. "Well, in our position what might you have thought?"

  A silence descended around the table. The Thuriens wouldn't have known what to believe, Hunt conceded inwardly. Their only way to check the facts would have been to reopen the dialogue with Earth secretly and establish face-to-face contact, which was precisely what they had done. So why had it been so important?

  Suddenly Lyn's mouth dropped open, and she stared wide-eyed at Calazar. "You were afraid that we might have bombed the Shapieron or something!" she gasped, horrified. "If we were the way those stories said, we'd never have let that ship get to Thurien to tell anybody about it." The shocked looks coming from around her said that it suddenly all made sense to the others too. Even Caldwell seemed deflated for the moment. It was a shame about Jerol Packard, but nobody could blame the Thuriens for acting as they had.

  "But you didn't have to wait to find out," Hunt said after a few seconds. "You can project black-hole ports across light-years. Why didn't you simply intercept the snip and get it here fast? Surely they'd have been the obvious people to check your surveillance reports with; they had been on Earth for six months."

  "Technical reasons," Eesyan replied. "A Thurien vessel can clear a planetary system in about a day, but only because it carries on-board equipment that interacts with the transfer port and keeps the gravitational disturbance relatively localized. Naturally the Shapieron does not have
such equipment. We needed to give it months if we were to avoid perturbing your planetary orbits. That would have been embarrassing if our fears were groundless. But we've been taking a risk. We finally reached the point where we had to know whether or not that ship was safe—now, without any further delays and obstructions."

  "We had decided to go ahead anyway when it became clear that we were not making progress with the UN," Calazar told them. "Only when your messages from Jupiter started coming in did we decide to leave it a little longer. We had the necessary ships and generators ready then, and they have been standing by ever since. All they needed was one signal from us to commence the operation."

  Hunt sank back in his chair and released a long breath. It had been a close thing. If Joe Shannon on Jupiter Five had not been thinking too clearly for a day or two, all of Earth's astronomical tables would have needed to be worked out all over again from square one.

  "You'd better send the signal."

  The voice sounded suddenly from one end of the Terran group. Everyone looked round, surprised, and found Danchekker directing a challenging look from one part of the table to another as if inviting them to make some obvious deduction. A score of Terran and Ganymean faces stared back at him blankly.

  Danchekker removed his spectacles, polished them with a handkerchief, and then returned them to his nose in the manner of a professor allowing a class of slow students time to reflect upon some proposition he had put to them. There was no reason why visar would make lenses that existed only in somebody's head go cloudy, Hunt thought to himself; the ritual was just an unconscious mannerism.

  At last Danchekker looked up. "It seems evident that this, er, `organization' responsible for the surveillance activities, whatever its nature, would not see its interests served by the Shapieron reaching Thurien." He paused to let the full implication sink in.

  "And now let me conjecture as to what might be my disposition now, were I in the position of the leaders of that organization," he resumed. "I assume that I know nothing about this meeting or that any dialogue between Thurien and Earth is taking place at all since my source of information would be the terrestrial communications network, and all references to such facts have been excluded from that system. Therefore I would have no reason to believe that my falsified accounts of Earth have been questioned. Now, that being so, if the Shapieron were to encounter an unfortunate, shall we say, accident, somewhere in the void between the stars, I would have every reason to feel confident that, if perchance the Thuriens should suspect foul play, Earth would top their list as the most likely culprit." He nodded and showed his teeth briefly as the appalled expressions around the table registered the impact of what he was driving at.

  "Precisely!" he exclaimed, and looked across at Calazar. "If you have at your disposal the means of extracting that vessel from its present predicament, I would strongly advise that you proceed with such action without a moment of further delay!"

  Chapter Twelve

  Niels Sverenssen lay propped against the pillows in his executive-grade quarters at Giordano Bruno, watching the girl dress by the vanity on the far side of the room. She was young and quite pretty, with the clear complexion and open features typical of many Americans, and her loose black hair cut an intriguing contrast against her white skin. She should use the sunray facilities provided in the gymnasium more often, he thought to himself. As with most of her sex, her superficial layer of college-applied pseudointellectualism went no deeper than the pigment in her skin; beneath it she was as facile as the rest of them—a regrettably necessary but not unpleasant diversion from the more serious side of life. "You only want my body," they had cried indignantly down through the ages. "What else can you offer?" was his reply.

  She finished buttoning her shirt and turned toward the mirror to run a comb hurriedly through her hair. "I know it's a strange time to be leaving," she said. "Trust me to be on early shift this morning. I'm going to be late again as it is."

  "Don't worry about it," Sverenssen told her, putting more concern into his voice than he felt. "First things must come first."

  She picked her jacket up off the back of a chair next to the vanity and slung it over her shoulder. "Have you got the cartridge?" she asked, turning back to face him.

  Sverenssen opened the drawer of the bedside unit, reached inside, and took out a matchbook-size, computer micromemory cartridge. "Here. Remember to be careful."

  The girl walked over to him, took the cartridge and folded it inside a tissue, then slipped it into one of the pockets of her jacket. "I will. When will I see you again?"

  "Today will be very busy. I'll have to let you know."

  "Don't make it too long." She smiled, stooped to kiss him on the forehead, and left, closing the door softly behind her.

  Professor Gregor Malliusk, the Director of Astronomy at the Giordano Bruno observatory, was not looking pleased when she arrived in the main-dish control room ten minutes later. "You're late again, Janet," he grumbled as she hung her jacket in one of the closets by the door and put on her white working coat. "John had to leave in haste because he's going to Ptolemy today, and I've had to cover. I've got a meeting in less than an hour and things to do beforehand. This situation is becoming intolerable."

  "I'm sorry, Professor," she said. "I overslept. It won't happen again." She walked quickly across to the supervisory console and began going through the routine of calling up the night's status logs with deft movements of her fingers.

  Malliusk watched balefully from beside the equipment racks outside his office, trying not to notice the firm, slim lines of her body outlined by the white material of her coat and the raven black curls tumbling carelessly over her collar. "It's that Swede again, isn't it," he growled before he could stop himself.

  "That's my business," Janet said without looking up, making her voice as firm as she dared. "I've already said—it won't happen again." She compressed her mouth into a tight line and stabbed savagely at the keyboard to bring another screen of data up in front of her.

  "The check correlation on 557B was not completed yesterday," Malliusk said icily. "It was scheduled for completion by fifteen hundred."

  Janet hesitated from what she was doing, closed her eyes momentarily, and bit her lip. "Damn!" she muttered beneath her breath, then louder, "I'll skip break and get it done then. There's not a lot of it left."

  "John has already completed it."

  "I'm . . . sorry. I'll do an extra hour off his next shift to make up."

  Malliusk scowled at her for a few seconds longer, then turned on his heel abruptly and left the control room without saying anything more.

  When she had finished checking the status logs, she switched off the screen and walked over to the transmission auxiliary processor cabinet, opened a cover panel, and inserted the cartridge that Sverenssen had given her into an empty slot. Then she moved around to the front of the system console and ran through the routine of integrating the contents of the cartridge into the message buffer already assembled for transmission later that day. Where the transmission was intended for she didn't know, but it was part of whatever had brought the UN delegation to Bruno. Malliusk always took care of the technical side of that personally, and he never talked about it with the rest of the staff.

  Sverenssen had told her that the cartridge contained some mundane data that had come in late from Earth for appending to the transmission that had been already composed; everything that went out was supposed to be approved formally by all of the delegates, but it would have been silly to call them all together merely to rubber-stamp something as petty as this. But a couple of them could be touchy, he had said, and he cautioned her to be discreet. She liked the feeling of being confided in over a matter of UN importance, even if it had only to do with some minor point, especially by somebody so sophisticated and worldly. It was so deliciously romantic! And, who knew? From some of the things that Sverenssen had said, she could be doing herself a really big favor in the long run.

  "H
e is a guest here, like the rest of you, and we have done our best to be accommodating," Malliusk told Sobroskin later that morning in the Soviet delegate's offices. "But this is interfering with the observatory's work. I do not expect to have to be accommodating to the point of having my own work disrupted. And besides that, I object to such conduct in my own establishment, particularly from a man in his position. It is not becoming."

  "I can hardly intervene in personal matters that are not part of the delegation's business," Sobroskin pointed out, doing his best to be diplomatic as he detected more than merely outraged propriety beneath the scientist's indignation. "It would be more appropriate for you to try talking to Sverenssen directly. She is your assistant, after all, and it is the department's work that is being affected."

  "I have already done that, and the response was not satisfactory," Malliusk replied stiffly. "As a Russian, I wish my complaint to be conveyed to whichever office of the Soviet Government is concerned with the business of this delegation, with the request that they apply some appropriate influence through the UN. Therefore I am talking to you as the representative here of that office."