The Two Worlds Page 4

  "Secretly," Pacey explained in answer to Hunt's questioning look. "No public spectacles or anything like that. What it seems to add up to is that they're hoping to do some quiet checking up without the outfit that's running the surveillance knowing about it."

  Hunt nodded. The plan made sense. But there was a note in Pacey's voice that hinted of things not having gone so smoothly. "So what's the problem?" he asked, shifting his eyes to glance at both Pacey and Heller.

  "The problem is the policy that's been handed down from the top levels inside the UN," Heller replied. "To put it in a nutshell, they're scared of what it might mean if this planet simply opens up to a civilization that's millions of years ahead of us . . . our whole culture could be torn up by the roots; our civilization would come apart at the seams; we'd be avalanched with technology that we're not ready to absorb . . . that kind of thing."

  "But that's ridiculous!" Hunt protested. "They haven't said they want to take this place over. They just want to come here and talk." He made an impatient throwing-away motion in the air. "Okay, I'll accept that we'd have to play it softly and exercise some caution and common sense, but what you're describing sounds more like a neurosis."

  "It is," Heller said. "The UN's being irrational—there's no other word for it. And the Farside delegation is following that policy to the letter and operating in go-slow, stall-stall-stall mode." She waved toward the folder she had indicated earlier. "You'll see for yourself. Their responses are evasive and ambiguous, and do nothing to correct the wrong impressions that the Thuriens have got. Norman and I have tried to fight it, but we get outvoted."

  Hunt caught Lyn's eye as he sent a despairing look around the room. She sent back a faint half-smile and a barely perceptible shrug that said she knew how he felt. A faction inside the UN had fought hard and for the same reasons to prevent the Farside transmissions being continued after the first, unexpected reply had come in, he remembered, but had been overruled after a deafening outcry from the world's scientific community. That same faction seemed to be active again.

  "The worst part is what we suspect might be behind it," Heller continued. "Our brief from the State Department was to help move things smoothly toward broadening Earth's communications with Thurien as fast as developments allowed, at the same time protecting this country's interests where appropriate. The Department didn't really agree with the policy of excluding outsiders, but had to go along with it because of UN protocols. In other words, the U.S. has been trying to play it straight so far, but under protest."

  "I can see the picture," Hunt said as she paused. "But that just says that you're becoming frustrated by the slow progress. You sounded as if there's more to it than that."

  "There is," Heller confirmed. "The Soviets also have a representative on the delegation—a man called Sobroskin. Given the world situation—with us and the Soviets competing everywhere for things like the South Atlantic fusion deal, industrial-training franchises in Africa, scientific-aid programs, and so on—the advantage that either side could get from access to Ganymean know-how would be enormous. So you'd expect the Soviets to be just as impatient to kick some life into this damn delegation as we are. But they aren't. Sobroskin goes along with the official UN line and doesn't bitch about it. In fact he spends half his time throwing in complications that slow things down even further. Now when those facts are laid down side by side, what do they seem to say?"

  Hunt thought over the question for a while, then tossed out his hands with a shrug. "I don't know," he said candidly. "I'm not a political animal. You tell me."

  "It could mean that the Soviets are planning to set up their own private channel to fix a landing in Siberia or somewhere so that they get exclusive rights," Pacey answered. "If that's so, then the UN line would suit them fine. If the official channel stays clogged up, and the U.S. plays straight and sticks with the official channel, then guess who walks off with the bonanza. Think of the difference it would make to the power balance if a few heads of select governments around the world were quietly tipped off that the Soviets had access to lots of know-how that we didn't. You see—it all fits with the way Sobroskin is acting."

  "And an even more sobering thought is the way in which the UN's policy fits in with that so conveniently," Heller added. "It could mean that the Soviets have ways that we don't even know about of pulling all kinds of strings and levers right inside the top levels of the UN itself. If that's true, the global implications for the U.S. are serious indeed."

  The facts were certainly beginning to add up, Hunt admitted to himself. The Soviets could easily set up another long-range communications facility in Siberia, up in orbit, out near Luna maybe, and operate their own link to whatever was intercepting Farside's signals out beyond the edge of the solar system. Any reply coming back would probably be in the form of a fairly wide beam by the time it got to Earth, which meant that anybody could receive it and know that somebody somewhere other than the UN was cheating. But if the replies were in a prearranged code, nobody would be able to interpret them or know for whom they were intended. The Soviets might be accused, in which case they would deny the charge vehemently . . . and that would be about as much as anybody would be able to do about it.

  He thought he could see now why he had been brought in on all this. Heller had given herself away earlier when she said that the U.S. had been trying to play it straight, "so far." As insurance the State Department had decided that it needed its own private line too, but nothing crude enough to be detected anywhere within a few hundred thousand miles of Earth. So who would they have sent Heller and Pacey to talk to? Who else but someone who knew a lot about Ganymeans and Ganymean technology, somebody who had also been among the first people to receive them on Ganymede?

  And that was another point—Hunt had spent a lot of time on Ganymede, and he still had many close friends among the UNSA personnel there with the Jupiter Four and Jupiter Five missions. Jupiter was a long, long way from the vicinity of Earth, which meant that no receivers anywhere near Earth would ever know anything about a beam aimed toward Jupiter from the fringe of the solar system, whether the beam diverged appreciably or not. And, of course, the J4 and J5 command ships were linked permanently to Earth by laser channels . . . which Caldwell and Navcomms just happened to control. It couldn't possibly be all just a coincidence, he decided.

  Hunt looked up at Caldwell, held his eye for a second, then turned his head to gaze at the two people from Washington. "You want to set up a private wire to Gistar via Jupiter to arrange a landing here, without any more messing around, before the Soviets get around to doing something," he told them. "And you want to know if I can come up with an idea for telling the people at Jupiter what we want them to do, without the risk of any Thuriens who might be bugging the laser link finding out about it. Is that right?" He turned his eyes back toward Caldwell and inclined his head. "What do I get, Gregg?"

  Heller and Pacey exchanged glances that said they were impressed.

  "Ten out of ten," Caldwell told him.

  "Nine," Heller said. Hunt looked at her curiously. There was a hint of laughter in her expression. "If you can come up with something, we'll need all the help we can get handling whatever comes afterward," she explained. "The UN might have decided to try going it alone without their Ganymean experts, but the U.S. hasn't."

  "In other words, welcome to the team," Norman Pacey completed.

  Chapter Four

  Joseph B. Shannon, Mission Director of Jupiter Five, orbiting two thousand miles above the surface of Ganymede, stood in an instrumentation bay near one end of the mile-and-a-quarter-long ship's command center. He was watching a large mural display screen from behind a knot of spellbound ship's officers and UNSA scientists. The screen showed an undulating landscape of oranges, yellows, and browns as it lay cringing beneath a black sky made hazy by a steady incandescent drizzle falling from somewhere above, while in the far distance half the skyline was erupting in a boiling column of colors that exploded upward off the
top of the picture.

  It had been fifty-two years before—the year that Shannon was born—when other scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena had marveled at the first close-ups of Io to be sent back by the Voyager I and II probes, and dubbed the extraordinary disk of mottled orange "the great pizza in the sky." But Shannon had never heard of any pizza being cooked in the way this one had.

  Orbiting through a plasma flux of mean particle energies corresponding to 100,000° Kelvin sustained by Jupiter's magnetic field, the satellite acted as an enormous Faraday generator and supported internal circulating currents of five million amperes with a power dissipation of a thousand billion watts. And as much energy again was released inside it as heat from tidal friction, resulting from orbital perturbations induced as Europa and Ganymede lifted Io resonantly up and down through Jupiter's gravity. This amount of electrically and gravitationally produced heat maintained large reservoirs of molten sulfur and sulfur compounds below the moon's surface, which eventually penetrated upward through faults to explode into the virtually zero-pressure of the outside. The result was a regular succession of spectacular volcanoes of solidifying sulfur and sulfur-dioxide frost that ejected at velocities of up to a thousand meters per second, and sometimes reached heights of 300 kilometers or more.

  Shannon was looking at a view of one of those volcanoes now, sent back from a probe on Io's surface. It had taken the mission's engineers and scientists more than a year of back-to-the-drawing-board experiences to devise an instrumentation package and shielding method that would function reliably under Jupiter's incessant bombardment of radiation, electrons, and ions, and Shannon had felt an obligation to be present in person to observe the results of their eventual success. Far from being the chore he had expected, the occasion had turned out an exhilaration and served as a reminder of how easy it was for supreme commanders of anything to allow themselves to become remote and lose touch with what was happening in the trenches. In future, he thought to himself, he would make a point of keeping more up to date on the progress of the mission's scientific projects.

  He remained in the command center discussing details of the probe for a full hour after he was officially off duty, and then at last excused himself and retired to his private quarters. After a shower and a change of clothes he sat down at the desk in his stateroom and interrogated the terminal for a listing of the day's mail. One item that had come in was qualified as a text message from Vic Hunt at Navcomms Headquarters. Shannon was both pleasantly surprised and intrigued. He had had many interesting talks with Hunt during the latter's stay on Ganymede, and didn't perceive him as being somebody with much time for idle socializing, which suggested that something interesting was afoot. Curious, he keyed in a command for Hunt's message to be displayed. Five minutes later he was still sitting there staring at the message, his brows knitted in a mystified frown. It read:

  Joe,

  To avoid any further cross words on this subject, I looked for some clues in the book you mentioned and came across some references on pages 5, 24, and 10. When you get down to sections 11 and 20, it all makes more sense.

  How they got 786 is still a puzzle.

  Regards

  Vic

  Not a word of it meant anything to him. He knew Hunt well enough to be reasonably sure that something serious was behind the message, and all he could think of was that Hunt was trying to tell him something highly confidential. But why would Hunt go to this kind of trouble when UNSA possessed a perfectly adequate system of security codes? Surely it wasn't possible that somebody could be eavesdropping on the UNSA net, somebody equipped with enough computer power to render its protective measures unreliable. On the other hand, Shannon reflected soberly, the Germans had thought exactly that in World War II, and the British, with their "Turing Engine" at Bletchley, had been able to read the complete radio traffic between Hitler and his generals, frequently even before the intended recipients. Certainly this message would mean nothing to any third party even though it had come through in plain English, which made it appear all the more innocuous. The problem was that it didn't mean anything to Shannon, either.

  * * *

  Shannon was still brooding about the message early the next morning when he sat down for breakfast in the senior officers' dining quarters. He liked to eat early, before the captain, the first navigation officer, and the others who were usually on early shift appeared. It gave him time to collect his thoughts for the day and keep up with events elsewhere by browsing through the Interplanetary Journal—a daily newspaper beamed out from Earth by UNSA to its various ships and installations all over the solar system. The other reason he liked to be early was that it gave him an opportunity to tackle the Journal's crossword puzzle. He'd been an incurable addict for as long as he could remember, and rationalized his addiction by claiming that an early-morning puzzle sharpened the mental faculties in preparation for the demands of the day ahead. He wasn't really sure if that were true, and didn't care all that much either, but it was as good an excuse as any. There was nothing sensational in the news that morning, but he skimmed dutifully through the various items and arrived gratefully at the crossword page just as the steward was refilling his coffee cup. He folded the paper once, then again, and rested it against the edge of the table to scan through the clues casually while he felt inside his jacket for a pen. The heading at the top read: JOURNAL CROSSWORD PUZZLE NUMBER 786.

  Shannon stiffened, his hand still inside his jacket, as the number caught his eye. "How they got 786 is still a puzzle" replayed itself instantly in his mind. Every word of Hunt's mysterious message had become firmly engraved by that time. "786" and "puzzle" . . . both appearing in the same sentence. It couldn't be a coincidence, surely. And then he remembered that Hunt had been a keen crossword solver too in his rare moments of free time; he had introduced Shannon to the particularly cryptic puzzles contained in the London Times, and the two of them had spent many a good hour solving them over drinks at the bar. Suppressing the urge to leap from his chair with a shout of Eureka! he pushed the pen back into his pocket and felt behind it for the copy of the message tucked inside his wallet. He drew out the sheet of paper, unfolded it, and smoothed it flat on the table between the Journal and his coffee cup. He read it once again, and the words took on a whole new light of meaning.

  Right there in the first line it said "cross words," and a little farther on, "clues." Their significance was obvious now. What about the rest of it? He had never mentioned any book to Hunt, so that part had to be just padding. Presumably the numbers that followed meant something, though. Shannon frowned and stared hard at them: 5, 24, 10, 11, and 20. . . . The sequence didn't immediately jump out and hit him for any reason. He had already tried combining them in various ways and gotten nowhere, but when he read through the message again in its new context, two of the phrases that he had barely noticed before did jump out and hit him: ". . . came across . . ." associated with 5, 24, and 10, and immediately after: ". . . get down . . ." associated with 11 and 20, had obvious connotations to do with crosswords: they referred to the across and down sets of clues. So presumably whatever Hunt was trying to say would be found in the answers to clues 5, 24, and 10 across, and 11 and 20 down. That had to be it.

  With rising excitement he transferred his attention to the Journal. At that moment the captain and the first navigation officer appeared in the doorway across the room, talking jovially and laughing about something. Shannon rose from his seat and picked up the Journal in one movement. Before they were three paces into the room he had passed them, walking briskly in the opposite direction and tossing back just a curt "Good morning, gentlemen," over his shoulder. They exchanged puzzled looks, turned to survey the doorway through which the Mission Director had already vanished, looked at each other again and shrugged, and sat down at an empty table.

  Back in the privacy of his stateroom, Shannon sat down at his desk and unfolded the paper once more. The clue to 5 across read, "Find the meaning of a poem to
Digital Equipment Corporation (6)." The company name was well known among UNSA and scientific people; DEC computers were used for everything from preprocessing the datastreams that poured incessantly through the laser link between Jupiter and Earth to controlling the instruments contained in the robot landed on Io. "DEC"! Those letters had to be part of the solution. What about the rest of the clue? "Poem." A list of synonyms paraded through Shannon's head: "verse" . . . "lyric" . . . "epic" . . . "elegy." They were no good. He wanted something of three letters to complete the single-word answer of six letters indicated in the parentheses. "Ode"! Added to "DEC" it gave "DECODE," which mean, "Find the meaning of." Not too difficult. Shannon penned in the answer and shifted his attention to 24 across.

  "Dianna's lock causes heartache (8)." "Dianna's" was an immediate giveaway, and after some reflection Shannon had succeeded in obtaining Di's tress (lock of hair), which gave heartache in the form of "DISTRESS."

  10 across read, "A guiding light in what could be a confused voyage (6)." The phrase "could be a confused voyage" suggested an anagram of "voyage," which comprised six letters. Shannon played with the letters for a while but could form them into nothing sensible, so moved on to 11 down. "Let's fit a date to reorganize the experimental results (4,4,4)." Three words of four letters each made up the solution. "Reorganize" looked like a hint for an anagram again. Shannon searched the clue for a combination of words containing twelve letters and soon picked out "Let's fit a date." He scribbled them down randomly in the margin of the page and juggled with them for a few minutes, eventually producing "TEST DATA FILE," which his instinct told him was the correct answer.