"We owe you an apology," Calazar said bluntly as soon as the introductions had been completed. "I know that’s not supposed to be the best way of starting a meeting by Earth’s customs, but I’ve never really understood why. If it needs saying, let’s say it and get it out of the way. As you no doubt appreciate by now, we needed to check some facts that are important to us, and to you too I would imagine. It seems just as well that we did."
It was going to be a far less formal affair than he had been half prepared for, Hunt noted with relief. He wondered if what he was hearing was an accurate translation of Calazar’s words or a liberal interpretation concocted by VISAR. He had assumed that an opening on this note would be unavoidable, and was ready for some fireworks there and then. But as he looked around he could see that the Ganymean defusing tactics appeared to be having their desired effect. Caldwell and Heller seemed in command of themselves and were looking purposeful as if by no means ready to let the matter just go at that, but at the same time they were subdued sufficiently to wait and see what developed before making an issue out of anything. Danchekker had obviously come in spoiling for a fight, but the psychological left hook that the Ganymeans had delivered out of the blue—literally—at the last moment had temporarily knocked it out of him. Packard appeared to be in some kind of trance; in his case the tranquilizer had, perhaps, worked too well.
After pausing, Calazar continued, "On behalf of our entire race, we welcome you to our world and to our society. The threads that have traced the evolution of our two kinds, and which have remained separated until now, have at last crossed. We hope that from this point on they will continue to remain entwined for the benefit and greater learning of all of us." With that he sat down. It was simple, Hunt thought, and seemed a good way of getting things moving.
The Terran faces turned toward Packard, who was officially the most senior in rank and therefore the designated spokesman. It took him a few seconds to realize that the others were looking at him. Then he looked uncertainly from side to side, gripped the sides of his chair, moistened his lips, and rose slowly and somewhat unsteadily to his feet. "On behalf of the . . . government of. . ." The words dried up. He stood swaying slightly and staring dumbstruck at the rows of alien countenances arrayed before him, and then raised his head and shook it disbelievingly at the spectacle of the tower falling away into the metropolis of Vranix and the panorama of Thurien stretching off on every side beyond. For an instant Hunt thought he was going to collapse. And then he vanished.
"I regret that the Secretary of State appears to be temporarily indisposed," VISAR informed the assembly.
That was enough to break the spell. At once Caldwell was on his feet, his eyes steely and his mouth clamped in a downturned line. Heller had also started to rise, but she checked herself and sank back into her seat as Caldwell beat her to it by a split second. "This has gone too far," Caldwell grated, fixing his eyes on Calazar. "Save the niceties. We came here in good faith. You owe us an explanation."
Instantly everything changed. The forum, the tower, Vranix, and the overhead canopy of Thurien were gone. Instead they were all indoors in a fairly large but not huge room with a domed ceiling, which contained a wide, circular table of iridescent crystal as a centerpiece. The principal participants were placed around it in the same relative positions as before with Caldwell still standing; the other Ganymeans who had been present earlier were looking on from raised seats behind. Compared to the previous setting this one felt protective and secure.
"We underestimated the impact," Calazar said hastily. "Perhaps this will be closer to what you are used to."
"Never mind the Alice-in-Wonderland effects," Caldwell said. "Okay, you’ve made your point—we’re impressed. But we came here at your request and somebody just flipped out as a consequence. We don’t find it amusing."
"That was not intentional," Calazar replied. "We have already expressed our regrets. Your colleague will be back to normal very soon."
The exchange did not have the connotations that it would have if this confrontation were taking place on Earth, Hunt knew as he listened. Because of their origins Ganymeans simply didn’t seek to intimidate nor did they respond to intimidation. They didn’t think that way. Calazar was simply stating the facts of the matter, no more and no less. The standards and conditioning of human culture did not apply to this situation. Caldwell knew it too, but somebody had to be seen to set the limits.
"So let’s get down to some straight questions and answers," Caldwell said. "You said that our two races have evolved separately until now. That’s not entirely true—the two lines come together a long way back in the past. Since the story you’ve been getting about us seems to have become confused somewhere, it might help clear up a lot of uncertainty and save us some time if I sum up what we already know." Without waiting for a response he went on, "We know that your civilization existed on Minerva until around twenty-five million years ago, that you shipped a lot of terrestrial life there, possibly to attempt a genetic-engineering solution to the environmental problems, and that the Lunarians evolved from ancestors included among them after you left. We also know about the Lunarian war of fifty thousand years ago, about the Moon being captured by Earth, and about ourselves having descended from Lunarian survivors that came with it. Are we talking the same language so far?"
A ripple of murmurings broke out among the Ganymeans. They seemed surprised. Evidently the Terrans knew a lot more than they had expected. That could put an interesting new perspective on things, Hunt thought.
Frenua Showm, the female ambassador of Thurien, who had been introduced at the commencement of the proceedings, replied. "If you already know about the Lunarians, you shouldn’t have any difficulty in finding the answer to one of the questions that you have no doubt been asking," she said. "Earth has been under surveillance because of our concern that it might go the way of its Lunarian ancestors and become a technically advanced, belligerent planet. The Lunarians destroyed themselves before they spilled out of the solar system. Earth might not have. In other words we saw in Earth a potential threat to other parts of the Galaxy, and perhaps, one day, to all of it." Showm gave the impression that she was far from convinced, even now, that it wasn’t so. Definitely not a Terranophile, Hunt decided. The reason did not come as a surprise. With the Ganymeans being the way they were and the Lunarians having been the way they had, it had to be something like that.
"So why all the secrecy?" Heller asked from beside Caldwell. Caldwell sat down to allow her to take it from there. "You claim to represent the Thurien race, yet it’s obvious that you don’t speak for everybody. You don’t want this dialogue brought to the attention of whoever is responsible for the surveillance. So are you what you say you are? If so, why do you need to conceal your actions from your own people?"
"The surveillance is operated by an autonomous . . . shall we say, ‘organization’ within our system," Calazar replied. "We had reason to suspect the accuracy of some of the information being reported. It became necessary for us to verify it . . . . but discreetly, in case we were wrong."
"Suspect the accuracy!" Hunt repeated, spreading his hands in an imploring gesture around the table. "You’re making it sound like just a minor aberration here and there. Christ. . . they didn’t even tell you that the Shapieron had returned and was on Earth at all—your own ship with your own people in it! And the picture you got of Earth wasn’t just inaccurate; it was systematically distorted. So what the hell’s been going on?"
"That is an internal affair of Thurien that we will now be in a position to do something about," Calazar assured him. He seemed a little off balance, perhaps as a result of his having been unprepared for the Terrans knowing as much as Caldwell had revealed.
"It’s not just an internal affair," HeJler insisted. "It concerns our whole planet. We want to know who’s been misrepresenting us, and why."
"We don’t know why," Calazar told her simply. "That’s what we’re trying to find out. The first step was to get our facts straight. My apologies again, but I think we have now achieved that."
Caldwell was scowling. "Maybe you ought to let us talk to this ‘organization’ direct," he rumbled. "We’ll find out why."
"That’s not possible," Calazar said.
"Why?" Heller asked him. "Surely we’ve got a legitimate interest in all this. You’ve carried out your discreet checking of facts now, and you’ve got your answers. If you in fact represent this planet, what’s to stop you acting accordingly?"
"Are you in a position to make such demands?" Showm challenged. "If our interpretation of the situation is correct, you do not constitute an officially representative group of the whole of Earth’s society, either. That function surely belongs rightfully to the United Nations, does it not?"
"We’ve been communicating with them for weeks," Calazar said, taking Showm’s point. "They have done nothing to dispel any wrong impressions of Earth that we may have, and they seem disinclined to meet us. But your transmissions were directed from another part of the solar system entirely, suggesting perhaps that you did not wish our replies to become general knowledge, and therefore that you are equally concerned with preserving secrecy."
"What is the reason for the UN’s curious attitude?" Showm asked, looking from one to another of the Terrans and allowing her eyes to rest finally on Heller.
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," Ecsyan 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 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," Calazar 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 spacetime 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 ship 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!" be 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!"