Night surrounded the Soviet military jet skimming northward over the ice between Franz Josef Land and the Pole. The clash that had occurred inside the Kremlin and throughout the ruling hierarchy of the Soviet Union was still far from resolved, and the loyalties of the nation’s forces were divided; the flight was therefore being made secretly to minimize risks. While Verikoff sat rigidly between two armed guards at the back of the darkened cabin and the half-dozen other officers dozed or talked in lowered voices in the seats around him, Mikolai Sobroskin stared out at the blackness through the window beside him and thought about the astounding events of the past forty-eight hours.
The aliens didn’t stand up very well under interrogation, he had discovered. At least, the alien Verikoff hadn’t. For that was what Verikoff was—a member of a network of agents from the fully human contingent of Thurien that ran the surveillance operation, and who had been infiltrating Earth’s society all through history. Niels Sverenssen was another. The demilitarization of Earth had been engineered in preparation for their emergence as a ruling elite to be established by the Jevlenese, with Sverenssen as planetary overlord. Earth would eventually be deindustrialized to provide a playground for the aristocracy of Jevlen and extensive rural estates as rewards for its more faithful servants. How a planet reduced to this condition would support the portion of its population not required for labor and services had not been explained.
Once this much had been established, the value of Verikoff’s skin had fallen markedly. To save it he had offered to cooperate, and to prove his credibility he had divulged details of the cornmunications link between Jevlen and its operation on Earth, located at Sverenssen’s home in Connecticut and installed by Jevlenese technicians employed by a U.S. construction company set up as a front for some of the Jevlenese’s other activities. Through this link Sverenssen had been able to report details of the Thurien attempt to talk to Earth secretly via Farside and had received his instructions for controlling the Earth end of the dialogue. Sobroskin had detected no hint that Verikoff knew anything about the U.S. channel that Norman Pacey had mentioned. Despite the elaborate Jevlenese information-gathering system, therefore, Sobroskin had concluded that at least that secret had been kept safe.
Sobroskin had decided that the first step toward breaking up the network would have to be the severing of the link through Connecticut while its discovery was still unknown, and the Jevlenese were therefore off guard and vulnerable. Obviously that could only be accomplished with the help of somebody in Washington, and since nobody, not even Verikoff, knew the full extent of the network or who might be among its members, that had meant Norman Pacey. Sobroskin had called "Ivan" at the Soviet embassy and, using a prearranged system of innocuous-sounding phrases, conveyed a message for relaying to Pacey. A call from the U.S. State Department to an office in Moscow eight hours later, stating that hotel reservations had been made for a group of visiting Russian diplomats, confirmed that the message had been received and understood.
"Five minutes to touchdown," the pilot’s voice sounded from an intercom in the darkness overhead. A low light came on in the cabin, and Sobroskin and the other officers began collecting the cigarette packages, papers, and other items strewn around them, then put on heavy arctic coats in preparation for the cold outside.
Minutes later the plane descended slowly out of the night and settled in the center of a dim pool of light that marked the landing area of an American scientific research base and arctic weather station. A U.S. Air Force transport stood in the shadows to one side with its engines running and a small group of heavily muffled figures huddled in front of it. The door forward of the cabin swung open, and a set of steps telescoped downward. Sobroskin and his party descended and walked quickly across the ice with Verikoff and the two officers escorting him making up the middle of the group. They halted briefly in front of the waiting Americans.
"You see, it wasn’t such a long time, after all," Norman Pacey said to Sobroskin as they shook hands through the thick gloves they were wearing.
"We have much to talk about," Sobroskin said. "This whole thing goes further than your wildest imaginings."
"We’ll see," Pacey replied, grinning. "We haven’t exactly been standing still, either. You may have some surprises coming too."
The group began boarding while behind them the engine note of the Soviet jet rose, and the plane disappeared back into the night. Thirty seconds later the American transport lifted off, its nose swinging northward onto the course that would take it over the Pole and down across eastern Canada to Washington, D.C.
It was late evening at McClusky. The base was quiet. A short distance from the line of parked aircraft brooding silently in the subdued orange glow cast by lamps spaced at intervals along the perimeter fence, Hunt, Lyn, and Danchekker were staring in the direction of the constellation Taurus.
They had argued, inveigled, and protested that the business was as much Earth’s as anybody’s, and that if Garuth and Eesyan were risking themselves, honor and justice demanded that Earthpeople should also be there to share whatever consequences were in store, but to no avail; Calazar had been adamant that the perceptron could not be moved. They had not dared call in higher authority in the form of the UN or the U.S. Government to back their case because there was no way of knowing who might be working for the Jevlenese. Therefore they could do nothing but resign themselves to hoping and waiting.
"It’s crazy," Lyn said after a while. "They’ve never fought a war in their history, and now they’re going in on a commando raid to try and take out a whole planet. I never knew Ganymeans were like that. Do you think Garuth has flipped out or something?"
"He just wants to fly his ship one more time," Hunt murmured and snorted humorlessly. "You’d think that after twenty-five million years of it he’d have had enough." The thought had also crossed Hunt’s mind that perhaps Garuth had decided to go down with it like the proverbial captain. He didn’t say so.
"A noble gesture, nevertheless," Danchekker said. He shook his head with a sigh. "But I feel uneasy. I don’t see why the perceptron had to remain here. That sounded like an excuse. Even if we could not have contributed anything technically, we could still contribute something else which I fear Garuth and his friends might well find themselves in need of if they encounter difficulties."
"How do you mean?" Lyn asked.
"I’d have thought it was obvious," Danchekker answered. "We have seen already how differently Ganymean and human minds function. The Jevlenese may possess some talent for intrigue and deception, but they are not the masters of the art that they appear to imagine. It requires a human insight, however, to recognize and exploit their blunders."
"They’ve only had Ganymeans to deal with," Hunt said. "We’ve had a few thousand years of practice handling one another."
"My point entirely."
A short period of silence elapsed, then Lyn said absently, "You know what I’d like to see? If those Jevlenese guys think they’re so smart, I’d like to see them come up against some real professionals and find out what deception is all about. And with VISAR on our side, we ought to have the right equipment to do it with, too."
Hunt looked at her and frowned. "What are you talking about?"
"I’m not sure really." She thought for a moment and shrugged. "I was just thinking that with JEVEX faking all that information for years and feeding it to the Thuriens, it would be kind of nice if we did something like that to them. . . . just for the hell of it."
"Did something such as what?" Hunt asked, still puzzled.
Lyn looked back up at the night sky with a distant expression. "Well, imagine this as a for-instance. JEVEX must have all those stories about weapons and bombs and things that it’s been inventing stored away someplace in its records, right? And someplace else in its records, it must have all the genuine information about Earth that it’s collected through its surveillance system—in other words, all the stuff about Earth that it knows is true. But how does it know which is which? How does it know which records are real and which are phony?"
"I don’t know." Hunt shrugged and reflected for a second. "I suppose it’d have to tag them with some kind of header-label system."
"That’s what I thought," Lyn said, nodding. "Now suppose VISAR did manage to get inside JEVEX, and it scrambled those labels around so that JEVEX couldn’t tell the difference anymore. It could make JEVEX really believe all those stories were true. Imagine what would happen if it started saying things like that. Braghuilio and his bunch would go bananas. See what I mean—it’d be nice to watch."
"What a delightful thought," Danchekker murmured, intrigued. An evil smile crept across his face as he pictured it. "How unfortunate that we never mentioned it to Calazar. War or not, the Ganymeans would have been unable to resist it."
Hunt was smiling distantly too as he thought about it. The idea could be taken a lot further than Lyn had suggested. If VISAR got into JEVEX’s memory system sufficiently to change the labels, it would only be a short step from there for it to add in some extra fiction of its own devising. For example, if it could gain access to the part of JEVEX that handled the incoming surveillance data from Earth, VISAR could probably make JEVEX think anything it wanted about what was happening on Earth—such as a whole armada being readied to blow Jevlen out of the Galaxy. As Danchekker had said, a delightful thought.
"You could fake an agreement with Thurien to use their toroids to transport a strike force to Jevlen," Hunt said. "That way you could have JEVEX saying it would arrive in days. And if you’d already scrambled its records from way back, that would be fully consistent with what it would think it had been reporting for years. The Jevlenese would know it hadn’t . . . . but then if they’ve never questioned it all their lives, maybe they wouldn’t know what to think. What do you think Broghuilio would make of that?"
"He’d have a heart attack," Lyn said. "What do you think, Chris?"
Danchekker turned serious all of a sudden. "I have no idea," he replied. "But this is an example of precisely the kind of thing I was referring to. The idea of finding ways to bewilder a foe is something that comes naturally to humans but not to Ganymeans. They are going to attempt the straightforward approach of simply crashing JEVEX—direct, logical, and without any thought of deviousness. But suppose that the Jevlenese have prepared themselves by providing backup systems capable of operating autonomously even without JEVEX. If so, the Shapieron could still find itself exposed to considerable dangers when it reveals itself by bringing down JEVEX, assuming it succeeds. I trust you see my point." Danchekker directed a solemn stare at the other two, then continued: "But on the other hand, if their plan had been to control JEVEX rather than disable it, and to disorient the Jevlenese by subterfuge of the kind you have been describing, then perhaps all manner of opportunities to exploit and exacerbate the resulting situation further might have presented themselves, which as things stand will never be created." He looked up at the sky again and shook his head sadly. "I can’t for a moment imagine our Ganymean friends adopting such a tactic, I’m afraid."
The amusement of a few minutes earlier had drained from Hunt’s face as he listened. He had tried, Caldwell had tried, and Heller had tried, but still he couldn’t escape the lingering discomfort that perhaps they could have tried harder still. Now that Danchekker had voiced them, he recognized the same thoughts that he had been suppressing. "We should have gone with them," he said in a heavy voice. "We should have made Gregg bully them into it."
"I doubt that it would have made any difference," Danchekker said. "Couldn’t you see that Garuth had a personal score to settle with Broghuilio? He didn’t want anybody else involved as a matter of principle. Calazar knew it too. Nothing we could have said would have made any difference."
"I guess you’re right." Hunt sighed. He looked toward Taurus again, stared at it for a while, then suddenly snapped out of his reverie and looked from side to side at the others. "It’s getting cold," he said. "Let’s go inside and get some coffee."
They turned and began walking slowly back across the apron toward the mess hall.
Many light-years away, the Shapieron slipped quietly out of orbit above Thurien. For a little over a day VISAR tracked it to beyond the Gistar system and monitored its transfer through h-space to a point just outside JEVEX’s zone of control on the fringe of the Jevlenese star system. The power and control beams to the two unmanned decoy ships sent with it were promptly jammed, and while they drifted helplessly on the edge of JEVEX-space, the Shapieron continued moving inward and vanished from the view of VISAR’s instruments into the cloak of impenetrabifity that surrounded the enemy star.