"I don’t understand this," Calazar said as he stared out from one of the Thurien vessels floating near Uttan. "Those are full-scale quadriflexors, exactly as we designed them. The Jevlenese have been building hundreds of them."
"I don’t know," Showm replied, shaking her head beside him. "It makes no sense."
Heller, Caldwell, and Danchekker looked at each other. "What’s a quadriflexor?" Caldwell asked.
Calazar sighed. There was no point in being evasive. "They are the devices with which we were going to enclose the solar system," he said. "They were to be positioned at a considerable distance outside Pluto at points defining a quasi-spherical surface around the system. Every quadriflexor would couple through h-fields to the four adjacent to it in the grid, and collectively they would create a cumulative deformation of spacetime at that boundary which would equate to an escape-proof gravitic gradient.
"We performed preproduction testing on some scaled-down prototypes, and we did in fact begin building some of the full-size versions, but we are still a long way from being in a position to implement the final plan." Calazar waved at the view outside the ship. "But the Jevlenese have obviously been copying our designs in secret, and their program was far more advanced. I can’t understand why."
Danchekker was blinking behind his spectacles and frowning to himself while he wrestled with the riddle. Somehow he had the feeling that the last layer of the enigmatic onion that seemed to surround everything connected with the Jevlenese was about to be peeled away. By at first exaggerating Earth’s aggressiveness and later manufacturing false evidence, the Jevlenese had persuaded the Ganymeans that Terran expansion had to be checked, and nothing short of physical containment would check it. The Ganymeans had, until very recently, been convinced, and had set the necessary preparations in motion accordingly. But the Jevlenese had embarked on an identical venture and concealed the fact from the Ganymeans. Why? What did it mean?
Danchekker looked over at the images that VISAR was presenting of the Command Deck of the Shapieron and Sverenssen’s office in Connecticut, but there were no suggestions forthcoming from those directions. The Ganymeans in the Shapieron were preoccupied with something that was happening on the main screen inside the ship, while in the other view he could see only the backs of Hunt and the others as they crowded around the terminal on the other side of the room, which connected them to the Shapieron. A lot of excited talking was going on in both places, but what it was about was obscure.
"Could they have been planning to do the same thing themselves?" Karen Heller said at last.
"For what reason?" Calazar asked. "We were already working on it. What could they have stood to gain?"
"Time?" Caldwell offered.
Calazar shook his head. "If time was so critical to them, they could have persuaded us to accelerate our own program with a fraction of the effort that they must have put into this. Certainly we have the resources to have been able to beat any schedule they could have been aiming at."
Frenua Showm was looking thoughtful. "And yet it’s strange," she mused. "On several occasions when we wanted to speed up our program, the Jevlenese actually seemed to play down the risks of Terran expansion. It was as if they were trying to keep our research moving, but weren’t in a hurry to see us move into production."
"They were milking off the know-how," Caldwell grunted. "Making sure that their program stayed well ahead of yours." He paused for a few seconds, then asked, "Could those things be used for shutting in anything else apart from a star system?"
"Hardly," Calazar replied, then added, "Well, I suppose they could be used to close in anything of comparable size . . . or something smaller, come to that."
"Mmm. . ." Caldwell lapsed back into thought.
Heller shrugged and turned up her hands. "If they weren’t going to enclose the solar system, they must have been planning to enclose some other . . ." Her voice trailed away as the answer suddenly became plain, to her and to everybody else at the same time.
Calazar and Showm stared speechlessly at each other for a few seconds. "Us?" Calazar managed at last in a strained voice. "The Thuriens? They were going to shut in Gistar?" Showm brought her hand up to her brow and shook her head as she struggled to take in the implication of it. Caldwell and Heller were standing dumbstruck.
The whole thing slowly became clear in Danchekker’s mind. "Yes!" he exclaimed. He moved forward to the center of the group and stood for a moment checking his thoughts, then began nodding his head vigorously. "Yes!" he said again. "Surely it’s the only acceptable explanation." He looked excitedly from one to another of the others as if he expected them to agree with something there and then. They stared back at him blankly. Nobody knew what he was talking about. He waited for a moment and then elaborated. "I have never been able to accept fully that the obsessive Lambian-Cerian rivalry could have persisted in the minds of the Jevlenese for all that time, especially with their exposure to Ganymean influence. Did it never strike you as strange? Didn’t any of you ever feel that there had to be something more behind it than just that?" He looked at the others questioningly again.
After a few seconds Caldwell said, "I guess not, Chris. Why? What are you getting at?"
Danchekker moistened his lips. "It’s an interesting thought, wouldn’t you agree, that there was one entity that was always there at the back of things, permanent and unchanging while generations of Jevlenese came and went."
There was a moment of silence. Then Heller stared at him and gasped. "JEVEX? Are you saying the computer was behind the whole thing?"
Danchekker nodded rapidly. "JEVEX was established a long time ago. Is it completely inconceivable that its basic design and programming couldn’t somehow have embodied as some kind of innate driving instinct the ruthlessness and ambitions of its creators—the descendants of the original Lambians? And to realize those ambitions, could it not have harnessed the Jevlenese elite as its instruments? But if that were so, it would have found itself confronted by a serious obstacle in the form of the restraints imposed on it by the Thuriens."
Caldwell was beginning to nod. "It would have had to get the Thuriens out of the way somehow," he agreed.
"Precisely," Danchekker said. "But not too quickly. There was a lot that it wanted to learn from them first. And the really cunning part was that at the end of it all, the Thuriens’ own ingenuity and technology would provide the means whereby the Jevlenese would get rid of them. Then, armed with stolen Ganymean science and with JEVEX as their leader, the Jevlenese would have had the Galaxy at their mercy. Think of all those developing worlds, and a technology that could cross light-years in moments. They would become the masters of every part of explored space, poised to expand their empire without limit, and the only potential opposition would be safely locked up inside a gravitic shell that nothing could get out of." Danchekker gripped his lapels and turned from side to side to take in the astounded expressions around him. "So now at last we see what was behind it all—the ultimate design that they had been working on, probably ever since Minerva. And how near they came to succeeding!"
"So the weapons at Uttan . . ." Calazar said falteringly, still struggling to grasp the enormity of it all. "They were never intended to be used against Thurien at all?"
"I doubt it," Danchekker said. "I suspect that they were for afterward, to add teeth to their expansion when the time came."
"Yes, and guess who’d have been first on the list," Heller said. "They were Lambians, and we were Cerians."
"Of course!" Showm whispered. "Earth would have been defenseless. That was why they concealed your demilitarization from us." She nodded slowly in grudging admiration. "It was neatly worked out. First they work to retard Earth’s advancement while they grow strong and learn. Then they accelerate Earth’s rate of discovery suddenly, engineer the results into a threat which they enlist Ganymean aid to eliminate. And finally they remove the threat to themselves but conceal the fact from the Ganymeans, and use the very technique that they have induced the Ganymeans to develop as the means of eliminating the Ganymeans instead. That would have left them in a position to settle the old score with the Cerians without interference, and with the odds overwhelmingly in their favor."
"We wouldn’t have stood a chance," Caldwell breathed, for once genuinely staggered.
"And the Jevlenese would have repossessed the solar system, which I suspect has always been their first goal," Danchekker said. "I would imagine they have always considered it rightly theirs. And they would no longer have had to play second fiddle to the Ganymeans, a position they clearly have never been able to come to terms with gracefully."
"It all makes sense," Calazar said in a resigned voice. "Why they were so insistent about administering their own, autonomous group of worlds . . . why they needed a system independent of VISAR, controlling its own volume of space." He looked at Showm and nodded. "A lot of things are beginning to make sense now."
He fell silent for a few seconds. When he spoke again his voice was lighter. "If all this is true, then our problem of what to do next could be eased considerably. If the roots of it all lay not so much in the Jevlenese people but in JEVEX, then maybe there is hope for them after all. Distasteful punitive measures may not be necessary."
A distant look came into Showm’s eyes. "Ye-es," she said slowly, and began nodding. "Perhaps, given the right help, they might rebuild their civilization upon a new model and emerge from it all as a mature and benign race. All may not be lost yet."
"It does give us a positive goal to aim at and a task to accomplish," Calazar said, sounding more enthusiastic. "Despite all the setbacks, things might work out to a successful conclusion. As you say, all is not lost."
"Er, at present this is merely a hypothesis, you understand," Danchekker said hastily. "But there might be a way to test it. If the whole thing did in fact begin with JEVEX, it might be possible to trace the origins of some of the things we’ve been talking about back to conceptual subnets of some form buried in JEVEX’s older archives." He looked at Calazar. "I assume that once your people are fully in control of Jevlen, it would be possible to reactivate parts of JEVEX in a controlled fashion and allow VISAR to examine its records thoroughly."
Calazar was already nodding. "I would have thought so. Eesyan is really the person we should talk to about that." He looked across at the view coming from the Command Deck of the Shapieron. "Isn’t he free yet? What’s happening there?"
Consternation was breaking out among the Ganymeans crowded below the main screen in the image. At the same time a chorus of shouts erupted from the other image, showing the view from Earth, in which Hunt and the others were bumping into each other in their haste to get back across the room to the terminal that connected them to the Thurien ship at Uttan. Danchekker, Calazar, and the others with them forgot their conversation of a few moments earlier and stared in astonishment. Hunt was almost incoherent with excitement as he got to the screen. "We’ve found them! ZORAC reprocessed the planet. We know where they went. It’s impossible!"
Danchekker blinked at him. "Vic, what are you babbling about? Kindly calm down, and simply say whatever it is that you’re trying to say."
Hunt recomposed himself with some effort. "The five Jevlenese ships. We know what happened to them." He paused for a second to get his breath back, then turned his head away to call over the people behind him to the terminal connecting them to the Shapieron. "ZORAC, pass that shot over to VISAR, would you? Tell VISAR to display it at Uttan." In the ship where Danchekker was, an image appeared of the final shot of the Jevlenese vessels sent back by the Shapieron’s probe just before the tunnel caved in. "Have you got it?" Hunt asked.
Danchekker nodded. "Yes. What about it?"
"The spot in the upper right-hand corner is a planet," Hunt said. "We asked ZORAC if there was any way it could reprocess that part of the image and enhance it to give us a better look at it. It did. We know what planet it is."
"Well?" Danchekker asked, puzzled, after a second or two. "Where is it?"
"A better question would be when?" Hunt told him.
Danchekker frowned and looked around him only to be met by expressions as confused as his own. "Vic, what are you talking about?" he asked.
"VISAR, show them," Hunt said in reply.
The speck enlarged in an instant to become a full disk occupying the whole frame. It was a world shining brightly against the stars with cloud formations and oceans. The resolution was not good, but there were continental outlines discernible on its surface. Calazar and Showm froze. A split second later, Danchekker realized why.
What he was looking at was not unfamiliar. Like Hunt, he had studied every island, isthmus, estuary, and coastline sandwiched between the two enormous ice caps of that planet many times—at Houston, in the course of the Lunarian investigations over two years earlier. He looked away. Calazar and Showm were still staring in silent awe, and now Caldwell too was wide-eyed with disbelief. Danchekker slowly turned his head to follow their gaze once again. It was still there. He hadn’t imagined it.
The planet was Minerva.