The procession of black limousines drew slowly to a halt before the military guard of honor and lines of foreign ambassadors standing by the side of the field of Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, a few miles from Washington, D.C. The day was sunny and clear, and the thousands filling the area outside the boundary fence all around were strangely quiet.
Feeling somewhat odd and formal in his black pinstripe three-piece suit, stiffened cuffs and collar, and tightly knotted necktie, Hunt stepped out of the second car back from the one flying the presidential pennant on its hood, and helped Lyn out after him while the chauffeur held the door. Danchekker, similarly attired though nothing seemed to fit exactly as it was supposed to, came next, followed by Caldwell and a group of senior UNSA executives.
Hunt looked around and picked out the perceptron among a line of aircraft parked some distance away in the background. "It’s not really like home, is it," he commented. "There aren’t any windows boarded up, and it needs some snow and a few mountains around."
"I never thought you were sentimental," Lyn said. She looked up. "Blue sky, and lots of green. I’ll stick with this."
"Not a romantic who hankers for old times, I perceive," Danchekker said.
Lyn shook her head. "After the amount of flying that I did back and forth to that place, I don’t care if I never see McClusky again."
"We might be sending you a lot farther than that before very much longer," Caldwell grunted.
The Soviet Premier and his delegation had not yet emerged from the car immediately in front of them, but ahead of that the U.S. President and his entourage were assembling. Karen Heller and Norman Pacey detached themselves from the group and walked back. "Well, get used to it," Paccy said, making a sweeping gesture with his arm. "It’s going to be your new home for a while. I’ve got a feeling this place will get to feel like your own private airport. You people are going to be pretty busy."
"We were just talking about it," Lyn said. "Vic seems to prefer McClusky."
"When will you be moving up to D.C.?" Heller inquired.
"It’ll be a few months yet at least," Caldwell said.
She looked at Danchekker. "The first thing we’ll have to do is have dinner somewhere, Chris. It’ll make up for all those canteen meals in Alaska."
"An admirable suggestion," Danchekker replied. "And one with which I concur fully." Lyn nudged Hunt in the ribs. Hunt looked away and grinned.
Pacey glanced at his watch and looked over his shoulder. Sobroskin was leading the Soviet party from the car ahead. "It’s almost time," he said. "We’d better move on up." They walked forward to join the Soviet contingent, all of whom they had already met individually in the Executive Lounge earlier, and the whole group moved on to join the President and his party at the front of the cavalcade of limousines. Sobroskin moved closer to Pacey as they came to a halt. "The day has arrived, my friend," he said. "The children will see other worlds under other stars."
"And I told you you’d see it happen," Pacey said.
Packard was looking at Pacey curiously. "What did that mean?" he asked.
Pacey smiled. "It’s a long story. I’ll have to tell you about it sometime."
Packard turned his head toward Caldwell. "Well, at least I know what to expect this time, Gregg. You know, I don’t think I’ll ever live that down."
"Don’t worry about it," Caldwell told him. "The rest of us were only a few seconds behind you."
They moved toward the open area of the base and came to a halt again, arranged in orderly rectangular groups with the McClusky team, including Jerol Packard, at the front, the U.S. and Soviet leaders alongside each other behind them with Pacey and Sobroskin standing ahead of their respective national delegations, and the UNSA and other groups from the remaining cars arrayed at the back. Every head was turned upward, waiting. And suddenly, sensed rather than heard, a wave of excitement rippled across the entire base and through the crowds packed outside.
The ship was already visible as a faint dot enlarging in the flawless blue above. As it grew larger, it took on a brilliant silvery sheen that glinted with reflected highlights in the sun, and resolved into a slender wedge with gracefully curved leading edges flaring to merge into two needle-pointed nacelles at the tips. And still it was getting larger.
Hunt’s mouth dropped open as the raised bulges along its hull, ancillary housings swelling from its underside, fairings, pods, busterdomes, and turrets gradually revealed themselves in a steadily unfolding hierarchy of detail to give the first real hint of the craft’s awesome size. Gasps of wonder were coming from either side of him and behind, and the crowd outside seemed paralyzed. It must have been miles in length. . . tens of miles; there was no way of telling. It expanded above their heads to fill half the sky like some huge, mythical bird that seemed to be hanging over the entire state of Maryland. And still it might have been in the stratosphere, or even beyond that.
He had seen the Thurien power generators and been told they were thousands of miles across, but that had been out in empty space where there were no references. His senses had been spared the impact of direct confrontation, leaving only his imagination to grapple with what the numbers had meant. This was different. He was standing on Earth, surrounded by trees, buildings, and everything else that made up the world of the familiar and the unquestioned, in which intrusions like this were forbidden. Even the distance from one horizon to another, which he sensed unconsciously although it was not visible directly, set a perspective that defined the permissible, imposed rules, and forced limits. The Thurien spaceship had no place in that scheme. It belonged to a different order of magnitude, breaking every known rule and making nonsense of the usual limits. He felt like an insect that had just grasped the meaning of the toenail in front of it, or a microbe that had glimpsed an ocean. His mind had no model to accommodate it. His senses rebelled from taking in the totality of what he was seeing. His brain fought to reconcile it with something that was manageable within a lifetime’s stored experiences, couldn’t, and gave up.
At last a light moving across his field of view against the underside of the ship broke the hypnotic trance that had taken hold of him. The figures that had been frozen into immobility around him began stirring as they saw it too. Something was coming down, and was already much nearer than the ship; it had to have been descending for some time, and had only just become visible. It moved swiftly and silently on a direct line toward the center of the base and turned into a flattened, highly elongated ellipsoid of pure gold, completely smooth except for two low, sharply swept fins projecting from its upper surface. It landed without a sound a short distance away, its nose pointing to where Hunt and the others were standing. For perhaps ten seconds not a sound or a movement disturbed the total stillness that had enveloped the base.
And then the forward section of the underside hinged slowly downward to form a broad, shallow ramp leading down to the ground. The point where the ramp entered the body was lost in a glow of brilliant yellow light. Lyn’s fingers found Hunt’s and squeezed as the first eight-foot-tall shapes appeared a dozen or so abreast out of the light and began moving down the ramp. At the bottom of the ramp, they halted to survey the waiting lines of Terrans.
In the center was Calazar, easily recognizable even without his familiar short silver cape and green tunic, and on one side of him were Frenua Showm, Porthik Eesyan, and Eesyan’s deputy, Morizal. Garuth was at Calazar’s other side, with Shilohin, Monchar, and other Ganymeans from the Shapieron whose light gray skins set them apart as a group from the darker, less heavily built Thuriens. The team that had gone to McClusky had been waiting a long time for this moment. For the first time since the perceptron’s landing and their first hesitant entry into it, they were not seeing the Thuriens via neural stimulations transmitted from light-years away. This time the Thuriens were real.
Massed bands had begun playing in the background. The crowd, still overwhelmed by the spectacle filling the sky above their heads, was quiet. Then with orderly, unhurried dignity the Ganymeans started moving again, and Caldwell stepped forward to lead the McClusky team to meet them at the halfway point.
"It was a bit scary at times, but I think Earth has made it," Lyn whispered as they began moving.
"You’re making it sound as if it’s all over," Hunt murmured beside her. "This is just the start of it."
And it was. For the Ganymeans, it was the end of a task they had been working on for millennia; for the inhabitants of Jevlen, it was a change of heart and direction; and for VISAR, it was a new phase of existence.
But for Homo sapiens, it was a whole new beginning.
The heirs to the stars were about to claim their inheritance.