his fists down to the sides of his head, held the pose for several seconds, and
then looked at Connel with a strange, distant light in his eyes. “I have not the
names that astronomers use, but I see us traveling over a great distance to a
place that is not Mars . . . much farther from Earth than Mars.”
“Where?” Connel gasped. “What’s it like?”
“A child of the haloed giant who shepherds a flock of seventeen,” Zambendorf
pronounced in ringing tones. “I know not where I am … but it is cold and dark
below the unbroken clouds of red and brown that float upon air that is not air.
There are mountains made of ice, and vast wildernesses. And . . .” His voice
trailed away. His jaw dropped, and his eyes opened wider.
“What?” Connel whispered, awed.
“Living beings! . . . They are not human, but neither are they from any part of
Earth. They have minds! I am feeling out to them even now, and . . .”
“Get him off,” General Vantz snapped on the far side of the Control Deck.
“Kill it! Get him off.” the Communications Director ordered. An engineer nipped
a switch on his console. Voices were jabbering excitedly on every side.
“I don’t care! Tell them anything,” Herman Thoring yelled over an auxiliary
channel to the Production Director in the GCN studio back in New York. “Say
we’ve got a technical hitch. No, I don’t know what it’s about either, but we’ve
got all hell loose up here.”
Back in Globe II, Vernon Price was staring dumbstruck at the cabin wallscreen,
which had just switched back to a view of Earth. “Well?” Malcom Wade challenged
smugly as he puffed his pipe on the bunk opposite. “So he’s a fake, is he? How
do you explain that, then, eh?”
In his home in a Washington suburb, Walter Conlon pounded the table by his chair
furiously with a fist. “He can’t get away with it! He can’t! Massey had him, for
chrissakes—he had him cold!”
“Warren Taylor is on the line for you,” his wife, Martha, said.
Conlon got up and stamped over to the comnet terminal across the room. The face
of the NASO, North American Division Director was purple with anger. “What
happened?” he demanded. “I thought you were supposed to have an expert up there
who could handle that turkey.”
In the study of his mansion in Delaware, Burton Ramelson was staring at a screen
showing the stunned face of Gregory Buhl, who had just been put through from
GSEC’s head office. “My God!” Ramelson exclaimed incredulously. “Do you think we
might have been wrong about this whole thing? Could there really be something to
Zambendorf after all?”
In the Mission Director’s executive offices in Globe I of the Orion, Caspar Lang
was shaking his head at a grim-faced Daniel Leaherney. “Of course it’s not
genuine,” Lang insisted. “We underestimated Zambendorf and his people. We took
them for simple tricksters, but they’re obviously far more sophisticated. It was
a clever piece of espionage— nothing more, and nothing less.”
“We’ll have to tell the mission,” Leaherney said. “It doesn’t matter how
Zambendorf did it—the result’s still the same. We’ll have to tell everyone on
the ship the real story now.”
“But we would have had to tell them before much longer anyway,” Lang reminded
him. “At least we’re on our way, which is the main thing. It’s a pity that the
Soviets will find out now, instead of later when the Orion fails to show up at
Mars, I know; but you have to agree, Dan, that with the number of people who’ve
been involved, security has been a hell of a lot better than we dared hope.”
Leaherney frowned for a while, but eventually nodded with a heavy sigh. “I guess
you’re right. Okay, put a clamp on all unofficial communications to Earth,
effective immediately, and announce that I’ll be addressing all personnel within
a few hours. And get that psychic over here right away, would you. I reckon it’s
about time he and I had a little talk.”
In Moscow an official from the Soviet Foreign Ministry, who was aware that the