he decided. He would have let it be, allowing it to seek out and evolve its own solutions at its own pace. Those were always the kinds of changes that endured, he had found. The worthwhile changes.
“And I still have the feeling that we were getting so close,” he said aloud.
Afterward, Hunt stopped by Gina’s suite to give her the news and to see how things were going.
“And when you go through it, Gregg could be right,” he told her. “Eubeleus may have nothing to do with it. We can’t make any case to JPC. Any junior lawyer with his name still wet on the door could make mincemeat out of it.”
Gina shook her head. “Surely there has to be some way to get further.”
“Probably true, but hardly constructive.”
“What about that office of Baumer’s, the one I went to? Mightn’t that turn up something?” she asked, reaching for a straw.
“It was broken into and ransacked. Whoever did it made a bonfire. There wasn’t enough paper left to write your name on. Now, wasn’t that convenient for somebody?” Hunt stretched back in his chair. “I don’t know, Gina. Why do people insist on complicating life like this? You’d think they’d learn to just enjoy the pleasant side of it, wouldn’t you? It’s short enough. . . Thinking about it, I might even go and join this monastery of Eubeleus’s. Now, wouldn’t that qualify as a genuine miracle?” He grinned tiredly across the room at her. “Anyway, how are you feeling? I never even thought to ask.”
“Oh, a bit like having a tooth out. It feels strange at first, but you get used to it. Pretty much the way you said.”
“That’s good to know, anyhow. Did you talk to Sandy?”
“Yes. She’s glad it worked out.”
ZORAC came through at that moment with a call for Hunt from Duncan Watt, who was at another JEVEX site with the Ganymean engineers. Further findings had corroborated the nonsensical conclusion of the first: not only was JEVEX evidently far smaller than the original design information said; if what the Ganymeans were discovering was typical, it was virtually nonexistent.
“Another one,” Watt announced.
Hunt was baffled. “Another fake?”
“Worse. I wanted you to see this one for yourself.”
“Where are you?”
“Traganon, city about three hundred miles north.”
“So, what have you found?” Hunt asked.
“Well, you know what we found at the other sites: usually some interfacing and i-space transmission gear that was real enough, and then streets of impressive-looking cubes and beamguides all doing nothing. But take a look at what we’ve got here. It beats the rest for sheer audacity.”
Watt stepped to one side to reveal the scene behind him. He had been standing in front of a wide window. It looked like that of a control room, facing out over a vast floor, dark in shadows. The floor was bare and dusty: just an empty expanse of untiled concrete, stretching away between lines of square, unadorned pillars into shadows cast by a few, weak, overhead lamps.
For a moment Hunt wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be looking at. “That’s it?”
“That’s it. Nothing. They didn’t even bother faking this one. Rodgar thinks it could have been like this for centuries.”
The camera moved, sliding Watt out of the frame completely and showing more derelict galleries. There were oddments of trash and debris scattered in places, and here and there a length of cable hanging from a roof support. Small animals were scurrying in the shadows. Hunt wondered if there had once been equipment installed there that had been moved elsewhere for some reason.
It seemed larger than most of the other vaults that Duncan had checked. Hunt tried to visualize it as the Thurien designers had intended: packed with tiers of crystalline slab stacked to the roof and serviced by access elevators and walkways—Hunt had “visited” some of the halls on Thurien where VISAR’s bulk-processing centers were located. The contrast between the desolation of the view on the screen and the image in Hunt’s mind took on an odd significance that he couldn’t quite pin down. He stared at the screen with a strange mixture of somberness and reverie.