“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 Jevienese. 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?”