Broghuilio turned to appeal to the rest of the room. “You all heard it. What did that idiot machine say? Were those views live or were they not?” Nobody was listening. One of the aides was rushing back and forth and jabbering incoherently, another was clutching at his face and moaning, while among the rest consternation was breaking out on every side.
“They couldn’t be from two days ago.”
“How do you know? How do you know what’s happening and what isn’t? How do you know anything?”
“JEVEX said so.”
“It said the opposite too.”
“Maybe JEVEX is mad.”
“But JEVEX said-”
“JEVEX doesn’t know what it’s saying. We can’t trust anything.”
“The Terrans are coming! They’re only hours away!”
On one side of the room the scientist, Estordu, quietly vanished. In the confusion, nobody noticed.
Broghuilio was waving his arms and shouting above the clamor. “Twelve hours! Twelve hours! And you tell me you have no weapons! They’ll be coming straight in for the kill because they don’t know what opposition to expect. . . . AND WE HAVE NO OPPOSITION TO OFFER! A shipful of children could walk in and take us over, and the Terrans don’t even know it. And what do I have to stop them? Imbecile generals, imbecile scientists, and an imbecile computer!”
Wylott shouldered his way through to where Broghuilio was standing. “There is no choice,” he insisted. “You have to accept Verikoff’s terms. At least that way there will come another day.” Broghuilio turned his head and glowered, but the inevitability of what Wylott had said was written in his eyes. But still he could not bring himself to give the order. Wylott waited for a few seconds, then z~aised his head to call above the commotion still going on around them. “.mv~x. Call Earth via your own channel to Sverenssen. Get Verikoff on the line.”
“At once, General,” JEVEX acknowledged.
In the communications room in Connecticut, Hunt turned his head toward Verikoff, who was watching from the doorway. “You’d better come on in. It looks as if you’ll be on again in a few seconds to accept the surrender. It’s just about all over.” Verikoff moved to the center of the room while the others fell back to clear a small circle around him. On the screen showing the Jevienese War Room, Wylott and Broghuilio had turned to look directly out at the room and were waiting expectantly for JEVEX to make the connection. Verikoff folded his arms and assumed a domineering posture in readiness.
And suddenly the screen went blank.
Puzzled looks appeared all around the room. “VISAR?” Hunt
said after a few seconds. “VISAR, what’s happened?” There was no reply. The screens that had been connecting them to Thurien and the Shapieron had gone blank as well.
Verikoff moved quickly over to a bank of equipment on one side of the room and ran rapidly through a sequence of tests. “It’s dead,” he announced, looking up at the others. “The whole system is dead. We don’t have any channels to anywhere, and I can’t open any. Something has cut us off from JEVEX completely.”
In the Government Center at Thurios, Caldwell was equally bewildered. “VISAR, what’s happened?” he demanded. “Where did the views from Earth and Jevlen go? Have you lost them or something?”
A few seconds went by, then VISAR answered. “It’s worse than that. I haven’t only lost Connecticut and the War Room, I’ve lost everything from JEVEX. I don’t have anything into it at all. The whole system has switched off.”
“Don’t you know anything that’s happening at Jevien at all?” Morizal asked, aghast.
“Nothing,” VISAR said. “The only channel I’ve got to anywhere in the whole of the JEVEX-controlled world-system is the one through to the Shapieron. JEVEX seems to be dead. The whole system has just gone down.”
Broghufflo found himself reclining in his private quarters deep underground in the complex that housed the Directorate of Strategic Planning. He sat up sharply, unsure of what had happened. A moment before he had been in the War Room with Wylott, waiting for a connection to Verikoff. Even as he remembered, he saw again is his mind’s eye the armada from Earth, at that moment sweeping inward toward Jevlen. He looked around wildly.