Garuth was tense and apprehensive as he stood in the center of the Command Deck taking in the reports. VISAR had not crashed JEVEX, so the culprit had to have been the Jevlenese themselves. Somehow they had discovered they were the unwitting objects of surveillance through JEVEX, and had shut down the system to blind VISM( to what they were doing. In other words they were up to something, and there was no way of knowing what. Garuth didn’t like it.
The other thing that was bothering him at a deeper level was the feeling that he had failed. Despite the reassurances of Eesyan, Shilohin, Monchar, and the others that his bringing the Shapieron to Jevlen had saved Thurien, Garuth was acutely conscious of how near to disaster he had brought them, and that only the fast action of Hunt and the others on Earth had saved things. He had risked his crew and Eesyan’s scientists irresponsibly, and others had bailed him out. Yes, the threat to Thurien had been removed; but Garuth didn’t feel he deserved very much credit for that. He
would have liked to have contributed more and the congratulations that had poured through from Thurien had only added to his discomfort.
On a smaller screen to one side, Hunt was talking over his shoulder to the others who were crowded into the room in the Connecticut house that had been the headquarters of the Jevienese operation to infiltrate Earth. “Can you imagine the problems we might have created for lots of people on this planet in years to come?”
“What do you mean?” the voice of Norman Pacey, the American government representative, asked from somewhere in the background.
Hunt half turned to wave at the screen in front of him. “One day people might be sending their kids to college on Thurien. Suppose the kids figure out this stunt for themselves and start calling home collect.”
After JEVEX had gone off the air and shut down the communications facility, the group in Connecticut had reestablished contact by the simple expedient of telephoning the control room at McClusky and linking back into VISAR via the databeam to the perceptron. They had called on two lines from the datagrid terminals in Sverenssen’s office, next door to the communications room, and had one screen to the Shapieron and another to the Government Center at Thurios.
“I still don’t believe it,” the CIA official, Benson, said from a chair by a window, partly visible over Hunt’s shoulder. “When I see somebody picking up the phone and calling talking computers in an alien spaceship out at some other star, I don’t believe it.” Benson turned his head to address somebody offscreen. “Jeezi The CIA should have had something like this years ago. We could even have tuned into what you guys were talking about in the men’s room inside the Kremlin.”
“I think the days of that kind of thing will very soon be over, my friend,” a voice replied from somewhere in an accent that Garuth assumed was Russian.
It would have made no difference if they were physically present in the Shapieron, he thought to himself. They would banter and laugh in the same way whatever the risks and whatever the unknowns. They could try, fail, forget, laugh, and try again-and probably succeed. The thought that they had been within a hair’s
breadth of disaster didn’t trouble them. They had won the round, now it was dismissed and in the past, and their only thoughts now were for the next. Sometimes Garuth envied Earthmen.
zo~c spoke suddenly. Its tone was urgent. “Attention please. There is a new development. Probe Four has detected ships rising fast from the surface on the far side of Jevien-five of them in tight formation.” At the same instant the view on the main screen changed to show the curving, cloud-blotched surface of the planet with five dots creeping across the mottled background.
On the auxiliary screen Hunt was leaning forward while others crowded behind him. They had stopped talking. An adjacent screen showed Calazar and the observers at Thurios, all equally tense.
“It has to be Broghuilio and his staff,” Calazar said after a few seconds. “They must be making a break for Uttan. Estordu said they’ve got a standby transfer system that operates between Jevlen and Uttan. That’s what they’ve been planning! We should have thought of it.”