were doing it through the Shapieron all the time. . . . We’re running away from a single unarmed ship.”
“What is it?” Broghuilio snapped. “Why are you looking like that?”
Estordu looked at him with a bleak stare. “It doesn’t exist. . . . The Terran strike force doesn’t exist. It never did. VISAR wrote it into JEVEX through the Shapieron. The whole thing was a fabrication. There was nothing there but the Shapieron all the time.”
The captain leaned over from above. “Excellency, we have to. . .” He stopped as he saw that Broghuilio was not listening, hesitated for a second, then turned away to call to somewhere behind him. “Disengage forward compensators. Cut in emergency boost and reverse at full power. Compute evasion function and execute immediately.”
“What? -What did you say?” Broghuillo turned to face the semicircle of cowering figures behind him. “Are you telling me the Terrans have been making fools out of all of you?”
From above the synthetic voice of a computer came tonelessly:
“Negative function. Negative function. All measures ineffective. Ship accelerating on irreversible gradient. Corrective action now impossible. Repeat: Corrective action now impossible.”
But Broghuiio didn’t hear, even as the craft plunged into the
knot of insanely tangled spacetime looming around them. “You imbeciles!” he breathed. His voice rose and began shaking uncontrollably as he lifted his fists high above his head. “Imbeciles! IMBECILES! You IM-BE-CILES!!”
“My God, they’re going straight into it!” Hunt gasped from a
screen on the Command Deck of the Shapieron. The view on the main screen was being sent back from the probe two hundred thousand miles away, still clinging doggedly to the heels of the Jevienese ships. A horrified silence had fallen all around.
“What’s happening?” Eesyan whispered from the center of the
floor.
“An oscillating instability is coupling positively to an h-frequency alias caused by discrepancies in the beam spectra,” VISAR answered. “The properties of the region created are beyond analysis.”
On another screen Calazar, openmouthed with shock, was shaking his head in protest. “I never intended this,” he said in a strangled voice. “Why didn’t they turn away? I just wanted to deny them the port.”
“ZORAC, cut the main drives and decelerate,” Garuth instructed in a voice that was clipped and expressionless. “Present an optical scan of the area as soon as we reintegrate.”
A background of turbulent light and blackness now filled the entire main screen. The five dots grew smaller in front of it .
and were suddenly swallowed up in the chaos. The turmoil seemed to rush out as the probe followed in after them, and then the view changed abruptly as the Shapieron’s stress field dispersed and zon~c switched through the long-range image from the ship’s own scanners. “The instability is breaking down,” VISAR reported.
“The resonances are degenerating into turbulence eddies. If there was a tunnel there, it’s caving in.” On the screen the patterns broke up into swirling fragments of light that spiraled rapidly in-ward, at the same time growing smaller, dimmer, and redder. They faded, and then died. The region of the starfield that was left shimmered for a few seconds to mark where the upheaval had been, and then all was normal just as if nothing had happened.
For a long time an absolute silence gripped the Command Deck, and nobody moved. The faces on the screens showing Earth and Thurien were grim.
And then VISAR spoke again. There was a distinct note of disbelief in its voice. “I have a further report. Don’t ask me how right now, but it looks as if they got through. The probe was still transmitting when the tunnel closed in behind it, and its last signal indicates that it reentered normal space.” While surprise was still evident all over the Command Deck, the view on the main screen changed to show the last image transmitted by the probe. The five Jevienese ships were hanging in ragged formation in what looked like ordinary space sure enough, studded with what looked like ordinary stars. And up near one corner was a larger speck that could
have been a planet. The image froze at that point. “The transmission ceased there,” VISAR said.