had embarked on an identical venture and concealed the fact from the Ganymeans. Why? What did it mean?
Danchekker looked over at the images that wsAR was presenting of the Command Deck of the Shapieron and Sverenssen’s office in Connecticut, but there were no suggestions forthcoming from those directions. The Ganymeans in the Shapieron were preoccupied with something that was happening on the main screen inside the ship, while in the other view he could see only the backs of Hunt and the others as they crowded around the terminal on the other side of the room, which connected them to the Slurpieron. A lot of excited talking was going on in both places, but what it was about was obscure.
“Could they have been planning to do the same thing themselves?” Karen Heller said at last.
“For what reason?” Calazar asked. “We were already working on it. What could they have stood to gain?”
“Time?” Caidwell offered.
Calazar shook his head. “If time was so critical to them, they could have persuaded us to accelerate our own program with a fraction of the effort that they must have put into this. Certainly we have the resources to have been able to beat any schedule they could have been aiming at.”
Frenua Showm was looking thoughtful. “And yet it’s strange,” she mused. “On several occasions when we wanted to speed up our program, the Jevlenese actually seemed to play down the risks of Terran expansion. It was as if they were trying to keep our research moving, but weren’t in a hurry to see us move into production.”
“They were milking off the know-how,” Caldwell grunted. “Making sure that their program stayed well ahead of yours.” He paused for a few seconds, then asked, “Could those things be used for shutting in anything else apart from a star system?”
“Hardly,” Calazar replied, then added, “Well, I suppose they could be used to close in anything of comparable size . . . or something smaller, come to that.”
“Mmm. . .” Caidwell lapsed back into thought.
Heller shrugged and turned up her hands. “If they weren’t going to enclose the solar system, they must have been planning to enclose some other . . .” Her voice trailed away as the answer
suddenly became plain, to her and to everybody else at the same time.
Calazar and Showm stared speechlessly at each other for a few seconds. “Us?” Calazar managed at last in a strained voice. “The Thuriens? They were going to shut in Gistar?” Showm brought her hand up to her brow and shook her head as she struggled to take in the implication of it. Caidwell and Heller were standing dumbstruck.
The whole thing slowly became clear in Danchekker’s mind. “Yes!” he exclaimed. He moved forward to the center of the group and stood for a moment checking his thoughts, then began nodding his head vigorously. “Yes!” he said again. “Surely it’s the only acceptable explanation.” He looked excitedly from one to another of the others as if he expected them to agree with something there and then. They stared back at him blankly. Nobody knew what he was talking about. He waited for a moment and then elaborated. “I have never been able to accept fully that the obsessive Lambian-Cerian rivalry could have persisted in the minds of the Jevlenese for all that time, especially with their exposure to Ganymean influence. Did it never strike you as strange? Didn’t any of you ever feel that there had to be something more behind it than just that?” He looked at the others questioningly again.
After a few seconds Caidwell said, “I guess not, Chris. Why? What are you getting at?”
Danchekker moistened his lips. “It’s an interesting thought, wouldn’t you agree, that there was one entity that was always there at the back of things, permanent and unchanging while generations of Jevlenese came and went.”
There was a moment of silence. Then Heller stared at him and gasped. “JEVEX? Are you saying the computer was behind the whole thing?”
Danchekker nodded rapidly. “JEVEX was established a long time ago. Is it completely inconceivable that its basic design and programming couldn’t somehow have embodied as some kind of innate driving instinct the ruthlessness and ambitions of its creators-the descendants of the original Lambians? And to realize those ambitions, could it not have harnessed the Jevienese elite as its instruments? But if that were so, it would have found itself confronted by a serious obstacle in the form of the restraints imposed on it by the Thuriens.”