Furthermore the temporarily decomputerized world of Jevlen
would provide an ideal environment for Garuth’s people from the Shapieron, displaced twenty-five million years from their own civilization, to recuperate and readjust to the ways of the Thuriens. At the same time they would be able to play a key role in helping Garuth rebuild the planet and inaugurate a new system of Jevienese government. So Garuth, his people, and zoI~c had a worthwhile job to do, a challenging future ahead, and a home of their own once again.
On Earth, Mikolai Sobroskin became the Soviet Foreign Minister under the new order that emerged from the wreckage of the previous regime. Through some machinations inside the Kremlin that would never be fully disclosed, Verikoff ended up as an advisor on extraterrestrial sciences, having made history as the first alien ever to apply for and be granted Terran citizenship.
In the U.S. State Department, Karen Heller and Norman Pacey headed a team assigned by Packard to draft a policy aimed at breaking down the barriers of East-West suspicions that had festered for over a century, and forging an era of universal prosperity from the combined economic and industrial might of the U.S. and Soviet giants, and the material and human resources of the emerging Third World. Already the international web that had precipitated World War I, financed both the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of Hitler, manufactured the Middle East and Southeast Asian crises of later years, contrived for a whole world to fund its own blackmail through the nuclear arms race, and been behind a long list of other interesting things found recorded in great detail inside JEVEX, was well on its way to being broken up for good.
The UN, purged of the influences that would have manipulated it into a focal point of global power to be delivered wholesale into the hands of the Jevlenese, would be remolded into the instrument through which Earth would take its place in the interstellar community. And it would have an important role to play in that community-a role in which people like Clifford Benson, Colonel Shearer, and Sobroskin’s generals would still have a place. For despite their sciences and their technology, the Ganymeans had learned the wisdom of preserving a strong right arm; there was no telling how many more Broghuilios might be waiting in the unexplored reaches of the Galaxy.
Such days would come, but they were still far in the future. In the meantime there were preparations to be made-a whole planet
to reeducate, and a whole system of natural sciences to be revised and brought up to date. UNSA drew up tentative plans for merging Navcomms into a new superdivision under Caidwell, who would move to Washington to begin the mammoth task of rewriting the long-range plans for the space program in the light of Ganymean technology and initiate studies for integrating selected parts of Earth’s communications net into VISAR. Hunt would become Deputy Director of the new organization, and Danchekker, fired by the vision of unlimited access to scores of alien worlds each with its own alien biology and alien evolution, accepted an offer to go too as Director of Alien Life Sciences. At least, that was why Danchekker said he wanted to move to Washington. Caldwell reserved a box in the organization chart for Lyn too, of course.
But the real hero of the war, for which neither anybody nor anything else in existence anywhere could conceivably have substituted, was VISAR. Calazar agreed that VISAR would take over Uttan and run the planet exclusively, to enjoy its own measure of independence, and in the process be free to evolve further its own brand of inteffigence in its own way and to its own design. But VISAR’s ties to its creators would not be broken, and in the years and centuries ahead, the expansion into the Galaxy would manifest the same alliance of human and Ganymean, organic and inorganic instincts and abilities that had already proved to be a formidable combination.
epilogue
The procession of black limousines drew slowly to a halt before the military guard of honor and lines of foreign ambassadors standing by the side of the field of Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, a few miles from Washington, D.C. The day was sunny and clear, and the thousands ifihing the area outside the boundary fence all around were strangely quiet.