And then something happened that he was completely unprepared for. Another object, moving fast and blazing white at the tail, curved into the scene from one side, passed close by the Shapieron’s nose, and exploded in a huge flash a short distance be
yond. Hunt stared at it, stunned. That wasn’t the way it had happened.
And then a voice sounded from the screen-an American voice, speaking in the clipped tones of the military. “Warning missile launched. Attack salvo primed and locked on target. T-beams being directed in near-miss pattern, and destroyers moving in to take up close-escort formation. Orders are to fire for effect if alien attempts evasion.”
Hunt shook his head and looked wildly from side to side, but the shadow figures around him paid no heed to his presence. “No!” he shouted. “It wasn’t like that! This is all wrong!” The shadows remained heedless.
On the screen a flotilla of black, sinister-looking vessels moved into view from all directions to take up position around the Ganymean starship. “Alien is responding,” the voice announced neutrally. “Commencing descent into parking orbit.”
Hunt shouted out again in protest and leaped forward, at the same time wheeling around to appeal for a response from the shadow figures. But they had gone. The command center had gone. All of Jupiter Five had gone.
He was looking down on a huddle of metal domes and buildings standing beside a line of Vega ferries amid an icy wilderness that lay naked beneath the stars. It was Main Base on the surface of Ganymede. And on an open area to one side of the complex, dwarfing the Vegas behind, stood the awesome tower of the Shapieron. He had advanced by several days and was witnessing again the moment when the ship had just landed.
But instead of the simple but touching welcoming scene that he remembered, he saw a column of forlorn Ganymeans being herded across the ice from their ship between lines of impassive, heavily armed combat troops, under the muzzles of heavy weapons being trained from armored vehicles positioned farther back. And the base itself had acquired defense works, weapons emplacements, missile batteries, and all kinds of things that had never existed. It was insane.
He couldn’t tell whether he was inside one of the domes and looking out over the scene as he had been at the time, or whether he was somehow floating disembodied at some other viewpoint. Again his immediate surroundings were indistinct. He swung around, moving in a dreamlike way in which his body had lost its
substance, and found that he was alone. Even surrounded by ice and endless empty space he felt clammy and claustrophobic. The terror that had gripped him when he first stepped out of the alien vessel was still there, gnawing insistently and stripping away his powers of reason. “What is this?” he demanded in a voice that choked somewhere at the back of his throat. “I don’t understand. What does this mean?”
“You don’t remember?” the voice boomed deafeningly from nowhere and everywhere.
Hunt looked wildly in every direction, but there was nobody. “Remember what?” he whispered. “I remember none of this.”
“You do not remember these events?” the voice challenged. “You were there.”
An anger surged up inside him suddenly-a delayed-action reflex to protect him from the merciless assault on his mind and senses. “No!” he shouted. “Not like that! They never happened like that. What kind of lunacy is this?”
“How, then, did they happen?”
“They were our friends. They were welcomed. We gave gifts.” His anger boiled over into a quivering rage. “Who are you? Are you mad? Show yourself.”
Ganymede vanished, and a series of confused impressions poured by in front of his eyes, which inexplicably his mind assembled together into coherent meaning. There was a vision of the Ganymeans being taken into captivity by a stern and uncompromising American military . . . being allowed to repair their ship only after agreeing to divulge details of their technology.
being taken to Earth to keep their side of the bargain. . . being dispatched ignominiously back into the depths of space.
~”Was it not so?” the voice demanded.
“For Christ’s sake, NO! Whoever you are, you’re insane!”