“If it was a piece of surveillance hardware that had gone faulty and given us a direct line, we didn’t want to draw attention to it,” Ecsyan replied. “We were getting some interesting information through it.”
“You didn’t want this-‘organization’ to know about it?” Heller queried, looking puzzled.
“Correct.”
“But they already knew about it. The reply from Gistar was all over Earth’s newsgrid. They must have known about it if they run the surveillance.”
“But they weren’t picking up your signals to the relay,” Eesyan said. “We would have known if they were.” Suddenly Hunt realized why Gistar hadn’t responded to the Farside transmissions that had continued for months after the Shapieron’s departure: the Thuriens didn’t want to reveal their direct line via Earth’s news network. That fitted in with their insistence on nothing being com
municated via the net when at last they had elected to reopen the dialogue.
Heller paused for a moment and brought her hand up to her brow while she collected her thoughts. “But they couldn’t have left it at that,” she said, looking up. “From what they picked up out of the newsgrid, they would have known that you knew about the Shapieron-something they hadn’t been telling you about. They couldn’t have just done nothing . . . not without arousing suspicion. They’d have to tell you about it at that point, because they knew if they didn’t you’d be going to them and asking some awkward questions.”
“Which is exactly what they did,” Calazar confirmed.
“So didn’t you ask them why they hadn’t gotten around to it earlier?” Caidwell asked. “I mean-hell, the ship had been there for six months.”
“Yes, we did,” Calazar replied. “The reason they gave was that they were concerned for the Shapieron’s safety, and feared that attempts to interfere with the situation might only jeopardize it further. Rightly or wrongly, they had come to the decision that it would be better for us to know only after it was out of the solar System.”
Caldwell snorted, obviously not impressed by the mysterious “organization’s” excuse. “Didn’t you ask to see the records they had acquired through their surveillance?”
“We did,” Calazar answered. “And they produced ones that had every appearance of justifying their fears for the Shapieron completely.”
Now Hunt knew where the phony depictions that he had witnessed of the Shapieron’s arrival at Ganymede had come from:
the “organization” had faked them just as they had been faking their reports of Earth all along. Those were the versions that Calazar’s people had been shown. If those scenes with their frighteningly authentic blending of reality and fantasy were typical of what had been going on, it was no wonder that the deception had gone unsuspected for years.
“I’ve seen some of those records,” Hunt said. He sounded incredulous. “How did you ever come to suspect that they might not be genuine? They’re unbelievable.”
“We didn’t,” Eesyan told him. “VISAR did. As you may be aware, the drive method of the Shapieron creates a spacetime
deformation around the ship. It is most pronounced when main drive is operating, but exists to some extent even under auxiliary drive-sufficient to displace the apparent positions of background stars close to the vessel’s outline by a measurable amount. VISAR noticed that the predicted displacements were present in some of the views we were shown, but completely missing from others. Hence the reports of the Shapieron were suspect.”
“And not only those,” Calazar said. “By implication, every other report that we had ever received of Earth was in doubt too, but we had no comparable way of testing them.” He moved his eyes solemnly along the row of Terran faces. “Perhaps now you can see why we were concerned. We had two conflicting impressions of Earth, and no way of knowing how much of each might be true. But suppose that Earth was as aggressive and as irrational as we had been led to believe for years, and that the occupants of the Shapieron had indeed been received and treated in the ways described to us. . . .” He left the sentence unfinished. “Well, in our position what might you have thought?”
A silence descended around the table. The Thuriens wouldn’t have known what to believe, Hunt conceded inwardly. Their only way to check the facts would have been to reopen the dialogue with Earth secretly and establish face-to-face contact, which was precisely what they had done. So why had it been so important?