As he stood back to allow his companions to surge forward toward the Terrans, Garuth spoke quietly into the throat microphone that still connected him with the Shapieron, riding not far away from the Thurien vessel. “zoa~c, I am not dreaming? This is really happening?” zoi~c could monitor visual scenes via the miniaturized TV-camera headbands that Ganymeans from the ship wore most of the time.
“I don’t know what you mean,” zoa&c’s voice replied in the earpiece that Garuth was also wearing. “All I can see is a ceiling. You’re all lying in chairs of some kind in there, and you haven’t moved for almost ten minutes.”
Garuth was at a loss. He looked around and saw Hunt and Calazar making their way toward him through the throng of Ganymeans and Terrans. “Can’t you see them?” he asked, mystified.
“See who?”
Before Garuth could answer, another voice said, “Actually that wasn’t zo~c. It was me, repeating and imitating zo~&c. Allow me to introduce myself-my name is ws~i. Perhaps it’s time we explained a few things.”
“But not in the lobby,” Hunt said. “Let’s go on through into the ship. There’s quite a lot that needs explaining.” Garuth was even more perplexed. Hunt had heard and understood the exchange even though he was not wearing communications accessories and the exchange had been in Ganymean.
Calazar stood waiting until the rest of the welcomes and intro. ductions had been completed. Then he beckoned and led the mixed group of Ganymeans and Terrans into the body of the huge spacecraft from Thurien, now only a matter of hours away.
chapter sixteen
Hunt and Danchekker were somewhere out in the vastness of space. Around them was a large, darkened area made up of walled enclosures that looked like booths and interconnecting stretches of open floor, extending away beneath pools of subdued local lighting into the shadows on all sides. The dominant light was a soft, ghostly whiteness coming from the stars overhead, every one bright and unblinking.
After the reception of the Shapieron some distance outside the system of Gistar, Jerol Packard, by then his normal self once more, had decided to leave the two groups of Ganymeans alone for some time without Terran intrusion. The others had agreed. They seized the opportunity thus presented to make some instant “visits,” courtesy of VISAR, to experience other parts of the Thurien civilization. Packard and Heller went to Thurios to learn more of the system of social organization while Caidwell and Lyn were taken on a tour of light-years between stops to observe more of Thurien space engineering in action. Hunt and Danchekker, intrigued after following the operation that had been mounted to intercept the Shapieron, were curious about how the energy had been generated to form the enormous black-hole toroid thrown in the ship’s path, and how it was hurled across such an immense distance. ws~ had offered to show them a Thurien power plant, and an instant later they had found themselves here.
They were beneath a huge, transparent blister that formed part of some form of construction hanging in space. But what scale of construction was this? To left and right outside the blister, and in front and behind, the external parts of the structure swept away and upward in four gently curving arms of intricately engineered metal architecture that shrank into the distance to give an impression of immensity that was almost frightening. They seemed to be standing at the crossover point of two shallow crescents that met at right angles like sections of the equator and a longitude line drawn on a globe. The tips of the four crescent arms carried four
long, narrow, cylindrical forms whose axes seemed to converge on some distant point like those of four gigantic gun barrels trained to concentrate fire on a remote target. How far away they were was impossible to guess since there was nothing familiar to give any visual cue of size.
Farther away and to one side, positioned almost edge-on to their vantage point, was another structure identical to the one they were in, comprising a similar cruciform of two crescents and carrying its own quadruplet of cylinders, details of its far side losing themselves in foreshortening and distance. And on the other side of the view was another, also edge-on, and another above, and yet another below. The whole set of them, Hunt realized as he looked, was positioned symmetrically in space around a common center to form sections of an imaginary spherical surface like parts of an engineer’s exploded drawing, and the gun barrels were pointing inward radially. And far away at the focus of this configuration, an eerie halo of blurred, scrambled starlight was hanging in the void, tinted with a dash of violet.