Apparently the “organization” possessed equipment capable of tracking the Shapieron just as Calazar’s people did, and Calazar had been unwilling to reveal his actions by simply allowing the ship to vanish from the course it had been following. Therefore he had called upon Eesyan’s engineers to modify the operation to cover not only the fishing of a vessel out of the void twenty light-years away, but also the substitution of a dummy object constructed to give identical readings on the “organization’s” tracking instruments. There was a risk that the gravitational disturbance produced in the process might itself be detected, but since continuous monitoring was not practicable for technical reasons, there was a good chance that the substitution could be made invisible provided the operation was pulled off in minimum time. As planned, the switch had gone quickly and smoothly, and if all had gone well the “organization” would by now be receiving tracking-data updates originating from the decoy while the Shapieron was in fact light-years away and almost at Thurien. Time would no doubt tell if the switch had gone quickiy and smoothly enough.
Hunt didn’t know what to make of this game of deception and counterdeception between two, possibly rival, groups of Ganymeans. As Danchekker had maintained from the beginning, the response simply did not fit with the way Ganymean minds worked. Hunt had tried several times to squeeze a hint of what was behind it all out of VISAR, but the machine, evidently acting under a firm
directive not to discuss the matter, merely reaffirmed that Calazar would broach the subject himself at the appropriate time.
But whatever the reasons, the Shapieron had not been attacked or interfered with in whatever way Pacey had feared, and it was now in safe hands. The only conclusion Hunt could draw was that Pacey had totally misinterpreted something and overreacted, which seemed strange for the kind of person Hunt had judged Pacey to be. To be fair, Hunt conceded as he thought about it again, Pacey hadn’t actually said for certain that it was the Shapieron that was threatened; what he had said was that he had reason to believe that something well out in space was in danger of destruction, and he had expressed concern that it might be the Shapieron. Calazar had decided not to take any chances, and Hunt couldn’t blame him for that. What the warning did seem to indicate was that Pacey had been hopelessly wrong about something. Or had he? Hunt wondered.
Suddenly Hunt realized he was feeling physically uncomfortable. Surely not, he thought. Surely the package of sensations that made up his computer-simulated body couldn’t be that complete. What would be the point?
He looked around him instinctively and discovered he was back in his own body in the recliner inside the perceptron. “Facing you at the back end of the corridor,” VISAR’S voice informed him. Hunt sat up, shaking his head in wonder. As always, the Ganymeans had thought of everything. So that was what the mysterious door was for.
He was back at Gistar a few minutes later, and found Danchekker waiting for him wearing a grave expression. “Some alarming news has come through while you were absent,” the professor informed him. “It appears that our friend at Giordano Bruno was not quite as mistaken as we had supposed.”
“What’s happened?” Hunt asked.
“The device that has been relaying the communications between Farside and Thurien has ceased operating. According to VISAR, indications are that something destroyed it.”
chapter seventeen
How could Norman Pacey, isolated and incommunicado on lunar Farside, have known that the relay was about to be destroyed? His only source of information from outside the solar system was the signals coming in from the Thuriens at Gistar, and the Thuriens themselves hadn’t known about it. And why had Pacey apparently acted independently of the official UN delegation on Farside in sending the warning? Furthermore, how had he gained access to the equipment there, and how had he been able to operate it? In short, just what was going on at Farside?
Jerol Packard requested from the Thuriens a complete set of their versions of all the messages that had been exchanged with Earth since the whole business began. Calazar agreed to supply them, and VISAR hard-copied them through to McClusky by means of equipment contained in the perceptron. When the team there compared the Thuriens’ transcripts with their own, some peculiar discrepancies emerged.