It was approaching 2 A.M. local time when a light tap sounded on the door. Puzzled, Pacey rose from the chair in which he had been brooding and went over to answer it. It was Sobroskin. The Russian slipped in quickly, waited until Pacey closed the door,
then reached inside his jacket and produced a large envelope that he passed over without speaking. Pacey opened it. Inside was a pink wallet with a bright red border, The title label on the front read: CONFIDENTIAL. REPORT 238/2G/Nrs/FM. NORMAN H. PACE?
-PERSONAL PROFILE AND NOTES.
Pacey looked at it incredulously, opened it to ruffle quickly through the contents, then looked up. “How did you get this?” he asked in a hoarse voice.
“There are ways,” Sobroskin said vaguely. “Did you know of it?”
“I . . . had reason to believe that something like it might exist,” Pacey told him guardedly.
Sobroskin nodded. “I thought you might wish to put it somewhere safe, or perhaps burn it. There was only one other copy, which I have already destroyed, so you may rest with knowledge that it will not get to where it was supposed to go.” Pacey looked down at the wallet again, too stunned to reply. “Also, I came across a very strange volume of minutes of the delegation’s sessions-nothing at all like what I remembered. I substituted a set of the copies that you and I both saw and approved. Take my word for it that those are the ones that will reach New York. I resealed them myself in the courier’s bag just before it was taken to Tycho.”
“But. . . how?” was all Pacey could say.
“I have not the slightest intention of telling you.” The Russian’s voice was curt, but his eyes were twinkling.
Suddenly Pacey grinned as the message at last got through that not everybody in the world was his enemy. “Perhaps it’s about time we sat down and compared notes,” he said. “I guess I don’t have any vodka in the place. How about gin?”
“Precisely the conclusion that I have come to also,” Sobroskin said, extracting a sheaf of notes from an inside pocket. “Gin would be fine-I’m very partial to it.” He hung his jacket by the door and sat down to make himself comfortable in one of the armchairs while Pacey went into the next room for some glasses. While he was there he checked to make sure the ice maker was well stocked. He had a feeling it was going to be a long night.
chapter nineteen
Garuth had spent twenty-eight years of his life with the Shapieron. A group of scientists on ancient Minerva had advocated a program of extensive climatic and geological engineering to control the predicted buildup of carbon dioxide. The project would have been extremely complicated, however, and simulation models revealed a high risk of rendering the planet uninhabitable sooner rather than later by disrupting the greenhouse effect that enabled Minerva to support life at its considerable distance from the Sun. As an insurance against this risk, another group proposed a method for increasing the Sun’s radiation output by modifying its self-gravitation, the idea being that the climatic-engineering program could go ahead, and if instabilities did set in to the point of destroying the greenhouse effect, the Sun could be warmed up to compensate. Thus, overall, Minerva would be no worse off.
As a precaution, the Minervan government decided to test the later idea first by dispatching a scientific mission aboard the Shapieron to conduct a full-scale trial on a sunlike star called Iscaris, whose planets supported no life of any kind. It was as well that they did. Something went wrong that caused Iscaris to go nova, and the expedition had been forced to flee without waiting for completion of the repairs to the ship’s main-drive system, which were in progress at the time. Hurled to maximum speed and with its braking system inoperative, the Shapieron returned to the vicinity of the solar system and circled for over twenty years by its own clocks under conditions of compounded time dilation while a million times that amount sped by in the rest of the Universe. And so, eventually, the ship had come to Earth.