familiar to them? What significance could their expedition have had, since nothing they could have achieved at their destination could possibly have affected their civilization in any way whatsoever-not with that discrepancy in time scales? But hadn’t Garuth said something about everything not having gone according to plan?
Having sorted his thoughts into something resembling order once more, Hunt had another question. “How far from the Sun was this star?”
“The distance that light would travel in nine point three Earth years,” ZORAC answered.
The situation was getting crazy. Allowing for the speed that would have been necessary to produce the time-dilation, such a journey should have taken hardly any time at all . . . astronomically speaking.
“Did the Ganymeans know that they would return after twenty-five million years?” Hunt asked, determined to get to the bottom of it.
“When they left the star, they knew. But when they left Minerva to go to the star, they did not know. They did not have a reason to believe that the journey from the star would be longer than the journey to the star.”
“How long did it take them to get there?”
“Measured from the Sun, twelve point one years.”
“And the journey back again took twenty-five million?”
“Yes. They could not avoid traveling very fast. I believe that the results of this are familiar to you. They orbited the Sun far away many times.”
Hunt replied with the obvious question. “Why didn’t they just slow down?”
“They could not.”
“Why?”
ZORAC seemed to hesitate for a fraction of a second.
“The electrical machines could not be operated. The pointsthat-destroy-all-things and move in circles could not be stopped. The space-and-time-joining blendings could not be unbent.”
“I don’t understand that,” Hunt said, frowning.
“I can’t be more clear without asking more questions about English,” ZORAC warned him.
“Leave it for now.” Hunt remembered the stir caused by specu
lations about the propulsion system of the Ganymean ship beneath Pithead, which dated from about the same period as the Shapieron. Although the UNSA scientists and engineers could not be certain, many of them suspected that motion had been produced not by reactive thrust, but by an artificially induced zone of localized space-time distortion into which the vessel “fell” continuously. Hunt felt that such a principle could allow the kind of sustained acceleration needed for the Shapieron to attain the speeds implied by ZORAC’s account. No doubt other scientists were putting similar questions to ZORAC; he would discuss the matter with them tomorrow, he decided, and not press the matter further for the time being.
“Do you remember that time,” he asked casually. “Twenty-five million years ago, when your ship left Minerva?”
“Twenty-five million years by Earth time,” ZORAC pointed out. “It has been less than twenty years by Shapieron time. Yes. I remember all things.”
“What kind of world did you leave?”
“I don’t fully understand. What kind of kind do you mean?”
“Well, for example, what was the place on Minerva like that you departed from? Was the land flat? Was there water? Were there structures that the Ganymean people had built? Can you describe a picture of it?”
“I can show a picture,” ZORAC offered. “Please observe the screen.”
Intrigued, Hunt reached out to pick up the wrist unit from where he had placed it on the top of the bedside locker. As he turned it over in his hand the screen came to life with a scene that immediately drew an involuntary whistle of amazement from his lips. He was looking down on the Shapieron, or at least on a vessel that was indistinguishable from it, but this was not the scarred and pitted hulk that he had seen from the bus a few hours before; it was a clean, gleaming, majestic tower of flawless mirror-silver, standing proudly on its tail in a vast open space that was occupied by strange constructions-buildings, cylinders, tubular structures, domes, masts and curves, all interconnected and fused into a single, continuous synthetic landscape. Two other ships were standing there on either side of the first, both just as grand, but somewhat smaller.
The air above the spaceport-for that was what the picture
suggested-was alive with all manner of flying vehicles ranging from the very large to the very small, the majority of which moved in well-defined lanes like processions of disciplined skywalking ants.