The Two Worlds (17 page)

Pacey's posture and manner had changed abruptly. He leaned forward and stared at her, a shocked look on his face. Her eyes widened in alarm as she realized that what she said was more serious than she thought. "How many?" he demanded crisply.

"Three . . . The last was early this morning."

"When was the first?"

"A few days ago . . . more maybe. It was before Karen Heller left."

"What did they say?"

"I don't know." Janet shrugged helplessly. "How would I know that?"

"Aw, come on." Pacey waved a hand impatiently. "Don't tell me you weren't curious. You've got the equipment to read a memory onto a screen."

"I tried to," she admitted after a few seconds. "But they had a lockout code that wouldn't permit a read from the console routine. They must have had a built-in, one-time activating sequence from the transmission call. They'd self-erased afterward."

"And that didn't make you suspicious?"

"At first I thought it was just some kind of routine UN security procedure. . . . Then I wasn't so sure. That was when it started bothering me." She looked across at Pacey nervously for a few seconds, then added timidly, "He did say it was only some trivial additions." Her tone said she didn't believe that now, either. Then she lapsed into silence while Pacey sat back with a distant expression on his face, gnawing unconsciously at the knuckle of his thumb while his mind raced through the possible meaning of what she had said.

"What else has he said to you?" he asked at last.

"What else?"

"Anything. Try and remember anything strange or unusual that he might have done or talked to you about—even things that sound stupid. This is important."

"Well . . ." Janet frowned and stared at the wall behind him. "He told me about all the work he did for disarmament and how he was mixed up in turning the UN into an efficient global power since then . . . all the people in high places that he knows all over."

"Uh huh. We know about that. Anything else?"

A smile flickered on Janet's mouth for a second. "He gets mad because you seem to give him a hard time at the delegation meetings. I get the impression he thinks you're a mean bastard. I can't think why, though."

"Yes."

Her expression changed suddenly. "There was something else, not long ago. . . . Yesterday, it was." Pacey waited and said nothing. She thought for a moment. "I was in his quarters—in the bathroom. Somebody else from the delegation came in the front door suddenly, all excited. I'm not sure which one it was. It wasn't you or that little bald Russian guy, but somebody foreign. Anyhow, he couldn't have known I was in there and started talking straight away. Niels shut him up and sounded really mad, but not before this other guy had said something about some news coming in that something out in space a long way off would be destroyed very soon now." She wrinkled her brow for a moment, then shook her head. "There wasn't anything else . . . not that I could make out, anyway."

Pacey was staring at her incredulously. "You're sure he said that?"

Janet shook her head. "It sounded like that . . . I can't be sure. The faucet was running and . . ." She let it go at that.

"You can't remember hearing anything else?"

"No . . . sorry."

Pacey stood up and walked slowly over to the door. After pausing for a while he turned and came back, halting to stand staring down in front of her. "Look, I don't think you realize what you've got yourself into," he said, injecting an ominous note into his voice. She looked up at him fearfully. "Listen hard to this. It is absolutely imperative that you tell nobody else about this. Understand?
Nobody!
If you're going to start being sensible, the time is right now. You must
not
let one word of what you've told me go a step further." She shook her head mutely. "I want your word on that," he told her.

She nodded, then after a second or two asked, "Does that mean I can't see Niels?"

Pacey bit his lip. The chance to learn more was tempting, but could he trust her? He thought for a few seconds, then replied, "If you can keep your mouth shut about what you heard and what you've said. And if anything else unusual happens, let me know.
Don't
go playing at spies and looking for trouble. Just keep your eyes and ears open, and if you see or hear anything strange, let me know and nobody else. And don't write anything down. Okay?"

She nodded again and tried to grin, but it didn't work. "Okay," she said.

Pacey looked at her for a moment longer, then spread his arms to indicate that he was through. "I guess that's it for now. Excuse me, but I've got things waiting to get done."

Janet got up and walked quickly to the door. She was just about to close it behind her when Pacey called, "And Janet . . ." She stopped and looked back. "For Christ's sake try to get to work on time and stay out of the hair of that Russian professor of yours."

"I will." She managed a quick smile, and left.

Pacey had noted for some time that, like himself, Sobroskin seemed excluded from the clique that revolved around Sverenssen, and he had come to believe increasingly that the Russian was playing a lone game on behalf of Moscow and merely finding the UN policy expedient. If so, Sobroskin would not be a party to whatever information Janet had caught a snippet of. Unwilling to break radio silence on Thurien-related matters with Earth, he decided to risk playing his hunch and arranged to meet the Russian later that evening in a storage room that formed part of a rarely frequented section of the base.

"Obviously I can't be sure, but it could be the
Shapieron
," Pacey said. "There seem to be two groups of Thuriens who aren't exactly on open terms with each other. We've been talking to one group, who appear to have the best interests of the ship at heart, but how do we know that other people back here haven't been talking to the other group? And how do we know that the other group feels the same way?"

Sobroskin had been listening attentively. "You're referring to the coded signals," he said. As expected, everybody had denied having anything to do with them.

"Yes," Pacey answered. "We assumed it was you because we know damn well it isn't us. But I'm willing to concede that we might have been wrong about them. Suppose the UN has set up this whole thing at Bruno for appearance's sake while it plays some other game behind the scenes. They could be stalling both of us while all the time they're talking behind our backs to . . . I don't know, maybe one Thurien side, maybe the other, or maybe even both."

"What kind of game?" Sobroskin asked. He was obviously fishing for ideas, probably through having few of his own to offer just then.

"Who knows? But what I'm worried about is that ship. If I'm wrong about it I'm wrong, but we can't just do nothing and hope so. If there's reason to suppose that it might be in danger, we have to let the Thuriens know. They might be able to do something." He had thought for a long time about risking a call to Alaska, but in the end decided against it.

Sobroskin thought deeply for a while. He knew that the coded signals were coming in in response to the Soviet transmissions, but there was no reason to say so. Yet another oddity had come to light concerning the Swede, and Sobroskin was anxious to follow it through. Moscow wished for nothing other than good relations with the Thuriens, and there was nothing to be lost by cooperating in warning them by whatever means Pacey had in mind. If the American's fears proved groundless, no permanent harm would result that Sobroskin could see. Either way, there was no time to consult with the Kremlin. "I respect your confidence," he said at last, and meant it, as Pacey could see he did. "What do you want me to do?"

"I want to use the Bruno transmitter to send a signal," Pacey replied. "Obviously it can't go through the delegation, so we'd have to go to Malliusk directly to take care of the technical side. He's a pain, but I think we could trust him. He wouldn't respond to an approach from me alone, but he might from you."

Sobroskin's eyebrows raised a fraction in surprise. "Why did you not go to the American girl?"

"I thought of it, but I'm not convinced she's reliable enough. She's too close to Sverenssen."

Sobroskin thought for a moment longer, then nodded. "Give me an hour. I'll call you in your room then, whatever the news." He sucked his teeth pensively as if weighing up something in his mind and then added, "I would suggest taking things easy with the girl. I have reports on Sverenssen. He can be dangerous."

They met Malliusk in the main-dish control room after the evening shift was over and while the astronomers booked for the night were away having coffee. Malliusk agreed to their request only after Sobroskin had consented to sign a disclaimer stating that the action was requested by him, acting in his official capacity as a representative of the Soviet Government. Malliusk locked the statement among his private papers. He then closed the control-room doors and used the main screen of the supervisory console to compose and transmit the message that Pacey dictated. Neither of the Russians could understand why Pacey insisted on appending his own name to the transmission. There were some things that he was not prepared to divulge.

Monchar, Garuth's second-in-command, was visibly tense when Garuth arrived in response to the emergency call to the
Shapieron
's Command Deck. "There's something we've never seen before affecting the stressfield around the ship," he said in answer to Garuth's unvoiced question. "Some kind of external bias is interfering with the longitudinal node pattern and degrading the geodesic manifolds. The gridbase is going out of balance, and zorac can't make sense of it. It's trying to recompute the transforms now."

Garuth turned to Shilohin, the mission's chief scientist, who was in the center of a small group of her staff, taking in the information appearing on a battery of screens arrayed around them. "What's happening?" he asked.

She shook her head helplessly. "I've never heard of anything like this. We're entering some kind of space-time asymmetry with coordinates transforming inversely into an exponential frame. The whole structure of the region of space that we're in is breaking down."

"Can we maneuver?"

"Nothing seems to work. The divertors are ineffective, and the longitudinal equalizers can't compensate even at full gain."

"zorac, what's your report?" Garuth called in a' louder voice.

"Impossible to construct a gridbase that couples consistently into normal space," the computer replied. "In other words I'm lost, don't know where we are, where we're going, or even if we're going anywhere, and don't have control anyway. Otherwise everything's fine."

"System status?" Garuth inquired.

"All sensors, channels, and subsystems checked and working normally. No—I'm not sick, and I'm not imagining it."

Garuth stood nonplussed. Every face on the Command Deck was watching and waiting for his orders, but what order could he give when he had no idea what was happening and what, if anything, could be done about it. "Call all stations to emergency readiness and alert them to stand by for further instructions," he said, more to satisfy expectations than for any definite reason. A crewman to one side acknowledged and turned toward a panel to relay the order.

"Total stressfield dislocation," Shilohin murmured, taking in the latest updates on the screens. "We're dissociated from any identifiable reference." The scientists around her were looking grim. Monchar nervously gripped the edge of a nearby console.

Then zorac's voice sounded again. "The trends reported have begun reversing rapidly. Coupling and translation functions are reintegrating to a new gridbase. References are rotating back into balance."

"We might be coming out of it," Shilohin said quietly. Hopeful mutterings broke out all around. She studied the displays again and appeared to relax somewhat.

"Stressfield not returning to normal," zorac advised. "The field is being externally suppressed, forcing reversion to subgravitic velocity. Full spatial reintegration unavoidable and imminent." Something was slowing the ship down and forcing it to resume contact with the rest of the universe. "Reintegration complete. We're in touch with the universe again . . ." An unusually long pause followed. "But I don't know which part. We seem to have changed our position in space." A spherical display in the middle of the floor illuminated to show the starfield surrounding the ship. It was nothing like that visible from the vicinity of the Solar System, which should not have altered beyond recognition since the
Shapieron
's departure from Earth.

"Several large, artificial constructions are approaching us," zorac announced after a short pause. "The designs are not familiar, but they are obviously the products of intelligence. Implications: we have been intercepted deliberately by a means unknown, for a purpose unknown, and transferred to a place unknown by a form of intelligence unknown. Apart from the unknowns, everything is obvious."

"Show us the constructions," Garuth commanded.

Three screens around the Command Deck displayed views obtained in different directions of a number of immense craft, the like of which Garuth had never seen, moving slowly inward from the background of stars. Garuth and his officers could only stand and stare in silent awe. Before anybody could find words, zorac informed them, "We have communications from the unidentified craft. They are using our standard high-spectrum format. I'm putting it on the main monitor." Seconds later, the large screen overlooking the floor presented a picture. Every Ganymean in the Command Deck froze, stupefied by what they saw.

"My name is Calazar," the face said. "Greetings to you who went to Iscaris long ago. Soon you will arrive at our new home. Be patient, and all will be explained."

It was a Ganymean—a slightly modified Ganymean, but a Ganymean sure enough. Elation and joy mixed with disbelief surged in the confused emotions exploding in Garuth's head. It could only mean that . . . the signal that the Earthmen had beamed outward from their Moon had been received. Suddenly his heart went out to the impetuous, irrepressible, unquenchable Earthmen. They had been right after all! He loved them, every one.