The Two Worlds (18 page)

Gasps of wonder were erupting on every side as one by one the others realized what was happening. Monchar was turning circles and waving his arms in the air in an uncontrollable release of emotion, while Shilohin had sunk into an empty seat and was just gaping wide-eyed and speechless up at the screen. Then zorac confirmed what they already knew. "I've matched the starfield with extrapolations from records and fixed our location. Don't ask me how, but it seems that the voyage is over. We're at the Giants' Star."

Less than an hour later, Garuth led the first party of Ganymeans out of the lock of one of the
Shapieron
's daughter vessels and into a brilliantly lit reception bay in one of the craft from Thurien. They approached the line of figures that were waiting silently, and went through a short welcoming ritual in which the dam finally broke and all the pent-up anguish and hope that the wanderers had carried with them burst forth in a flood of laughter and not a few tears. It was over. The long exile was over, and the exiles were finally home.

Afterward the new arrivals were conducted to a side chamber and required to recline on couches for a few minutes. The purpose of this was not explained. The Ganymeans experienced a strange sequence of sensory disturbances, after which all was normal again. They were then told that the process was complete. Minutes later, Garuth left the side chamber with his party to reenter the area where the Thuriens were assembled . . . and suddenly stopped dead in his tracks, his eyes popping in disbelief.

Slightly ahead of the Thuriens, grinning unashamedly at the Ganymeans' bemusement, stood a small group of familiar pink dwarves. Garuth's mouth fell open, hung limply for a moment, and then closed again without making any sound. For the two figures moving toward him, ahead of the other humans, were none other than—

"What kept you, Garuth?" Hunt asked cheerfully. "Did you miss a sign somewhere along the way?"

"Do forgive my amusement at your expense," Danchekker said, unable to suppress a chuckle. "But I'm afraid the expression on your face is irresistibly provocative."

Behind them Garuth could see another familiar figure—stocky and broad, with wiry hair streaked with gray and deeply etched features; it was Hunt's superior from Houston, and next to him was the red-haired girl who also worked there. Beside them were another man and woman, neither of whom he recognized. Garuth forced his feet to move again, and through his daze saw that Hunt was extending a hand in the customary manner of greeting of Earth. Garuth shook hands with him warmly, then with the others. They were not optical images of some kind; they were real. The Thuriens must have brought them from Earth for this occasion by methods unknown at the time of Minerva.

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. "zorac, I am not dreaming? This is really happening?" zorac 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," zorac'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 zorac. It was me, repeating and imitating zorac. Allow me to introduce myself—my name is visar. 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 introductions 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.

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 Caldwell 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. visar 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 meeting 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.

After giving them some time to take in the scene visar informed them, "You are now something like five hundred million miles outside the system of Gistar. You're standing in something called a
stressor.
There are six of them, and together they define a boundary around a spherical volume of space. Each of the arms outside is of the order of five thousand miles long. That's how far away those cylinders are, which should give you some idea of their size."

Danchekker looked at Hunt dumbfounded, raised his head again to take in the scene above, then looked at Hunt once more. Hunt just stared back glassy-eyed.

visar continued, "The stressors induce a zone of enhanced space-time curvature that increases in intensity toward the center until, right at the focus, it collapses into a back hole." A bright red circle, obviously superposed on their visual inputs by visar, appeared from nowhere to surround the hazy region. "The hole is in the center of the circle," visar told them. "The halo effect is distorted light from background stars—the region acts like a gravitic lens. The hole itself is about ten thousand miles from you, and the space you're in is actually highly distorted. But I can censor confusing data, so you feel and act normal.

"Behind the shell defined by the stressors are batteries of projectors that create intense beams of energy by matter annihilation and direct them between the sensors and into the hole. From there the energy is redirected and distributed through a higher-order dimension grid and extracted back into ordinary space wherever it's needed. In other words this whole arrangement forms the input into an h-space distribution grid that delivers to anywhere you like, instantaneously, and over interstellar distances. Like it?"

A while went by before Hunt found his voice. "What kinds of things hook on the other end?" he asked. "I mean, would this feed a whole planet . . . or what?"

"The distribution pattern is very complex," visar replied. "Several planets are being fed from Garfalang, which is what the place you're at is called. So are a number of high-energy projects that the Thuriens are engaged in at various places. But you can hook smaller units into the grid wherever they happen to be, such as spacecraft, other vehicles, machines, dwellings—anything that uses power. The local equipment needed to tap into the grid is not large in size. For instance the perceptron that we landed in Alaska was powered from the grid on the conventional stage from its exit port to Earth. It would have had to be much larger if it carried its own onboard propulsion source. Hardly any of our machines have local, self-contained power sources. They don't need them. The grid feeds everything from large centralized generators and redirectors, like the one you're in, located far out in space."

"This is unbelievable," Danchekker breathed. "And to imagine, fifty years ago people were frightened of their energy sources being exhausted. This is stupefying . . . quite stupefying."

"What's the prime source?" Hunt asked. "You said the input beams were produced by matter annihilation. What gets annihilated?"

"Mainly the cores of burned-out stars," visar answered. "Part of the energy generated is tapped off to drive a network of transfer ports for conveying material from the remote sites, where the cores are dismantled, to the annihilator batteries. The net production of useful energy fed into the grid from Garfalang is equivalent to about one lunar mass per day. But there's plenty of fuel around. We're a long way from any crisis. Don't worry about it."

"And you can concentrate the energy from here across light-years of space through some kind of . . . hyperdimension and create a transfer toroid remotely," Hunt said. "Is it always as elaborate as the operation we watched?"

"No. That was a special case that required exceptionally precise control and timing. An ordinary transfer is pretty simple by comparison, and just routine."

Hunt fell silent while he took in more of the spectacle overhead, and went back in his mind over the details of the operation he had witnessed.

Calazar had decided to go ahead with the interception of the
Shapieron
without further delay when a baffling message, signed personally by Norman Pacey, came in from Bruno to warn of a possibility that the ship could be in some kind of danger. How Pacey could have known about a risk that had been recognized on Thurien only with the benefit of information that Pacey couldn't possibly have possessed was a mystery.

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 quickly 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 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 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.