"Pardon, Excellency, but I have no record of saying any such thing."
It was too much. Broghuilio's voice began to rise and shake uncontrollably. "How can the Terrans be less than a day away?" he demanded. "Are they or are they not departing from Earth now?"
"They began departing from Earth two days ago," jevex replied. "They have entered Jevlenese planetary space and will commence their attack in twelve hours' time."
Broghuilio's color was deepening rapidly. "Those surveillance reports that you just presented. Were they or were they not live from Earth as of this moment, as you stated?"
"They were records obtained two days ago, as I stated."
"YOU DID NOT SAY THAT!" Broghuilio screamed.
"I did. My records confirm it. Shall I replay them?"
Broghuilio turned to appeal to the rest of the room. "You all heard it. What did that idiot machine say? Were those views live or were they not?" Nobody was listening. One of the aides was rushing back and forth and jabbering incoherently, another was clutching at his face and moaning, while among the rest consternation was breaking out on every side.
"They couldn't be from two days ago."
"How do you know? How do you know what's happening and what isn't? How do you know anything?"
"jevex said so."
"It said the opposite too."
"Maybe jevex is mad."
"But jevex said—"
"jevex doesn't know what it's saying. We can't trust anything."
"The Terrans are coming! They're only hours away!"
On one side of the room the scientist, Estordu, quietly vanished. In the confusion, nobody noticed.
Broghuilio was waving his arms and shouting above the clamor. "Twelve hours.
Twelve hours!
And you tell me you have no weapons! They'll be coming straight in for the kill because they don't know what opposition to expect. . . . AND WE HAVE NO OPPOSITION TO OFFER! A shipful of children could walk in and take us over, and the Terrans don't even know it. And what do I have to stop them? Imbecile generals, imbecile scientists, and an imbecile computer!"
Wylott shouldered his way through to where Broghuilio was standing. "There is no choice," he insisted. "You have to accept Verikoff's terms. At least that way there will come another day." Broghuilio turned his head and glowered, but the inevitability of what Wylott had said was written in his eyes. But still he could not bring himself to give the order. Wylott waited for a few seconds, then raised his head to call above the commotion still going on around them. "jevex. Call Earth via your own channel to Sverenssen. Get Verikoff on the line."
"At once, General," jevex acknowledged.
In the communications room in Connecticut, Hunt turned his head toward Verikoff, who was watching from the doorway. "You'd better come on in. It looks as if you'll be on again in a few seconds to accept the surrender. It's just about all over." Verikoff moved to the center of the room while the others fell back to clear a small circle around him. On the screen showing the Jevlenese War Room, Wylott and Broghuilio had turned to look directly out at the room and were waiting expectantly for jevex to make the connection. Verikoff folded his arms and assumed a domineering posture in readiness.
And suddenly the screen went blank.
Puzzled looks appeared all around the room. "visar?" Hunt said after a few seconds. "visar, what's happened?" There was no reply. The screens that had been connecting them to Thurien and the
Shapieron
had gone blank as well.
Verikoff moved quickly over to a bank of equipment on one side of the room and ran rapidly through a sequence of tests. "It's dead," he announced, looking up at the others. "The whole system is dead. We don't have any channels to anywhere, and I can't open any. Something has cut us off from jevex completely."
In the Government Center at Thurios, Caldwell was equally bewildered. "visar, what's happened?" he demanded. "Where did the views from Earth and Jevlen go? Have you lost them or something?"
A few seconds went by, then visar answered. "It's worse than that. I haven't only lost Connecticut and the War Room, I've lost everything from jevex. I don't have anything into it at all. The whole system has switched off."
"Don't you know anything that's happening at Jevlen at all?" Morizal asked, aghast.
"Nothing," visar said. "The only channel I've got to anywhere in the whole of the jevex-controlled world-system is the one through to the
Shapieron.
jevex seems to be dead. The whole system has just gone down."
Broghuilio found himself reclining in his private quarters deep underground in the complex that housed the Directorate of Strategic Planning. He sat up sharply, unsure of what had happened. A moment before he had been in the War Room with Wylott, waiting for a connection to Verikoff. Even as he remembered, he saw again in his mind's eye the armada from Earth, at that moment sweeping inward toward Jevlen. He looked around wildly. "jevex?"
No response.
"jevex, answer me."
Nothing.
Something cold and heavy turned over deep in his stomach. He leaped to his feet, fumbled his way into a robe to cover his shorts and undershirt, and hurried into the next room to check the status indicators of the suite's monitor panel. Lighting, air conditioning, communications, services . . . everything had reverted to emergency backup mode. jevex was not operating. He tried activating the communications console, but the only thing he could raise on the screen was a message stating that all channels were saturated. It meant that the condition was general and not due simply to some local failure; the complex was in panic. He rushed through into his bedroom and began frantically tearing clothes out of a closet.
He was still buttoning his tunic when a tone sounded from the outside door in the hallway. Broghuilio hastened out and pressed his thumb against a printlock plate to dematerialize the door. Estordu was there with two other aides. The sounds of shouting and commotion came in from behind them.
"What's happened?" Broghuilio demanded. "The whole system is dead."
"I deactivated it," Estordu told him. "I threw the manual override breakers in the master nucleus control room. I've shut jevex down totally."
Broghuilio's beard quivered, and his eyes widened. "You
what
—" he began, but Estordu waved a hand impatiently to silence him. The gesture was so out of character that Broghuilio just stared.
"Can't you see what's happened?" Estordu said, speaking rapidly and urgently. "jevex was not functioning coherently. Something was affecting it from the
inside.
It could only have been visar. Somehow visar gained access to it. That meant that the Thuriens could have been watching every move we made. We still have twelve hours, and if we move quickly we can still get away. We still have emergency communications channels to Uttan, and the standby transfer system can project an entry port to Jevlen. With jevex inoperative and visar therefore blind, we can make our arrangements without risking interference from the Thuriens or the Terrans. The nearest Terran ships are still twelve hours away. By the time they get here we can be gone, and they'll have no way of knowing where to. By the time they think of looking for us at Uttan, we will be well prepared. Don't you see? It was the only way. With jevex running we couldn't have planned a move without them knowing."
Broghuilio thought rapidly as he listened. There was no time for arguing, and anyway, Estordu was right. He nodded. "Everyone with their wits about them will go physically to the War Room," he said. He looked at Estordu. "Find Lantyar and tell him I want five reliable crews mustered and brought to Geerbaine by eighteen hundred hours today. You . . ." He directed his gaze at one of the two aides standing behind Estordu. "Contact the operations commander at Geerbaine and tell him I want five E-class transports ready for launch not one minute later than then, and power standing by on-line at Uttan to project ports as soon as the transports clear Jevlen." He gestured to the other aide. "And you, find General Wylott and tell him to mobilize four companies of guards and organize air transportation from here to Geerbaine, ready to leave by seventeen thirty hours. I'll need capacity for two thousand persons. Commandeer it from wherever you need to, and don't hesitate to use force. Do you understand?" Broghuilio straightened his collar and went back through to the bedroom to buckle on his belt and sidearm. "I am going to the War Room now," he called out to them. "The three of you will report to me there not later than one hour from now. Do as I say, and this time tomorrow we will all be on Uttan."
The
Shapieron
had moved closer to Jevlen to await the arrival of the Ganymean ships from Thurien, which had begun moving inward from the edge of the planetary system but were still many hours away. The main screen on the Command Deck was showing views of Jevlen's surface being sent back from probes at lower altitudes. The planet seemed to be in chaos. Nothing was flying anywhere, but in many places people had begun leaving the cities on foot and in disorderly streams of ground vehicles that had soon jammed solid on highway systems never intended for more than minor local or recreational traffic. Disturbances and rioting had broken out in a few places, but in most the populations were merely assembling in the open spaces, leaderless and bewildered. Communications traffic from the surface was garbled and revealed no organization for maintaining order or vital services. In short, the Ganymeans were going to have a big job on their hands putting the pieces of the mess together again.
Garuth was tense and apprehensive as he stood in the center of the Command Deck taking in the reports. visar had not crashed jevex, so the culprit had to have been the Jevlenese themselves. Somehow they had discovered they were the unwitting objects of surveillance through jevex, and had shut down the system to blind visar to what they were doing. In other words they were up to something, and there was no way of knowing what. Garuth didn't like it.
The other thing that was bothering him at a deeper level was the feeling that he had failed. Despite the reassurances of Eesyan, Shilohin, Monchar, and the others that his bringing the
Shapieron
to Jevlen had saved Thurien, Garuth was acutely conscious of how near to disaster he had brought them, and that only the fast action of Hunt and the others on Earth had saved things. He had risked his crew and Eesyan's scientists irresponsibly, and others had bailed him out. Yes, the threat to Thurien had been removed; but Garuth didn't feel he deserved very much credit for that. He would have liked to have contributed more and the congratulations that had poured through from Thurien had only added to his discomfort.
On a smaller screen to one side, Hunt was talking over his shoulder to the others who were crowded into the room in the Connecticut house that had been the headquarters of the Jevlenese operation to infiltrate Earth. "Can you imagine the problems we might have created for lots of people on this planet in years to come?"
"What do you mean?" the voice of Norman Pacey, the American government representative, asked from somewhere in the background.
Hunt half turned to wave at the screen in front of him. "One day people might be sending their kids to college on Thurien. Suppose the kids figure out this stunt for themselves and start calling home collect."
After jevex had gone off the air and shut down the communications facility, the group in Connecticut had reestablished contact by the simple expedient of telephoning the control room at McClusky and linking back into visar via the databeam to the perceptron. They had called on two lines from the datagrid terminals in Sverenssen's office, next door to the communications room, and had one screen to the
Shapieron
and another to the Government Center at Thurios.
"I still don't believe it," the CIA official, Benson, said from a chair by a window, partly visible over Hunt's shoulder. "When I see somebody picking up the phone and calling talking computers in an alien spaceship out at some other star, I don't believe it." Benson turned his head to address somebody offscreen. "
Jeez!
The CIA should have had something like this years ago. We could even have tuned into what you guys were talking about in the men's room inside the Kremlin."
"I think the days of that kind of thing will very soon be over, my friend," a voice replied from somewhere in an accent that Garuth assumed was Russian.
It would have made no difference if they were physically present in the
Shapieron
, he thought to himself. They would banter and laugh in the same way whatever the risks and whatever the unknowns. They could try, fail, forget, laugh, and try again—and probably succeed. The thought that they had been within a hair's breadth of disaster didn't trouble them. They had won the round, now it was dismissed and in the past, and their only thoughts now were for the next. Sometimes Garuth envied Earthmen.
zorac spoke suddenly. Its tone was urgent. "Attention please. There is a new development. Probe Four has detected ships rising fast from the surface on the far side of Jevlen—five of them in tight formation." At the same instant the view on the main screen changed to show the curving, cloud-blotched surface of the planet with five dots creeping across the mottled background.
On the auxiliary screen Hunt was leaning forward while others crowded behind him. They had stopped talking. An adjacent screen showed Calazar and the observers at Thurios, all equally tense.
"It has to be Broghuilio and his staff," Calazar said after a few seconds. "They must be making a break for Uttan. Estordu said they've got a standby transfer system that operates between Jevlen and Uttan. That's what they've been planning! We should have thought of it."
Eesyan had joined Garuth in the center of the Command Deck. Shilohin, Monchar, and some of the scientists were gathering around from the sides of the room. "They have to be stopped," Eesyan said, sounding worried. "They could have Uttan prepared and defended as a fallback base. If they reach it and regroup, they could decide to fight it out. It would only be a matter of time before they realized that we don't have anything to challenge them with. With Uttan in their hands, we'd be in real trouble."