"What's happening?" Eesyan whispered from the center of the floor.
"An oscillating instability is coupling positively to an hfrequency alias caused by discrepancies in the beam spectra," visar answered. "The properties of the region created are beyond analysis."
On another screen Calazar, openmouthed with shock, was shaking his head in protest. "I never intended this," he said in a strangled voice. "Why didn't they turn away? I just wanted to deny them the port."
"zorac, cut the main drives and decelerate," Garuth instructed in a voice that was clipped and expressionless. "Present an optical scan of the area as soon as we reintegrate."
A background of turbulent light and blackness now filled the entire main screen. The five dots grew smaller in front of it . . . and were suddenly swallowed up in the chaos. The turmoil seemed to rush out as the probe followed in after them, and then the view changed abruptly as the
Shapieron
's stressfield dispersed and zorac switched through the long-range image from the ship's own scanners. "The instability is breaking down," visar reported. "The resonances are degenerating into turbulence eddies. If there was a tunnel there, it's caving in." On the screen the patterns broke up into swirling fragments of light that spiraled rapidly inward, at the same time growing smaller, dimmer, and redder. They faded, and then died. The region of the starfield that was left shimmered for a few seconds to mark where the upheaval had been, and then all was normal just as if nothing had happened.
For a long time an absolute silence gripped the Command Deck, and nobody moved. The faces on the screens showing Earth and Thurien were grim.
And then visar spoke again. There was a distinct note of disbelief in its voice. "I have a further report. Don't ask me how right now, but it looks as if they got through. The probe was still transmitting when the tunnel closed in behind it, and its last signal indicates that it reentered normal space." While surprise was still evident all over the Command Deck, the view on the main screen changed to show the last image transmitted by the probe. The five Jevlenese ships were hanging in ragged formation in what looked like ordinary space sure enough, studded with what looked like ordinary stars. And up near one corner was a larger speck that could have been a planet. The image froze at that point. "The transmission ceased there," visar said.
"They survived that?" Eesyan stammered. "Where is it? Where in space did they emerge?"
"I don't know," visar answered. "They must have been trying for Uttan, but anything could have happened. I'm trying to match the starfield background with projections from Uttan now, but it could take a while."
"We can't risk waiting," Calazar said. "Even though Uttan might be defended, I'll have to send in the reserve ships from Gistar to try and cut Broghuilio off before he reaches that planet." He waited for a few seconds, but nobody could disagree. His voice became heavier. "visar, connect me to the reserve-squadron commander," he said.
"There is nothing more for us to do here," Garuth said in a voice that had become very quiet and very calm. "zorac, return the ship to Jevlen. We will await the arrival of the Thuriens there."
While the
Shapieron
was turning to head back, a set of toroids opened up briefly some distance outside the planetary system of Gistar, and the squadron of Thurien vessels that had been held in reserve there transferred into h-space, then reemerged outside the system of Uttan. The Jevlenese long-range surveillance instruments detected them as a series of objects hurtling inward at a speed not much below that of light. The commander at Uttan decided that a portion of the Terran strike force had been diverted, and within minutes every emergency signal band was carrying frantic offers of unconditional surrender. The Thuriens arrived at Uttan some hours later and took over without opposition.
That result had been unexpected. The reason for it was even more unexpected: Broghuilio's ships had not, after all, appeared at Uttan, or anywhere near it. Uttan control had lost contact when they vanished from the vicinity of Jevlen, and had been unable to relocate them. Without their leaders, the defenders at Uttan opted to capitulate without a fight.
So where had the five Jevlenese ships gone? visar reported that they had not rematerialized anywhere inside the regions of space that it controlled, and when it projected small transfer ports to the scores of worlds previously run by jevex and sent search probes bristling with sensors and instruments, the ships were not to be found at any of those places, either. They seemed to have vanished entirely from the explored portion of the Galaxy.
The Thuriens did find something else at Uttan, however—something that left them shaken and mystified. Hanging in space, all at various stages of construction, they found lines of immense engineering structures. Each was in the form of a hollow square that measured five hundred miles along a side, and carried at its center a two-hundred-mile-diameter sphere supported by bars extending diagonally inward from the corners.
"I don't understand this," Calazar said as he stared out from one of the Thurien vessels floating near Uttan. "Those are full-scale quadriflexors, exactly as we designed them. The Jevlenese have been building hundreds of them."
"I don't know," Showm replied, shaking her head beside him. "It makes no sense."
Heller, Caldwell, and Danchekker looked at each other. "What's a quadriflexor?" Caldwell asked.
Calazar sighed. There was no point in being evasive. "They are the devices with which we were going to enclose the Solar System," he said. "They were to be positioned at a considerable distance outside Pluto at points defining a quasispherical surface around the system. Every quadriflexor would couple through h-fields to the four adjacent to it in the grid, and collectively they would create a cumulative deformation of space-time at that boundary which would equate to an escape-proof gravitic gradient.
"We performed preproduction testing on some scaled-down prototypes, and we did in fact begin building some of the full-size versions, but we are still a long way from being in a position to implement the final plan." Calazar waved at the view outside the ship. "But the Jevlenese have obviously been copying our designs in secret, and their program was far more advanced. I can't understand why."
Danchekker was blinking behind his spectacles and frowning to himself while he wrestled with the riddle. Somehow he had the feeling that the last layer of the enigmatic onion that seemed to surround everything connected with the Jevlenese was about to be peeled away. By at first exaggerating Earth's aggressiveness and later manufacturing false evidence, the Jevlenese had persuaded the Thuriens that Terran expansion had to be checked, and nothing short of physical containment would check it. The Thuriens had, until very recently, been convinced, and had set the necessary preparations in motion accordingly. But the Jevlenese had embarked on an identical venture and concealed the fact from the Thuriens. Why? What did it mean?
Danchekker looked over at the images that visar was presenting of the Command Deck of the
Shapieron
and Sverenssen's office in Connecticut, but there were no suggestions forthcoming from those directions. The Ganymeans in the
Shapieron
were preoccupied with something that was happening on the main screen inside the ship, while in the other view he could see only the backs of Hunt and the others as they crowded around the terminal on the other side of the room, which connected them to the
Shapieron.
A lot of excited talking was going on in both places, but what it was about was obscure.
"Could they have been planning to do the same thing themselves?" Karen Heller said at last.
"For what reason?" Calazar asked. "We were already working on it. What could they have stood to gain?"
"Time?" Caldwell offered.
Calazar shook his head. "If time was so critical to them, they could have persuaded us to accelerate our own program with a fraction of the effort that they must have put into this. Certainly we have the resources to have been able to beat any schedule they could have been aiming at."
Frenua Showm was looking thoughtful. "And yet it's strange," she mused. "On several occasions when we wanted to speed up our program, the Jevlenese actually seemed to play down the risks of Terran expansion. It was as if they were trying to keep our research moving, but weren't in a hurry to see us move into production."
"They were milking off the know-how," Caldwell grunted. "Making sure that their program stayed well ahead of yours." He paused for a few seconds, then asked, "Could those things be used for shutting in anything else apart from a star system?"
"Hardly," Calazar replied, then added, "Well, I suppose they could be used to close in anything of comparable size . . . or something smaller, come to that."
"Mmm . . ." Caldwell lapsed back into thought.
Heller shrugged and turned up her hands. "If they weren't going to enclose the solar system, they must have been planning to enclose some other . . ." Her voice trailed away as the answer suddenly became plain, to her and to everybody else at the same time.
Calazar and Showm stared speechlessly at each other for a few seconds. "
Us?
" Calazar managed at last in a strained voice. "
The Thuriens?
They were going to shut in Gistar?" Showm brought her hand up to her brow and shook her head as she struggled to take in the implication of it. Caldwell and Heller were standing dumbstruck.
The whole thing slowly became clear in Danchekker's mind. "
Yes!
" he exclaimed. He moved forward to the center of the group and stood for a moment checking his thoughts, then began nodding his head vigorously. "Yes!" he said again. "Surely it's the only acceptable explanation." He looked excitedly from one to another of the others as if he expected them to agree with something there and then. They stared back at him blankly. Nobody knew what he was talking about. He waited for a moment and then elaborated. "I have never been able to accept fully that the obsessive Lambian-Cerian rivalry could have persisted in the minds of the Jevlenese for all that time, especially with their exposure to Ganymean influence. Did it never strike you as strange? Didn't any of you ever feel that there had to be something more behind it than just that?" He looked at the others questioningly again.
After a few seconds Caldwell said, "I guess not, Chris. Why? What are you getting at?"
Danchekker moistened his lips. "It's an interesting thought, wouldn't you agree, that there was one entity that was always there at the back of things, permanent and unchanging while generations of Jevlenese came and went."
There was a moment of silence. Then Heller stared at him and gasped. "jevex? Are you saying the computer was behind the whole thing?"
Danchekker nodded rapidly. "jevex was established a long time ago. Is it completely inconceivable that its basic design and programming couldn't somehow have embodied as some kind of innate driving instinct the ruthlessness and ambitions of its creators—the descendants of the original Lambians? And to realize those ambitions, could it not have harnessed the Jevlenese elite as its instruments? But if that were so, it would have found itself confronted by a serious obstacle in the form of the restraints imposed on it by the Thuriens."
Caldwell was beginning to nod. "It would have had to get the Thuriens out of the way somehow," he agreed.
"Precisely," Danchekker said. "But not too quickly. There was a lot that it wanted to learn from them first. And the really cunning part was that at the end of it all, the Thuriens' own ingenuity and technology would provide the means whereby the Jevlenese would get rid of them. Then, armed with stolen Ganymean science and with jevex as their leader, the Jevlenese would have had the Galaxy at their mercy. Think of all those developing worlds . . . and a technology that could cross light-years in moments. They would become the masters of every part of explored space, poised to expand their empire without limit, and the only potential opposition would be safely locked up inside a gravitic shell that nothing could get out of." Danchekker gripped his lapels and turned from side to side to take in the astounded expressions around him. "So now at last we see what was behind it all—the ultimate design that they had been working on, probably ever since Minerva. And how near they came to succeeding!"
"So the weapons at Uttan . . ." Calazar said falteringly, still struggling to grasp the enormity of it all. "They were never intended to be used against Thurien at all?"
"I doubt it," Danchekker said. "I suspect that they were for afterward, to add teeth to their expansion when the time came."
"Yes, and guess who'd have been first on the list," Heller said. "They were Lambians, and we were Cerians."
"Of course!" Showm whispered. "Earth would have been defenseless.
That
was why they concealed your demilitarization from us." She nodded slowly in grudging admiration. "It was neatly worked out. First they work to retard Earth's advancement while they grow strong and learn. Then they accelerate Earth's rate of discovery suddenly, engineer the results into a threat which they enlist Thuriens aid to eliminate. And finally they remove the threat to themselves but conceal the fact from the Thuriens, and use the very technique that they have induced the Thuriens to develop as the means of eliminating the Thuriens instead. That would have left them in a position to settle the old score with the Cerians without interference, and with the odds overwhelmingly in their favor."
"We wouldn't have stood a chance," Caldwell breathed, for once genuinely staggered.
"And the Jevlenese would have repossessed the solar system, which I suspect has always been their first goal," Danchekker said. "I would imagine they have always considered it rightly theirs. And they would no longer have had to play second fiddle to the Thuriens, a position they clearly have never been able to come to terms with gracefully."
"It all makes sense," Calazar said in a resigned voice. "Why they were so insistent about administering their own, autonomous group of worlds . . . why they needed a system independent of visar, controlling its own volume of space." He looked at Showm and nodded. "A lot of things are beginning to make sense now."