The Two Worlds (34 page)

"No disrespect, but your experts are missing the obvious," Garuth said. "They've taken advanced Thurien technology for granted for so long that they can't think in any other terms."

Calazar raised his hands protectively. "Calm down, stop waving your arms about, and tell me what you're trying to say," he suggested.

"The way to get in at Jevlen is in orbit over Thurien right now," Shilohin said. "The
Shapieron
! It might be obsolete by your standards, but it's got its own on-board power, and zorac flies it perfectly well without any need for anybody's h-grid."

For a few seconds Calazar stared mutely back at them in astonishment. What they had said was true—none of the scientists who had been debating the problem without a break since jevex had severed its connections had even considered the
Shapieron.
It seemed so obvious that Calazar was convinced there had to be a flaw. He looked questioningly at Eesyan.

"I can't see why not," Eesyan said. "As Shilohin says, there's no way jevex could stop it."

There was something deeper behind this proposal, Calazar sensed as he searched Garuth's face. What was equally obvious, and had not been said, was that even if jevex could not prevent the
Shapieron
from physically entering its operating zone, it might well have plenty of other means at its disposal for stopping the ship once it got in there. Garuth had been itching to confront the Jevlenese yesterday, and had been frustrated at the last moment. Was he now ready to risk himself, his crew, and his ship in recklessly settling something that he saw as a personal vendetta against Broghuilio? Calazar could not permit that. "The
Shapieron
would still be detected," he pointed out. "The Jevlenese will have sensors and scanners all over their star system. You could be walking into anything. A ship on its own, isolated from any communications with Thurien, with no defensive equipment of any kind? . . ." He let the sentence hang and allowed his expression to say the rest.

"We think we have an answer to that," Shilohin said. "We could fit the ship's probes with low-power h-link communicators that wouldn't register on jevex's detectors and deploy them as a covering screen twenty miles or so out from the
Shapieron.
That would give them, effectively, faster-than-light communications back to the ship's computers. zorac would be able to generate cancellation functions that the probes would relay outward as out-of-phase signals added to the optical and radar wavelengths reflected from the ship so that the net readings registered at a distance in any direction would be zero. In other words it would be electromagnetically invisible."

"It would still show up on h-scan," Calazar objected. "jevex could detect its main-drive stressfield."

"We don't have to use main drive at all," Shilohin countered. "visar could accelerate the ship in h-space and eject it from the exit port with sufficient momentum to reach Jevlen passively in a day. When it got near, it could retard and maneuver on its auxiliaries, which radiate below detection threshold."

"But you'd still have to project an exit port outside the star system," Calazar said. "You couldn't hide that scale of disturbance from jevex. It would know that something was going on."

"So we send another ship or two as decoys . . . unmanned ships," Shilohin replied. "Let jevex jam those and think that's all there is to it. In fact that would be a good way of diverting its attention from the
Shapieron.
"

Calazar still didn't like the proposal. He turned away, clasped his hands behind his back, and paced slowly across the room to stare at the wall while he thought it over. He was not a technical expert, but from what he knew, the scheme was workable theoretically. Thurien ships carried on-board compensators that interacted with a projected toroid, compacting it and minimizing the gravitational disturbance created around it. That was why Thurien ships could travel out of a planetary system and transfer into h-space after only a day of conventional cruising. The
Shapieron
had not been built with such compensators, of course, which was why months had been necessary for it to clear the solar system. But even as the thought struck him, Calazar realized there was a simple answer to that too: the
Shapieron
could be equipped with a Thurien compensator system in a matter of days. Anyway, if there were serious technical difficulties, Eesyan would already have found them.

Calazar did not have to ask what the purpose of the exercise would be. jevex consisted of a huge network similar to visar, and in addition to its grid of h-communications facilities possessed a dense mesh of conventional electromagnetic signal beams that it employed for local communications over moderate distances around Jevlen. If the Thuriens could intercept one, or preferably several, of those beams, simulating regular traffic in order to be inconspicuous, there was a chance that they might be able to gain access to the operating nucleus of jevex and crash the system from the inside. If they succeeded, the whole Jevlenese operation would come down with it, and the same thing would happen to the whole empire that had happened on a smaller scale to the Thurien Jevlenese a day earlier. But the problem was how to get the necessary hardware physically into a position to intercept the beams. Eesyan's scientists had been debating it for over a day and so far had produced no usable suggestions.

At last Calazar wheeled around to face the others again. "Very well, you seem to have that side of it all figured out," he conceded. "But tell me if I'm missing something. There's something else that you haven't mentioned: the kind of computing power you'd need to bring down a system like jevex would be phenomenal. zorac could never do it. The only system in existence that would stand a chance is visar, but you couldn't couple visar into zorac because that would require an h-link, and you couldn't close an h-link while jevex is running."

"That's a gamble," Eesyan admitted. "But zorac wouldn't have to crash the whole jevex system. All it would have to do is open up a channel to let visar in. Our idea is to equip the
Shapieron
and a set of its daughter probes with h-link equipment that visar can couple in through, and disperse them to intercept a number of channels into jevex. Then if zorac can just get far enough into jevex to block its jamming capability, we can throw the whole weight of visar in behind zorac and hit jevex from all directions at once. visar would do the rest."

There was a chance, Calazar admitted to himself. He didn't know what the plan's odds of success were, but it was a chance; and Garuth's idea was more than anybody else had been able to come up with. But the vision in his mind's eye of the
Shapieron
venturing alone into a hostile region of space, unarmed and defenseless, and the tiny zorac pitting itself against the might of jevex, was chilling. He walked slowly back to the center of the room while the other three Ganymeans watched him intently. It was clear from their expressions what they wanted him to say. "You realize, of course, that this could mean subjecting your ship to what could be a considerable risk," he said gravely, looking at Garuth. "We have no idea what the Jevlenese have waiting there. Once you are in, there will be no way for us to get to you if you encounter difficulties. You would not even be able to contact us without revealing your presence, and even then the channel would immediately be jammed. You would be entirely on your own."

"I know that," Garuth answered. His expression had hardened, and his voice was uncharacteristically tense. "
I
would go. I would not ask any of my people to follow. It would be for them to decide individually."

"I have already decided," Shilohin said. "A full crew would not be necessary. More would come forward than would be needed."

Inside, Calazar was beginning to yield to the irrefutable logic of their argument. Time was precious, and the effectiveness of anything that could be done to thwart the Jevlenese ambitions would be amplified by an enormous factor with every day saved. But Calazar knew, too, that Garuth's scientists and zorac would not possess the knowledge of Thurien computing techniques viably to wage a war of wits with jevex; the expedition would have to include some expertise from Thurien as well.

Eesyan seemed to read his mind. "I will go too," he said quietly. "And there will also be more volunteers among my experts than we will require. You can count on it."

After a long, heavy silence, Shilohin said, "Gregg Caldwell has a method that he uses sometimes when he has to make a difficult decision quickly: forget the issue itself and consider the alternatives; if none of them is acceptable, the decision is made. It fits this situation well."

Calazar drew a long breath. She was right. There were risks, but doing nothing and having to face at some later date what the Jevlenese had been preparing anyway, with their plans correspondingly more advanced, might be taking a greater risk in the long run. "Your opinion, visar?" he said.

"Agreed on all points, especially the last," visar replied simply.

"You're confident about taking on jevex?"

"Just let me at it."

"You could operate effectively with access only through zorac? You could neutralize jevex on that basis?"

"Neutralize it? I'll tear it apart!"

Calazar's eyebrows lifted in surprise. It sounded as if visar had been talking with Terrans too much. His expression grew serious again as he thought for a few seconds longer, then nodded once. The decision was made. At once his manner became more businesslike. "The most important thing now is time," he told them. "How much thought have you given to that? Do you have a schedule worked out yet?"

"A day to select and brief ten of my scientists, five days to equip the
Shapieron
with entry compensators for it to clear Gistar in minimum time, and five days to fit the ship and probes with h-link and screening hardware," Eesyan replied at once. "But we can stage those jobs in parallel and conduct testing during the voyage. We'll need a day to clear Gistar and another to make Jevlen from the exit port, plus an extra day to allow for Vic Hunt's Murphy Factor. That means we could be leaving Thurien in six days."

"Very well," Calazar said, nodding. "If we are agreed that time is vital, we must not waste any. Let us begin immediately."

"There is one more thing," Garuth said, then hesitated.

Calazar waited for a few seconds. "Yes, Commander?"

Garuth spread his hands, then dropped them to his sides again. "The Terrans. They will want to come too. I know them. They will want to use the perceptron to come physically to Thurien to join us." He looked appealingly at Shilohin and Eesyan as if for support. "But this . . . war will be fought purely with advanced Ganymean technologies and techniques. The Terrans would be able to contribute nothing. There is no reason why they should be allowed to place themselves at risk. On top of that, we have been helped enormously so far by information from Earth, and we might well be again. In other words we cannot afford to be without the communications channel to McClusky at a time like this. They have a more valuable function to perform there. Therefore I would rather we deny any such request . . . for their own good as much as anything else."

Calazar looked into Garuth's eyes and saw again the hardness that he had glimpsed at the moment when Broghuilio had announced the
Shapieron
's destruction. It was as Calazar had suspected—a personal score to be settled with Broghuilio. Garuth wanted no outsiders, not even Hunt and his colleagues. It was a strange reaction to find in a Ganymean. He looked at Shilohin and Eesyan and could see that they had read it too. But they would not offend Garuth's pride and dignity by saying so. And neither would Calazar.

"Very well," he agreed, nodding. "It will be as you request."

Night surrounded the Soviet military jet skimming northward over the ice between Franz Josef Land and the Pole. The clash that had occurred inside the Kremlin and throughout the ruling hierarchy of the Soviet Union was still far from resolved, and the loyalties of the nation's forces were divided; the flight was therefore being made secretly to minimize risks. While Verikoff sat rigidly between two armed guards at the back of the darkened cabin and the half-dozen other officers dozed or talked in lowered voices in the seats around him, Mikolai Sobroskin stared out at the blackness through the window beside him and thought about the astounding events of the past forty-eight hours.

The aliens didn't stand up very well under interrogation, he had discovered. At least, the alien Verikoff hadn't. For that was what Verikoff was—a member of a network of agents from the fully human contingent of Thurien that ran the surveillance operation, and who had been infiltrating Earth's society all through history. Niels Sverenssen was another. The demilitarization of Earth had been engineered in preparation for their emergence as a ruling elite to be established by the Jevlenese, with Sverenssen as planetary overlord. Earth would eventually be deindustrialized to provide a playground for the aristocracy of Jevlen and extensive rural estates as rewards for its more faithful servants. How a planet reduced to this condition would support the portion of its population not required for labor and services had not been explained.

Once this much had been established, the value of Verikoff's skin had fallen markedly. To save it he had offered to cooperate, and to prove his credibility he had divulged details of the communications link between Jevlen and its operation on Earth, located at Sverenssen's home in Connecticut and installed by Jevlenese technicians employed by a U.S. construction company set up as a front for some of the Jevlenese's other activities. Through this link Sverenssen had been able to report details of the Thurien attempt to talk to Earth secretly via Farside and had received his instructions for controlling the Earth end of the dialogue. Sobroskin had detected no hint that Verikoff knew anything about the U.S. channel that Norman Pacey had mentioned. Despite the elaborate Jevlenese information-gathering system, therefore, Sobroskin had concluded that at least that secret had been kept safe.