The Two Worlds (21 page)

"Oh, come . . ." Sverenssen frowned and looked away for an instant like somebody seeking to avoid a delicate subject. "Surely you can't expect your affair with your American colleague to have escaped notice completely. Really . . . this kind of thing is embarrassing and uncalled for. I would rather we dropped the matter."

Pacey stared at him for a moment in frank disbelief, then turned his gaze toward Daldanier. The Frenchman turned to pick up his drink. He looked at Saraquez, who avoided his eyes and said nothing. Finally he turned to Van Geelink, the South African, who had only been listening so far. "It was very unwise," Van Geelink said, almost managing to sound apologetic.

"
Him!
" Pacey gestured in Sverenssen's direction and swept his eyes over the others again, this time offering a challenge. "You let
him
stand there and spew something like that? Him of all people? You can't be serious."

"I'm not sure that I like your tone, Pacey," Sverenssen said. "What are you trying to insinuate?"

The situation was real. Sverenssen was actually brazening it out. Pacey felt his fist bunch itself against his side but resisted the urge to lash out. "Are you going to try and tell me I dreamed that too?" he whispered. "Malliusk's assistant—it never happened? Are these puppets of yours going to back you up on that too?"

Sverenssen made a good job of appearing shocked. "If you are suggesting what I mink you are suggesting, I would advise you to retract the remark at once and apologize. I find it not only insulting, but also demeaning to somebody in your position. Pathetic fabrications will not impress anybody here, and are hardly likely to do anything to restore the doubtlessly somewhat tarnished image that you will have made for yourself on Earth. I would have credited you with more intelligence."

"Bad, very bad," Daldanier shook his head and sipped his drink.

"Unheard of," Saraquez muttered.

Van Geelink stared uncomfortably at the floor, but said nothing.

At that moment a call from the speaker concealed in the ceiling interrupted. "Calling Mr. Sverenssen of the UN Delegation. Urgent call holding. Would Mr. Sverenssen come to a phone, please."

"You must excuse me, gentlemen," Sverenssen sighed. He looked sternly at Pacey. "I am prepared to attribute this sad exhibition to an aberration occasioned by your having to acclimatize to an extraterrestrial environment, and will say no more about it." His voice took on a more ominous note. "But I must warn you that should you persist in repeating such slanderous accusations when we leave the confines of this establishment, I will be obliged to take a far more serious view. If so, you would not find the consequences beneficial either to your personal situation or to your future prospects professionally. I trust I make myself clear." With that he turned and conveyed himself regally from the room. The other three drank up quickly and left in rapid succession.

That night, his last at Bruno, Pacey was too bewildered, frustrated, and angry to sleep. He stayed up in his room and paced about the floor going over every detail of all that had happened and examining the whole situation first from one angle and then from another, but he could find no pattern that fitted everything. Once again he was tempted to call Alaska, but resisted.

It was approaching 2 A.M. local time when a light tap sounded on the door. Puzzled, Pacey rose from the chair in which he had been brooding and went over to answer it. It was Sobroskin. The Russian slipped in quickly, waited until Pacey closed the door, then reached inside his jacket and produced a large envelope that he passed over without speaking. Pacey opened it. Inside was a pink wallet with a bright red border. The title label on the front read:

CONFIDENTIAL. REPORT

238/2[G/NTS/FM]. NORMAN H. PACEY—PERSONAL PROFILE AND NOTES.

Pacey looked at it incredulously, opened it to ruffle quickly through the contents, then looked up. "How did you get this?" he asked in a hoarse voice.

"There are ways," Sobroskin said vaguely. "Did you know of it?"

"I . . . had reason to believe that something like it might exist," Pacey told him guardedly.

Sobroskin nodded. "I thought you might wish to put it somewhere safe, or perhaps burn it. There was only one other copy, which I have already destroyed, so you may rest with knowledge that it will not get to where it was supposed to go." Pacey looked down at the wallet again, too stunned to reply. "Also, I came across a very strange volume of minutes of the delegation's sessions—nothing at all like what I remembered. I substituted a set of the copies that you and I both saw and approved. Take my word for it that those are the ones that will reach New York. I resealed them myself in the courier's bag just before it was taken to Tycho."

"But . . . how?" was all Pacey could say.

"I have not the slightest intention of telling you." The Russian's voice was curt, but his eyes were twinkling.

Suddenly Pacey grinned as the message at last got through that not everybody in the world was his enemy. "Perhaps it's about time we sat down and compared notes," he said. "I guess I don't have any vodka in the place. How about gin?"

"Precisely the conclusion that I have come to also," Sobroskin said, extracting a sheaf of notes from an inside pocket. "Gin would be fine—I'm very partial to it." He hung his jacket by the door and sat down to make himself comfortable in one of the armchairs while Pacey went into the next room for some glasses. While he was there he checked to make sure the ice maker was well stocked. He had a feeling it was going to be a long night.

Garuth had spent twenty-eight years of his life with the
Shapieron.

A group of scientists on ancient Minerva had advocated a program of extensive climatic and geological engineering to control the predicted buildup of carbon dioxide. The project would have been extremely complicated, however, and simulation models revealed a high risk of rendering the planet uninhabitable sooner rather than later by disrupting the greenhouse effect that enabled Minerva to support life at its considerable distance from the Sun. As an insurance against this risk, another group proposed a method for increasing the Sun's radiation output by modifying its self-gravitation, the idea being that the climatic-engineering program could go ahead, and if instabilities did set in to the point of destroying the greenhouse effect, the Sun could be warmed up to compensate. Thus, overall, Minerva would be no worse off.

As a precaution, the Minervan government decided to test the latter idea first by dispatching a scientific mission aboard the
Shapieron
to conduct a full-scale trial on a sunlike star called Iscaris, whose planets supported no life of any kind. It was as well that they did. Something went wrong that caused Iscaris to go nova, and the expedition had been forced to flee without waiting for completion of the repairs to the ship's main-drive system, which were in progress at the time. Hurled to maximum speed and with its braking system inoperative, the
Shapieron
returned to the vicinity of the solar system and circled for over twenty years by its own clocks under conditions of compounded time dilation while a million times that amount sped by in the rest of the Universe. And so, eventually, the ship had come to Earth.

As Garuth stood in the doorway of one of the lecture theaters of the ship's school and gazed across the rows of empty seats and scratched worktops to the raised dais and array of screens at the far end, his mind recalled those years. Many who had left Minerva with him had not survived to see this day. At times he had believed that none of them would ever see it. But, as was the pattern of life, a new generation had replaced those who were gone—a generation born and raised in the emptiness of space, who, apart from the brief stay on Earth, had known no other home than the inside of the ship. In many ways Garuth felt like a father to all of them. Although his own faith had wavered at times, theirs had not, and as they had never thought to doubt, he had brought them home. What would happen to them now? he wondered.

Now that the day had arrived, he found he had mixed feelings. The rational part of him was joyful, naturally, that the long exile of his people was over, and they were at last reunited with their kind; but at a deeper level, another part of him would miss this miniature, self-contained world, which for so long now had been the only one he had known. The ship, its way of life, and its tiny, close-knit community were as much part of him as he was part of them. Now all that was over. Would he ever be able to belong in the same way in the mind-defying, overwhelming civilization of Thurien with technologies that bordered on magic and a population of hundreds of billions flung across light-years of stars and space? Could any of them? And if not, could they ever belong anywhere again?

After a while he turned away and began walking slowly through the deserted corridors and communications decks toward an access point into a transfer tube that would take him back to the ship's command section. The floors were worn by years of treading feet, the corners of the walls abraded and smoothed by the passings of innumerable bodies. Every mark and score had its own tale to tell of some event that had occurred somewhere in the course of all those years. Would all that now be forgotten?

In some ways he felt that it already had been. The
Shapieron
was in high orbit over Thurien, and most of its occupants had been taken down to accommodations prepared for them on the surface. There had been no public celebrations or welcoming ceremonies; the fact that the ship had been intercepted still had to be concealed. Only a handful of Thuriens were aware that Garuth and his people existed at all.

Shilohin was waiting on the Command Deck when he arrived, studying information on one of the displays. She looked around as he approached. "I had no idea just how complex the operation to intercept the ship was," she said. "Some of the physics is quite remarkable."

"How so?" Garuth inquired.

"Eesyan's engineers created a composite hyperport—a dual-purpose toroid that functioned as an entry port in one direction and an exit in the other at the same time. That was how they made the substitution so quickly: the dummy came out of one side as we went into the other. But to control it, they had to get their timing down to picoseconds." She paused and gave him a searching look. "You seem sad. Is something wrong?"

He gestured vaguely in the direction he had just come from. "Oh, it's just . . . walking through the ship . . . empty, with nobody around. It takes some getting used to after so long."

"Yes, I know." Her voice fell to an understanding note. "But you shouldn't feel sad. You did what you promised. They will all have their own lives to live again soon. It will be for the better."

"I hope so," Garuth said.

At that moment zorac spoke. "I've just received another message through visar: Calazar is free now and says he'll see you as soon as you're ready. He suggests meeting at a planet called Queeth, approximately twelve light-years from here."

"We're on our way," Garuth said. He shook his head wonderingly at Shilohin as they left the Command Deck. "I'm not sure I'll ever get used to this."

"The Earthpeople seem to be adapting well," she replied. "The last time I talked to Vic Hunt, he was trying to find a way of getting a coupler installed in his office."

"Earthpeople can adapt to anything," Garuth said with a sigh.

They entered the room in which the Thuriens had installed a row of four portable percepto-coupling cubicles, which represented the only means of using the Thurien system since the
Shapieron
was not wired for visar; hence Calazar could not "visit" the ship. Had the ship not been in orbit and therefore in free-fall, the weight of the microtoroid contained in the communications module of the equipment would have buckled the deck at best. Garuth entered one of the cubicles as Shilohin selected another, and he settled back in the recliner to couple his mind into visar. An instant later he was standing alongside Calazar in a large room that was part of an artificial island floating fifty miles above the surface of Queeth. Shilohin appeared next to him a few seconds later.

"Terrans are shrewder than you give them credit for," Garuth stated after the three of them had been talking for some time. "We lived among them for six months, and we know. What is difficult for the Ganymean mind to grasp is that deception and the recognition of deception are parts of their way of life. They have a natural feel for it and will soon get to the truth. Trying to conceal it any longer will only make the situation more embarrassing for all of us when they do. You should be frank with them now."

"And besides, this is not the Ganymean way," Shilohin said. "We have told you the true situation on Earth and how we were made welcome and helped there in every way possible. Your earlier doubts were justified because of the lies reported to you by the Jevlenese, but that no longer holds. You owe it to the Terrans, and to us, to tell them the whole truth now."

Calazar moved away a short distance and turned to stand with his hands clasped behind his back while he considered what they had said. The room they were in formed an oval projection hanging from the underside of the island. Its interior comprised a sunken floor surrounded by a continuous, sloping transparent wall that looked down over the purple, cloud-flecked surface of Queeth in every direction. Outside the wall and above, the mass of the island loomed in a series of metallic contours, blisters, and prominences converging together as they curved away out of sight overhead. "So . . . we won't be able to keep the truth from them," Calazar said at last without turning his head.

"Remember it was the Terrans who first recognized the risk that the Jevlenese could have planned to destroy the
Shapieron
with Earth set up to take the blame," Garuth reminded him. "The Thuriens would never have thought of it. Let's be honest—Terran and Jevlenese minds think very much alike, and Ganymean minds think very differently. We are not predators, and we have not evolved the art of sensing predators."