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up out of the newsgrid, they would have known that you knew about the
Shapieron-something they hadn't been telling you about. They couldn't have
just done nothing...not without arousing suspicion. They'd have to tell you
about it at that point, because they knew if they didn't you'd be going to
them and asking some awkward questions."
"Which is exactly what they did," Calazar confirmed.
"So didn't you ask them why they hadn't gotten around to it earlier?" Caidwell
asked. "I
mean-hell, the ship had been there for six months."
"Yes, we did," Calazar replied. "The reason they gave was that they were
concerned for the
Shapieron's safety, and feared that attempts to interfere with the situation
might only jeopardize it further. Rightly or wrongly, they had come to the
decision that it would be better for us to know only after it was out of the
solar System."
Caldwell snorted, obviously not impressed by the mysterious "organization's"
excuse.
"Didn't you ask to see the records they had acquired through their
surveillance?"
"We did," Calazar answered. "And they produced ones that had every appearance
of justifying their fears for the Shapieron completely."
Now Hunt knew where the phony depictions that he had witnessed of the
Shapieron's arrival at Ganymede had come from:
the "organization" had faked them just as they had been faking their reports
of Earth all along. Those were the versions that Calazar's people had been
shown. If those scenes with their frighteningly authentic blending of reality
and fantasy were typical of what had been going on, it was no wonder that the
deception had gone unsuspected for years.
"I've seen some of those records," Hunt said. He sounded incredulous. "How did
you ever come to suspect that they might not be genuine? They're
unbelievable."
"We didn't," Eesyan told him. "VISAR did. As you may be aware, the drive
method of the
Shapieron creates a spacetime deformation around the ship. It is most
pronounced when main drive is operating, but exists to some extent even under
auxiliary drive-sufficient to displace the apparent positions of background
stars close to the vessel's outline by a measurable amount. VISAR noticed that
the predicted displacements were present in some of the views we were shown,
but completely missing from others. Hence the reports of the Shapieron were
suspect."
"And not only those," Calazar said. "By implication, every other report that
we had ever received of Earth was in doubt too, but we had no comparable way
of testing them." He moved his eyes solemnly along the row of Terran faces.
"Perhaps now you can see why we were concerned. We had two conflicting
impressions of Earth, and no way of knowing how much of each might be true.
But suppose that Earth was as aggressive and as irrational as we had been led
to believe for years, and that the occupants of the Shapieron had indeed been
received and treated in the ways described to us..." He left the sentence
unfinished. "Well, in our position what might you have thought?"
A silence descended around the table. The Thuriens wouldn't have known what to
believe, Hunt conceded inwardly. Their only way to check the facts would have
been to reopen the dialogue with Earth secretly and establish face-to-face
contact, which was precisely what they had done. So why had it been so
important?
Suddenly Lyn's mouth dropped open, and she stared wide-eyed at Calazar. "You
were afraid that we might have bombed the Shapieron or something!" she gasped,
horrified. "If we were the way those stories said, we'd never have let that
ship get to Thurien to tell anybody about it." The shocked looks coming from
around her said that it suddenly all made sense to the others too. Even
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CaIdwell seemed deflated for the moment. It was a shame about Jerol Packard,
but nobody could blame the Thuriens for acting as they had.
"But you didn't have to wait to find out," Hunt said after a few seconds. "You
can project black-hole ports across light-years. Why didn't you simply
intercept the ship and get it here fast? Surely they'd have been the obvious
people to check your surveillance reports with; they had been on Earth for six
months."
"Technical reasons," Eesyan replied. "A Thurien vessel can clear a planetary
system in about a day, but only because it carries on-board equipment that
interacts with the transfer port and keeps the gravitational disturbance
relatively localized. Naturally the Shapieron does not have such equipment. We
needed to give it months if we were to avoid perturbing your planetary orbits.
That would have been embarrassing if our fears were groundless. But we've been
taking a risk. We finally reached the point where we had to know whether or
not that ship was safe-now, without any further delays and obstructions."
"We had decided to go ahead anyway when it became clear that we were not
making progress
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with the UN," Calazar told them. "Only when your messages from Jupiter started
coming in did we decide to leave it a little longer. We had the necessary
ships and generators ready then, and they have been standing by ever since.
All they needed was one signal from us to commence the operation."
Hunt sank back in his chair and released a long breath. It had been a close
thing. If Joe
Shannon on Jupiter Five had not been thinking too clearly for a day or two,
all of Earth's astronomical tables would have needed to be worked out all over
again from square one.
"You'd better send the signal."
The voice sounded suddenly from one end of the Terran group. Everyone looked
round, surprised, and found Danchekker directing a challenging look from one
part of the table to another as if inviting them to make some obvious
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