At that instant another operator called out, "Gravitational anomaly building up astern and starboard, range nine eighty miles, strength seven, increasing. Readings indicate a Class Five exit port. H-scan shows conformal entry-port mapping to vicinity of Shapieron." The tension on the bridge rocketed. It meant that visar was projecting two beams to create a linked pair of transfer ports—a "tunnel" through h-space from the Shapieron to the Jevlenese vessels. A Class Five port would admit something relatively small. The operator's voice came again, rising with alarm. "An object has emerged at this end. It's coming this way, fast!"
"A bomb!" somebody screamed. "They've exited a bomb!" Consternation broke out around the bridge. Broghuilio was wide-eyed and sweating profusely. Wylott had collapsed onto a chair.
The operator's voice came again. "Object identified. It's one of the Shapieron's robot probes . . . matching us in course and speed. The exit port has dissolved."
And the long-range surveillance operator: "Shapieron closing and still accelerating. Range two-twenty thousand miles."
"Get rid of it," Broghuilio barked up at the level above. "Captain, shake that thing off."
The captain gave a set of course-correction instructions, which the computers acknowledged and executed.
"Probe matching," came the report. "Evasion ineffective. Shapieron has corrected to a new vector and is still closing."
Broghuilio turned a furious face toward Estordu. "You said they'd be blind! They're not even slowing down." Estordu spread his hands and shook his head helplessly. Broghuilio looked at the rest of the group of scientists. "Well, how are they doing it? Can't any of you work it out?" He waited for a few seconds, then pointed a finger angrily at the screens showing the tracking data of the Shapieron. "Some genius on that ship has thought of something." He began pacing back and forth across the bridge. "How does this happen? They have all the geniuses, and I have all the imbeciles. Give me—"
"The probe!" Estordu groaned suddenly. "They must have fitted the probe and the Shapieron with h-links. The probe will be able to monitor every move we make and update the Shapieron's flight-control system through visar. We'll never lose it now."
Broghuilio glared at him for a second, then looked across at the communications officer. "We have to make the jump to Uttan now," he declared. "What's the status there?"
"The generators are up to power and standing by," the officer told him. "Their director is locked onto our beacon, and they can throw a port here immediately."
"But what if that probe transfers through with us?" Estordu said. "visar would locate it when it reenters at Uttan. It would reveal our destination."
"Those geniuses will have guessed our destination already," Broghuilio retorted. "So what could they do? We can blow anything that comes near Uttan to atoms."
"But we're still too close to Jevlen," Estordu objected, looking alarmed. "It would disrupt the whole planet . . . chaos everywhere."
"So would you rather stay here?" Broghuilio sneered. "Hasn't it occurred to you yet that the probe was just a warning? The next thing they tunnel through at us will be a bomb." He sent a stare around the bridge that defied anybody to argue with him. Nobody did. He raised his head. "Captain. Transfer now, to Uttan."
The command was relayed to Uttan, and within seconds huge generators were pouring energy into a tiny volume of space ahead of the five Jevlenese ships. The fabric of space-time wrinkled, then buckled, heaved, and fell in upon itself to plummet out of the Universe. A spinning vortex began growing to open up the gateway to another realm, first as a faint circle of curdled starlight against the void, then getting stronger, thicker, and sharper, and expanding slowly to reveal a core of featureless, infinite blackness.
And then a counterspinning pattern of refractions materialized inside the first. The resultant composite of vortices shimmered and pulsated as filaments of space and time writhed in a tangle of knotted geodesies. Something was wrong. The port was going unstable. "What's happening?" Broghuilio demanded.
Estordu was turning his head frantically from side to side to take in the displays and data reports. "Something is deforming the configuration . . . breaking up the field manifolds. I've never seen anything like this. It can only be visar."
"That's impossible," one of the other scientists shouted. "visar can't jam. It has no sensors. jevex is shut down."
"That's not jamming," Estordu muttered. "The port began to form. It's doing something else. . . ." His eye caught the view of the Shapieron again. "The probe! visar is using the probe to monitor the entry-port configuration. It couldn't jam the beam, so it's trying to project a complementary pattern from Gistar to cancel out the toroid from Uttan. It's trying to neutralize it."
"It couldn't," the other scientist protested. "It couldn't get enough resolution through a single probe. It would be aiming virtually blind from Gistar."
"The Gistar and Uttan beams would interact constructively in the same volume," another pointed out. "If an unstable resonance developed, anything could happen."
"That is an unstable resonance," Estordu shouted, pointing at the display. "I tell you, that's what visar's doing."
"visar would never risk it."
Ahead of the ships, a maelstrom of twisting, convulsing, multiple-connected relativity was boiling under the clash of titanic bolts of energy materializing and superposing from two points, each light-years away. The core shrank, grew again, fragmented, then reassembled itself. And still they were heading directly for its center.
Broghuilio had listened enough. He turned his head up to where the captain was watching him, waiting. Then at the last second, something about Estordu pulled his attention away.
Estordu was standing absolutely still with a strange look on his face as he stared at the view of the Shapieron. He was mumbling to himself, and seemed to have forgotten everything going on around him. "H-links through the probes," he whispered. "That was how visar got into jevex." His eyes opened wider, and his face became ashen as the full realization hit him. "That was how . . . everything got into jevex! It never existed, any of it. They were doing it through the Shapieron all the time. . . . We're running away from a single unarmed ship."
"What is it?" Broghuilio snapped. "Why are you looking like that?"
Estordu looked at him with a bleak stare. "It doesn't exist. . . . The Terran strike force doesn't exist. It never did. visar wrote it into jevex through the Shapieron. The whole thing was a fabrication. There was nothing there but the Shapieron all the time."
The captain leaned over from above. "Excellency, we have to . . ." He stopped as he saw that Broghuilio was not listening, hesitated for a second, then turned away to call to somewhere behind him. "Disengage forward compensators. Cut in emergency boost and reverse at full power. Compute evasion function and execute immediately."
"What?—What did you say?" Broghuilio turned to face the semicircle of cowering figures behind him. "Are you telling me the Terrans have been making fools out of all of you?"
From above the synthetic voice of a computer came tonelessly: "Negative function. Negative function. All measures ineffective. Ship accelerating on irreversible gradient. Corrective action now impossible. Repeat: Corrective action now impossible."
But Broghuilio didn't hear, even as the craft plunged into the knot of insanely tangled space-time looming around them. "You imbeciles!" he breathed. His voice rose and began shaking uncontrollably as he lifted his fists high above his head. "Imbeciles! IMBECILES! You IM-BE-CILES!!"
"My God, they're going straight into it!" Hunt gasped from a screen on the Command Deck of the Shapieron. The view on the main screen was being sent back from the probe two hundred thousand miles away, still clinging doggedly to the heels of the Jevlenese ships. A horrified silence had fallen all around.
"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 pr
operties 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.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
"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 kn
ow-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.
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