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."
He fell silent for a few seconds. When he spoke again his voice was lighter. "If all this is true, then our problem of what to do next could be eased considerably. If the roots of it all lay not so much in the Jevlenese people but in jevex, then maybe there is hope for them after all. Distasteful punitive measures may not be necessary."
A distant look came into Showm's eyes. "Ye-es," she said slowly, and began nodding. "Perhaps, given the right help, they might rebuild their civilization upon a new model and emerge from it all as a mature and benign race. All may not be lost yet."
"It does give us a positive goal to aim at and a task to accomplish," Calazar said, sounding more enthusiastic. "Despite all the setbacks, things might work out to a successful conclusion. As you say, all is not lost."
"Er, at present this is merely a hypothesis, you understand," Danchekker said hastily. "But there might be a way to test it. If the whole thing did in fact begin with jevex, it might be possible to trace the origins of some of the things we've been talking about back to conceptual subnets of some form buried in jevex's older archives." He looked at Calazar. "I assume that once your people are fully in control of Jevlen, it would be possible to reactivate parts of jevex in a controlled fashion and allow visar to examine its records thoroughly."
Calazar was already nodding. "I would have thought so. Eesyan is really the person we should talk to about that." He looked across at the view coming from the Command Deck of the Shapieron. "Isn't he free yet? What's happening there?"
Consternation was breaking out among the Ganymeans crowded below the main screen in the image. At the same time a chorus of shouts erupted from the other image, showing the view from Earth, in which Hunt and the others were bumping into each other in their haste to get back across the room to the terminal that connected them to the Thurien ship at Uttan. Danchekker, Calazar, and the others with them forgot their conversation of a few moments earlier and stared in astonishment. Hunt was almost incoherent with excitement as he got to the screen. "We've found them! zorac reprocessed the planet. We know where they went. It's impossible!"
Danchekker blinked at him. "Vic, what are you babbling about? Kindly calm down, and simply say whatever it is that you're trying to say."
Hunt recomposed himself with some effort. "The five Jevlenese ships. We know what happened to them." He paused for a second to get his breath back, then turned his head away to call over the people behind him to the terminal connecting them to the Shapieron. "zorac, pass that shot over to visar, would you. Tell visar to display it at Uttan." In the ship where Danchekker was, an image appeared of the final shot of the Jevlenese vessels sent back by the Shapieron's probe just before the tunnel caved in. "Have you got it?" Hunt asked.
Danchekker nodded. "Yes. What about it?"
"The spot in the upper right-hand corner is a planet," Hunt said. "We asked zorac if there was any way it could reprocess that part of the image and enhance it to give us a better look at it. It did. We know what planet it is."
"Well?" Danchekker asked, puzzled, after a second or two. "Where is it?"
"A better question would be when?" Hunt told him.
Danchekker frowned and looked around him only to be met by expressions as confused as his own. "Vic, what are you talking about?" he asked.
"visar, show them," Hunt said in reply.
The speck enlarged in an instant to become a full d
isk occupying the whole frame. It was a world shining brightly against the stars with cloud formations and oceans. The resolution was not good, but there were continental outlines discernible on its surface. Calazar and Showm froze. A split second later, Danchekker realized why.
What he was looking at was not unfamiliar. Like Hunt, he had studied every island, isthmus, estuary, and coastline sandwiched between the two enormous ice caps of that planet many times—at Houston, in the course of the Lunarian investigations over two years earlier. He looked away. Calazar and Showm were still staring in silent awe, and now Caldwell too was wide-eyed with disbelief. Danchekker slowly turned his head to follow their gaze once again. It was still there. He hadn't imagined it.
The planet was Minerva.
Chapter Forty
Nobody could say for certain exactly how it had come about in those final few seconds as visar and the projector at Uttan fought for control of the same speck of space-time light-years away, and many believed that nobody ever would. But Hunt was forced at last to accept the truth of the claim that Paul Shelling had made at Houston on the day that Karen Heller and Norman Pacey had come to talk to Caldwell: the Ganymean physical equations that described the possibility of point-to-point transfers through space had solutions that admitted transfers through time too. Or both. For somehow the five Jevlenese ships had been hurled across light-years of space and backward through tens of thousands of years of time to emerge in the solar system when Minerva was still in existence. In fact, by careful measurement of the positions of background stars, the Ganymean scientists determined to a high degree of accuracy when; it came out to be about two hundred years before the final Lunarian war.
And that, of course, explained where the superbreed of Lambians, who had emerged seemingly overnight with a technology far in advance of anything else anywhere on the planet, had come from. And it explained why a planet that had, by and large, mended its warlike ways and commenced working constructively and cooperatively toward an eventual migration to Earth became divided into the two rival factions that in the end had destroyed each other. The Cerians were native, having evolved from the terrestrial primates transported to Minerva twenty-five million years earlier by the Ganymeans, while the Lambians were from Jevlen and fifty thousand years in the future. The Lambians never emerged at all; they arrived.
There were more than enough riddles in this for the scientists to argue over for many years to come. How, for example, could the Lambians have been the descendants of their own descendants? Their greed and power lust were seen at last as characteristic of them as a group rather than of the human race as a whole, but that being so, where had those characteristics originated? The Jevlenese had inherited them from the Lambians, who had inherited them from the Jevlenese that had landed on Minerva. So where and when had it started? Danchekker speculated that their passage through the zone of dislocated space-time might have induced some form of psychological aberration that had started the whole thing off, but the suggestion was not very satisfying since the meaning of the word "started" in this context was obscure to say the least.
Another enigma arose from the knowledge of subsequent events that the Jevlenese would presumably have taken back to Minerva with them. If they knew about the next two hundred years, the war, the millennia after that with the Thuriens, and their own eventual defeat at the hands of visar, why would they have allowed those very things to happen? Had they been powerless to change the sequence? Surely not. Had a whole new history somehow been written into the timeloop to erase and replace something else that had existed there "before," whatever that meant? Or had they perhaps taken few hard records with them in their haste and suffered some kind of stress-induced amnesia such that they arrived not knowing who they were or where they had come from, thus dooming themselves to launch again into an endless, unaltering cycle?
The Thuriens didn't know the answers to these questions either, which raised issues that were on the fringes of their own theoretical researches. Possibly, one day, future generations of Ganymean and Terran mathematicians and physicists would deduce the strange logic within which such things could happen. Then again, possibly no one would ever know.
But one mystery was solved that had been perplexing the Terrans, the Ganymeans, and the Jevlenese alike—the mystery of the device out beyond Pluto that had responded to that first message beamed from Farside in ancient Ganymean code, and relayed it directly to visar. The Thuriens had assumed it was something that the Jevlenese had positioned, the Jevlenese had assumed it was something that the Thuriens had emplaced, and because of the circumstances neither side had ever been able to challenge the other. And now that it had been destroyed, there was no way of investigating it. So what had it been, and how had it gotten there?
The answer could only be the probe that had gone through the tunnel on the heels of the Jevlenese ships. Naturally it had been programmed to respond to the communications protocols used by its own mother ship, and it had been fitted with an h-link to Thurien. By analyzing the log of messages exchanged during those last few seconds, Shilohin's scientists established that, just before the tunnel closed behind it, the probe had been in a passive mode awaiting its next command from the Shapieron. Apparently it had waited for a long time. After exiting near Minerva under the impetus that visar had imparted in accelerating it in pursuit of the Jevlenese ships, it climbed away from the Sun and eventually stabilized in a distant orbit out beyond Pluto. And it waited. And eventually it heard a command that it understood, and relayed it to visar because that was what its instructions told it to do. It didn't know that fifty thousand years had gone by in the meantime.
And so the full circle that linked Minerva and the early Ganymeans, the Lunarians both Lambian and Cerian, Charlie and Koriel, Earth and Homo sapiens, and the Giants' Star, was complete. It had begun with its own ending, and in the process jevex, Broghuilio, and the Lambians had become locked in an unbreakable loop that was firmly and permanently embedded in the past. Ironically their prison was even more escape-proof than the one that they themselves had devised.
Deprived of their corrupt element, the people of Jevlen turned out to be not so unlike human beings anywhere else after all, and set themselves to the task of rebuilding their society with a new mood of cooperation and optimism. This would require a great deal of physical hard work as well as social and political reforms because of the widespread damage, mainly from flooding, that had been caused by the gravitational upheaval of Broghuilio's spectacular departure, so Calazar installed Garuth as temporary planetary governor to supervise and coordinate the operation. Jevlen would be on probation for a while to come, and for some time there would be no planet-wide system after the pattern of jevex; planning and other functions would require extensive information-processing capacity nevertheless, and fortunately a machine of just the right size presented itself in the form of zorac. The Shapieron was permanently based at Jevlen, and zorac became the nucleus of a new pilot network that one day would assume interplanetary dimensions and be merged into visar.
Furthermore the temporarily decomputerized world of Jevlen would provide an ideal environment for Garuth's people from the Shapieron, displaced twenty-five million years from their own civilization, to recuperate and readjust to the ways of the Thuriens. At the same time they would be able to play a key role in helping Garuth rebuild the planet and inaugurate a new system of Jevlenese government. So Garuth, his people, and zorac had a worthwhile job to do, a challenging future ahead, and a home of their own once again.
On Earth, Mikolai Sobroskin became the Soviet Foreign Minister under the new order that emerged from the wreckage of the previous regime. Through some machinations inside the Kremlin that would never be fully disclosed, Verikoff ended up as an advisor on extraterrestrial sciences, having made history as the first alien ever to apply for and be granted Terran citizenship.
In the U.S. State Department, Karen Heller and Norman Pacey headed a team assigned by Packard to draft a policy aimed at br
eaking down the barriers of East-West suspicions that had festered for over a century, and forging an era of universal prosperity from the combined economic and industrial might of the U.S. and Soviet giants, and the material and human resources of the emerging Third World. Already the international web that had precipitated World War I, financed both the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of Hitler, manufactured the Middle East and Southeast Asian crises of later years, contrived for a whole world to fund its own blackmail through the nuclear arms race, and been behind a long list of other interesting things found recorded in great detail inside jevex, was well on its way to being broken up for good.
The UN, purged of the influences that would have manipulated it into a focal point of global power to be delivered wholesale into the hands of the Jevlenese, would be remolded into the instrument through which Earth would take its place in the interstellar community. And it would have an important role to play in that community—a role in which people like Clifford Benson, Colonel Shearer, and Sobroskin's generals would still have a place. For despite their sciences and their technology, the Ganymeans had learned the wisdom of preserving a strong right arm; there was no telling how many more Broghuilios might be waiting in the unexplored reaches of the Galaxy.
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