Sverenssen made a good job of appearing shocked. "If you are suggesting what I think 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 238/2G/Nrs/FM. NORMAN H. PACE-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.
Chapter Nineteen
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 later 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?