Hunter had done all the work. He'd traveled to each planet, did the snooping, made the contact. And he did it all at speeds way below full ultraoverdrive and with conventional takeoffs and landings. He caused several massive power blackouts, nevertheless. The public was allowed to believe these were aftereffects of the frightening events earlier in the week. What exactly had happened that day the world shook? Shifts in the planet's crust was the official government line. The best scientists were studying the problem. The President was monitoring the situation personally.
It was now noon on the third day.
Thirty-five guests were seated around the oval table in the CIA's subterranean blue room. Sitting in silence, staring at each other, not quite believing that they were actually there, they were leaders of the Home Planets. They all had at least one thing in common: Until very recently, they had awakened every morning with the unwavering belief that their planet was the only world in the star system, the Galaxy, the Universe. That such a tightly held belief was now hopelessly obsolete had come as a great shock. It takes a while for the psyche to finally give itself over to a new reality. That's why no one in the room was talking.
Still, these thirty-five people could not get away from the fact that they were all related to each other. Some were white, some black, some brown, yellow, tan, olive. Their dress was as varied as their names, their titles, their hairdos. Yet they all looked the same. They moved the same. They thought the same things. And though they were reticent now, there had been enough murmuring for them to realize they had something else in common: They all spoke the same language. The universal tongue of the Galaxy. The mother tongue of Earth.
So they were connected.
And they were more than neighbors.
They were family.
Gordon ran the meeting.
Hunter, Tomm, and Zarex sat to his left, the six other CIA chiefs sat to his right. The room was ringed with uniformed CIA guards, but all weapons were kept out of sight. The big wall screen was showing a huge graphic of Moon 39 taken from Hunter's always-on viz flight recorder. It looked dark and sinister.
To begin the meeting, Gordon took a cue from the space travelers. He raised his right hand, palm out, thumb extended. The universal sign of peace in the Galaxy.
"Welcome, friends," he said. "It is my job to tell you why you are all here."
They already knew most of the story, but Gordon went through it again anyway. The discovery of Moon 39. The secrets found locked away in the mountains of the American Southwest. The evidence pointing to Earth's original population being imprisoned here for nearly four thousand years. The faces around the table registered the same emotions all over again: disbelief, denial, anxiety, anger.
When Gordon finished, he simply held his arms out in front of him and said, "I think you'll agree some discussion would be helpful at this point."
That opened the floodgates. Nearly all of the representatives. began talking at once. Most had just one question in mind.
"How could the entire population of a planet be sentenced to prison?" someone finally got out. "What crime could possibly call for such a sentence?"
Gordon looked over at Hunter, who was taking a long sip from his whiskey glass. He knew this question was coming.
"You are not criminals," Hunter began. "I don't believe you're in prison because of anything your ancestors did wrong. You're in prison because the people who did this wanted you out of the way. Way out of the way. Why? To take over the Earth and thus, an empire. It sounds grandiose, but it's the only explanation. I've told each one of you about my experience in the mind ring. In my opinion, as soon as all those rockets left Earth, that's when the Second Empire began. So they are the ones responsible for this… "
Another sip of Seagram's. He swirled the ice cubes around in his glass for a moment.
"Where I came from, the historians will tell you that the First Empire most likely colonized every planet and star system in the Galaxy. Some consider it the greatest of the four empires, even though they know next to nothing about it, nor the other two as well. But one thing is for certain: The First Empire must have been made up of all of the peoples of Earth. That means you are the remnants of the First Empire. And that means the Galaxy was taken away from you. It means Earth was taken away from you. You were shipped way the hell out here, where no one would ever think to look for you. They built this monstrosity of a star system and then fixed it so your evolutions would crawl along with the speed of a glacier, while the rest of the Galaxy was moving faster than the speed of light. That's very sinister, gentlemen. It's cruel and unusual punishment. And it has to be changed—"
The representative from Planet Germany asked, "You've con-finned that we are locked inside a very elaborate concentration camp — and we have been for centuries. You say there are a million soldiers out there with weapons that will make our heads spin. My friend, how exactly can we change any of that?"
Gordon took over. "The first thing we do is come to an agreement on one major point," he said. "Just for self-preservation alone, no planet can attempt to reach space until the whole situation can be properly assessed. We suggest that when you return home, you tell the facts to your people and warn them that from this moment on, frankly, nothing will ever be the same again. That's really why we brought you here. We uncovered the secret, and we had to tell you. Through our three friends here we had the means to contact you, unorthodox and unde-tectable as it was. I think everyone in this room would have done the same thing if they were in our position."
There was some discussion, mostly about how best to reveal the facts to the peoples of their individual planets. Each of their worlds had suffered cataclysmic events in their histories, yet none of them had ever figured out why. Now they knew, and as it turned out, nearly two dozen of them had space-launch programs nearing completion. Money, time, and resources had been spent in these endeavors. But in the end, the space-ban agreement just made sense. It really was for everyone's own good.
Eventually, there were handshakes all around, even some embraces. Nothing was ever written down. No language ever formalized. There wasn't even a show of hands for a vote. They just agreed with each other. Though the people in the room didn't know it, that was the moment the United Planets was born.
And it was in the next moment that their first crisis arrived.
One representative spoke up. He'd sat stone silent throughout the historic meeting. Even now, his voice was barely above a whisper.
"I believe we might have a problem," he said. "There is a cabal of industrialists on my planet that has been secretly working on an orbital spacecraft for two decades. They call it the Love Rocket. These industrialists are not under my government's control; frankly, they are too big for that. The last I heard, they were ready to launch this spacecraft at any time. Possibly any minute…"
Every eye in the room was suddenly burning a hole through this guy. No one wanted to hear this. Seeing one of the Home Planets utterly destroyed would be bad enough. But the unspoken fear was that while one world was getting pulverized by Moon 39, the invaders might somehow get wind that the other planets were hip to what was going on, setting them up for invasion, too.
"Well, surely you can talk them out of it," Gordon told the man now. "Just present them with the evidence and—"
But the man just shook his head. "Even if I could get back to my world in time, I have to tell you that the chances of them heeding my warnings are nil. Even your friends here would find them like a brick wall. These are vainly obstinate men I'm talking about. To them it's all about ego. They wield much more power than my government does, and at this point they would probably try to overthrow us rather than be told they cannot launch. This is arrogance to the nth degree. I realize that. But this space program of theirs is a pure power play. Plus their launch site is so secret, even we have no idea where it is. Trying to find it will take weeks, months even. By that time, they will know we are looking for them, and they'll launch it anyway. I'd almost have to say they will be impossible to stop—"