"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 Caldwell 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 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 deduction. A score of Terran and Ganymean faces stared back at him blankly.

Danchekker removed his spectacles, polished them with a handkerchief, and then returned them to his nose in the manner of a professor allowing a class of slow students time to reflect upon some proposition he had put to them. There was no reason why VISAR would make lenses that existed only in somebody’s head go cloudy, Hunt thought to himself; the ritual was just an unconscious mannerism.

At last Danchekker looked up. "It seems evident that this, er, ‘organization’ responsible for the surveillance activities, whatever its nature, would not see its interests served by the Shapieron reaching Thurien." He paused to let the full implication sink in.

"And now let me conjecture as to what might be my disposition now, were I in the position of the leaders of that organization," he resumed. "I assume that I know nothing about this meeting or that any dialogue between Thurien and Earth is taking place at all since my source of information would be the terrestrial communications network, and all references to such facts have been excluded from that system. Therefore I would have no reason to believe that my falsified accounts of Earth have been questioned. Now, that being so, if the Shapieron were to encounter an unfortunate, shall we say, accident, somewhere in the void between the stars, I would have every reason to feel confident that, if perchance the Thuriens should suspect foul play, Earth would top their list as the most likely culprit." He nodded and showed his teeth briefly as the appalled expressions around the table registered the impact of what he was driving at.

"Precisely!" he exclaimed, and looked across at Calazar. "If you have at your disposal the means of extracting that vessel from its present predicament, I would strongly advise that you proceed with such action without a moment of further delay!"

Niels Sverenssen lay propped against the pillows in his executive-grade quarters at Giordano Bruno, watching the girl dress by the vanity on the far side of the room. She was young and quite pretty, with the clear complexion and open features typical of many Americans, and her loose black hair cut an intriguing contrast against her white skin. She should use the sunray facilities provided in the gymnasium more often, he thought to himself. As with most of her sex, her superficial layer of college-applied pseudointellectualism went no deeper than the pigment in her skin; beneath it she was as facile as the rest of them-a regrettably necessary but not unpleasant diversion from the more serious side of life. "You only want my body," they had cried indignantly down through the ages. "What else can you offer?" was his reply.

She finished buttoning her shirt and turned toward the mirror to run a comb hurriedly through her hair. "I know it’s a strange time to be leaving," she said. "Trust me to be on early shift this morning. I’m going to be late again as it is."

"Don’t worry about it," Sverenssen told her, putting more concern into his voice than he felt. "First things must come first."

She picked her jacket up off the back of a chair next to the vanity and slung it over her shoulder. "Have you got the cartridge?" she asked, turning back to face him.

Sverenssen opened the drawer of the bedside unit, reached inside, and took out a matchbook-size, computer micromemory cartridge. "Here. Remember to be careful."

The girl walked over to him, took the cartridge and folded it inside a tissue, then slipped it into one of the pockets of her jacket. "I will. When will I see you again?"

"Today will be very busy. I’ll have to let you know."