Suddenly Hunt realized he was feeling physically uncomfortable. Surely not, he thought. Surely the package of sensations that made up his computer-simulated body couldn’t be that complete. What would be the point?

He looked around him instinctively and discovered he was back in his own body in the recliner inside the perceptron. "Facing you at the back end of the corridor," VISAR’s voice informed him. Hunt sat up, shaking his head in wonder. As always, the Ganymeans had thought of everything. So that was what the mysterious door was for.

He was back at Gistar a few minutes later, and found Danchekker waiting for him wearing a grave expression. "Some alarming news has come through while you were absent," the professor informed him. "It appears that our friend at Giordano Bruno was not quite as mistaken as we had supposed."

"What’s happened?" Hunt asked.

"The device that has been relaying the communications between Farside and Thurien has ceased operating. According to VISAR, indications are that something destroyed it."

How could Norman Pacey, isolated and incommunicado on lunar Farside, have known that the relay was about to be destroyed? His only source of information from outside the solar system was the signals coming in from the Thuriens at Gistar, and the Thuriens themselves hadn’t known about it. And why had Pacey apparently acted independently of the official UN delegation on Farside in sending the warning? Furthermore, how had he gained access to the equipment there, and how had he been able to operate it? In short, just what was going on at Farside?

Jerol Packard requested from the Thuriens a complete set of their versions of all the messages that had been exchanged with Earth since the whole business began. Calazar agreed to supply them, and VISAR hard-copied them through to McClusky by means of equipment contained in the perceptron. When the team there compared the Thuriens’ transcripts with their own, some peculiar discrepancies emerged.

The first set comprised one-way traffic from Earth and were from the period immediately following the Shapieron’s departure, when scientists at Bruno had resisted UN pressure and continued transmitting in the hope of renewing the dialogue that the first brief, unexpected signal from the Giants’ Star had initiated. These messages contained information regarding Earth’s civilization and state of scientific progress that over the months had begun adding up to form a picture which was not at all consistent with that reported to the Thuriens for years by the still mysterious and undefined "organization." Perhaps these inconsistencies had been the cause of the Thuriens becoming suspicious about the reports in the first place. In any event, the two sets of transcripts of these messages matched perfectly.

The next group of exchanges dated from the time that Thurien began talking again, and the UN stepped in to handle Earth’s end. At this point the tone of the transmissions from Farside took on a distinctly different flavor. As Karen Heller had told Hunt at his first meeting with her in Houston, and as he had verified for himself since, the messages became negative and ambivalent, doing little to dispel the Thuriens’ notions of a militarized Earth and rejecting their overtures for a landing and direct talks. Among these transmissions the first discrepancies appeared.

Every one of the communications sent during the period in which Heller was on Farside was reproduced faithfully in the Thuriens’ records. But there were two additional ones-identifiable by their format and header conventions as having undoubtedly originated from Bruno-that she had never seen before. What made these even more mysterious was that their contents were overtly belligerent and hostile to a degree that the UN delegation would never have condoned even with its negative attitude. Some of the things they said were simply untrue, the gist of them being that Earth was capable of managing its own affairs, didn’t want and wouldn’t tolerate alien interference, and would respond with force if any landing was attempted. More inexplicable still was the fact that some of the details correlated with and reinforced the falsified picture of Earth that Hunt and the others had learned of only after meeting the Thuriens. How could anyone at Bruno have known anything about that?

Then Hunt’s signals had started coming in from Jupiter-coded in Ganymean, welcoming the suggestion for a landing, suggesting a suitable location, and projecting a different image completely. No wonder the Thuriens had been confused!

After that came the Soviet signals, complete with details of the security code to be used for replies. Packard had persuaded Calazar to include them by playing up the grilling that the Terrans had been put through and especially its effect on him personally. The Soviets, too, had expressed interest in a landing, though in a manner distinctly more cautious than Hunt’s messages from Jupiter. This theme traced consistently through most of the Soviet signals, but again there were some, in this case three, that stood out as exceptions and conveyed similar sentiments to those of the "unofficial" transmissions from Bruno. And even more amazingly, they tallied in some significant details with the Bruno exceptions in ways that couldn’t have been coincidental.

How could the Soviets have known about unofficial signals from Bruno that even Karen Heller hadn’t known about when she was there? The only way, surely, was if the Soviets were responsible for them. Did that mean that the Kremlin was so dominating the UN that the whole Bruno operation had been simply a sham to distract the U.S. and other prominent nations that knew about Gistar, and that the delegation’s ostensibly mild but nevertheless counterproductive actions had been secretly derailed, presumably by somebody put there for the purpose-perhaps in the form of Sobroskin? That the Director of Astronomy at Bruno was also a Russian gave further credibility to the thought, but against it was the unavoidable fact that the Soviets’ own effort had been sabotaged in exactly the same manner. Again nothing made sense.

Later a third unofficial message from Bruno, sent after Karen Heller had left, reached a new peak of aggressiveness, announcing that Earth was severing relations and had taken steps to ensure that the dialogue would be discontinued permanently. Finally there was Norman Pacey’s warning of something about to be destroyed out in space, and shortly afterward the relay had ceased operating.

The answers to these riddles would not be found in Alaska. Packard waited until a State Department courier arrived at McClusky with the official news that communications with Gistar had ceased and the UN delegation was returning to Earth, and then left for Washington with Caldwell. Lyn went with them for the purpose of returning to McClusky with an update as soon as they had talked to Pacey.

Hunt and Danchekker stood on the apron at McClusky, watching the UNSA jet that had just lifted off to take Packard, Caldwell, and Lyn to Washington turn and begin climbing away steeply toward the south. Not far from them, a ground crew was busy shoveling snow over the holes in the concrete left by the landing gear of the perceptron, which had moved itself into line with the other UNSA aircraft parked along one side of the apron in order to provide a more natural scene for the "organization’s" surveillance instruments. Although the black hole contained in the vessel’s communications system was microscopic, it still had the equivalent mass of a small mountain; McClusky’s apron hadn’t been designed for that.

"It’s funny when you think about it," Hunt remarked as the plane shrank to a dot above the distant ridgeline. "It’s twenty light-years from Vranix to Washington, but the last four thousand miles take all the time. Maybe when we get this business cleared up, we could think about wiring a few parts of this planet into VISAR."