Hunt flashed Murray an uneasy look. “These people he’s calling. It couldn’t be the hit squad, could it?”
“I dunno. What can we do about it if it is?”
“If he was one of them, an Ent, would Nixie know? Would she be able to tell?”
Murray asked her in Jevlenese. “He is not one,” she said. “I would know.”
For the next hour they appeared to have been forgotten as a buzz of activity erupted over the house. Jevlenese appeared from other parts of it or arrived from places outside, muttered in twos and threes, and went away again on mysterious errands. Much conferring went on behind closed doors, and the tones and chimes of incoming calls sounded constantly. Through it all, Scirio was everywhere, calling out orders, checking details, hurrying to take calls, usually accompanied by Dreadnought. Tenseness crackled in the air like static. Nixie was unable to make out what was going on. It felt like the preparations for a military operation.
Then Dreadnought came out of a doorway that had been in constant use and called out something, at the same time beckoning. Nixie got up from a couch she had been perched on. Hunt unfolded from a deep, leathery chair, close behind Murray, who had been leaning against a pillar. “Well, here goes,” Murray murmured.
“What’s happening?” Hunt asked.
“Search me. But whatever it is, it looks like we don’t have much choice.”
Scirio, now wearing a dark suit and short blue topcoat, was waiting at the outside door with three more Ichena. After a brief exchange of questions and answers delivered in curt, harsh voices, the group went out into the corridor and followed the terrace back around the well to the elevators. But instead of returning to the seashell lobby with the bridge crossing the stream, they went up.
They came out into an airy, metal-walled space with wide, low windows running almost the full length of two adjacent walls, giving it the appearance of an observation floor high over the city. From the score or more of what were clearly flying vehicles of assorted shapes and sizes parked about the place, it was evidently a rooftop landing deck. The three henchmen led the way to a sleek machine, finished in yellow and white, at the end of one of the rows. Its general form was a bubble-canopied front end and solid center fuselage, tapering to the rear in a way that vaguely suggested a helicopter, but with no rotor or stabilizer. The rear body sprouted a pair of low-mounted, steeply anhedraled stub wings, carrying streamlined pods at the ends. There didn’t seem to be any wheels.
The doors were already open. A pulsating hum emanated from low down at the rear, and two men in black jackets were in the nose seats. The remainder of the forward compartment contained three rows of three seats each, and there was an Ichena already seated in the back. Hunt and Murray were guided into the other two seats next to him; Nixie and two of the group who had come up from the house got in the center row, while the third, along with Dreadnought and Scirio, settled themselves ahead of them, behind the two nose seats. The doors closed, and a moment later the vehicle lifted from the floor, turning at the same time. It moved forward, and the whole section of wall and windows in front of it swung down and outward to form a takeoff platform projecting out from the building. The flier soared out with barely a feeling of movement over roof gardens similar to the one outside the crescent-shaped room they were in earlier, and screened from each other by the landscaping. Then came more rooftops, with the neighborhood avenues and strips of parkland visible farther below. On looking up, Hunt made out a faint seam joining part of the sky. It was one of the canopies: simulated, not real.
The flier approached the stratified cliffs of built-up structures looming above the boundary screen of trees. A vast, bright opening yawned ahead and became one of the main aerial traffic corridors piercing the city. The flier accelerated and merged into the flow. Between Murray and the stone-faced Ichena on his other side, Hunt brooded silently to himself, wondering what the hell he had gotten himself into now.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Calazar, on Thurien, and Torres, inside the Shapieron, and Caldwell, who had appeared on-line from Earth, debated the situation for a long time after contact through the probe was lost. Soon after Caldwell joined in the discussion, the Jevlenese blocked all communications from ZORAC out of Geerbaine. Since the rest of Jevlen’s system of satellites and links had been controlled locally by JEVEX and not by VISAR, it meant that all other access to the planetary network was denied also.
For the moment, then, there was no alternative but to hope that Hunt and the others with him would complete for themselves what Porthik Eesyan had been about to say when the connection was lost, namely that the only tactic that immediately presented itself was to get VISAR hooked into JEVEX, somehow, on Jevlen. The general feeling was that they would. Whether or not they would be able to find a way of accomplishing it was another matter.
What then? If the group on Jevlen did succeed in getting VISAR connected into JEVEX, what, exactly, were the policymakers hoping that VISAR would do?
Caldwell could not see what the problem was. “If VISAR gains control, it can lock out all the couplers until we figure out a way of getting past Uttan’s defenses,” he told the others. “Then no more of these Ents will be able to get out, and there’ll be no risk of any invasion. Once we get into Uttan we dismantle the matrix, and the problem will be settled permanently.”
But Calazar, speaking with surprising firmness, vetoed such a possibility. “The Ents may have their problematical side, but peculiar as their origins may seem to us, they are fully evolved intelligences in every respect, with all the rights which that implies,” he said. “However the Entoverse came into existence, exist it does, and destroying it would amount to the genocide of its inhabitants. Thuriens could not permit that. It isn’t an option.”
Caldwell thought about it and decided that the Thuriens were right. He had, he admitted to himself, spoken too hastily. “Okay,” he agreed. “We can’t pull the plug. So, why don’t we simply disconnect all the neurocouplers and let Jevlen have a different, VISAR-like system when the time comes to take them off probation? Or VISAR could be extended. That way, the Entoverse can continue to exist and carry on evolving internally any way it likes. We permanently quarantine it.”
But the Thuriens were not happy about that idea, either.
“Those are thinking, feeling beings, trapped in a hostile and perilous environment,” Calazar explained. “The hopes of many of them are pinned on the possibility of escape. To deny them that chance would be unethical and immoral. We couldn’t condone it.”
Caldwell accepted the mild rebuff gracefully. “Okay then,” he conceded patiently. “What do you want to do?”
“We don’t know.”
Caldwell drew a long, steady breath and reminded himself that he was dealing with the effective head of state of an alien civilization.
“Great,” he replied.
The flier sped over the countryside beyond the city at a modest altitude that Hunt judged to be three to four thousand feet. Occasional bleeps came from the front, with snatches of a synthetic voice that sounded like the flight-control computer. Scirio made and took a number of calls to others elsewhere over a handset, but otherwise nobody spoke.
Below, the heaped suburbs surrounding Shiban for several miles thinned out into the kind of clusters of urban collage and spatterings of buildings strung along roadways that looked much the same everywhere, from Sumatra to New Jersey. Compared to typical developed areas on Earth there was less evidence of industry, which, following the Thurien practice, tended to be mostly underground. On the other hand, some constructions reached a scale of immensity that Earth had never seen. In one place the vehicle passed a straight, sheer-sided rift cut through a mountain range, packed with tangles of metallic geometry, the purpose of which Hunt was unable to guess. Farther on, they saw on the skyline an array of slender, pear-topped towers, interconnected by tubes, that must have stood a mile high.