The consternation breaking out among the Thuriens meant that something very unusual was happening. Hunt turned to meet an inquiring look from Danchekker and shrugged. "It looks as if JEVEX has broken off diplomatic relations," he said.
"What do you suppose it means?" Danchekker asked.
"Who knows? It sounds like a siege. They’re inside their own zone controlled by JEVEX, and JEVEX isn’t talking to anyone. So I guess that short of sending ships in there’s no way anyone can get at them now."
"It might not be that easy," Lyn said from Hunt’s other side. "If they’ve been setting themselves up as a Galactic police force, there could be a problem there."
A strange silence fell over the Thuriens. Calazar and Showm looked uneasily at each other; Eesyan looked down and fiddled awkwardly with his knuckles. The Terrans and the Shapieron Ganymeans looked at them curiously. Eventually Calazar looked up with a sigh. "Your demonstration of how to get truth from the Jevlenese was remarkable. You were wrong on one of your assumptions, however. We have never agreed to any proposal by the Jevlenese that they maintain a military force either to counter possible aggressive expansionism by Earth or for any other reason."
Heller didn’t seem too reassured by the statement as she sat down. "You know now what they’re like," she said. "How can you be certain that they haven’t been secretly arming themselves?"
"We can’t," Calazar admitted. "If they have, the implications of the situation that would confront both of our civilizations are serious."
Caldwell was puzzled. He frowned for a moment as if to check over what was going through his mind, stared at Heller for a second, then looked across at Calazar. "But we assumed that was why they invented the phony stories," he said. "If that wasn’t the reason, then what was?"
The Thuriens looked even more uncomfortable. Showm turned to Calazar and spread her hands as if conceding there was something that couldn’t be concealed any longer. Calazar hesitated, then nodded. "It is clear to us now why the Jevlenese falsified their reports," Showm said, turning her head to address the whole room. An expectant hush fell as she paused. She took a long breath and resumed, "There is more to this, which up until now we have felt it wiser not to talk about. . ." She turned her head momentarily sideways to glance at Garuth and his colleagues, "to any of you." They waited. She went on, "For a long time the Ganymeans have been haunted by the specter of Minerva repeating itself, and this time possibly spilling out into the Galaxy. Just under a century ago, the Jevlenese persuaded our predecessors that Earth was on the verge of doing just that, and urged a solution to contain Earth’s expansion permanently. The Thuriens commenced working on a contingency plan accordingly. Because of the false picture that we were given by the Jevlenese, we have continued with the preparations to implement that plan. If we had known the true situation on Earth, we would have abandoned the idea. Clearly the Jevlenese were misleading us in order to harness our technology to contain their rival permanently and eliminate it from competing with them across the Galaxy in times to come. That was what Broghuilio meant when he referred to the final solution."
The Terrans needed a few seconds to digest what Showm was saying. "I’m not sure I follow what you mean," Danchekker said at last. "Contained Earth’s expansion by what means? You don’t mean by force, surely."
Calazar shook his head slowly. "That would not be the Ganymean way. We said contain, not oppose. The choice of word was deliberate."
Hunt frowned as he tried to fathom what Calazar was driving at. Contain Earth? It was too late for that; mankind’s civilization had already spread a long way beyond Earth. Then it could only mean. . . . His eyes widened suddenly in disbelief. Surely not even Thurien minds could think on a scale as vast as that. "Not the solar system!" he gasped, staring at Calazar in awe. "You’re not telling us you were going to shut in the whole solar system."
Calazar nodded gravely. "We devised a scheme for using our gravitic science to create a shell of steepened gravitational gradient that nothing-not Earthmen, nor Earthmen’s aggression, nor even light itself, would escape from. Inside the shell conditions would be normal, and Earth would be free to pursue whatever way of life it chose. And beyond the shell, so would we." Calazar looked around and took in the appalled stares coming back at him. "That was to have been our final solution," he told them.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
And so for the first time in the long history of their race the Ganymeans found themselves at war, or at least in a situation so akin to war that the differences were academic. Their response to the Jevlenese was swift and devastating. Calazar ordered VISAR to withdraw all its services from the Jevlenese who were physically present on Thurien and the other Ganymean-controlled worlds. A whole population who throughout their lives had taken for granted the ability to communicate or travel instantly anywhere at any time, to have information of every description available on request, and who had relied completely on machines for every facet of their existence, found themselves suddenly cut off from the only form of society that they knew how to function in. They were isolated, powerless, and panic-stricken. Within hours they had been reduced to helplessness and were speedily rounded up and detained, as much for their own safety and sanity as to keep them out of any unlikely mischief, until the Ganymeans decided what to do with them. The whole Jevlenese contingent scattered across all the Ganymean worlds had thus been eliminated in a single lightning blow that left no survivors.
That left the enemy headquarters planet of Jevlen together with its system of allied worlds, which were serviced by JEVEX and not by VISAR. This, it turned out, was going to be a far harder nut to crack since it was unassailable by simply sending in ships as Hunt had thought of doing earlier.
The problem was that Jevlen was light-years away from Gistar, and the only way of getting ships there was through black-hole toroids projected by VISAR. But when VISAR attempted to project a few test beams into JEVEX’s operating zone, it found that JEVEX was able to disrupt the beams easily; evidently the Jevlenese had been planning to break from Thurien for some time. Neither was it feasible for VISAR to transfer ships through toroids projected to just beyond the fringe of JEVEX’s effective jamming radius to make their own way to Jevlen from there. The problem in this case was that all the Thurien vessels relied on power, as well as navigational and control signals, beamed through the Thurien h-grid from centralized generating and supervisory centers, and JEVEX could disrupt those beams just as easily. In other words, nothing could get into the Jevlenese system as long as JEVEX was operating, and the only way to stop it from operating was to send something in. It was a deadlock.
More serious was the possibility that the Jevlenese might have been amassing weapons secretly for a long time, and, in anticipation of exactly the kind of situation that now existed, building vessels to transport them that operated with self-contained propulsion and control capability. If so, they would be in a position to move their forces with impunity into VISAR-controlled regions and proceed unopposed with whatever threats or actions they had been planning. Time was crucial. The events at Thurios had clearly forced the Jevlenese to make their break sooner than they had intended, and the more swiftly the Thuriens reacted, the better the chances would be of catching the Jevlenese at a disadvantage with their preparations incomplete. But what kind of reaction was possible from a race that had no experience of resisting an armed opponent, possessed no weaponry to react with even if they had, and couldn’t get near their opponent anyway? Nobody had any solution to offer until a day after the confrontation in Thurios, when Garuth, Shilohin, and Eesyan requested a private audience with Calazar.