"Dr. Hunt. You've caught up with us," Chien said. "We didn't get very far, I'm afraid. Your colleague, Professor Danchekker, was going to show us the Thurien virtual travel system. But it seems to be down at the moment. I hope it's not a general indicator of Thurien engineering."
"That's extraordinary!" Sonnebrandt exclaimed. "We did the same. And I said exactly what you just said." Chien laughed. The two Thuriens, who were still with the other group, remained detached in a curious kind of way.
But Danchekker wasn't laughing. He looked at Hunt with an expression of somebody confronting the impossible and not knowing how to frame a question to express it. It seemed he was having the same problem, which would mean that he thought the same that Hunt did-or had until a moment ago. But that could only be because he had tried to pull the same trick on his companions, too.
"Okay, VISAR, a good one," Hunt fired at it.
"What do you mean, Vic?"
"The joke's over. Come on, level up. What's going on?"
Mildred, however, was acting differently from the others. She stood, staring uncertainly at Hunt for several seconds, and then moved a step nearer, bringing her face close. For a moment he thought she was about to kiss him on the cheek. She stepped back, her eyes twinkling mischievously. "Christian told me you used to be a smoker until not very long ago. Is that right?"
"Well… yes." He shook his head. "What does that have to do with-"
"Ah! Gotcha, VISAR," Mildred said softly. "You're getting lazy."
"What did I do?"
Mildred smiled at Hunt as she replied. "You used your old stored profile to create Dr. Hunt. It included a hint of the aroma that smokers typically have. It's there now. But it shouldn't be. It wasn't earlier, or when we came up in the shuttle." She explained to the others who were listening, but who still hadn't figured it out, "The system is working just fine. We are inside it right now, as I speak-all of us! I'm amazed. Congratulations, Christian. You really had us fooled." Danchekker was looking too astonished to reply. Behind him, the two Thuriens were grinning.
"Okay, you win," VISAR conceded. "So shall we continue with the tour?"
"But of course," Chien said. At the same time, she sent Mildred an approving nod.
It occurred to Hunt that this would be one way of making sure that the crew in the Command Deck and elsewhere wouldn't have to be bothered by gaggles of tourists coming through. Sonnebrandt moved close as they started moving again. "She's sharp," he murmured. "It may be as well that she's coming along."
Hunt had to agree. He was still getting over the surprise himself. It was the first time ever that he had known VISAR to be caught out on something.
CHAPTER SEVEN
From records pieced together in the course of investigating Charlie and the other Lunarian remains uncovered on the Moon, it had been established that the Lunarians knew of the lost race of giant-size bipeds that had inhabited Minerva long before their own time. Lunarian mythology told that this race still existed at a star known as the Giants' Star, which could be identified on the charts. At the time of these discoveries, the scientists of Earth had no way of knowing if the legend was true. But they kept the star's name, and it had persisted since.
Giants' Star, or Gistar, was located approximately twenty light-years from the Solar System in the constellation of Taurus. It was Sun-like in size and composition but somewhat younger, and supported a system of five outer gas giants and five inner terrestrial-type planets, all of them attended by various gaggles of moons, that came uncannily close to duplicating the pattern back home. This was hardly surprising, since ancient Ganymean leaders had searched long and diligently to find a new home for their race that would present as few hazards in the way of unknowns and surprises as possible.
Thurien was the fifth planet out from its star, as Minerva had been, a little smaller than Earth, and cooler, which suited the Ganymean range of adaptation. However, the composition and dynamics of the atmosphere provided a more equalized pattern of heat distribution than Earth's, resulting in polar regions that were smaller than a simple comparison of distances would have indicated, and equatorial summers that were seldom hotter than the equivalent of marginal subtropical to Mediterranean. The surface was roughly seventy percent water, with four major continental land masses distributed, unlike those of Earth, fairly equally across both hemispheres, but with a greater variation in height between the deepest ocean chasms and highest mountain peaks.
The Thuriens had been pursuing their unsuccessful attempt to unravel the mystery of trans-Multiverse movement in terms of their existing h-space physics at a place called Quelsang, close to the city of Thurios, the planet's administrative and governing center. Thurios was where Hunt and his group would be staying, as would most of the other Terrans aboard. It stood near the coast in a setting of lakes connected by gorges and waterfalls on one of the two southern continents, called Galandria. There was none of the complication of docking at a transfer satellite and having to board a surface shuttle as happened when Terran interplanetary craft arrived at Earth. The Ishtar went straight from its approach into a descent that brought it down into the great space port situated by the water just over a hundred miles east of the city. Even Hunt, who had probably had as much dealing with Thuriens as any Terran, was awed by the vast complex of launch and loading installations, with starships the size of ocean liners lined up like suborbitals and freighters on a busy day at O'Hare or JFK.
Thurien architecture delighted in immense, soaring compositions of verticality, adorned with towers and spires, some of the larger cities extending upward for miles. A flying hotel lobby that looked like a flattened blimp from the outside but was burnished gold in color carried the arrivals to the city. Their first sight of it came before they were halfway there. It appeared on the horizon as a slowly growing cluster of whiteness and light, at first belying the distance by the suggestion being of some kind of monolithic structure. But as they drew closer and its true proportions revealed themselves, what had seemed to be facets of a single structure gradually unfolded and resolved into entire precincts of colossal frontages and vistas, terraced skyscrapers, canyons, and cliffs of architecture woven amid festoons of bridges and arcades around towering central massifs in a tapestry that sent the mind reeling. There was as much greenery as glass and sculpted stone filling the progressions of tiers and levels, with lakes connecting via a system of canals, and waterfalls constrained between the faces of buildings, while above, layers of cloud wreathed the topmost pinnacles. It wasn't so much a city, Hunt found himself thinking, as an artificial mountain range.
By the time the ray-shaped blimp brought them to what appeared to be the city's transportation center-or maybe just one of them-Hunt had lost track among the compositions of cityscape that they had passed between and over. They sailed into a vast, hangar-like space high in a stepped block of city vaguely reminiscent of an outsize ziggurat, disappearing below into a tangle of curving traffic ramps and lesser structures. From here, conveyances of every description seemed to come and go, from a web of tubes radiating from the lower levels like an integral circulation system built into the city, to streams of objects following the ubiquitous g-conveyor lines across the spaces above and between, which were as much a part of Thurien city-building as the edifices themselves. It was not always easy to tell what constituted a "vehicle," for pieces of the architecture seemed capable of moving and reattaching elsewhere. On leaving the blimp, the Thurien hosts took Hunt and his group down a couple of levels to a dining area for lunch. When they had finished, they emerged to find that the room had become part of their hotel. A little under thirty-five hours had elapsed by their watches since the Ishtar lifted out from orbit above Earth.