A tense but curious silence pervaded the Command Deck as all eyes took in the images from outside being presented on the screens. "The beacons are here," ZORAC reported. "We're at the right place, anyhow. The channel back to home is up and working." Images of Calazar, Caldwell, and anxious faces watching from MP2, the lab at Quelsang, and a location somewhere in the Government Center at Thurios formed a montage on the main screen.
"Well, I guess this is it," Caldwell said. "We'll talk to you again when you check in later." The M-connection from Thurien to the beacons would remain, and the beacons would still be capable of relaying via a regular communications beam. However, the Shapieron would be cut off from regular communications when it activated its main drive, which created an encapsulating manifold of deformed spacetime that electromagnetic signals couldn't penetrate.
"It won't be long," Hunt answered. "When we've just had a quick check around."
"Good fortune be with you all," Calazar said.
"We have no doubts about it," Eesyan replied.
"Take it easy with that thing, Junior," VISAR said-aimed at ZORAC, to amuse the bioforms.
"Junior? I was driving this ship before you were a design spec."
"Report local status," the supervisor requested.
"Wave function consolidated and stabilized," Garuth responded. "Ready to detach."
"Dissolving the bubble."
"Local bubble deactivated," ZORAC advised.
The screens showing he link from Thurien cut out. The Shapieron was a free body, now part of a different universe, as it had existed somewhere around fifty thousand years in the past.
"ZORAC, go to main drive," Garuth instructed. "Take us to the first reference."
This began a series of stops and checks around the Solar System to verify that the Shapieron was operating normally under main drive conditions, and to assess where and when they were. Minerva was not to be found. Its moon was located, already on a course that would carry it inward toward the sun, and nascent Pluto, emerging from the dispersing cloud of planetary debris. A long range view from closer in showed the recently arrived Thurien rescue ships commencing their thankless task. The Shapieron was able to pick up identifiable Thurien crosstalk on the regular local bands and in h-link mode. There was little talk around the Shapieron's Command Deck. Garuth decided that they would not announce themselves. The rescuers out there had enough to think about without the situation being complicated further.
One more thing needed to be verified before they departed. Broghuilio and his Jevlenese were thought to have appeared at Minerva at around the time that the Lambian-Cerian rift was developing. Whether the Jevlenese had actually caused it was unknown. But even if not, the warlike disposition and ambitions of conquest that Broghilio had displayed on Minerva suggested that they would have been involved in escalating tensions to the eventual outbreak of war. Since the Shapieron was witnessing the termination of that war, it had obviously arrived at a point in time that lay after the arrival of the Jevlenese. Exactly how long after, nobody could say. The Thurien interrogators at the time had asked no questions about Jevlenese, for Jevlenese didn't yet exist, while the Lunarian survivors had said nothing about any mysterious aliens showing up at some point in the past. And that was hardly surprising. For if events had indeed followed the course that was surmised, it meant that one side was being aided by an alien intrusion whose existence could only have united the general Lunarian population in opposition had they known about it. Hence, Broghuilio and his cohort, and whatever Lunarian element had thrown its lot in with them, would have every reason to conceal the fact of the new allies' origins-which the fully human form of the Jevlenese would have facilitated greatly.
From the fragments of Lunarian records available at the time of the original "Charlie" investigations, it had been guessed that the Jevlenese arrived at Minerva a century or two before the war. The more recent researches that Duncan and Sandy had helped with now put it at far less. The Lambian leader at the time the war escalated to destroying the planet was a dictator called Xerasky. He had come to power upon the death of his predecessor Zargon, which few at the time doubted Xerasky had engineered. Zargon had been a former military general of the last of the Lambian kings, Freskel-Gar. Zargon was an unknown who came rapidly to the fore in initiating and commanding an advanced militarization program. He later ousted Freskel-Gar and proclaimed a dictatorship, taking charge himself. The suggestion that Zargon might have been Broghuilio was obvious, but it was still speculation. Zargon had appeared abruptly somewhere around twenty years before Minerva's destruction.
When the Jevlenese ships exited from the turmoil of spacetime that had tunneled them from another universe, they had been followed by the probe whose last transmitted image of Minerva had gotten back before the tunnel closed. Hunt, Danchekker, Garuth, and others aboard the Shapieron now had been present when that image came in. The probe was from the Shapieron, which had been pursuing the Jevlenese. Fifty thousand years later, orbiting on the edge of the Solar System and carrying still functional h-band equipment, it would relay the first signals that opened up contact between modern Earth and Thurien. If it had arrived at Minerva twenty years previously with the Jevlenese, that probe should be out there somewhere now. This was the one final thing to check.
ZORAC used the ship's communications gear to scan a circle around the ecliptic, sending out the appropriate call codes. And sure enough the probe returned an acknowledgment and fix from a position not too far from Minerva-it would have fifty thousand years to find its way out to the edge of the Solar System. It meant that, yes, Broghuilio and the Jevlenese had arrived. But they were already a part of Minerva's past. The Shapieron needed to move farther upstream against the flow of events.
"That's all we need to know," Eesyan told Garuth. "There's no more for us to do here."
Garuth brought the Shapieron back to the vicinity of the primary beacon. A call via the beacon when the ship had powered down from main drive reestablished contact with Thurien.
"Lock on to ship's compensator confirmed," the supervisor's voice advised. "Suppressor compensation positive. Stabilizing the bubble… You're set to come home."
"You guys don't seem very talkative," Caldwell commented, back on the circuit. Silence hung heavily for a second or two.
"I guess there's not really a lot you can say, Gregg," Hunt answered finally.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The voice of Top Sergeant Nooth yelling at the newest squad of recruits, accompanied by the rhythmic thud of boots crashing in unison, came from outside the barrack hut window.
"Hup-two-three-four. Hup-two-three-four. What's the matter, Frenitzow? Frightened of pulling a muscle? Worry about it when you've got some. Pick those feet up. Hup-two-three-four…" The sounds faded in the direction of the parade square, giving way to the intermittent rat-tat-tat of small arms from the firing range.
Lieutenant Klesimur Bosoros stretched back on his bunk and set aside the magazine with the article on biological writings of the Giants that he had been reading. At least, he was still known as Kles. That much of his life hadn't changed. Just about everything else had, in ways that he would never have thought possible. He didn't get much time to think about his former interests these days, although when he was alone on night sentry duties he would still pick out the Giants' Star and remember his boyhood dreams. The situation between Lambia and Cerios had deteriorated to the point where actual conflict had broken out between them under different pretexts on a number of occasions. Only a matter of years ago, such things had been all but unthinkable. Now, so the sociologists said, they were recognized as an inevitable consequence of societies becoming more complex and developing ideas they were not prepared to compromise. So the world was busily learning and improving its new arts to defend them.