Three hours later loading was complete and the final departure preparations had been made. Garuth and a small Ganymean rear-guard exchanged formal words of parting with the base commander and some of his officers, who had driven out to the ramp for the ceremony. Then the Earthmen boarded their vehicle and returned to the base while the Ganymeans withdrew into the Shapieron and the stern section retracted upward into its flight position.
Hunt was alone in the cabin that had been allocated to him, taking in his last view of Main from a mural videoscreen, when ZORAC announced that takeoff was imminent. There was no sensation of motion at all; the view just started to diminish in size and flatten out as the ground fell away beneath. The Ganymedean landscape flowed inward from the edges of the picture and the surface details rapidly dissolved into a uniform sea of frosty whiteness as the ship gained altitude. Soon even the pinpoint of reflected light that was Main faded into the background, and an arc of blackness began advancing upward across the view as Ganymede's dark side moved into the picture. At the top, the curvature of the moon's sunlit side appeared, ushering in a gaggle of attendant background stars. The bright strip left in the center of the screen continued to narrow steadily, and at last its ends slipped in from beyond the edges of the frame to reveal it as a brilliant crescent hanging in the heavens, and already shrinking as he watched.
Then the crescent and the stars seemed to dissolve into diffuse smudges of light that flowed into one another until the whole screen was reduced to a uniform expanse of featureless, iridescent fog. The ship was now under main drive, he realized, and temporarily shut off from information coming in from the rest of the universe--information carried as electromagnetic waves anyway. He wondered what the Ganymeans used instead--to navigate by, for instance. Here was something he would raise with ZORAC.
But that could wait for now. For the moment he just wanted to relax and prepare his mind for other things. Unlike his voyage out aboard Jupiter Five , the journey to Earth would be measured in days.
Chapter Seventeen
And so the Ganymeans came at last to Earth.
After the failure of the various governments to reach agreement among themselves as to where the aliens should be received in the event of their accepting the invitation to visit, the Parliament of the United States of Europe had voted to go it alone and make their own preparations anyway--just in case. The place they selected was an area of pleasant open country on the Swiss shore of Lake Geneva, where, it was hoped, the climate would prove agreeable to the Ganymean constitution and the historical tradition of nonbelligerence would add a singularly appropriate note.
About halfway between the city of Geneva and Lausanne, they fenced off an area just over a mile square on the edge of the lake, and inside it erected a village of chalets that had been designed for Ganymean occupation; the ceilings were high, the doorways big, the beds strong, and the windows slightly tinted. Communal cooking and dining facilities were provided, along with leisure rooms, terminals linked into the World's integrated entertainments: data/news grid, an outsize swimming pool, a recreation area, and just about anything else which seemed likely to contribute to making life comfortable and could be included in the time available. A huge concrete pad was laid to support the Shapieron and afford parking for vehicles and daughter ships, and accommodation inside the perimeter was provided for delegations of visiting Earthmen, together with conference and social facilities.
When the news came in from Jupiter that the aliens were planning on departing for Earth in just a couple of weeks' time and--even more startling--the journey would take only a few days, it was obvious that the issue of where to receive them had already been decided. By the time the Shapieron appeared from the depths of space and went into Earth orbit, a fleet of suborbital aircraft was converging on Geneva with officials and Heads of State from every corner of the globe, all hurrying to participate in the hastily worked out welcoming formalities. Swarms of buzzing VTOL jets shuttled back and forth between Geneva International Airport and what was now being called Ganyville to convey them to their final destination while traffic on the Geneva/Lausanne highway below deteriorated to a bumper-to-bumper jam, private aircars having been banned from the area. A peppering of colors, becoming denser as the hours went by, appeared on the green inland slopes that overlooked Ganyville, as the first spectators arrived and set up camp with tents, sleeping bags, blankets and picnic stoves, determined to secure and hold a grandstand view. A continuous cordon of jovial but overworked policemen, including some from Italy, France and Germany since the numbers of the tiny Swiss force were simply not up to the task, maintained a clear zone two hundred meters wide between the rapidly growing crowd and the perimeter fence, while on the lakeward side a flotilla of police launches scurried to and fro to keep at bay an armada of boats, yachts and craft of every description. Along the roadsides an instant market came into being as the more entrepreneurial members of the shopkeeping fraternity from the nearby towns loaded their stocks into trucks and brought the business to where the customers were. A lot of small fortunes were made that day, from selling everything from instant meals and woolly sweaters to hiking boots and high-power telescopes.
Several thousand miles above, the Shapieron was not quite away from it all. An assortment of UNSA craft had formed themselves into a ragged escort around the ship, sweeping with it round the Earth every hour and a half. Many of them carried newsmen and camera crews broadcasting live to an enthralled audience via the World News Grid. They had exchanged messages with ZORAC and the Earthmen aboard who had come with the Shapieron from Jupiter, thrilled the viewers below by beaming down views from inside an alien spacecraft, and mixed in constantly updated reports of the latest developments at Lake Geneva. In between, the commentators had described ad nauseam how the ship had first appeared over Ganymede, what had transpired since, where their race had originated in the first place, why the expedition had gone to Iscaris and what had happened there, and anything else they could think of to fill in time before the big event. Half the factories and offices on Earth were estimated to have given it up as a bad job and closed down until after the big event was all over, since the employees who weren't glued to a screen somewhere else were glued to one being paid out of the firm's money. As one president of a New York company commented to an NBC street interviewer: "I'm not gonna spend thousands to find out all over again what King Canute proved centuries ago--you can't stop the tide once it's made its mind up. I've sent'em all home to get it outa their systems. I guess this year we've got an extra day's public holiday." On being asked what he himself intended doing, he replied with surprise: "Me? I'm going home to watch the landing, of course."
Inside the Shapieron , Hunt and Danchekker were among the mixed group of Ganymeans and Earthmen gathered in the ship's command center--the place to which Hunt had been conducted with Storrel and the others at the time of their momentous first visit from Jupiter Five. A number of eggs had been dispatched from the Shapieron to descend to lower altitudes and obtain, for the aliens' benefit, a bird's-eye preview of different parts of Earth. The Earthmen were explaining the significance of some of the pictures that the eggs were sending back. Already the Ganymeans had gazed incredulously at the teeming density of life in cities such as New York, Tokyo and London, gasped at the spectacles of the Arabian desert and the Amazon jungle--terrain unlike any that had existed on Minerva--and stared in mute, horrified fascination at a telescopic presentation of lions stalking zebra in the African grasslands.