"We can’t risk waiting," Calazar said. "Even though Uttan might be defended, I’ll have to send in the reserve ships from Gistar to try and cut Broghuilio off before he reaches that planet." He waited for a few seconds, but nobody could disagree. His voice became heavier. "VISAR, connect me to the reserve-squadron commander," he said.

"There is nothing more for us to do here," Garuth said in a voice that had become very quiet and very calm. "ZORAC, return the ship to Jevlen. We will await the arrival of the Thuriens there."

While the Shapieron was turning to head back, a set of toroids opened up briefly some distance outside the planetary system of Gistar, and the squadron of Thurien vessels that had been held in reserve there transferred into h-space, then reemerged outside the system of Uttan. The Jevlenese long-range surveillance instruments detected them as a series of objects hurtling inward at a speed not much below that of light. The commander at Uttan decided that a portion of the Terran strike force had been diverted, and within minutes every emergency signal band was carrying frantic offers of unconditional surrender. The Thuriens arrived at Uttan some hours later and took over without opposition.

That result had been unexpected. The reason for it was even more unexpected: Broghuilio’s ships had not, after all, appeared at Uttan, or anywhere near it. Uttan control had lost contact when they vanished from the vicinity of Jevlen, and had been unable to relocate them. Without their leaders, the defenders at Uttan opted to capitulate without a fight.

So where had the five Jevlenese ships gone? VISAR reported that they had not rematerialized anywhere inside the regions of space that it controlled, and when it projected small transfer ports to the scores of worlds previously run by JEVEX and sent search probes bristling with sensors and instruments, the ships were not to be found at any of those places, either. They seemed to have vanished entirely from the explored portion of the Galaxy.

The Thuriens did find something else at Uttan, however-something that left them shaken and mystified. Hanging in space, all at various stages of construction, they found lines of immense engineering structures. Each was in the form of a hollow square that measured five hundred miles along a side, and carried at its center a two-hundred-mile-diameter sphere supported by bars extending diagonally inward from the corners.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

"I don’t understand this," Calazar said as he stared out from one of the Thurien vessels floating near Uttan. "Those are full-scale quadriflexors, exactly as we designed them. The Jevlenese have been building hundreds of them."

"I don’t know," Showm replied, shaking her head beside him. "It makes no sense."

Heller, Caldwell, and Danchekker looked at each other. "What’s a quadriflexor?" Caldwell asked.

Calazar sighed. There was no point in being evasive. "They are the devices with which we were going to enclose the solar system," he said. "They were to be positioned at a considerable distance outside Pluto at points defining a quasi-spherical surface around the system. Every quadriflexor would couple through h-fields to the four adjacent to it in the grid, and collectively they would create a cumulative deformation of spacetime at that boundary which would equate to an escape-proof gravitic gradient.

"We performed preproduction testing on some scaled-down prototypes, and we did in fact begin building some of the full-size versions, but we are still a long way from being in a position to implement the final plan." Calazar waved at the view outside the ship. "But the Jevlenese have obviously been copying our designs in secret, and their program was far more advanced. I can’t understand why."

Danchekker was blinking behind his spectacles and frowning to himself while he wrestled with the riddle. Somehow he had the feeling that the last layer of the enigmatic onion that seemed to surround everything connected with the Jevlenese was about to be peeled away. By at first exaggerating Earth’s aggressiveness and later manufacturing false evidence, the Jevlenese had persuaded the Ganymeans that Terran expansion had to be checked, and nothing short of physical containment would check it. The Ganymeans had, until very recently, been convinced, and had set the necessary preparations in motion accordingly. But the Jevlenese had embarked on an identical venture and concealed the fact from the Ganymeans. Why? What did it mean?

Danchekker looked over at the images that VISAR was presenting of the Command Deck of the Shapieron and Sverenssen’s office in Connecticut, but there were no suggestions forthcoming from those directions. The Ganymeans in the Shapieron were preoccupied with something that was happening on the main screen inside the ship, while in the other view he could see only the backs of Hunt and the others as they crowded around the terminal on the other side of the room, which connected them to the Shapieron. A lot of excited talking was going on in both places, but what it was about was obscure.

"Could they have been planning to do the same thing themselves?" Karen Heller said at last.

"For what reason?" Calazar asked. "We were already working on it. What could they have stood to gain?"

"Time?" Caldwell offered.

Calazar shook his head. "If time was so critical to them, they could have persuaded us to accelerate our own program with a fraction of the effort that they must have put into this. Certainly we have the resources to have been able to beat any schedule they could have been aiming at."

Frenua Showm was looking thoughtful. "And yet it’s strange," she mused. "On several occasions when we wanted to speed up our program, the Jevlenese actually seemed to play down the risks of Terran expansion. It was as if they were trying to keep our research moving, but weren’t in a hurry to see us move into production."

"They were milking off the know-how," Caldwell grunted. "Making sure that their program stayed well ahead of yours." He paused for a few seconds, then asked, "Could those things be used for shutting in anything else apart from a star system?"

"Hardly," Calazar replied, then added, "Well, I suppose they could be used to close in anything of comparable size . . . or something smaller, come to that."

"Mmm. . ." Caldwell lapsed back into thought.

Heller shrugged and turned up her hands. "If they weren’t going to enclose the solar system, they must have been planning to enclose some other . . ." Her voice trailed away as the answer suddenly became plain, to her and to everybody else at the same time.

Calazar and Showm stared speechlessly at each other for a few seconds. "Us? " Calazar managed at last in a strained voice. "The Thuriens? They were going to shut in Gistar?" Showm brought her hand up to her brow and shook her head as she struggled to take in the implication of it. Caldwell and Heller were standing dumbstruck.

The whole thing slowly became clear in Danchekker’s mind. "Yes! " he exclaimed. He moved forward to the center of the group and stood for a moment checking his thoughts, then began nodding his head vigorously. "Yes!" he said again. "Surely it’s the only acceptable explanation." He looked excitedly from one to another of the others as if he expected them to agree with something there and then. They stared back at him blankly. Nobody knew what he was talking about. He waited for a moment and then elaborated. "I have never been able to accept fully that the obsessive Lambian-Cerian rivalry could have persisted in the minds of the Jevlenese for all that time, especially with their exposure to Ganymean influence. Did it never strike you as strange? Didn’t any of you ever feel that there had to be something more behind it than just that?" He looked at the others questioningly again.