Hunt frowned uncertainly. “So… what does that translate into? Exactly what is he saying he’s going to do?”
Murray exhaled sharply, then shook his head. “I’m not sure how, but it looks like you’ve pulled it off, Doc. He’s doing what you wanted. He’s gonna get his technical guys to connect VISAR up to their channel into JEVEX.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Danchekker relaxed back into silken cushions in one of the voluminous chairs in Osaya’s lounge, his hands clasped behind his head, and studied the shameless opulence and erotic imagery around him. “You know, I must confess there are times when I feel tempted to consider myself the victim of a misspent youth,” he called over his shoulder toward the open doorway as he heard Gina coming back in. “What tastes these establishments cater to, I fear I might be past daring to imagine.”
Gina appeared, holding two cups of the brew that Hunt had christened ersatz-she’d had to get them from the girls downstairs in Murray’s, since the chef in Osaya’s kitchen only responded to Jevlenese, and the manual controls were a mystery. “Now you can see the kind of hook that JEVEX could be,” she said, closing the door.
Danchekker’s eyes widened suddenly as the full meaning of what she and Sandy had been saying for all this time finally sank home. “My God, I never connected it with things like that!” he exclaimed.
He accepted one of the mugs and conveyed it to a side table. Gina sat down with her own in another of the chairs. She took a sip and tried to relax, but couldn’t. The dragging waiting for something to happen was fraying her nerves.
“Does any of it really matter if you take a long enough view of things?” she asked, mostly just to break the silence. “From the point of view of evolution, I mean. Does anything we do or don’t do really make much difference in the long run to what would have happened anyway?” Then she remembered what she had said to Hunt when they were aboard the Vishnu, about five percent of species surviving and it all being a matter of luck, and admitted to herself that she was only trying to rationalize their situation. It did matter, and they were powerless.
Danchekker’s answer did nothing to assuage her feelings. “Indeed it can. The most minuscule difference in causes can sometimes bring about huge changes in the outcome of a situation. I remember an example that Vic gave me once, when we were discussing highly nonlinear systems.”
“What was that?” Gina asked.
Danchekker settled himself more comfortably, glad to have something else to talk about. “Suppose that you break up the pack of balls on an ideal, frictionless pool table, and that you were able to measure the velocity and direction of every ball with perfect accuracy,” he said. “How far into the future would your computational model continue to predict the subsequent motions with reasonable validity, do you think?”
Gina frowned. “Ideally? For the rest of time, I always thought. Isn’t that right?”
“In theory, yes-which was Laplace’s great claim. But in reality, the mechanism is such an effective amplifier of errors that if you’d ignored the effect of the gravitational pull of a single electron on the edge of the Galaxy, your prediction would be hopelessly wrong after less than a minute.” He nodded at the astonished expression on Gina’s face and warmed to the theme. “You see, what it illustrates is the extraordinary sensitivity of some processes to-”
Just then, a chime sounded and an alluring female voice said something in Jevlenese. Gina and Danchekker looked at each other, puzzled for a second, and then realized that it was Osaya’s house computer. Voices came from the hallway, and a moment later the two girls who had been left in Murray’s apartment appeared, followed by three men. Gina stood up from the chair, uncertain what to expect. Danchekker looked up at them with an expression of defiant resignation, chin outthrust and jaw clamped shut.
A stream of Jevlenese issued from both of the girls at once, accompanied by lots of gesticulating and waving. One of the men, solidly built, with a hard face and narrow, Oriental-like eyes, and dressed in a straight gray jacket and black, roll-neck shirt, uttered a series of sharp, staccato syllables and pointed back toward the outside door.
“It looks as if the party’s moving on somewhere,” Gina said to Danchekker.
“I, ah, rather get the impression that our opinion on the matter isn’t being invited,” Danchekker observed, taking in the looks on the faces of the other two men.
“Right. I get that feeling, too.”
Danchekker put down his mug and rose from the chair. “Very well. Let’s get on with it.”
They followed the three men back outside to the landing. The two girls came down with them as far as Murray’s door, where they waved and disappeared back inside. At least their manner gave no indication of anything threatening. Gina and Danchekker went with the three men down to the lobby and out to where a car in which another two were waiting.
Ten minutes after they departed, a Shiban city police van pulled up on the same spot and disgorged a squad of troopers, who ran clattering in through the apartment-block doors.
The flier landed in a parking area at the rear of some buildings by a traffic highway, where a number of other flying vehicles and ground vehicles were standing. With few words being said, the party disembarked and crossed the lot to a larger craft, which looked like a kind of flying van: windowless, except for the nose compartment, and painted pink and white with garish signs on the sides in Jevlenese.
They boarded through a center door to find half the interior fitted with seats, and in less than a minute they were airborne once again.
Nixie said something to Murray, who gawked in surprise, and they went into a succession of questions and answers.
“What’s it all about?” Hunt asked. -
“These guys must believe in going equipped for the job,” Murray replied. “This thing we’re in is a funeral truck.”
“You’re joking! It looks more like a tour bus for a rock band.”
“It belongs to one of the weirdo sects. It seems they do all their mourning when somebody gets born-on account of all the hassles and shit that the guy’s gonna have to put up with in life. But when he croaks at the end of it all, that’s something to celebrate. So they make this a party wagon. I guess it takes all kinds, eh?”
They landed again after about the same total flight time as the journey out, suggesting that they were back in Shiban. Sure enough, when they climbed out Hunt saw that they were on a wide platform projecting out from the rounded end of a structure high over the city, facing one of the wide traffic corridors receding away between cliffs of buildings. Above, the structure that they were on met what could be seen to be a solid canopy of artificial sky, probably penetrating through it to form one of the towers visible outside. Far below, the buildings and terraces merged together into the structures of the lower city.
They entered a set of doors and crossed a drab, bare hall of crumbling floor and scratched gray walls. It felt like the kind of place that had gotten tired of existing a long time earlier, and was waiting only to fall apart. A slow, creaking elevator carried them down for what seemed an interminable descent, and they came out in a dark, carpeted hallway that smelled old and musty. From there they went down a flight of stairs to a gallery with corridors and halls going off in several directions. One of the corridors brought them to a doorway. Scirio spoke briefly via a microphone to someone, and the door opened. Inside was a narrow passage that opened into another lined by doors on both sides. The surroundings seemed familiar, but the party moved through without slackening pace, and they were entering the lounge with the bar before Hunt realized that they were back in the Gondola Club, where they had come in search of Baumer.