James Hogan - Giant's Star

Farther away and to one side, positioned almost edge-on to their vantage point, was another structure identical to the one they were in, comprising a similar cruciform of two crescents and carrying its own quadruplet of cylinders, details of its far side losing themselves in foreshortening and distance. And on the other side of the view was another, also edge-on, and another above, and yet another below. The whole set of them, Hunt realized as he looked, was positioned symmetrically in space around a common center to form sections of an imaginary spherical surface like parts of an engineer’s exploded drawing, and the gun barrels were pointing inward radially. And far away at the focus of this configuration, an eerie halo of blurred, scrambled starlight was hanging in the void, tinted with a dash of violet.

After giving them some time to take in the scene VISAR informed them, "You are now something like five hundred million miles outside the system of Gistar. You’re standing in something called a stressor. There are six of them, and together they define a boundary around a spherical volume of space. Each of the arms outside is of the order of five thousand miles long. That’s how far away those cylinders are, which should give you some idea of their size."

Danchekker looked at Hunt dumbfounded, raised his head again to take in the scene above, then looked at Hunt once more. Hunt just stared back glassy-eyed.

VISAR continued, "The stressors induce a zone of enhanced spacetime curvature that increases in intensity toward the center until, right at the focus, it collapses into a black hole." A bright red circle, obviously superposed on their visual inputs by VISAR, appeared from nowhere to surround the hazy region. "The hole is in the center of the circle," VISAR told them. "The halo effect is distorted light from background stars-the region acts like a gravitic lens. The hole itself is about ten thousand miles from you, and the space you’re in is actually highly distorted. But I can censor confusing data, so you feel and act normal.

"Behind the shell defined by the stressors are batteries of projectors that create intense beams of energy by matter annihilation and direct them between the stressors and into the hole. From there the energy is redirected and distributed through a higher-order dimension grid and extracted back into ordinary space wherever it’s needed. In other words this whole arrangement forms the input into an h-space distribution grid that delivers to anywhere you like, instantaneously, and over interstellar distances. Like it?"

A while went by before Hunt found his voice. "What kinds of things hook on the other end?" he asked. "I mean, would this feed a whole planet. . . or what?"

"The distribution pattern is very complex," VISAR replied. "Several planets are being fed from Garfalang, which is what the place you’re at is called. So are a number of high-energy projects that the Thuriens are engaged in at various places. But you can hook smaller units into the grid wherever they happen to be, such as spacecraft, other vehicles, machines, dwellings-anything that uses power. The local equipment needed to tap into the grid is not large in size. For instance the perceptron that we landed in Alaska was powered from the grid on the conventional stage from its exit port to Earth. It would have had to be much larger if it carried its own on-board propulsion source. Hardly any of our machines have local, self-contained power sources. They don’t need them. The grid feeds everything from large centralized generators and redirectors, like the one you’re in, located far out in space."

"This is unbelievable," Danchekker breathed. "And to imagine, fifty years ago people were frightened of their energy sources being exhausted. This is stupefying. . . . quite stupefying."

"What’s the prime source?" Hunt asked. "You said the input beams were produced by matter annihilation. What gets annihilated?"

"Mainly the cores of burned-out stars," VISAR answered. "Part of the energy generated is tapped off to drive a network of transfer ports for conveying material from the remote sites, where the cores are dismantled, to the annihilator batteries. The net production of useful energy fed into the grid from Garfalang is equivalent to about one lunar mass per day. But there’s plenty of fuel around. We’re a long way from any crisis. Don’t worry about it."

"And you can concentrate the energy from here across lightyears of space through some kind of . . . hyperdimension and create a transfer toroid remotely," Hunt said. "Is it always as elaborate as the operation we watched?"

"No. That was a special case that required exceptionally precise control and timing. An ordinary transfer is pretty simple by comparison, and just routine."

Hunt fell silent while he took in more of the spectacle overhead, and went back in his mind over the details of the operation he had witnessed.

Calazar had decided to go ahead with the interception of the Shapieron without further delay when a baffling message, signed personally by Norman Pacey, came in from Bruno to warn of a possibility that the ship could be in some kind of danger. How Pacey could have known about a risk that had been recognized on Thurien only with the benefit of information that Pacey couldn’t possibly have possessed was a mystery.

Apparently the "organization" possessed equipment capable of tracking the Shapieron just as Calazar’s people did, and Calazar had been unwilling to reveal his actions by simply allowing the ship to vanish from the course it had been following. Therefore he had called upon Eesyan’s engineers to modify the operation to cover not only the fishing of a vessel out of the void twenty light-years away, but also the substitution of a dummy object constructed to give identical readings on the "organization’s" tracking instruments. There was a risk that the gravitational disturbance produced in the process might itself be detected, but since continuous monitoring was not practicable for technical reasons, there was a good chance that the substitution could be made invisible provided the operation was pulled off in minimum time. As planned, the switch had gone quickly and smoothly, and if all had gone well the "organization" would by now be receiving tracking-data updates originating from the decoy while the Shapieron was in fact light-years away and almost at Thurien. Time would no doubt tell if the switch had gone quickiy and smoothly enough.

Hunt didn’t know what to make of this game of deception and counterdeception between two, possibly rival, groups of Ganymeans. As Danchekker had maintained from the beginning, the response simply did not fit with the way Ganymean minds worked. Hunt had tried several times to squeeze a hint of what was behind it all out of VISAR, but the machine, evidently acting under a firm directive not to discuss the matter, merely reaffirmed that Calazar would broach the subject himself at the appropriate time.

But whatever the reasons, the Shapieron had not been attacked or interfered with in whatever way Pacey had feared, and it was now in safe hands. The only conclusion Hunt could draw was that Pacey had totally misinterpreted something and overreacted, which seemed strange for the kind of person Hunt had judged Pacey to be. To be fair, Hunt conceded as he thought about it again, Pacey hadn’t actually said for certain that it was the Shapieron that was threatened; what he had said was that he had reason to believe that something well out in space was in danger of destruction, and he had expressed concern that it might be the Shapieron. Calazar had decided not to take any chances, and Hunt couldn’t blame him for that. What the warning did seem to indicate was that Pacey had been hopelessly wrong about something. Or had he? Hunt wondered.