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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 a
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 Lausa
When the news came in from Jupiter that the aliens were pla
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 go
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.