A small vehicle, roughly rectangular but with pods and other protuberances cluttering its outside, moved slowly into view from behind the camera, flying twenty feet or so above the ground. It landed near the dome, and a group of Ganymeans wearing spacesuits emerged and began moving cautiously through the wreckage toward the opening. Then they stopped suddenly. There were movements in the shadows ahead of them.

A light came on from somewhere behind to light up the opening. It revealed more figures, also in suits, standing in front of what looked like an entrance leading down to an underground section of whatever the dome had been part of. Their suits were different, and they stood a full head and shoulders shorter than the Ganymeans facing them from a few yards away. They were carrying weapons, but they appeared unsure of themselves as they looked nervously at one another and at the Ganymeans. None of them seemed to know what to do or what to expect. None of them, except one.

He was standing in front of the others in a blue spacesuit that was plastered with dust and grotesquely discolored by scorch marks, his feet planted firmly astride, and a riflelike weapon held unwaveringly in one hand to cover the leading Ganymean. With his free arm he made a gesture behind him to wave the others forward. The movement was decisive and commanding. They obeyed, some moving up to stand on either side of him, others moving out to cover the aliens from protected positions among the surrounding debris. He was taller than the others and heavy in build, and the lips of the face behind his visor were drawn back in a snarl to reveal white teeth that contrasted sharply with his dark, unshaven chin and cheeks. Something unintelligible came through on audio. Although the words meant nothing, the tone of challenge and defiance was unmistakable.

"Our surveillance methods were not as comprehensive then," Calazar commented. "The language was not known."

In the scene before them, the Ganymean leader was replying in his own tongue, evidently relying on intonation and gesture to dispel alarm. As the exchange continued, the tension seemed to ease. Eventually the human giant lowered his weapon, and the others who had taken cover began emerging again. He beckoned for the Ganymeans to follow, and as the ranks behind him opened to make way, he turned away to lead them down into the inner entrance.

"That was Koriel," Garuth said.

Hunt had already guessed that. For some reason he felt very relieved.

"He succeeded!" Danchekker breathed. Elation was showing on his face, and he swallowed visibly. "He did get to Gorda. I’m-I’m glad to know that."

"Yes," Garuth said, reading the further question written across Hunt’s face. "We have studied the ship’s log. They did return, but Koriel’s companion had already died. They left him as they found him. They did manage to rescue some of the others who had been left strung out along the way, however."

"And after that?" Danchekker queried. "Another thing we have often wondered is whether or not Koriel was among those who finally reached Earth. It seems now that he may well have been. Do you happen to know if he in fact was?"

In reply Calazar called up another image. It was a view of a settlement formed from a dozen or so portable buildings of unfamiliar design, situated on a river bank against a background of semitropical forest with the hazy outline of mountains rising in the distance beyond. On one side was what looked like a supply dump, with rows of stacked crates, drums, and other containers. A crowd of two or three hundred figures was assembled in the foreground-human figures, dressed mainly in simple but serviceable-looking shirts and pants, and many of them carrying weapons either holstered at the waist or slung across the shoulder.

Koriel was standing ahead of them, huge, broad-shouldered, with dense, black hair, unsmiling features, and his thumbs hooked loosely in his belt. Two lieutenants were standing one either side and a pace behind him. Some of the arms in the crowd began rising in a farewell salutation.

Then the view began to fall away and tilt. The settlement shrank quickly and lost itself among a carpet of treetops, which in turn faded to become just a hazy area of green on a patchwork of colors taking form as the scale reduced and more of the surrounding landscape flowed into view from the sides. "The last view from the ship as it departed from Earth to return to Thurien," Calazar said. A coastline that was recognizable as part of the Red Sea moved into the picture and shrank to become part of a familiar section of Middle East geography despite being distorted at the periphery by perspective. Finally the edge of the planet itself appeared, already looking distinctly curved.

They watched in silence for a long time. Eventually Danchekker murmured, "Imagine . . . the whole human race began with that tiny handful. After all that they had endured, they conquered a whole world. What an extraordinary race they must have been."

This was one of the few occasions on which Hunt had seen Danchekker genuinely moved. And he felt it too. He thought back again to the scenes from the Lunarian war and the visions that the Jevlenese had created of Earth stampeding toward exactly the same catastrophe. And yet it had almost come true. It had been close-far too close. If Earth had not changed course when it did, just two or three decades more would have made that come true. And then Charlie, Koriel, Gorda, the efforts of the Thuriens, the struggles of the handful of survivors that he had just seen-and all that they endured after that-would have been for nothing.

It brought to mind Wellington’s words after Waterloo: "It was a close-run thing, a damned close-run thing-the closest-run thing you ever saw in your life."

Chapter Twenty-One

After hearing Norman Pacey’s account of the events at Bruno, Jerol Packard lodged a confidential request with an office of the CIA for a compendium of everything that had accumulated in its files over the years concerning Sverenssen and, for good measure, the other members of the UN Farside delegation as well. Clifford Benson, the CIA official who had dealt with the request, summarized the findings a day later at a closed-door session in Packard’s State Department office.

"Sverenssen reappeared in Western Europe in 2009 with a circle of social and financial contacts already established. How that happened is not clear. We can’t find any authenticated traces of him for about ten years before then-in fact from the time he was supposed to have been killed in Ethiopia." Benson gestured at a section of the summary charts of names, photographs, organizations, and interconnecting arrows pinned to a wallboard. "His closest ties were with a French-British-Swiss investment-banking consortium, a big part of which is still run by the same families that set up a network of financial operations around Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century to launder the revenues from the Chinese opium trade. Now here’s an interesting thing-one of the biggest names on the French side of that consortium is a blood relative of Daldanier. In fact the two names have been connected for three generations."

"Those people are pretty tightly knit," Caldwell commented. "I don’t know if I’d attach a lot of significance to something like that."

"If it were an isolated case, I wouldn’t, either," Benson agreed. "But look at the rest of the story." He indicated another part of the chart. "The British and Swiss sides control a sizable part of the world’s bullion business and are connected through the London gold market and its mining affiliations to South Africa. And look what name we find prominent among the ones at the end of that line."

"Is that Van Geelink of the same family as Sverenssen’s cohort?" Lyn asked dubiously.