Free The D’neeran Factor by Terry A. Adams

dialogue. He kept half an ear on it and half an eye on the readout, and in his lap he held a notepad and stylus. He would appear to the
Endeavor
personnel, and to the other Earth-based participants whose disembodied voices joined in from time to time from Admin and other locations, to be taking studious notes. He never took notes, but a lifetime of conferences had taught him the necessity of doodling to have something to do besides look at interchangeable faces and listen with diminishing concentration to interminable voices going on and on.
    This meeting had been going on half an hour and he had already filled and wiped the notepad’s screen once before something on the readout caught his attention.
    He leaned forward and said, “One moment, please.”
    All the voices stopped immediately. He said, “Lieutenant Hweng, back up a moment, please. What did you say about confirmation of the source of the original signal?”
    Tamara Hweng said without hesitation, “It took some time to refine the parameters of transmission, sir, probably because of equipment incompatibility, and we’ve only just pinned down the ambiguity margin. The signal we received didn’t originate in the target stellar system. It came from perhaps a third of that distance from
Endeavor.
Unless you accept the possibility of our being directly in line with an established relay system, that means they answered us from a spacecraft.”
    â€œThank you,” Jameson said. He waited for the voices to take up their theme before he leaned back and considered the news. It must fit into a pattern somewhere; but there were not yet enough facts to form a discernible pattern. There were only the signal to a distant new world, the answer from a spacecraft close at hand, a meeting set for an unspecified hour—then nothing.
    He appreciated the irony of the situation. All the laws of chance and logic argued the impossibility of
Endeavor
’s first effort drawing an answer. Hundreds or thousands of efforts with no answer had been the likely scenario. The impossible had most gratifyingly happened, however—and now was slipping out of reach.
    Why had species X not answered from the system that received the signal? To draw
Endeavor
away from it? To avoid being caught on the ground? If they had answered from a spacecraft, why had they not simply made physical contact with
Endeavor
at its original, well-described position?
    The readout said: “—suppose we scouted the target system just went there maybe used one of the shuttles or—”
    Jameson said, “No.”
    The speaker was McCarthy. He was a Heartworlder and not over-fond of Jameson. He looked up and said with a familiarity most of the others would not have dared, “Why not?”
    â€œYou have no shuttles with Inspace capability, Harry,” Jameson said. “You’d have to take the
Endeavor
into the gravity complex. If you took nine days to get to your present location, in deep space and working flat out, you would need—how long, Captain Fleming, to chart a safe path to and through the target system?”
    Fleming nodded. He said, “At a guess—and this is just a guess—a month. At least. Probably longer.”
    â€œYes. And you would relinquish the chance of contact where you are.”
    First Officer Ito Hirasawa said, “What about getting a smaller Inspace vessel out from the closest base? We could stay where we are while somebody else charts a course.”
    Jameson said, “We don’t know yet that they don’t consider one ship an invasion. We don’t want them worrying about two. Gentlemen and ladies, we have no idea what we’re dealing with. It has been seventeen days since Signal Alpha. Seventeen days may be only a moment to these beings. I suggest maintaining your position for a time. There are other reasons, but at present let’s just assume that your time can be best employed in