DAVE CROOKES PRESSED A KEY ON A CONSOLE IN THE ORION’S Digital Systems and Image Processing Laboratory, and sat back to watch as the sequence began replaying again on the screen in front of him. It showed one of the Taloids in the view recorded twenty-four hours previously watching a Terran figure make a series of gestures, and then turning its head to look directly at another Taloid standing a few feet behind. A moment later the second Taloid’s head jerked round to look quickly at the first Taloid and then at the Terran.
“There!” Leon Keyhoe, one of the mission’s signals specialists, said from where he was standing behind Crookes’ chair. Crookes touched another key to freeze the image. Keyhoe looked over his shoulder at two other engineers seated at instrumentation panels to one side. “The one in the brown helmet has to be saying something at that point right there. Check the scan one more time.”
“Still no change,” one of the engineers replied, nipping a series of switches and taking in the data displays in front of him. “There’s nothing from VLF and LF, right through to EHF in the millimeter band...No correlation on Fourier.”
“Positive correlation reconfirmed on acoustic,” the other engineer reported. “Short duration ultrasonic pulse bursts, averaging around, ah...one hundred ten thousand per second, duration twenty to forty-eight microseconds. Repetition frequency is variable and consistent with modulation at up to thirty-seven kilocycles. Sample profile being analyzed on screen three.”
Keyhoe sighed and shook his head. “Well, it seems to be definite,” he agreed. “The Taloids communicate via exchanges of high-frequency sound pulses. There’s no indication of any use of radio at all. It’s surprising—I was certain that those transmission centers down on the surface would turn out to be long-range relay stations or something like that.” Readings obtained from the Orion had confirmed the Dauphin orbiter’s findings that several points on the surface of Titan emitted radio signals intermittently and irregularly. Probes sent below the aerosol layer had revealed the sources to lie near some of the heavily built-up centers from which the surrounding industrialization and mechanization appeared to have spread. The patterns of signal activity had correlated with nothing observed on the surface so far.
Joe Fellburg, who was wedged on a stool between Dave Crookes’ console and a bulkhead member, rubbed his chin thoughtfully for a second or two. “Do you buy this idea that Anna Voolink came up with about alien factories?” he asked, looking up at Keyhoe.
“Well, we’ve got to agree it’s a possibility, Joe,” Keyhoe said. “Why?”
Anna Voolink was a Dutch NASO scientist who had been involved several years before in a study of a proposal to set up a self-replicating manufacturing facility on Mercury for supplying Earth with materials and industrial products. She had speculated that Titan’s machine biosphere might have originated from a similar scheme set up by an alien civilization, possibly millions of years previously, which had somehow mutated and started to evolve. What had caused the system to mutate, why the aliens should have chosen Titan, and what had happened to them since were questions that nobody had ventured to answer even tentatively.
Fellburg leaned forward to prop an elbow against the side of the console and gestured vaguely at the screens. “It occurred to me that if everything down there did evolve from some superadvanced version of what NASO was talking about setting up on Mercury, then maybe radio could have been the primary method of communication in the early days. But if the aliens were any kind of engineers at all, you’d expect them to have provided some kind of backup, right?” He looked from Keyhoe to Crookes. Crookes pinched his nose, thought for a second, and nodded.
“Makes sense, I guess,” Keyhoe agreed.
Fellburg spread his hands. “So couldn’t the answer be that the primary system went out of use—maybe because of a mutation error or something like that—and the secondary became the standard? What we’re picking up from those centers could be just a remnant of something that doesn’t serve any purpose any more—coming from a few places where it hasn’t quite died out yet.”
“Mmm...it’s an interesting thought,” Keyhoe said.
“I wonder if the Taloids would still be capable of receiving anything,” Crookes murmured after thinking the suggestion over for a second or two.
“I suppose that would depend on where their blueprint information comes from...their ‘genetics,’ “ Keyhoe said.
Fellburg rubbed his chin again. “Well, if it’s not functionally relevant anymore, and if their evolution is driven selectively the same as ours is, I guess there wouldn’t be any strong selection working either one way or the other. So probably some of them can receive radio and some of them can’t. Some sensitive ones might still be produced.”
Dave Crookes smiled to himself. “If that’s true, I wonder what all our radio traffic over the last few weeks might have been doing to them,” he said.
“What’s your background, Joe?” Crookes inquired casually an hour later in the transit capsule that he and Fellburg were sharing on their way back to Globe II.
“How d’you mean?” Fellburg asked.
“Your technical background...I mean, it’s pretty obvious you know something about electronics and pulse techniques.”
“Why?”
“Oh...just curious, I guess.”
“Well, Michigan Tech—master’s. Six years in industry, mainly computer physics with IBM. Ten years army, finishing up as a technical specialist with intelligence. Good enough?”
The capsule passed a window section of the tube, giving a momentary view of the outside of the Orion and of Titan hanging in the background, partly obscuring the magnificent spectacle of Saturn and its rings. Crookes eyed Fellburg uncertainly for a few seconds. “Can I ask you something personal?” he said at last.
“Sure. If I think it’s none of your goddamn business, I’ll say so, okay?”
Crookes hesitated, then said, “Why are you mixed up with this Zambendorf thing?”
“Why not?”
Crookes frowned uncomfortably. Obviously he’d come about as close to being direct as he was prepared to. “Well, it’s...I mean, isn’t it a kind of a wasteful way to use that kind of talent?”
“Is it? Do you know what I’d be getting paid now if I’d gone back into industry after I quit the army?”
“Is that all that matters?” Crookes asked.
Fellburg thrust out his chin. “No, but it’s a good measure of how society values its resources. I’ve already had enough Brownie badges to stitch on my shirt instead of anything that’s worth something.”
Crookes shook his head. “But when the product is worthless...”
“The market decides what a product is worth—through demand, which fixes the price,” Fellburg said. “If plastic imitations are selling high today because people are too dumb to tell the difference, who’s doing the wasting—me, who accepts the going rate, or the guy who’s out on the street in front of his store, giving the real thing away?”
When Fellburg arrived back at the team’s day cabin, Thelma and Drew West were as he had left them, hunched in front of the display console, following developments down on the surface; Clarissa Eidstadt was sitting at a corner table, editing a wad of scripts. “What’ve you been up to?” Thelma asked as he came in.
“Over in the electronics section with Dave Crookes and a few of the guys, playing back the Taloid shots,” Fellburg replied. “Things are getting interesting. It doesn’t look as if they use radio to talk after all. They use high-frequency sound pulses. The engineers have started computer-processing the patterns already. Oh, and did you know they’re not so poker-faced after all?”
“The engineers?” West said, without looking away from the screen.
“The Taloids, turkey.”
“How come?”
“They have facial expressions—surface heat patterns that change like crazy all the time they’re talking. Crookes’ people have been taping a whole library of them in IR.”
“Say, how about that,” Thelma said.
“And how long will it be before anyone manages to decode anything from pulse-code patterns collected in the databank?” West asked. He waved an arm at the screen. “Karl and Otto are doing a much better job their own way. They’ve practically swapped life stories with the Taloids already.” Fellburg followed his gaze toward the screen.
Down on the surface a second lander had appeared in the pool of light alongside the first, and the surrounding area was dotted with the lights of ground vehicles and EV-suited figures exploring and poking around in the general vicinity. The first lander’s cargo bay had been depressurized and left unheated with its loading doors open to Titan’s atmosphere to serve as a shelter for the Taloids. Zambendorf, having snatched a few hours rest inside the ship a short while previously, was now back outside and talking to the Taloids again in his self-appointed role as Earth’s ambassador—which the Taloids seemed to have endorsed by responding to him more readily and freely than to anybody else. Scrawled in white on the hull of the surface lander in the background, and extending back for yard after yard in what looked like a mess of graffiti toward the ship’s stern, was a jumble of shapes and symbols, arrows and lines, and dozens of whimsical Taloids interspersed with bulbous, domeheaded representations of spacesuited Terrans. The primary communications medium used in the historic moment of first contact between civilizations from two different worlds had turned out to be chalk and blackboard, and the ship had offered the handiest writing surface available.
“I got Herman Thoring to okay a news flash to Earth to the effect that Karl initiated communications with the aliens,” Clarissa said without looking up.
Fellburg laughed and moved closer to take in the view on the screen. “So, what’s the latest down there?” he asked.
West turned a knob to lower the voice of the NASO officer who was listening in on the local surface frequencies and keeping up a commentary from inside the lander. “See the Taloid who’s waving at Karl now—the one in the red cloak—that’s Galileo. He’s curious about nearly everything. The one with him is Sir Lancelot. He seems to be the head guy of the bunch.”
“Okay,” Fellburg said.
“The Taloids have some hand-drawn maps that our people managed to match up with reconnaissance pictures—so now we know where the Taloids are heading,” West said. “It’s a pretty big city in the mechanized area on the other side of the desert. It looks as if they’re on their way to the palace or whatever of the king who runs that whole area. It seems that Lancelot and the others work for the king, but we’re not sure yet exactly how Galileo fits in.”
“You don’t get three guesses,” Thelma said to Fellburg.
“Huh?”
“Karl’s called the king Arthur.”
Fellburg groaned.
“What else did you expect?” West asked. “Anyhow, the bunch that the army wiped out was from some country over the mountains that’s at war with Arthur for some reason, or something like that. But if these Taloids we’ve ended up talking to are Arthur’s knights or whatever, then maybe we’ve gotten ourselves an introduction.”
“So what are our people aiming at—a landing somewhere near that city you mentioned if Arthur agrees to it?” Fellburg asked.
West nodded. “You’ve got it.”
“How long would we need to wait before Lancelot and his guys get there? Do we know that?”
“Nobody’s figured out how they reckon time yet.” West nodded toward the screen. “But if Karl gets his way, it won’t matter too much anyway. He’s trying to sell the Taloids on the idea of letting us airlift them the rest of the way. And you know something, Joe, I’ve got a feeling they just might buy the idea.”