THE FEATURELESS RED-BROWN BALL OF TITAN GREW LARGER AND flattened out into what looked like a solid desert surface from the twelve-man flyer Hornet skimming above the aerosol layer, where it had leveled out after its descent from orbit. Zambendorf, clad in a helmetless EV suit, was sitting in the rear cabin, brooding silently to himself over the latest events, while opposite him Vernon Price gazed spellbound through one of the side ports at the rainbow-banded orb of Saturn beyond Titan’s rim, seemingly floating half-submerged in the immense plane of its ring system viewed almost edge-on.
Sgt. Michael O’Flynn had reacted with a singular display of imperturbability and composure when Zambendorf asked for his advice on the best way to go about stealing a vehicle to get down to the surface. “Now, they’re not exactly the kind of thing you’d expect people to just walk away from and leave lying around for anyone to help themselves to,” O’Flynn had said. “And besides, even if you did get your hands on one, there’s nothing you could do with it. A surface lander needs a minimum crew of four, all highly trained, and it couldn’t take off without a preflight preparation routine by a regular ground team.”
“I’m not talking about a full-blown orbital shuttle, for God’s sake,” Zambendorf had replied. “But what about a medium-haul personnel flyer—one of the small ones? Couldn’t you pull one of those out of service and list it as being withdrawn for maintenance or something?”
“But those are just surface flyers. They don’t make descents from orbit.”
“They could here, at a pinch,” Zambendorf had insisted. “With Titan’s low gravity you could use one as a miniature lander...if you were to ignore certain sections of NASO flight regulations and allowed the International Space Transportation Regulatory Commission’s safety margins for wing loading and thermal stress to slip a little.”
“Hmm...you seem to know what you’re talking about, I see. Now, where would somebody like you have found out about things like that, I’m sitting here asking meself.”
“Never mind. The question is, can you do it, Mike?”
“Well, maybe I can, and then again, maybe I can’t...But supposing for the moment that I could, it would have to be for the hardware only, you understand. I’m not in the headhunting business. You’d have to find your own pilot.”
“I think I can take care of that.”
O’Flynn had sounded surprised. “Oh, who...and with what qualifications?”
“Former combat maneuver instructor with the Air Force Suborbital Bomb Wing; two years specializing in high-altitude attack and evasion tactics. Is that good enough?”
“Begorrah, you’re kidding! Someone on your team?”
“Yes.”
“Let me see now...it would have to be Joe, the big black fella. Is that who it is?”
“No.”
“Who, then?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Zambendorf replied, his eyes twinkling. “Anyway, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. You’d be surprised at some of the talent we’ve got between us in our little outfit.”
It had taken little imagination to see that supplying Terran weapons to the inherently belligerent Paduans would completely destabilize the situation between Padua and its neighboring states, and before very much longer the more distant ones too. Other Taloid nations would seek similar weapons to secure themselves against the threat of Paduan aggression—as indeed Genoa desired to do already—and then others would feel threatened as those that hadn’t reequipped their forces found themselves being intimidated by the ones that had. Eventually all the Taloid states would be forced to follow suit, and in the process they would be progressively reduced to a condition of vassal-dependency on Earth, which would thus be able to negotiate separately with each on terms of its own choosing. It was an old, familiar pattern, which earlier centuries on Earth had seen repeated many times over.
Massey had composed a message summarizing the main points and had it transmitted to Conlon via his private NASO channel. Eight hours later a reply stated that Conlon had confronted some of the senior NASO officials with the allegations, but their version of the facts, as advised from GSEC’s political liaison office in Washington, was very different. It said, in effect, that Padua was a peaceful nation whose leaders aspired toward Western democratic ideals, and that the limited aid being given by the mission had been requested by the Paduan authorities to combat incursions upon their territory from Genoa—an illegally imposed rebel regime—and to relieve Paduan religious minorities who were being persecuted within the Genoese borders. The decision to grant the request was seen as a goodwill gesture that would help establish cordial and cooperative future relationships. The situation back on Earth was still confused, apparently, and would take a long time to resolve itself, especially in view of the long turnaround of communications to Saturn. Zambendorf had not been prepared to wait. “We’re not going to get any sense out of them for days,” he had told Massey. “You’d better stay on the line here and keep in touch as things develop. I’m going down to Titan to talk to Arthur.”
“What do you think you’re going to do, even if you manage to find some way of getting down there?” Massey had asked.
“I have no idea, Gerry, but there’s no way I’m going to sit up here with this kind of thing going on.”
Zambendorf’s thoughts were interrupted by Clarissa Eidstadt’s summons over the intercom from the forward compartment. “Karl, can you get up here a minute? We’ve got problems.”
Price turned away from the port and watched uneasily as Zambendorf stood up, stepped carefully round the team’s recently completed second transmogrifier box, and moved forward to the open doorway at the front of the cabin. Clarissa glanced back at him from the captain’s seat, while in the copilot’s position Otto Abaquaan was flipping switches frantically in front of an array of data displays and readouts that were obviously unfamiliar to him. “It’s no good,” Abaquaan said, shaking his head. “I can’t get the midrange to scale, and the monitor recall has aborted. This isn’t making any sense.”
“What’s wrong?” Zambendorf asked.
“We’re losing it,” Clarissa said. There was a problem in fixing the flyer’s position from the electronic navigation grid transmitted from the satellites that the Orion had deployed shortly after arriving at Titan. Clarissa had warned that it might happen without an experienced copilot-navigator to calibrate the on-board reference system to the shifting satellite pattern as the flyer descended. “We know we’re somewhere near where we need to go down through the muck, but we don’t have a fine-tuned fix.”
“No go?” Zambendorf asked, looking at Abaquaan.
Abaquaan spread his hands. “Sorry, Karl. I thought I had it down okay when we went through the routine up on the ship, but I guess it needs more practice.”
“It was worth a try,” Clarissa murmured.
“It’s not your fault there wasn’t more time, Otto,” Zambendorf said and turned to Clarissa. “How serious is it? Can you take care of it?”
“Sure, but not while I’m flying this thing too. The easiest thing to do would be to put down someplace and reinitiate the full sequence on the ground, without the added complication of having to compensate for being on a moving platform. Once we’re locked into the grid at a fixed point, I can update the inertial system so that it will supply the drift onsets automatically.”
“How long would you need?”
“To get everything right and double-checked, aw...say, an hour. But we need to land now, while we still know we’re roughly in the right place. If we leave it much longer, we could wind up coming through the blanket anywhere over Titan, in the dark, without a ground datum. Then the way to Genoa would be anybody’s guess.”
“You’d better take us down, then,” Zambendorf agreed.
“Okay. Go back, sit down, and buckle up.”
Zambendorf ducked back into the rear cabin and lowered himself into the seat opposite Price. “We’re going down.”
“Trouble?”
“An unscheduled stop to synch the on-board nav system with the satellite grid.”
The red-brown desert outside began rising to meet them, and as it came nearer it was transformed slowly from smooth, rounded hummocks into jagged peaks of muddy cloud, bottomless canyons of darkness falling away between. Cliffs and precipices of vapor reared up ahead, then were towering above on either side and flashing past at greater and greater speed...and then the stars vanished from the overhead ports as the flyer plunged into darkness. Zambendorf felt the seat pressing against him as Clarissa flattened the craft against Titan’s thickening atmosphere to shed velocity. The structure vibrated and pounded in protest as the stresses climbed above the limits it had been built to endure.
“Wing sensors reading nine-twelve, to ten-three, with orange-two on six,” Abaquaan’s voice shouted through the open door up front. “Belly and underwing skin temperatures rising fast.”
“Forward retros, five degrees out and down sixteen both, ramp to three thousand and sustain,” Clarissa snapped. Zambendorf was thrown forward against his seat harness; loud juddering noises came from somewhere under the floor. Across the aisle, Price was tightlipped and saying nothing.
“In at ten, ramp factor five,” Abaquaan’s voice reported. “Coming up to eleven over glide.”
“Gimme plus-three on dive—easy.”
“Dive brake increased three degrees.”
“Are we going to make it?” Zambendorf called out.
“What a question!” Clarissa shouted back. “You have to learn not to put up with any nonsense from these machines. If those guys up there can get a flying eggbeater all the way to Titan, I can sure-as-hell get this thing the rest of the way to the surface.”
Then they were losing height rapidly again, and the flyer banked as Clarissa put it into a long, sustained turn that would slow them down without altering their general position. They were now well below the aerosol layer, and the view outside was black in every direction, with a few ghostly streaks of methane cloud showing faint white below. “See if you can get a ground radar profile,” Clarissa said to Abaquaan. “I don’t want to go too low in that mess on visual. Try and find us somewhere high and flat—a plateau or something.” Abaquaan fiddled with a console to one side of him, muttered a few profanities beneath his breath, and tried something else. “Set the HG centerline to blue zero,” Clarissa said, glancing sideways. “Then use the coarse control to lock the scanbase and select your profile analysis from the menu on S-three.”
“What?...Oh yeah, okay...Got it.” Abaquaan took in the information that appeared on one of his screens. “Looks like we’re at altitude thirty-five thousand meters, ground speed three-zero-eight-five kilometers per hour, reducing at twenty-eight meters per second. Mountainous terrain with highest peaks approximately eight hundred meters above mean surface level.”
“Any flat summits?” Clarissa asked.
“The higher ones all seem pretty grim. There are some below five hundred that look better.”
“Gimme a slave of your scope on screen two.”
“You’ve got it.”
The flyer’s circling became tighter as it continued to slow and lose altitude. “Okay, prime a couple of seventy-FV-three flares and set them for proximity-triggered airbursts at fifty meters. Then activate the underbelly searchlight and give me a vertical optical scan on screen one,” Clarissa instructed after studying the display for a few seconds. “I’m going to have a look at that big flat-topped guy between the two thinner ones. See which one I mean?”
“I see it,” Abaquaan said, looking at his own screen. “Flares primed for proximity bursts at five-zero and five-zero meters; belly light activated; vertical optical scan selected and routed to pilot’s screen one.”
The flyer slowed to hover motionless in the gloom, and a few seconds later two brilliant white lights blossomed a short distance below it revealing the squat hilltop that its radar fingers had probed invisibly. The summit was reasonably smooth, free of cracks and fissures, and uncluttered by boulders or loose debris. The searchlight came on to pick out a landing spot and hold it in steady illumination, and then the flyer began to sink slowly downward once more to complete the final few hundred feet of its descent.
“What manner of omen is this?” Groork whispered fearfully to himself as he sat petrified, staring up at two radiant orbs of purest violet that had appeared in the sky above the mountaintop moments after the voices had gone quiet. “By the Lifemaker!” he gasped. A flying creature, similar to the one he had seen over Xerxeon but glowing with blinding light, and much larger, was floating over the mountain, above the orbs. It was sinking slowly toward the ground, balanced on a column of violet radiance. The orbs were descending steadily too, all the time keeping ahead of the creature as if to clear its way—harbingers of light sent on before the heavenly beast to conduct it from its sacred realm beyond the sky. The creature descended out of sight, and shortly afterward a halo of violet light appeared and continued to glow softly among the rocks at the summit.
What did it mean? Was it a sign for Groork to ascend the mountain or a warning for him to turn back? Would he risk being smitten for presumptuous arrogance if he went forward, or smitten for self-serving disobedience and cowardice if he went back? For a fleeting moment he wished his brother Thirg were present; blasphemer or not, Thirg’s unholy methods of argument could prove useful in situations like this. And then Groork remembered the message he had been given at the time of his being commanded to leave Xerxeon: Soon he would be told of the path that it was the Lifemaker’s will for him to follow. The ways of the Lifemaker were sometimes mysterious and devious, but they were never misleading or capricious.
So now, it seemed, the moment had come.
With a mixture of wonder, trepidation, and excitement rising within him at every step, Groork urged his mount off” the trail he had been following and began to pick his way upward. When the smoother terrain gave way to steeper ice crags and broken rock, he dismounted near some mountain scrub growing by a stream, tethered his animal to a bar of a conduit-support trellis beside a clump of tubing winders, and climbed on foot toward the mystical light beckoning to him from the summit.
“So what does Gerry think he can do about it?” Zambendorf asked. Vernon Price shrugged in his seat across the cabin. “He’s not sure yet. What can you do? Try and get the message across to as many Taloids as you can about what’s behind it all and why, maybe...Then perhaps enough of them will wise up sufficiently to throw out the leaders who’d go along with Giraud’s deal. In a word, you educate them, I guess.”
Zambendorf shook his head. “It’s no good, Vernon. It won’t work.”
Price shuffled his feet awkwardly, as if deep down he already knew that. “How come?” he asked anyway.
“Because the Taloids are too much like people—they believe what they want to believe and close their eyes to what they don’t want to believe. They need to think the world is the way they’d like it to be because having to face up to the reality that it isn’t would be too uncomfortable. So they carry on pretending because it makes them feel better.”
Price frowned for a second. “I’m not sure I see the connection.”
“When you look around at the leaders people follow and take orders from unquestioningly, what do you see? For the most part, you can’t say that the leaders are where they are because of any particular talent or ability, can you—most of them aren’t really very bright when all’s said and done. In many cases their only claim to exceptionality is their abnormal gullibility and extraordinary capacity for self-delusion. But the people don’t see it. The leader-image that exists in the minds of the followers is something quite different. The person that the followers follow is a fantasy that they manufacture in their own imaginations, which they can project onto anyone who’ll stand up and play the role. All that a leader needs is the gall to stand up and tell them he’s got what they’re looking for. They’ll believe it because they need to.”
“They need to believe they’re in capable hands,” Price said, taking the point. “Truth isn’t the important thing. The important thing is to be certain.” It didn’t sound as if he was hearing it for the first time.
“To have the illusion of certainty, anyway,” Zambendorf agreed. “If they just know their place and do as they’re told, life will be very cosy and uncomplicated. To feel secure they need their authority figures. They’d be lost without them—hopelessly, helplessly, and traumatically. They talk about being free, but the thought of real freedom terrifies them. They couldn’t handle it...not until they learn how in their own time, anyhow.” He raised his head to look at Price. “And that’s why trying to tell them they’re being taken doesn’t do any good. Even if they do get rid of whoever is selling them up the river today, tomorrow they’ll be flocking after somebody else who’s just as bad, and quite likely worse. They wouldn’t have learned a thing.”
A few seconds of silence passed, broken only by the voices of Clarissa and Abaquaan reciting numbers to each other in the nose compartment. “So what do you do?” Price asked at last. “About the Taloids, I mean. We can’t just wash our hands of the whole business and do nothing.”
Zambendorf frowned down at the floor and sighed. “First we have to accept reality as it is,” he replied slowly. “And the facts are that you can’t turn people whose beliefs are based on ignorance and superstition into rational, objective thinkers overnight. You’d be wasting your time. They don’t have the concepts. The only way they’ll get rid of corrupt leaders is when they stop listening to them, not because of any slogans that you or I might have taught them to memorize, but because of reasons they’ve worked out for themselves and understand. You’re right—the answer is education, but unfortunately there isn’t any instant brand of it that you can get by adding water.”
Price thought for a moment. “Well, if they’re going to go on being irrational for a while anyway, maybe the best thing you can do is give them some kind of harmless substitute to get them by in the meantime,” he said. “You should know what I’m talking about. It’s what you’ve been doing for years, isn’t it.”
“Well, it took you long enough to figure that out,” Zambendorf grunted.
Price worried at a tooth with his thumbnail and eyed Zambendorf dubiously for a second or two longer, then looked away and stared at the far wall. Suddenly he got up and crossed the cabin to peer through one of the ports. “What is it?” Zambendorf asked, turning in his seat.
“I thought I saw something moving just outside the light out there...Maybe not. I don’t know.”
Zambendorf rose to his feet and moved over to the port to look for himself. After a few seconds he called in the direction of the forward cabin door, “Can you turn on an outside flood, Clarissa? -- port-side forward?”
“Why?”
“We think there might be something moving out there.”
A moment later a cone of light stabbed from the craft and etched the figure of the Taloid clearly against the darkness. It was motionless on its knees, its hands clasped upon its chest and its head bowed in humble reverence.