you’d signed up.”
“You mean you weren’t sent to monitor the ESP experiments on Mars?” Zambendorf
said, surprised.
“No more than you were sent to conduct them.”
“So . . . what were you sent for?”
“I very much suspect that we’re just beginning to find out.”
The terminal screen came to life to show a man with a red, gnomish face topped
by a mat of white, close-cropped hair saying something that was inaudible since
the sound was still turned down. Zambendorf stared hard for a moment, then said,
“Isn’t that Conlon from NASO?”
Massey raised an eyebrow in surprise. “You know him?”
“I know his face.”
“How come?”
“I make it my business to know lots of things.”
The view on the screen changed to a picture of Saturn with the words TITAN
MISSION superposed in large letters along with the GCN logo; then followed a
shot of the Orion in orbit against a background of part of Titan’s disk.
Evidently the footage was a replay of a routine newscast from Earth. A woman’s
voice faded in as Price turned up the sound, and the picture changed again, this
time to a view of an area of cluttered machinery and scrap piled just outside
Genoa Base.
“. . . said that there might be a possibility of salvaging something useful from
the remnants of the defunct alien civilization discovered on Titan, but most of
it must be considered a total write-off. In any case, the cost of attempting a
full-scale cleanup operation from Earth would more than offset any benefits that
could conceivably be obtained.” A good-looking, aubum-haired, smartly dressed
woman, probably in her midforties appeared, sitting at a desk facing the camera.
She smiled out at the viewers as she turned a sheet of paper in front of her. “A
disappointment, I’m afraid, for those people who have been hoping for a new
Industrial Revolution that would change the lives of all of us here on Earth.
But it’s still the biggest junkpile in the known universe, I’m told. So who
knows—it could turn out to be good news yet for all you scrap-metal dealers.
Better start submitting your bids. You’ll probably have to add a reserve tank to
your pickup though.”
Zambendorf turned a stunned face toward Massey and shook his head
disbelievingly. Massey nodded for him to keep watching.
The newscaster looked down and scanned quickly over the next sheet. “More news
about the Taloids—the man-size, walking maintenance robots that have been
catching a lot of people’s imagination. They see a composite image made up of
electronically intensified optical wavelengths—in other words ordinary visible
light highly amplified— and infrared wavelengths, or heat, according to an MIT
professor who has been studying reports from the Orion. The pitviper and boid
families of terrestrial snakes employ a similar system, apparently, but nothing
as sensitive as the Taloid version. We’ll be talking to Professor Morton
Glassner to hear more about that in just a few minutes. . . .
“Another question that a lot of people have been asking is, Can the Taloids
think?” The woman’s face vanished and was replaced by a shot of two U.S.
soldiers in EV suits facing a Taloid. Although the shot was from Genoa Base,
nothing of the city was visible in the background; only a jumble of derelict
machines was visible. The view gave the impression that the Taloid had just
emerged from some habitat in a kind of jungle. One of the soldiers was offering
something, then pulling it away as the Taloid reached for it—as if teasing a big
metal bear—while the second soldier could be seen grinning through his
faceplate. Zambendorf wondered how many hours of recordings this particular
sequence had been selected from.
“Well, there’s no getting away from the fact that they are extraordinary
machines,” the voiceover continued. “But then, wouldn’t we expect to find at
least a few cute tricks in machines left behind by an alien civilization that
most of our scientists are convinced must have achieved interstellar travel? It
all depends what you mean by think, says well-known philosopher and social
scientist, Johnathan Goodmay, in an article in this month’s issue of Plato. If