making excited gestures, pointing upward again with its arm extended as far as
it would stretch. “Higher! Higher!” It was important. The robot seemed to be
going frantic.
Zambendorf frowned and turned his head inside his helmet to look at Abaquaan.
Abaquaan returned a puzzled look and shrugged. Zambendorf stared at the robot,
tilted himself back ponderously to follow its pointing finger upward for a few
seconds, and then looked at its face again. Then, suddenly, he understood. “Of
course!” he exclaimed, and changed bands to connect the wristset through to an
image being picked up from orbit by the Orion and sent down in the trunk beam to
the surface lander via a relay satellite.
Giraud and the others had noticed what was going on and were gathering round to
watch curiously. “What’s happening with this guy?” one of the group asked.
“What lies beyond the clouds has always been a mystery to its race,” Zambendorf
replied. “It’s asking me if that is where we come from, and whether we can tell
it what’s out there and what kind of world it lives on. They’ve never even seen
the sky, don’t forget, let alone been able to observe the motions of stars and
planets.”
“You mean you could get all that from just a few gestures?” Konrad Seltzman
sounded incredulous.
“Of course not,” Zambendorf replied airily. “I have no need of such crude
methods.”
But beside them, Thirg had almost forgotten for the moment that the
dragon-servants existed as he stood staring without moving. For he was seeing
his world for the first time as it looked from beyond the sky.
It was a sphere.
And behind it, scattered across distances he had no way of estimating, were more
shining worlds than he knew even how to count.
17
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