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 comer
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.