back on Earth.”
Massey looked at him curiously. Zambendorf and his team had been showing a
genuine interest in the mission’s serious business—and surprising some of the
scientists with how much they knew. Was it possible that Zambendorf could be
undergoing a change of heart? “What’s the matter Karl?” he asked. “Are you
developing a guilt complex now that you’re seeing some real science for once?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Zambendorf scoffed. “And besides, even if it were true,
do you think I’d tell you? You’re the psychologist. You should be telling me.”
In other words Massey could take Zambendorf’s attitude either way. He was still
the same old Zambendorf—forever confusing, and always a jump ahead of the game.
“You’re doing something worthwhile for once,” Massey said. “You’ve got a knack
for getting through to the Taloids, and they trust you. That has to be a better
feeling than ripping people off all the time, so why not admit it?”
“It’s not the same thing,” Zambendorf replied. “I’ll help anyone who makes the
effort to help himself. The Taloids might have some way to go yet, but they
value knowledge and skill. They want to learn. They’re willing to work at it.
But people? Pah! They grow up surrounded by libraries, universities, teachers
who could show them the accumulated discoveries and wisdom of millennia and
they’re not interested. They’d rather live junk-lives. How can you steal
anything from someone who has already thrown everything away?”
“Perhaps people simply need to be shown how to think,” Massey suggested.
Zambendorf shook his head. “It’s like leading horses to water. When people are
ready to think, they will think. Trying to rush them is futile. All you can do
is show them where the water is and wait for them to get thirsty.” He gestured
over Massey’s shoulder at Osmond Periera and Malcom Wade, who were standing by
the doorway, debating in loud voices a speculation of Periera’s that the
antimatter spaceship responsible for creating the North Polar Sea might have
come from Titan. “Listen to those two idiots,” Zambendorf murmured in a lower
voice. “You could spend a year of your life preparing a detailed refutation that
might succeed in convincing them that what they’re talking about is nonsense. Do
you think they’d learn anything from the experience? Not a bit of it. Within a
week they’d be off into something else equally preposterous. So you could have
saved your time for something profitable. I’ll save mine for the Taloids.”
“Careful, Karl,” Massey cautioned. “You’re beginning to sound as if you’re
admitting you’re a fraud again.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Zambendorf said. “But even if it were true, do you think
people would learn anything from the experience if you proved it?” He shook his
head. “Not a bit of that either. Within a week they would have found something
else too … just like friend Osmond and that other character behind you.”
At that moment a loudspeaker announced that the personnel carrier that would be
taking the party into the city was waiting at the vehicle-access transfer lock.
“The problem with you is that you really are a scientist at heart,” Massey said
as they began moving in the direction of the doorway. “But you think it would be
beneath your dignity to admit it.”
Half an hour later they were among the passengers watching parts of the
outskirts of Genoa slide through the headlamp beams of the carrier and its
escort of two military scout cars fifty yards ahead and behind. All along the
way, Taloids came to stand by the roadside to watch the procession of strange
creatures that bore within them beings from another world. Some ran forward to
bathe themselves in the light, which they apparently believed to possess
miraculous and curative properties; a few shrank back as the vehicles passed, or
fled into the alleys and sidestreets.
One—a mounted figure wrapped in a heavy riding cloak, its face concealed in a
deep hood—watched inconspicuously from the shadows of a gateway near the city
wall, absorbing every detail. When the Terran vehicles had passed, the rider
reemerged and moved away along the side of the road in the opposite direction to