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39

Gerold Massey sat in his office at the University of Maryland, counting the cash in his wallet to decide whether he needed to draw more out during his lunch break. He had read somewhere that the volume of daily banking transactions had grown to the extent that to handle the load without computers, every adult American would have to work for a bank. Even with the Earthnet problems, things hadn't gotten quite that bad, but some of the restrictions people were having to live with now brought home with a jolt just how much his generation had taken for granted. Credit cards had been suspended, private checks were limited to ten per person per week, and most establishments were offering discounts for cash in order to avoid hassles. Half the factories were closed down for lack of supplies, while others had unshipped stock overflowing into the parking lots. Airline flights were grounded, taking off half-empty, or stuck in endless holding patterns, and waiting in gas lines was becoming the new national pastime as thousands of home workers, their terminals down or too unreliable to be used, discovered the joys of daily commuting. Jobs and contracts evaporated wholesale as firms, stores, hotels, and businesses floundered in a typhoon of financial uncertainty. The only good side to it was that war on any respectably modern scale was suspended until further notice, since nobody on any side was likely to get anything worthy of note off the ground.

Massey checked the list he had written on a page torn from a notepad: set of hinges for the closet door he'd been meaning to fix for weeks, light bulbs, various grocery items—depending on what had and hadn't been delivered to the supermarket this week—shoe polish, nail clippers to replace a pair that had vanished.

He looked over at his assistant, Vernon Price, who was at the other desk in the cluttered office they shared, designing a questionnaire for a psychological test. "Hey, Vernon. How are we for coffee?" he asked. They usually bought supplies for the departmental pot in the secretarial office opposite.

"Pretty low," Vernon said without looking up. "We could use some sweetener and sugar, too."

"Creamer?"

"No, creamer's okay."

Massey added the items to his list. "Seeing Liz tonight?" he asked casually as he looked over the sheet, trying to remember anything he might have missed.

"Yep. I'm not sure what we're up to, though. There's dancing at the Amazon, which I like, but a concert in Jefferson Hall that she wants to see. Probably we'll end up doing both."

"What's the concert?"

"Something classical. Brahms and Mahler, I think."

"Oh. Who was it who said that Wagner's music isn't really as bad as it sounds?"

"Not sure. Oscar Wilde?"

"Could be. I thought it was Shaw."

"I'd go with either."

"Yes, it's—" The phone on Massey's desk interrupted. He touched a key to accept. To his surprise, the screen activated for a video call; most lines were being restricted to voice in order to conserve bandwidth. It showed a man's face Massey didn't recognize.

"Hello. Massey here," he acknowledged.

"Gerold Massey, the research psychologist?"

"Yes."

"NASO headquarters, Washington. I have a message for you that's come in via the ground station net from Genoa Base, Titan. Can you take it now?"

"Oh . . . yes, of course." Massey's eyebrows rose in surprise. Probably it was something from Zambendorf again; Massey hadn't heard from him since the follow-up messages confirming the success of the ruse they had staged from the Orion. Massey still wasn't sure how he had ended up as an accomplice to a rogue like Zambendorf, whom he had originally set out with the aim of exposing. But the truth of it was that he had enjoyed himself. Psychologist or not, he still wasn't completely sure why.

"Okay to receive," he said, tapping in a code.

"Sending it through."

The caller was not Zambendorf. The face of the NASO operator was replaced by a peculiar, cartoonlike sketch of a cube with legs and a face. A curiously singsong voice that Massey didn't recognize said, "Hello, Gerold Massey, master of the ancient occult lores of Earth, adept of the higher powers that transcend space and time."

Massey blinked and turned in his chair to face the screen fully. At the other desk Vernon sat back, staring in astonishment. Massey shrugged and sent him a frowning glance. The message continued:

"My name is GENIUS. I am an artificial machine-resident intelligence located in one of the Titan processing complexes. I am originally from a planet that the humans call Asteria, which was the world of the Asterians. Asterians built the machines that came to Titan."

"It's some gag of Karl's," Vernon muttered.

Massey waved a hand. "Shh."

"I have spoken with the master Zambendorf of ancient Terran arts but ask proof. Zambendorf says that you are able to read numbers by mind instantly in time. This I wish to test. Send a reply that you agree. If agreed, Zambendorf will send numbers at four o'clock P.M. precisely, your time. You are to return your received values via the NASO link. I will compare them."

"What in hell is he up to out there now?" Massey mused, shaking his head.

GENIUS went on. "With your reply, send surrounding views outside the window. Also a filter shot of the sun's disk with a foreground object for reference. Thank you very much. Over and out." The cube vanished.

For several seconds Massey and Vernon stared at each other, speechless. "This isn't real . . . Not even with Karl," Massey said finally, still in a daze.

Vernon shook his head. "Is it genuine?"

"How would I know?"

"It's a repeat of the stunt that we did from the Orion."

"I do know that much, thank you, Vernon."

They stared at each other for a while longer, baffled.

At last Vernon spoke. "It has to be some crazy stunt of Karl's. If it's really an alien AI, wouldn't Karl have sent something through ahead to at least warn us? But instead it happens like this. The answer's gotta be that it's something cryptic, and we're supposed to read something into it." Massey contemplated the far wall of the room and didn't reply. Vernon waited, shifted restlessly in his seat, then threw out a hand. "Why the shots out the window? And what's all this business about the sun?"

"If it is really an AI, it could be monitoring the communications," Massey said at last. "So Karl let it make its own introductions and tell us the arrangement itself. He didn't want to be seen communicating with us himself in any way."

Vernon downshifted a gear, seeing the point. "So no one could say he'd prearranged anything through a code."

"Exactly."

"Um . . . So what in hell's going on, Gerry?"

Massey shrugged. "Karl obviously wants to repeat his Orion act. Presumably it's for the benefit of this . . . GENIUS. And for some reason it's crucial that it be accepted as genuine."

Vernon rubbed his brow. It added up, but it didn't make any sense. "Do alien AIs care about things like that?" he said.

"I don't know. I've never asked one."

There was another long silence.

"This stuff with the window and the sun could be to prove that we're sending from Earth," Vernon said. "The subtended angle would give our distance from it."

Massey thought about that, then nodded. It made good sense. He put his hands on his desk and stood up. "Well, we have to assume that it is genuine," he said briskly. "The reasons why will doubtless make themselves clearer in due course. But in the meantime, let's get started. We've got work to do."

 

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