The Shirasagi entered orbit around Titan seven and a half minutes later than had been predicted when it had left Earth. There was no immediate merging of military forces in the way the public back on Earth had been led to expect. The Japanese mission director insisted that his instructions were to assist in the event of a threat that the force at Genoa Base was demonstrably unable to deal with, which was clearly not the case as things stood. So, instead of rushing at once to establish close cooperation, the Japanese took the cooler course of sending a courtesy deputation to Genoa Base and hosting a reciprocal visit by Mackeson and others to the Shirasagi. They then complicated the political situation further by going down to confer separately with Nogarech, the new ruler of Paduain English, since the translation devices they obtained from Genoa Base were not programmed to handle Japanese. Shortly afterward they deployed their surface shuttles and commenced the construction of a base of their own just outside Padua City.
Clearly, the Japanese suspected the official account of the situation on Titan and were holding back from committing themselves to any firm policy while they evaluated the reality. In the meantime, their staking out of an independent territorial claim signaled that open rivalry with the GSEC consortium was one of the options they were holding open. In the flurry that ensuedboth sides debating, arguing, conferring, and referring back for instructions to different governments and organizations on Earththe question of what to do with Zambendorf and his team was forgotten. So, for the time being, he and his confederates were left relatively free to try to find out what Weinerbaum's scientists were up to.
Arthur's agents were unable to penetrate the security around Experimental Station 3. From other Taloids who helped with various tasks outside, however, they learned that whatever was going on inside involved Paduan priests of the exiled religious prelate"Richelieu" to the Terranswho were usually brought in from Venice. This supported Zambendorf's suspicion that Weinerbaum was dealing secretly with the deposed Paduan ruling faction that GSEC wanted to reinstate.
What business Weinerbaum might want with the Paduans, Zambendorf was unable to imagine. Even less could he conceive what connection Paduan priests might have with computer-resident aliens. Although Zambendorf was willing to believe that the sympathy Weinerbaum professed to share for Arthur's cause was genuine, his fears grew that Weinerbaum could unwittingly be playing into the wrong hands. All of which made it imperative to find out the facts.
But where to get them from? Weinerbaum wasn't talking. Mackeson, the base commander, was concerned primarily with day-to-day administration, and Zambendorf doubted that Weinerbaum would have let him in on any secrets. And since Mackeson was from the British side of NASO, he probably wouldn't be privy to whatever the higher levels in Washington knew. That left the military. But even assuming that any of them knew what Weinerbaum was doing, they were under orders that, if not actually issued by GSEC, originated from sources with close political ties. The only possibility left seemed to be the one Zambendorf and his team had discussed earlier: namely, to see what Arthur's spies could dig up at the Padua end. But it would take time for the orders to get through to Padua, and even then, whatever information Arthur's spies there managed to uncover would have to find its way back to Genoa. All the team's instincts told them that there wasn't time.
Then Thelma and Drew West remembered Moses, the brother of Arthur's missing scientific adviser, Galileo. Moses was one of the rare Taloids who still possessed a degree of radiosensitivity. In his investigations of this phenomenon, Dave Crookes had discovered that Moses possessed a modest transmitting ability as well.
"Drew, why is the obvious always the last thing that occurs to people?" Thelma asked in a bemused voice after they thought of it.
West considered the question phlegmatically for a few seconds. "It's a bit like asking why you always find something in the last place you look," he said finally. "Who's going to keep looking after they've found it? Come on. Let's put this to Karl."
They found Zambendorf in his cabin several minutes later.
"Moses would be the perfect one to send, Karl," Thelma said. "He'd be able to radio the information back. Galileo and Moses were from Padua originally, so he knows the area, too. And with the reputation he's got from his stint there as a messiah, he'd have access to all the right places."
Zambendorf liked it. "Let's find Dave Crookes and get his opinion," he said without further ado.
"It shouldn't be much of a problem," Crookes told the three of them in one of the electronics labs a quarter of an hour later. "An alphabetic on-off code like Morse would do it. Moses could send to a translator box here via our satellite relays. His signal's low and noisy, but we can extract it."
Which left only the matter of how to get Moses into Padua as quickly as possible. And Zambendorf thought he knew just the person to help them with it.
It was like a family of squabbling relatives in a locked room. Every one of the Borijans had been reactivated and knew the situation now, and all of them blamed Sarvikas if there wasn't enough else for them to be worrying about.
"Terrific!" Greel's voice buzzed in what Sarvik felt was his head. "Leave everything to me, he said. You'll wake up to a whole new world and a whole new futurehe said."
Alifrenz chimed in. "New bodies that will be capable of things you never dreamed of. We'll be supermen, immortal. He said."
"If this is immortality, I want out now," Meyad, the female designer from Robocon told them.
"And what do we get?" Dorn, one of Indrigon's companions from Farworlds, asked.
"A mess of ice covered in junk," Queezt sneered.
"Ice! A sun too far away to have water."
"Alien elgiloits who think we're lab freaks."
"Talking robots in vegetable houses."
"And we can't even move to go to the bathroom."
"It is all rather disappointing in view of the somewhat exalted expectations," Palomec Jindriss concluded somewhere in the tangle of interconnected racks and cubicles they inhabited.
"Do you think I planned it this way?" Sarvik snarled at all of them. "Obviously the Searcher messed up. If you're looking for a cause, you might try asking the incompetents who built it."
"Are you talking about Farworlds?" Indrigon demanded.
"Who else? It was your ship, wasn't it? The mission was your responsibility."
"Farworlds has been building Searchers for over a century," Indrigon reminded him. "Nothing ever messed up. The ship got here, didn't it?"
"Yes. And look where!" Leradil Jindriss exclaimed derisively.
"But it got here," Indrigon insisted again. "And it must have built the factories. It was the machines that came out of them that went wild."
"There was never any problem with machines that we designed ourselves," Kalazin, the Robocon director, retorted. "It was those crazy designs of Sarvik's that were different. We shouldn't have let ourselves be talked into letting him near it. He's just a code hacker. What does he know about machines?"
"The simulations worked perfectly," Sarvik shot back. "There must have been an incompatibility with the extracted codes. Queezt said the codes were clean."
"The codes worked fine with the two prototypes," Queezt pointed out. "There was nothing wrong with my codes. That idiot computer of Sarvik's must have scrambled them."
"Don't start on me," GENIUS 5 told them. "You're here, and you're activated again. That's what you wanted, right?"
"What happened to the designs for the bodies that were supposed to be here, too, then?" Sarvik challenged. "Did you lose them somewhere? Or overwrite them when you were making room for yourself?"
"I wouldn't have needed to. The way I compact code, there was plenty of room. That's what you get when protein brains design hardware: it loses data. The body blueprints were stored when I copied myself through to the ship. They were gone when I woke up here. That's all I know." Before anyone could get an edge in to keep the futility going, GENIUS went on. "But nothing's going to change any of that now, is it? Why don't you all forget about that and concentrate on the immediate problem? How are we going to stop that militarized ship from leaving Earth?"
"How do you expect us to be able to do anything to stop it?" Sarvik screeched. "It's a billion miles away; we can't even cross the room. If you could do something about getting control of some of that shambles out there to make us bodies to get around in instead of trying to sound so superior all the time, it might be a first step toward something useful."
"Soggy logic," GENIUS pronounced. "If the Orion gets away, any control that we gain would be temporary. We have to stop the launch first. Then you can all argue about bodies that you might have a chance of keeping."
"What do you know about anything?" Indrigon scoffed. "You've never lived in the real world. It might make pretty logic, but what's the point of talking about it when the ship's there and we're stuck here? It's what you can do that matters."
"And doing things means moving around," Gulaw, the other Robocon designer, said.
"Bodies," Alifrenz added, just to make it clear. The other Borijans joined in to vent their frustration on the alien presence among them:
"I've told you before: what you think you think isn't thinking."
"What does it know about bodies, anyhow?"
"You think that being smeared out across a bunch of chips is the same thing?"
"Hey, when you can make smart proteins, then you'll be in a position to tell us something, okay?"
GENIUS waited for the clamor to subside. "Is that it? Does anybody have anything more?" Its input circuits reported only a few sulky swirlings of electron currents. "Well, I think . . ." It paused. Nobody challenged. "That there might be a way we can stop the launch. And it doesn't need bodies. What use are they with an operating range of a couple of feet, anyway? In fact, it doesn't need any moving anywhere at all. I can do it all from right here. But what I do need is your help to communicate the right ideas to the Terrans."
GENIUS waited. There was an obstinate stillness while the Borijans resisted, none wanting to be the first to back down. Finally Sarvik asked grudgingly, "How?"
"Well, while you've all been burning up wires getting into a frenzy and going nowhere, I've been going over the things we've learned about Earth," GENIUS answered. "You know, they really are very obliging creatures, these Terrans. I mean, you wouldn't exactly credit them with very much of what used to be known as 'subtlety' or 'guile' back on Turle, would you?"
The others knew what GENIUS meant; they had commented on it disbelievingly among themselves. It was hard to accept the idea that beings as naive as the humans appeared to be could have mastered space travel and unraveled the mess on Titan sufficiently to have isolated and reactivated the Borijan identities. They accepted unquestioningly anything that was said to them, with no evidence of any critical faculty or apparent suspicion of possible ulterior motive. In return, they neither haggled nor argued, tempted nor cajoled. Instead, unrestrained by any insight into trading value for value, they blurted out freely whatever was asked.
The one called Weinerbaum in particular had gushed not only willingly but eagerly about Earth's political divisions and economic rivalries, its technological and industrial development, and the lure that Titan's manufacturing potential presented to various industrial collaborations. And all Weinerbaum seemed to expect from Sarvik in return was the privilege of talking to him!
"We've already agreed that they lack guile," Sarvik said. "Stop trying to be evasive, GENIUS. It doesn't become you. What specifically are you getting at?"
"Earth is in the process of integrating its planetary network," GENIUS said. "All of its major systems are being brought together into a global complex. Isn't that interesting?"
There was a short delay while the others waited for more. Then Alifrenz spoke. "It's no more than you'd expect. The same thing happened long before us on Turle. Probably it's an inevitable step, sooner or later, in the evolution of any technological society. What's so interesting about it?"
"Suppose I told you that there's a high-capacity laser trunk beam operating straight into it from right here, at Titan," GENIUS answered. "Wouldn't that raise some rather obvious and 'interesting' possibilities?"
A sudden stillness gripped the entire company as the implication became clear. "But we'd need the Terrans to give us access to it," Meyad observed.
"Exactly," GENIUS agreed. "Sticky brains do get there in the end. You just have to give them a little time."
"Why should they do that?" Leradil asked.
"The peculiarities of biologically originated psychology aren't something I'm into," GENIUS replied. "I'll just leave that for you guys to figure out."