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28

As far as the linguists could make out, the Taloids referred to it as a kind of dignitaries' carriage. It walked on legs that were not really alive but grew from a contractile material that Taloid craftsmen had been learning to cultivate for generations, and it had two full-width seats facing each other beneath a canopy. There was also a raised seat outside, from which a pair of Taloid coachmen controlled the wheeled tractor animal that pulled it.

The coach drew up behind an open "wagon" in a clearing amid overhead gantries and clunking freight-handling stations, alongside one of the broad conveyor lines the Taloids regarded as rivers. Zambendorf climbed out, moving ponderously in the NASO-issue suit, followed by Abaquaan, Thelma, Dave Crookes, and one of Crookes's technicians carrying a translator box and radio gear. Another vehicle stopped behind, from which Moses came forward to join them, accompanied by "Em," one of the officers who ran Arthur's intelligence operation—so dubbed by the Terrans after the M of James Bond fame—and one of Em's aides. An escort of Taloid guards, also from the third vehicle, moved out to secure the area, carrying the primitive, newly introduced Genoan firearms, which were powered by reduction-generated incendiary gas. From the wagon that had stopped in front, several more Taloids lifted down a section of metal casing that had once formed part of some piece of defunct machinery out in the wild. It was about eight feet long and roughly the shape of an old-fashioned cast-iron bathtub. Moses looked at it apprehensively.

Zambendorf's eventual brainwave for getting Moses into Padua had elicited mixed feelings among Terrans and Taloids alike. It had come to him while he and Abaquaan had been talking with some of the clerks in the admin offices. One of the walls there carried a large-scale map of Genoa and the surrounding regions, showing the natural geographic features and major conglomerations of machinery as charted from reconnaissance flights and satellite plots. One feature that the map revealed prominently had been the merging pattern of broadening conveyor systems that extended for miles across the landscape: local transfer lines feeding intermediate stages that led to immense delivery conveyors, all converging on the final assembly areas and ending at furnaces where everything not utilized upstream was vaporized for recycling. It became obvious why the Taloids thought of them as rivers. And there, tracing its way clearly across half the map, was a chain of tributaries connecting a "stream" not a few miles from Genoa City to the main artery flowing through Padua City.

"Otto, I've got it!" Zambendorf had exclaimed, and in his excitement had barely managed to prevent himself blabbing it out on the spot. A few minutes later in the corridor, out of earshot of the clerks, he had told the still-startled Abaquaan, "Find something we can use for a boat. That's how we'll do it: We send Moses down the river!"

Arthur had given his blessing reluctantly to what he obviously regarded as a madcap idea, since nobody had come up with anything better. Zambendorf didn't want to invite being overruled by anybody at the base and so had kept his plan a secret and left it to Arthur to organize the details. Explanations could wait till later. One piece of Irish philosophy Zambendorf had picked up from O'Flynn was that contrition was easier than permission.

The Taloid work detail maneuvered the section of casing over some girder work and up to a sloping section of roller conveyor that was bringing lengths of metal molding intermittently from somewhere in the labyrinth. The group of Terrans followed, along with Moses and Em.

"You will be famous forever in Titan's history," Zambendorf proclaimed exuberantly, clapping Moses confidently on the shoulder while the translator turned his words into Taloid ultrasonics. "From ancient times Taloids have always wondered about the maker of their life. We think that other Terrans have found the beings from the stars who started it all. You, Moses, will help us discover the true Lifemakers."

It was all very well for the Wearer to talk that way, Groork, Hearer-of-Voices thought to himself glumly as he watched the preparations going ahead in front of him. The Wearer wasn't about to plunge into a torrent of cataracts and rocks, flotsam and confusion, in a shell of tree bark. There had been adventurous robeings who'd experimented with river travel from time to time, but the idea had never caught on very much, and for good reasons that these Lumians seemed blissfully unaware of. Being snatched by some ferocious animal prowling the banks for tasty pickings wasn't the worst of them. Groork was still mindful of the last stunt the Wearer had talked him into, which had involved jumping out of a Lumian flying dragon to descend as an angel beneath billowing wings attached by lines to a body harness.

"Depart now safe Padua." The translation of Em's parting words came through inside Zambendorf's and the other Terrans' helmets.

"Let's just check the link one last time," Dave Crookes said. The technician with him flipped switches and tapped buttons on the unit he was carrying, then extended a thumb. "Dave to base. Are you reading, Leon?"

"I hear you, Dave," Leon Keyhoe's voice came back from the signals lab in Genoa Base. "How's it going out there?"

"Moses is ready to go now. We're giving the link a final check."

"Roger."

"Send your base-to-Moses call sign, then transmit, 'Test: one, two, three. Raise hand if okay,' " Crookes instructed.

The signal went out from Genoa Base. A few yards from where Crookes was standing, Moses looked up suddenly and went still while he listened to the incoming message. Then he turned toward Crookes and raised an arm.

From Genoa, Keyhoe read out the response from Moses as it was decoded into English from Taloid: "Hearing good. Guess all set."

Then Moses came through on the local frequency via the portable translator. "Ear listens Genoa. Moses go get Padua priests' story. Duty help Terrans. I go."

"Be careful, Moses," Thelma said.

"Our guys'll be listening for you all the way," Crookes promised.

Big deal, Groork thought. So what if the Lumian physicians had restored his internal ear so that he could talk to them in their camp at Menassim from a distance? It wouldn't do him a lot of good, trapped in the clamps of a half-ton casing peeler somewhere in the wilds of outer Kroaxia.

While other Taloids held the tub steady, Moses climbed in and wedged himself with pads of rubber and plastic packing. Em gave a few last words of encouragement, and his assistant passed Moses the staff that they had found in trials to be useful for steering and clearing away obstacles, along with a sword and lance for defense and supplies for the journey. Then, with a shove, the outlandish craft was away, bobbing and picking up speed down the descending roller ramp, then upending to plunge down onto a wider transfer line running below. It disappeared from sight beneath an overhead cable duct with a final turn from the intrepid mariner and a salute with his metal staff.

The others made their way back to their respective vehicles to return to Genoa, their silence betraying a need for reassurance that the risk they were asking Moses to take was justified. As their carriage began moving, Thelma told Zambendorf and Abaquaan again about one of the astronomers she had been talking to, who had mentioned a sudden flurry of interest among Weinerbaum's people in the star patterns that had existed a million years previously. "I mean, it can't be a coincidence, can it?" she asked, looking from one to the other. "We have to be right. Moses isn't doing this for nothing. All it can mean is that Weinerbaum is working with revived aliens."

Now that the immediate task of getting Moses on his way had been accomplished, Zambendorf gave vent to the anger he had been bottling up.

"How is it that at a time like this, with such staggering discoveries taking place right in front of their noses, these so-called intelligent people seem incapable of forgetting their petty jealousies and getting their act together for once?" His beard bristled behind the face piece of his helmet, and he waved his arms as indignantly as it was possible to do in an EV suit. "For all anybody knows, this could represent a threat the like of which has never been encountered before in the entire history of the human race. Heavens . . . we're talking about aliens from another star system! . . . We know absolutely nothing of their background, psychology, disposition, values, ethics, if they have any—or anything about them."

"You think Weinerbaum and his people could be walking into something?" Abaquaan asked. It didn't really need confirming.

"He's deluding himself, I know it—probably with some notion of commonality of intellect rising above origins," Zambendorf said. "Yet he monopolizes the resources while we have to creep about in the dark, launching robots in bathtubs down conveyor lines to try and find out what's going on. Insanity is the only word for it. We could be letting ourselves in for anything out here. Sitting ducks, Otto, and they can't even see it. Sitting ducks."

* * *

Zambendorf's apprehensions turned out to have come not a moment too soon. When they got back to Genoa Base after calling for a NASO bus to pick them up from Camelot, reports were already coming in over the Earthlink of major disruptions suddenly affecting military command and communications networks and NASO's logistics and launch-management systems, in particular the ones handling the Orion turnaround. Some of the harassed project managers were already saying that the ship's liftout date from Earth might have to be put back.

In the communications room Zambendorf groaned as he listened to as much as could be put together of the details. Things like this didn't just "happen." The aliens had somehow already penetrated Earth itself. Then one of the technicians let slip a comment about a direct-access trunk link that had just been run out to Experimental Station 3.

Which was as much as needed to be said about how the aliens had done it.

 

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