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43

Gloom settled over the entire Terran presence on Titan. After a conference with the senior NASO and military officers up in the Shirasagi, Yakumo set in motion the full-scale evacuation that his staff had been planning as a fallback measure. Work on the new Japanese base at Padua City had already been halted pending the outcome of the situation with the Asterians. Mackeson was given five days to close down the experimental stations and other remote sites and move their personnel back to Genoa Base. His staff began working out a schedule for lifting all personnel and materiel listed as not to be abandoned up to the Japanese ship. Meanwhile, the Shirasagi was put on an accelerated overhaul and systems checkout prior to being brought up to flight readiness.

The conference had involved command decisions on the future of both missions, and Zambendorf had not attended. However, after he learned the outcome—which had come as no surprise—he placed a call from Genoa Base to the Shirasagi and requested to be put through to Yakumo. Yakumo spoke to him from a screen in the side office off the communications room in which Zambendorf had taken the first call from GENIUS.

"Yes, Herr Zambendorf, I was expecting you to call. I know it means abandoning the Taloids. It was not something that we agreed to lightly. My responsibility is to the humans out here—everyone from the Orion and those of our own mission. It isn't to the Taloids, much as I sympathize with their predicament."

"But they've trusted us," Zambendorf said. "They still do. They evolved here viably for a million years until we came and reactivated the Asterians. How can we just walk out on them now?"

Yakumo made a gesture of helplessness. "What would you have me do? I can hardly bring thousands of Taloids back to Earth. We're jettisoning hundreds of tons of valuable equipment to accommodate everyone from Genoa Base as it is. And even if it were possible, Taloids couldn't survive there."

"I know, I know all that." Zambendorf raised a hand and sighed heavily. "It's just . . . look, is it absolutely certain that there is no alternative? Is there no way to stop these Asterians from seeing their plan through? We are here. The authorities on Earth, and whatever powers they possess, are not. If we leave, there will be no one to do whatever could have been done."

"What would you have me do?" Yakumo asked again.

"Even with the limited military capability that you have—Colonel Short's American, British, and French units, plus your own security force—it's not possible to destroy the manufacturing sites the Asterians are preparing?"

Yakumo shook his head. "Believe me, that was the first possibility I raised with the commanders. We examined it exhaustively. But it isn't even possible to find all the sites in that confusion down there. Even if we could, we don't have the firepower to take them out faster than the Asterians could create more—and the potential is virtually limitless. It would be like trying to mow a hundred-acre farm with scissors."

"Suppose we recruited the Taloids to help."

"Help how?" Yakumo asked. "Medieval robots with swords and spears, for the most part still stupefied by their own superstitions? What do you imagine they could do when a sophisticated machine intelligence a century or more ahead of anything we can devise has already failed?"

"Go into their forests. Wreck the processing centers that the Asterians are using," Zambendorf said.

Yakumo's hands waved briefly in the foreground on the screen. "How can they know which centers to go for when it's as much as we can do to identify them with all our equipment? The only thing the Taloids could do is attack everything indiscriminately. But that would destroy the environment that also supports them." Yakumo looked out of the screen, waiting for a few seconds, but there was nothing more Zambendorf could add. Yakumo went on. "Inciting the Taloids into provoking the Asterians to retaliate would probably be the fastest way to make sure that the Taloids do get wiped out. But if we leave, then there's the possibility that they and the Asterians will find their own balance of compromise."

"As master and slave," Zambendorf said. "Exactly what we were trying to save them from."

Yakumo gave a barely perceptible shrug. "Maybe. But better than being exterminated. Slaves may one day be freed. I am sorry, Herr Zambendorf. I understand your sentiments, and I share them. But my duty is clear. The order stands. Evacuation of the surface must be completed in five days."

Zambendorf stared down at his hands, hesitating for a moment, then looked back up at the screen. "Just one more thing. I talked about this with my team, and we came to the conclusion that the governments on Earth would see one last option. Forget all the sophisticated computers and mission scheduling: stage a last-fling, seat-of-the-pants bid using the Orion. Load it up with all the nuclear weapons it can carry, send it back to take out everything on Titan, and just hope that the Asterians don't come after us before it gets here. Is that what this evacuation is really all about? Is it what they've decided?"

Yakumo remained expressionless. "I only know my orders, Herr Zambendorf," he replied. "Of course, I must agree that the authorities are unlikely not to have considered such an option."

Zambendorf left the communications section and made his way leadenly back to the mess area, where the rest of the team was gathered. His expression left no need for anyone to ask the outcome. But they had all expected as much.

"They're going to do it if they can," Zambendorf said, sinking down onto one of the benches. "An all-out strike from the Orion. Total obliteration of everything on the surface."

"Everything?" Abaquaan repeated. "You mean the Taloids as well? Genoa, Arthur and his guys, all of them?"

"Where else are they gonna be?" Clarissa said laconically.

Thelma shook her head in a way that said it was too much to accept. "How can they?" she whispered. "This whole thing here that's been evolving for a million years . . . an entire machine biosphere that has culminated in intelligent life."

"Not just intelligent life. Friends," Abaquaan put in.

Thelma nodded. "And it's unique. Nothing like it will ever happen again. How can we just . . . blow it out of existence?"

"Go and say it to Yakumo," Zambendorf replied. "I just tried. He already knows all that. It doesn't make any difference."

"It's the way they have to think," Joe Fellburg said. "It's survival. If the Asterians get out, it could all happen the other way around."

Drew West pinched his lips dubiously. "Couldn't they give some kind of ultimatum first—if the Orion did manage to get here before the Asterians had built any ships? Couldn't they tune into the system again and say something like, 'Look, we're up here with all these bombs, and we can take you out. So let's talk and figure out some way of making this work for all of us'?" He looked around the group and gestured appealingly. "Hell, we're talking about the whole solar system, guys. It's not as if we're short on room."

"Our people wouldn't buy it," Fellburg said. "You've seen the Asterians' ideas of a deal. Nobody's gonna trust 'em now."

"Just flatten the whole works and be safe," Thelma concluded cynically.

Clarissa raised her eyebrows resignedly behind her butterfly spectacles. "That's how they're gonna see it."

"That's the business they're in," Fellburg said.

A long silence dragged while they all pondered how to raise the one obvious thing remaining that was weighing on all their minds. Finally Drew West voiced it. "We can't just go," he said, looking around. "Somehow we have to break it to Arthur." Everyone looked at everyone else searchingly. Nobody immediately volunteered, but neither did anyone attempt any reason for dropping out.

"Hell, we'll all go," Zambendorf said. Which decided the issue.

He called O'Flynn in vehicles maintenance. "Mike, it's Karl here. Six of us want to go over to Arthur's. How are you fixed?"

"Ah, not too bad," the Irish voice replied. "It'll be murder tomorrow, when they start shipping everything and its brother from the remote sites, but we're all right for now. I can give you a small personnel transporter. Crew might be more of a problem, though, since Harold's got everyone on chores around the base. Could you drive it yourselves this time?"

Zambendorf looked inquiringly at Clarissa, the jet pilot. She returned a nod. "No problem, Mike," Zambendorf reported.

"Okay, I'll have one ready for you in an hour, say. And six suits."

"That would be fine," Zambendorf said.

* * *

They met Arthur with the two Taloid brothers, Galileo and Moses, in the same ice chamber, with its odd pseudovegetable shapes and plastic and metal wall designs, that Zambendorf had come to with his previous message of reassurance. The difference was that this time he had nothing reassuring to say. He explained—as best he could in view of the translation difficulties and the Taloids' lack of any concept of what went on inside their own heads or any other kind of computer—that "spirit beings" from afar had invaded Titan's forests and were taking over the reproductive machinery to create bodies in which they intended to assume a physical form.

The humans were using one of Weinerbaum's new, improved translator boxes that produced output in the form of transmissions to their suit radios. A visual indicator on the box showed that Moses was speaking. "Explains death-quiet that has come. Spirits rule forests. I no longer hear forests' songs."

Zambendorf frowned questioningly behind his faceplate, looking like a ghostly apparition in the light from a flashlamp on minimum beam, which to the Taloids was still like a floodlight.

"The radio sources," Thelma reminded him over the local intercom frequency. "The Asterians blocked them after they got rid of GENIUS."

"Oh, of course." Zambendorf nodded and continued what he had been saying. The ship from Earth with its military expedition would not be coming, he said. A conflict over Titan's resources would not be to the Taloids' benefit. So the Terrans were returning to Earth. The spirits were the true creators of the life that inhabited Titan. They and the Taloids belonged there naturally and would learn to live together. The Terrans did not. It was an essentially true account, even if sweetened a little to be palatable. There was a long pause before Arthur's response came through.

"All Terrans will leave Titan?"

Zambendorf swallowed and nodded his head. "Yes."

"And not return. Other ship will not come back, not even without soldiers?"

Zambendorf didn't even want to think about that. "Maybe in the future," he whispered hoarsely. "There is much uncertainty." Several of the Terran figures shifted uncomfortably.

"Will we meet Zambendorf and his friends again?" Arthur asked.

"It is very unlikely."

The translator showed a different symbol to indicate that Galileo was speaking. "What of learning and the sciences? We had just begun."

"You will continue to learn," Zambendorf said. He couldn't bring himself to tell them any more. After all, there was a chance that things would work out as he was saying. The Asterians and the Taloids might manage to get along tolerably. So might Terrans and Asterians, for that matter. It wasn't untrue to say that ships from Earth could return some day. Yakumo hadn't actually said that an all-out nuclear strike was being planned. It was pure conjecture on Zambendorf and the team's part. Although the number of times he was right in divining the intentions of others—especially when it came to logical, predictable minds like those of scientists, the military, and officialdom—was something that he didn't want to think about. And even if it was planned, that didn't mean that it would succeed or that there would still be any point to it three months from now, which was the time the Orion would need to make Titan even if it departed immediately.

"That's all it needs, Karl." West's voice said on a local channel. "You don't have to spell out any more."

"Yeah, what's the point?" Fellburg asked.

"It's not your decision, Karl," Clarissa came in. "We've paid our respects, which was what we came for. There's nothing more we can do."

Kleippur had tried to follow the Wearer's explanation, but he was at a loss to understand why the Lumians seemed unable to combat these "spirits." It seemed all the more strange now that the Lumians who had wanted to reinstate Eskenderom had been thwarted once more, Kroaxia was solidly for Nogarech again, and all the nations of Robia were set to follow.

"What manner of spirits are these that the Lumians who fly from other worlds should flee without contest and abandon everything they have striven for?" he asked his companions in a worried voice. "They appear in the forests yet are immaterial? I have never before heard Lumian language the likes of this."

"Nor I," Thirg replied. "Methinks we are due soon to find out." It had troubled him, too. This latest Lumian talk sounded more like the Lifemaker creed of old than the sciences of reasoned knowledge they had always advocated. Yet the friends he had believed and relied on now seemed powerless to oppose this new force and were leaving. The future seemed suddenly very bleak.

Groork could only look forward in dread to the prospect of a future without the Lumians. Twice now he had been saved from what had seemed an inescapable end, first by the Lumians and then by the "voice" that had called itself GENIUS. On both occasions he had been a witness to power that was effortlessly able to confound all that had once terrified him, and he had felt secure. But now GENIUS and the other voices had been silenced, and the Lumians were leaving—it seemed—in ignominy. What form of unknown, hostile new power, then, was this, able to vanquish both, that the robeings were being left to face alone?

Kleippur maintained his usual calm resolve. "We faced adversity alone before the Lumians came," he declared. "And if it is necessary, we shall do so again."

"Perhaps this new adversity shall prove the force needed to unite all of Robia," Thirg said, looking for a hopeful note. He turned to the Lumian translating plant. "One day maybe Robian ships will come to Lumia. If we are not destined to meet again, perhaps our descendants shall."

In response to this, the Lumians were strangely reticent.

They all bade their farewells individually. Then the three Taloids escorted the visitors to a larger vault outside, where other Taloids were gathered whom the Terrans had gotten to know or had dealt with in one way or another. Arthur's advisers and scientists were there, including Em from military intelligence; Lancelot and his knights, who had brought Galileo out of Padua at the time of the Orion's arrival; Galileo's naturalist friend, Linnaeus, who had returned with him; and Leonardo, another of Galileo's fellow scientists from Padua. The Terrans exchanged farewells once again. Arthur made a speech that the translator delivered haltingly, and Zambendorf mustered a choking response, as short as he dared make it without the risk of sounding terse, which probably translated semicomprehensibly. Then it was time to go.

Preceded by Fellburg lighting the way with the flash-lamp, the somber procession of six figures in their bulky, dome-headed suits, their escorts looking like huge upright insects in the shadows, wound its way through gloomy caverns and canyonlike passageways to emerge finally in the forecourt where Clarissa had parked the transporter. The Terrans grouped by the door, and the Taloids closed around with final waved salutes and clumsy hand shakings between geniculated steel fingers and gauntleted hands.

And then an extraordinary thing happened. In the middle of the group of Taloids, Moses went suddenly rigid. He threw his head back and extended both arms upward to the heavens. The other Taloids moved back in alarm.

"Groork, what is it?" Arthur called across to him worriedly. "What ails thee thus?" But Groork made no response.

"Brother, what is it that you hear?" Thirg asked, recognizing the signs.

"The voices!" Groork exclaimed rapturously. "I hear the songs! The forests are singing again!"

From the translator box his announcement came through as "Machine surface song back." But it was enough. The Terrans looked at each other, startled.

"Tell me this can't mean what I think it means," Thelma whispered.

Abaquaan's mustache was quivering inside his helmet. "It's gone?" he said. "Whatever was blocking the radio sources has gone?"

"Gone?" Drew West repeated.

And then another voice came through to all of them on their assigned emergency frequency from Genoa Base. "Hello, base calling Zambendorf. Anybody there? Do you read?"

"Zambendorf here. I read," he answered.

"Got a call coming in for you, priority, from Weinerbaum at ES3. Relaying it through."

Weinerbaum's voice switched in straightaway. "Karl?"

"Yes?"

"The most amazing thing has just happened!" Weinerbaum's voice was excited, exuberant. It could mean only one thing.

Zambendorf's face creased into a smile behind his faceplate. "I know, Werner. Things are returning to normal, right? The Asterians are losing their hold."

"What?" Weinerbaum sounded mystified. "How could you possibly know that? We've only just worked it out here ourselves, with all the equipment at the monitoring center. How—"

"Oh, Werner, don't you understand yet?" Zambendorf scoffed, forcing a despairing tone. "I have no need of such crude methods."

Weinerbaum's sigh came over the connection audibly. "Karl, for once cut out that clowning. Get yourself out here as quickly as you can. I've asked base for a flyer. Mick's getting one readied for you right now."

 

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