The general personnel messroom was the focal point of off-duty life at Genoa Base. It was about forty feet long and half as wide, with ribbed metal walls painted lime green up to chest height and peach above that. A large mural display screen halfway along one sidewall could be driven locally or hooked into the general communications net. An always-open serving counter faced the room from one end, from which one or more white-jacketed NASO chefs dispensed such delicacies as NASO eggs, NASO beans, NASO chicken legs, and dried soups and vegetables reconstituted with recycled NASO water. Three long, scratched plastic-topped tables stretched most of the way to the other end, where there was a smaller counter that served as a bar for twelve hours of every twenty-four. The open area of floor beyond the tables had accommodated performances by the dramatics group and a string quartet as well as providing space for nightly dancing and the Saturday amateur-night cabaret.
Drew West had a clean-cut college look, and he continued keeping his appearance spruce and neat in a relaxed kind of way even after months at Genoa Base, where T-shirts and jeans tended to be the order of the day and even the military had drifted to wearing fatigues most of the time. Today he was in gray slacks and an open-neck white shirt with sleeves turned back to the elbows, sitting at one of the long tables roughly opposite the mural display screen. A mixed gathering of scientists, NASO personnel, and off-duty military types occupied most of the space on the benches around him.
Drew was the team's business manager. He had started out long before as Zambendorf's accountant and then had become his next full-time partner after Abaquaan as each recognized the talent of the other as a solution to a need that life at the time was failing to supply. West's contribution was a genius for causing money to disappear from places of visibility where it was likely to attract unwelcome attention from taxation and other authorities, while at the same time keeping its earning ability intact. Zambendorf, in return, offered a life of variety and excitement beyond the usual accountant's fare, although even West in his wildest imaginings had never guessed that it might one day lead to traveling almost a billion miles from Earth to find living machinery and a race of intelligent robots. Since those early days he had developed the additional skills that came as part of the graduation to full accomplice. For the Zambendorf phenomenon was, if the truth were known, very much a team affair.
"I'm just the business manager," West said, mustering his most practiced expression of innocence and showing his palms to the dark-haired young woman in an olive tank top sitting opposite him. "I don't know how Karl does any of it. If you say he's a fraud, then okay. A lot of other people think so, too. I just worry about arranging appearances and getting paid. It's a job."
Sharon Beatty worked with Dave Crookes and Leon Keyhoe in the electronics section. She had never understood why Zambendorf was there, and it disturbed her that so many seemingly rational people should take his antics seriously. She had wasted too much of her life being sidetracked by zany beliefs while she was a student, and, with the staggering nature of the recent discoveries on Titan, there were better things to occupy her time. It mystified her that everyone else didn't feel the same way.
"Gerry Massey can duplicate anything that Zambendorf has ever done," she said. It was hardly the first time West had heard this. "And Gerry never claimed to be more than a good conjurer." She directed her words not at West particularly but to the company in general.
Malcolm Wade, a Canadian psychologist and also an incurable Zambendorf believer, answered from the next table. "Mimicking an effect by a conjuring trick doesn't prove that it's a conjuring trick every time. Just because you can produce a rabbit from a hat, it doesn't mean that all rabbits come from hats, does it?"
"If a simple explanation will suffice, there's no justification for invoking a more complex one," Sharon replied tiredly. She didn't know how many times they had been through this. Conversation became repetitive when people were shut up in a place like this—especially with someone like Wade, who continued asking the same questions no matter how often he was given the same answers.
Behind them, Andy Schwartz, captain of one of the Orion's surface landers that had been left as part of the transportation pool, was lounging with his back to the wall, flanked by a couple of his flight crew. If Zambendorf really could receive information faster than light, why, he wondered, had nobody ever suggested checking him against long-range radar probing of a selected region of the Asteroid Belt? But he kept the thought to himself. Watching the experts at odds with each other relieved the off-duty boredom, and he figured that Zambendorf was encouraging the spectacle in order to entertain. Letting it all get too serious would have spoiled things.
At the table in front of them a beefy, straw-haired, pink-complexioned NASO sergeant called O'Flynn was talking to Graham Spearman, one of the biologists, over a plate of sausage and fries. "Ye'd think, now, that one way of testin' an ability like that would be by callin' a horse race or one o' the big matches before the results come in on the laser link. And there'd be money to be made from it, too."
"Hmm. And without needing to set up this Massey business at all," Spearman agreed. He was in his late thirties, with thick-rimmed spectacles and a droopy mustache, and he wore a tartan shirt with jeans. Spearman was generally known as amiable and totally apolitical, which meant that practically everyone was able to get along with him.
O'Flynn quaffed from a pint mug of hot, sweet tea and nodded. "Me point, exactly."
"It needs a tuned mind at the other end," Wade chimed in, turning and gesturing with the stem of his pipe. "Massey has the beginnings of real ability, too, you know. He just doesn't realize it himself yet."
"Is this a fact, now?" O'Flynn said.
Harold Mackeson, NASO's British commander of Genoa Base, was present with an aide. A portable communications pad lay on the table in front of them. Mackeson regarded the whole thing as part of the diversions it was his job to promote for the good of morale, and he had agreed good-naturedly to oversee the proceedings. Farther along, past the mural screen, Werner Weinerbaum, the mission's chief scientist, sat with a group of his senior specialists, talking loftily about the latest analyses of alien software from what appeared to be one of the control nodes out on Titan's surface. Their manner showed that they were above even acknowledging the existence of this Zambendorf nonsense, let alone having any time to involve themselves in it. For anyone who might be wondering, they just happened to be in the messroom purely coincidentally.
Gerold Massey was a professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Maryland, as well as being an accomplished stage magician. One of his special interests had long been the exposing of fraudulent claims to paranormal powers. Massey was also a personal friend of one of the NASO directors involved in organizing the mission and had been sent with the Orion ostensibly as an official psychologist. In reality, he had been there to act as an on-hand observer of what Zambendorf was up to and if necessary to provide a counterforce if whatever stunts GSEC involved him in started going too far.
The impossible had happened, however, when they had become allies in the common cause of preventing the Taloids from being exploited. Called by commitments back home, Massey had left with the Orion. But his improbable compromise with Zambendorf had not only endured, but reached the point where Massey was now cooperating in one of Zambendorf's demonstrations. Even Drew West, who was used to the spell that all who came within Zambendorf's range seemed to fall under, felt that Zambendorf had outdone himself this time. Those like Malcolm Wade, of course, took it as evidence of Massey's conversion. In fact, Zambendorf was as good a psychologist as Massey was an illusionist. He had known that any stage magician would have found the prospect of a ruse involving separation over interplanetary distance—unlike anything that had been tried before—irresistible.
"Here he is now," O'Flynn said, looking up as Zambendorf came in through the door midway between the screen and the serving-counter end of the room.
"Ah, right on time," Mackeson said. He surveyed the display on his panel. "We're hooked into the beam from the Orion. If Massey was able to respond immediately, his transmission should be coming in any time now." He keyed in some command characters. The large screen on the wall flickered into life with a caption giving the current date and time in the Orion's local units, along with a message that read: channel primed and holding.
"If Karl pulls this one off, the drinks are on me tonight," a voice somewhere murmured.
"Wait and see," Malcolm Wade prophesied confidently.
Zambendorf let his gaze drift casually around the room. In the split second while it passed over Drew West, West signaled with the scratching of an eyebrow that nothing untoward or unexpected had occurred while Zambendorf had been away. Zambendorf ambled across to look over Mackeson's shoulder. The screen on the portable panel in front of Mackeson showed the numbers 53, 17, 7, 68, and 90 in a line across the top. The same numbers had been written in large numerals on a strip of paper fastened to the wall below the room's large mural screen.
The distance to the Orion was by now such that the propagation delay for electromagnetic signals was fifty-two minutes. Almost that amount of time ago, Zambendorf had been there in the messroom to try something that one of the communications engineers had dreamed up—or thought he had; Otto Abaquaan was very good at suggestion. In a series of messages exchanged between Titan and the Orion the previous day, Massey had agreed to participate.
Less than an hour earlier, five members of the company, chosen by lot, had drawn the numbers randomly from a set of bingo disks shaken in a box. Then Zambendorf, presuming that Massey had prepared himself, had endeavored to transmit the selection to him telepathically. The arrangement agreed on the previous day was that as soon as Massey received the numbers, he would send them back over the communications beam linking to the Orion via relay satellites that had been left orbiting Titan. That response would, of course, take fifty-two minutes to reach Titan, even with the instantaneous outward transmission Zambendorf had claimed. Or, to put it another way, if Massey was able to return the numbers after fifty-two minutes or thereabouts, then he must have been aware of them virtually as soon as they were chosen. To kill time while they were waiting, Zambendorf had then announced that he was going back to his quarters to take a shower.
The legend on the large screen changed to connecting, which meant that the message processors at Genoa Base had picked out an incoming packet with the identifier Mackeson had instructed them to watch for. A moment later Massey appeared: fiftyish, his forehead accentuated by a receding hairline, with rugged features setting off a full beard starting to show gray streaks. He was wearing a short-sleeved navy shirt and sitting sideways to the camera at a desk console in what looked like one of the Orion's cabins. As if cued, he swiveled his seat to face the screen more directly and began speaking.
"Well, hello, all you people back there. We're getting close to Earth now, although to look outside, there isn't much difference to be seen—the sun's bigger, and that's about all. I must say, this old tub that you perhaps remember fondly is bearing up remarkably well . . ." He looked away for a moment. "I see we're slightly early here. Vernon, why don't you put that thing down for a moment and come around and say hi to our friends?"
The view on the screen tilted and slid sideways, then came to rest with the view captured from a different angle as whoever had been operating the camera set it down. Seconds later a younger man in his twenties, lithely built and with wavy brown hair, moved into the viewing angle. Everyone in the messroom recognized Vernon Price, Massey's assistant who had accompanied him to Titan. Price grinned and raised a hand.
"Hi, guys. Well, I plan to be splashing around on a Florida beach just a couple of weeks from now. It just tears me up to think of all that science you're doing back there that I'll be missing." Ribald mutterings ran around the company watching on Titan. "Seriously, though, I'll be interested to see how this thing of Gerry and Karl's works out. By the time you see this, everything will be over where we are. So nothing can change whatever has happened."
"We're almost due now, Vernon," Massey interrupted beside him.
Price glanced offscreen, presumably at a clock somewhere. "Oh, right . . . So, I guess, just sit back and enjoy the show, eh?" He disappeared from view. The image on the screen gyrated again, then stabilized to center Massey in the frame. Massey settled himself down in his chair, head against the back and arms draped loosely along the rests.
"Well, if you're on the schedule that we fixed yesterday, something should be due just about now." Massey closed his eyes and exhaled long and audibly. "I'm ready here, making myself relaxed and trying to be as receptive as possible. If nothing strange happens to prevent me, I'll try and give you a commentary of my impressions. Right now there isn't very much to comment on, though. I do feel unusually aware of the depths of space extending away in every direction outside this ship, but that could be purely subjective, of course—" Massey had seemed to be about to say something more, but his brow creased suddenly, apparently in surprise and not a little puzzlement. The atmosphere in the messroom tensed expectantly as everyone watched what had taken place hundreds of millions of miles away almost an hour before.
"What is it, Gerry?" Vernon Price's voice asked from off camera.
"I'm not sure. I feel more than just aware of the space outside. It's as if part of my mind is reaching out into it . . . being touched by something. My God, I'm getting something! Suddenly I'm flooded with an image of Karl, and yes, the feeling of a number. It's . . . let me see . . ." Massey brought up a hand, touching his fingertips to his brow. "Fifty . . . fifty-three. Is that it?"
Astonished gasps went up among the company gathered in the messroom. Mackeson tapped at the keys on his pad, and a 53 appeared superimposed in red on the image, high and to the left. Zambendorf watched impassively from behind, while to the side Malcolm Wade emitted satisfied puffs from his pipe. Weinerbaum looked on from the center of his group, disdainful but now silent.
"Yes, and I think I'm getting the next." On the screen, Massey was sitting forward in his chair, his hand gripping the armrests with the apparent effort of concentrating. He leaned back to stare up at the ceiling and announced, "Seventeen."
Smiling, Mackeson shook his head in a way that said he couldn't buy this even if he was unable to explain it. He added 17 to the top of the screen. Sharon Beatty was looking tight-faced. "I guess it's beers on me," the voice that had spoken earlier concluded glumly.
Now the screen was showing Massey in close-up. He was frowning and biting his lip and seemed to be having difficulty. "This one's not coming through very clearly at all . . . No, just a blur, I'm afraid. It has a feel of 'threeness' about it—thirteen, maybe, or thirty-something, but I think I have to pass."
He seemed restless with the next one also, shifting his gaze and looking around as if he half expected the answer to appear on the walls. But just when the audience was convinced that he was about to confess a second failure, still with his head turned toward the back of the cabin, his voice said, "Sixty-eight." Then he picked up a glass of water from the top of the unit beside him, took a long and evidently much-needed drink, and as he wiped his beard with a hand declared, "And the last one is . . . ninety." Massey faced the screen fully again and shrugged, showing his empty palms. "Well, there it is. That's what I got—or thought I did. Right at this moment only you know how well we did. I'll be curious to find out. Until then, so long from Vernon and myself on board the Orion." The image blanked out, leaving displayed the four numbers and one blank.
Four out of five—a score against odds of millions. Applause and appreciative comments came from all around. Zambendorf remained as he had stood all the way through, acknowledging them only with a faint bow. It was one of his strong beliefs that when events spoke for themselves, it was wisest not to interrupt.
"Well, then?" Wade challenged, looking smugly at Sharon Beatty.
"I'll have to think about it," she returned curtly.
"Well, it's going to have me doing a lot of thinking tonight, that's for sure," Graham Spearman told the room, shaking his head.
"It's gotta be real," Andy Schwartz said, looking from one to the other of his crewmen for support. "What other way could there be to explain it?" Neither of them could offer an explanation.
"If you will excuse me, I have more important matters to attend to than these antics." So saying, Weinerbaum rose and conveyed himself aloofly from the room. Most of his retinue of scientists followed. The others left in the room exchanged grins. It was as good a way as any for the mission's chief scientist to admit that he had no explanation, either.