According to the computers that provided a rudimentary translation between English and the strings of ultrasonic pulses via which the aliens communicated, the Taloids called it a river. And, indeed, its functions were comparable to those of a river: It flowed through the forest, attracting and sustaining life; it brought nutrients down from distant sources; and it carried away the debris, detritus, and wastes that were inevitable products of life in action.
In reality, the "river" was an immense conveyor line rolling through miles of machines and assembly stations, all thumping, whining, pounding, and buzzing on either side beneath an overhanging canopy of power lines, data cables, ducting, and pipes. The river came from more thinly mechanized regions, forming gradually out of the mergings of lesser transfer lines serving local material-processing centers and clusters of parts-making machines. Farther down it broadened, fed by incoming tributaries bringing ever more complex subassemblies and recycled parts. These flowed onward to fabrication centers lower down, which included the assembly sites for the peculiar machine "animals" and, at a number of specialized locations, for the Taloids themselves. And finally, everything that had not been utilized—components rejected by the sorting machines, substandard assemblies, unwanted pieces and parts picked up by the roving scavenger machines—was consumed in reduction furnaces and recovered as elementary materials for reprocessing.
The waste and inefficiency were enormous. In some places masses of jammed and defunct machinery stood in idle decay, partly dismantled by the scavengers. Piles of nuts, bolts, strands of wire, cuttings, and stampings covered the ground everywhere like a layer of forest humus. Entire lines of design died out, while others appeared in their place. But amid it all, as with the carbon-chemistry variety of life that had taken possession of distant Earth, the common thread that bound them all together as descendants from the same remote ancestral event managed somehow to sustain itself and endure.
It was like trying to find your way through a General Motors plant in diving gear with the lights out, Dave Crookes thought, perspiring and cursing inside his dome-helmeted extravehicular suit as he clambered over a gap in a line of pumping stations thick with hydraulic-line couplings. The Taloid in the lead—known as Franklin among the Terrans—waited a couple of paces ahead, while Armitage, the military escort assigned to the party, held aside a web of cables hanging like vines from the supports of a rotor housing dimly outlined in the gloom above. The party included an escort more as a matter of form than from any real need for protection against anything. And the troopers were always happy to get away from the base and see something new outside.
The beam from Crookes's flashlamp revealed pipes running across concrete foundations ahead, with steel pillars and a construction going upward. To the left of the construction, cables radiated away from an arrangement of protruding columns of stacked disks that looked like the insulators of a power transformer. On the right, a pile of scrap overflowed from a recessed space beneath the concrete foundation. A spindly six-legged machine that had been rooting with its tapered snout around the base of the pile scampered away into the darkness.
"Watch yourself above, to the right," Armitage's voice warned through the speaker in Crookes's helmet.
There was a piece of pipe sticking out with a valve on the end. "I see it," Crookes acknowledged.
The voice of Leon Keyhoe, the signals specialist accompanying Crookes, came over the circuit. "How much farther to the tower? This is getting to be like an obstacle course across Osaka." Keyhoe had put on weight during the voyage out from Earth with the Orion, and he sounded breathless even in Titan's low gravity. Being cooped up in the base at "Genoa" for most of the time since the ship's departure over two months previously hadn't helped matters.
"By my reckoning we should be practically there," Crookes answered.
"Men!" Amy Rhodes exclaimed as she followed Crookes over the wall of hydraulics couplings. "Just no spirit of adventure, that's your problem. No wonder it took thousands of years for Earth to get explored." Deigning to step down, she jumped the four feet from the top casing to the steel mesh plates covering the ice below.
Crookes turned away to resume following Armitage and Franklin. Behind Rhodes, Keyhoe heaved himself up and paused to wheeze for a moment before lowering himself down the other side of the obstacle. He was followed by "Charlie Chan," the Taloid bringing up the rear, so called on account of the golden hue of his metal hands and the facial parts not covered by his rough black hat and clothes of what looked like tire tread and woven wire.
The closest they had been able to land the flyer had been about half a mile back, among the remains of some kind of derelict construction beside the main conveyor line that ran through the area. The flyer's two-man NASO crew and the party's other military escort had remained to guard the craft—necessary, since certain types of Titan's metal-searching animals had developed a liking for Terran alloys—while the scientific party continued the rest of the way on foot.
The "tower" was in fact little more than a protuberance of girder frames capped by a circular platform, standing thirty feet or so above the general level of the structures in the vicinity. What made it interesting to communications engineers like Crookes and Keyhoe were the shapes on top that pictures from low-flying reconnaissance drones had revealed, suggestive of communications antennas. The pictures were low-resolution infrared, however, which made positive identification difficult, and no actual transmissions had been detected. Hence, the only way to find out for sure what the shapes were had been to go there and look.
If the whole Titan scene was indeed a result of some vast, alien, self-replicating industrial operation gone wrong, as supposed, it seemed likely that it would originally have used radio communication. A number of scattered and intermittent transmission sources existed, seeming to support such a conjecture, and some of the Taloids possessed what appeared to be a residual reception capability by which they could, on occasion, "hear" the transmissions. Traditionally, these latter were considered by the Taloids to be mystics who interpreted voices from the deity.
The prevalent opinion among the Terran scientists was that radio had formed the primary means of communication early on in the alien project but had become impracticable for some reason after the whole scheme messed up. So the system had reverted to the backup communication modes that the aliens would surely have provided if they had been any kind of engineers at all, and the isolated signals still being picked up were simply a remnant of something that was in the process of dying out. Thus, the scientists reasoned, there ought to be "fossil" radio facilities, recognizable in form but no longer functional, such as antennas, like vestigial limbs, still being built the way they always had been but no longer capable of doing anything. Verification of the prediction would go a long way toward advancing the theory. Hence the expedition to the "tower" in the part of Titan the Terrans called Genoa.
It was all a long way and very different from Denver. Crookes had signed up as one of the mission's scientists in the aftermath of a divorce to get away and find freedom in totally new surroundings for a while before returning to begin a new life. And he had done so in an unexpected way. On the face of it, "freedom" seemed a strange way to describe life in the confines of Genoa Base, lived according to the strict code of NASO's offplanet regulations. But the sense in which the word meant more to him was the release from the worldly obligations of bills, mortgages, departmental budgets, and dreary social chores, and the ability to concentrate in the company of his intellectual peers on the mysteries of Titan and the Taloids without distraction. For once in his life it was the job of others to take care of all the necessary things that didn't interest him, letting him enjoy the things that did, even if that did entail blundering around in mechanical jungles, encased in a claustrophobic EV suit.
Whatever had stood on the concrete foundation was gone. A line of supports carrying pipes now crossed the area above a pair of rectangular pits, one containing reciprocating machinery driven by gear trains, the other half-filled with a stagnant liquid, probably methane. A pair of thick, vertical stanchions, with a partly solid metal wall filling the space between, rose out of the clutter to support an arrangement of girders and platforms above. Armitage's hand lamp picked out more braces and structural ties above that. Consultation with a map sketched from the reconnaissance pictures showed that they had reached the tower.
Franklin pointed at the box attached to Crookes's belt. At the same time a red light on it began flashing, indicating that it was receiving high-frequency Taloid sonic pulses. Crookes unclipped the "transmogrifier"—a much improved version of the device he and Keyhoe had improvised after the first Terran-Taloid contact, though the name they had given it then had stuck—and touched a button with a finger of his gauntlet to interrogate. The message on the miniature screen read: okay terran (climb trees?) own back world-place?
Crookes nodded and switched in the channel of his suit radio that was set to the transmogrifier frequency. "Sure. We do it all the time." The device emitted an inaudible stream that Franklin seemed to understand.
i first lead if is good. taloids (used to/talk with?) forest.
"Fine."
"Why don't I go next after Franklin?" Amy Rhodes's voice said in Crookes's helmet. Her tone of voice wasn't so much a suggestion as a demand. Technically, Crookes was in command of the party, and it seemed to rile her; her attitude had been belligerent ever since they had set out. He shrugged inside his suit and made a nonchalant face.
"Sure. Go ahead." He caught Armitage's eye behind the face piece of his helmet. The soldier raised his eyebrows and turned away. It wasn't something that was worth getting into an argument over.
A long platform resembling a catwalk spanned the gap between the two stanchions about ten feet above where the group was standing. There was no access ladder, but Franklin reached the platform without much difficulty, climbing first to a run of hoses topping a line of cylindrical tanks, and from there up a series of stays and struts that provided holds. Amy followed, making a show of gliding on her feet and using her hands lightly for balance like a rock climber. Armitage went next, moving solidly and unhurriedly, and then Crookes. After a short delay and more huffing over the intercom circuit, Keyhoe appeared from the shadows below, with Charlie Chan following immediately behind.
They could now see beneath the tower over an incomplete section of the wall. Instead of the derelict lower levels they had expected, they found themselves looking down onto a fast-moving conveyor carrying an assortment of assemblies and components, which from its direction would join the main "river" not far from where the flyer was parked. Whatever installation had once existed in the base of the tower was gone, and a subsequent phase of construction had seen the conveyor run straight through where it had stood, leaving the skeleton of the former structure, with its tower above, straddling the banks like a bridge.
From where they now stood, there was no easy way farther up. The pillars at the right-hand end of the platform supported banks of switchgear boxes that gave moderately easy access for the next twenty feet or so, but the structure above was stark and bare, with little prospect of much to stand on. The center section held nothing but the support frame for the upper platform, high above them and way out of reach. That left only the pair of I-section girders standing cornerwise to each other at the left-hand end and forming a vertical right-angle channel about three feet wide on each side. Crookes and the others moved to that end and inspected it with probing flashlamp beams. The channel carried runs of heavy cables secured at intervals by fastenings that could, in a pinch, serve as a makeshift ladder. Awkward but not impossible, Crookes thought. After about thirty feet the channel reached the frame beneath the upper platform, and from there on the rest would be easier. Franklin was already experimenting, driving his straightened steel fingers between the cables like a wedge and walking himself up on his toes until he found a stance.
Hell, this is supposed to be a scientific investigation, not a display of heroics, Crookes thought. One rip in a suit at Titan's surface temperature would be lethal. Why risk it? They could be back with the right equipment in a matter of hours.
Amy seemed to read his mind—or, more likely, the expression through his faceplate. "Oh, I'll go," she said in a tone of exaggerated weariness, making it sound as if he were suffering a failure of nerve. "I led the Eiger a couple of years back. This is a cinch. I'll take a line up that you guys can hook on to." Armitage's sigh came heavily over the intercom circuit, but he said nothing.
Dave Crookes reflected later that that would have been the time to settle things. He should have pulled rank right then and declared that they were going back to the flyer, and that was final. The French had a phrase, esprit de l'escalier, which could be roughly translated as "staircase wisdom": the feeling that practically everyone experiences from time to time of belated realization only when halfway down the stairs and on the way out of the building, after the interview is over, of what one should have said. Or sometimes it happens ten seconds after putting down the phone.
But the way the situation felt to Crookes at the time was that making an issue out of it would have been overly defensive in just the kind of way the taunt was intended to provoke. Keyhoe was giving him a ready out if he needed one, holding both hands up protectively and shaking his head inside his helmet in a way that said emphatically, "Not me. No way!" But Crookes moved a couple of paces back and swung the beam of his lamp past Franklin, who was already six feet above their heads, and followed the channel upward to pick out the rest of the proposed route.
"It's what we came here for," Crookes said, making his voice matter-of-fact. "Okay, Leon can give us some light from down here. Charlie Chan had better stay with him. The rest of us can go take a look." He looked at Amy and couldn't resist adding, "Okay, if you want to play mountaineer, you go first."
Amy uncoiled a line from the gear they had brought with them and treated Crookes and Armitage to a minilecture on safety procedures. Then she set off, bracing a foot on each side of the channel and finding handholds among the cable restraints. The others watched as her legs, her backside, and the bottom of her pack receded upward in the light from their lamps, with Crookes holding the trailing line clear from obstructions. Then her voice over the intercom announced that she was at the platform and was securing herself. She pulled in the line; Crookes called to let her know when it was taut, and then followed.
There really wasn't a lot to it. The EV gauntlets afforded a good friction hold between the cables in the same way Franklin's Taloid fingers had, and there were more brackets and bolts to stand on than had been visible from below. Macho-jerk men could be a pain, Crookes reflected as he moved upward, falling quickly into a rhythm. But macho-jerk females were worse to deal with. No sense of how much force was appropriate; they went for the throat over trifles. Maybe it was because nobody had ever taught them when it was chivalrous or just plain smarter to hold back.
He joined Amy and Franklin on the upper platform and clipped himself to a loop she had made around a brace. Then Crookes brought up Armitage, who appeared a couple of minutes later, his M-37 slung along the side of his backpack. They stood up and surveyed the surroundings.
The four figures and the parts of the structure immediately around them stood out white in the light of the beams being directed from below. All around, the daytime twilight of Titan—about as bright as a moonlit night on Earth—showed the jungle of metal shapes extending away in every direction, highlighted intermittently in places by bursts of sparks and flashing electric arcs. The platform itself formed a terrace ten feet or so wide around a central superstructure continuing upward to the circular base visible in the reconnaissance pictures, which supported the antennas. The superstructure looked as if it should have been rectangular. However, two of its sides were missing, leaving the terrace on the far side as two narrow strips at right angles forming an exposed corner projecting precariously into space. Girder lattices sloped up to the circular base at an easy angle and would be no problem to climb.
"Well, this is my department," Crookes announced. "Let's see what we've got."
He began picking his way up the nearest lattice, using the cross-trusses as a ladder. Franklin came after him, while Armitage watched from the platform below and provided light. Amy wandered off to explore the far side of the terrace.
A parabolic dish and a helical antenna shared the base with what looked like part of a rhombic array, as well as other forms that Crookes was unable to identify. The first odd thing that struck him was that none of them possessed any electrical connections. They were mechanical assemblies only. Then he noticed that even the mechanical constructions were incomplete. Parts of the mounting for the parabolic dish, vital to allow it to rotate and elevate, were absent. Instead, the mechanism had been welded, rendering it totally immobile.
He was, indeed, looking at what they had suspected: a collection of fossils. Somewhere long in the past the instructions for making them operable had been lost, but a vestige of the form had remained. Whatever machines had erected this place had followed blindly directions contained in the blueprints passed down, possibly for millions of years, from the unknown origins from which the strange landscape below and all around him had sprung. As he gazed at the shapes, he wondered how long they had stood like this, staring mutely upward, waiting for messages they could never hear. And how many similar generations before them? . . .
Less than a scream, a short, sharp cry of alarm cut through the silence in his helmet. Then, almost in the same instant, he heard Keyhoe's voice from below: "What was that?"
And Armitage: "Oh, Christ!"
Crookes moved to the edge of the antenna base and held on to a mast to look down. Armitage was on one of the projecting sides of the terrace, scanning the area below with his lamp, while Franklin stood a few feet away, pointing downward with frantic stabbing motions—it was daylight to the Taloids. The red light on the transmogrifier at Crookes's waist was flashing. There was no sign of Amy. A few seconds later Crookes saw the light of her flashlamp as it was carried away on the conveyor below.
Whether she had slipped or a part of the structure had given way beneath her, nobody ever knew. From the catwalk where he had stayed with Keyhoe, Charlie Chan saw her fall, and he was back down to the floor level and through a gap in the wall to the conveyor line before those above had exchanged another word. But quick as he was, there was no trace of her when he got there. Crookes radioed the crew of the flyer, who switched on floodlights to watch for her at the larger conveyor, but nobody was sure if the tributary joined it upstream from where the flyer had landed, or down.
In any case, they saw nothing.