"Ah, let me see now . . . when I was a boy of about sixteen, it must have been. `Pat,' me father says to himself. `With them Americans walking around on the Moon itself and flying them hotels up in the sky, that's the place you should be for your sons to grow up in.' So we ups and moves the whole family to Brooklyn where me uncle Seamus and all was already living, and that's where the rest of them still are today." Sgt. Michael O'Flynn of the NASO Surface Vehicle Maintenance Unit reversed his feet, which were propped up on the littered metal desk in his cubbyhole at the rear of a cavernous cargo bay, and raised his paper cup for another sip of the brandy that Zambendorf had produced from a hip flask. He had a solid, stocky body that seemed as broad as it was long beneath the stained NASO fatigues, and his face was fiery pink and beefy, with clear blue eyes half-bidden beneath wiry, unruly eyebrows, and a shock of rebellious hair in which yellow and red struggled for dominance, each managing to get the better of the other in different places. O'Flynn spoke through pearly white teeth clamped around a wooden toothpick, in a husky whisper that had retained more than a hint of its original brogue for what must have been thirty or so years.
"What part of Ireland did you move from?" Zambendorf inquired from his cramped perch on a metal seat that folded out from the wall between a tool rack and an equipment cabinet—more comfortable than it looked since his weight near the ship's axis was barely sufficient to keep him in place.
"County Cork, in the south, not far from a little place called Glanmire."
Zambendorf rubbed his beard and looked thoughtful for a few seconds. "That would be roughly over in the direction of Watergrasshill, wouldn't it, if I remember rightly?" he said.
O'Flynn looked surprised. "You know it?"
"I was there a few years ago. We toured all around that area for a few days . . . and up to Limerick, back down around Killarney and the lakes." Zambendorf laughed as the memories flooded back. "We had a wonderful time."
"Well I'll be damned," O'Flynn said. "And you like the place, eh?"
"The villages are as pretty and as friendly as any you'll find in Austria, and I found Guinness remarkably good once I'd gotten used to it. Those mountains, though, what do you call them? Macgilly- something . . ."
"Macgillycuddy's Reeks."
"Yes—how is anybody supposed to remember something like that? Well they're not really mountains at all, are they? You really could use a genuine Alp or two, you know. But apart from that . . ." Zambendorf shrugged and sipped his own drink.
"What are your Alps but more of the same?" O'Flynn said. "Ours have everything a mountain needs to be called a mountain, except a man doesn't have to waste more of the breath he could be using for better things getting to the top."
"The higher a man rises, the farther he sees," Zambendorf said, throwing out a remark that was open for O'Flynn to take any way he pleased. "It's as true of life as it is of mountains, wouldn't you agree?"
O'Flynn's eyes narrowed a fraction further for a moment, and he chewed on his toothpick. "Yes, and the farther away he gets, the less he sees, until he can make out no part of any of it," he replied. "The world's full of people parading their high-and-mightiness, who think they can see everything, but they know nothing." It sounded like a general observation and not a veiled reference to Zambendorf.
"I take it that the noble and the worthy don't exactly inspire you to any great feelings of awe and reverence."
"Ah, and who else would they be but those who make it their affair to mind the rest of the world's business when the rest of the world is quite able to look after itself? It's people whose own business isn't worth minding who mind other people's business, I'm after thinking. A man has work enough in one lifetime trying to improve himself without thinking that he's fit to be out improving the world."
A strange garb to find a philosopher in, Zambendorf thought to himself. "Well, that's certainly been the old way," he said, stretching and looking around, as if for a way of changing the subject. "Who knows? Perhaps Mars will be the beginning of something different."
O'Flynn remained silent for a few seconds and rubbed his nose with a pink, meaty knuckle, as if weighing something in his mind. "So, it's convinced you are that it's Mars we're going to, is it?" he said at last.
Although nothing changed on Zambendorf's face, he was instantly alert. "Of course," he said, keeping his voice nonchalant. "What are you saying, Mike? Where else could we be going?"
"Well now, aren't you the great clairvoyant who sees into the future?" O'Flynn's smile twinkled mockingly for just an instant. "I was hoping that maybe you were going to tell me."
Zambendorf had ridden out worse in his time. "What are you saying?" he asked again "What makes you think we might be going anywhere else?"
O'Flynn chewed on his toothpick and watched Zambendorf curiously for a second or two, then crumpled the cup and dropped it into a trash disposal inlet. He stood and inclined his head to indicate the doorway. "Come on. I'll show you something." He cleared the distance to the bay area outside in one of the long, slow-motion bounds that was the most economical way to move around in almost zero-gravity surroundings. Zambendorf unfolded himself from his seat and followed.
O'Flynn led between rows of packing cases and halted at a larger area where three surface vehicles were stacked one above the other in their stowage frames to just below the ceiling. At the bottom of the next stack, a couple of NASO mechanics working at the open hatch of a tracked vehicle, and another who was inspecting something from a movable work platform higher up, carried on without paying much attention. O'Flynn gestured toward the lowermost vehicle in front of them—a personal carrier about fifteen feet high, painted mainly yellow, with six huge wheels. An enclosed cabin with lots of antennas and protrusions made up its forward two-thirds, and a clutter of girderwork, pipes, and tanks formed its rear.
"See them wheels," O'Flynn said, pointing. "Them's high-traction, low-friction treads—not what you'd need if you wanted to go joy-riding off across a place like Mars." He ducked forward and indicated a pair of short, fat nozzles projecting from below the vehicle's front end. "Know what they are? Plasma torches and blowers—not the best thing in the world if you get bogged down in a sand drift now, is it?"
"What would things like that be better for?" Zambendoff asked, peering more closely.
"Ice," O'Flynn told him. "Lots of ice." He jerked his thumb sternward. "And the equipment holds back there are full of things like steam hoses and superheated suction tubes, which are also the kinds of things you'd want to take along with you if you expected to be bothered by ice. Now, where would all that ice be on a place like Mars?" He straightened out from under the vehicle and rapped his knuckle on the outside wall of the cab. "Them walls will withstand four atmospheres—outside, not inside. Mars has a low-pressure atmosphere."
Zambendorf searched O'Flynn's face for a second or two and then looked back at the personnel carrier. O'Flynn stepped back a pace and pointed up at the fuselage of a low-altitude, fifteen-man airbus secured in the top frame of the stack. "And do you see that flyer up there? It's wings are detached so you can't see them for now, but they're too short and small to be any use at all in thin air. Now Mars must have changed quite a bit since I last read anything about it, unless I'm very much mistaken."
"But . . . this is incredible!" Zambendorf injected an appropriate note of astonishment into his voice while his mind raced through possible explanations. "Have you asked anyone in authority about it?"
O'Flynn shrugged. "What business is it of mine to be asking people about something they'd already have told me if they wanted me to know?" He hooked his thumbs in his belt and stood back. "Anyhow, we've almost got everyone aboard now. Soon they'll all be talking, and then the questions will start getting asked. I'm not much of a clairvoyant meself, you understand, but I've a sneaky feeling it won't be much longer before we get the answers too."
"Wow! Two hydrogen bombs every second? You're really not joking?" Thelma stared wide-eyed across the table at the young NASO captain smartly attired in his flight-officer's uniform. Around them, with only two days to go before the Orion's departure, the atmosphere in the crowded bar on the Recreation Deck of Globe IV was getting quite partylike.
Larry Campbell, proud of his recent promotion to the staff of General Vantz, commander of the Orion, sipped his gin and tonic and grinned reassuringly. "Well, they're really only small ones, and completely under control. There's nothing to be concerned about. We'll take good care of you."
"But it sounds so scary. I mean, how can anybody understand how to control something like that? You must be very clever. What sign were you born under?" Beneath the table, Thelma had pushed Campbell's briefcase back along the wall and within reach of the fingertips of one arm, which was draped casually over the chair next to her. She shifted slightly and lifted her glass to taste her martini while surreptitiously nudging the briefcase under the back of the booth behind her.
Campbell frowned at his glass for a second, then sighed and smiled condescendingly. "Well, let's put it this way—my training in understanding the physics of thermonuclear processes doesn't have anything to do with when I was born, I'm afraid. You don't get these—" he gestured at the captain's tracks on his epaulets "—for knowing about birth-signs, you know."
"You don't?" Thelma said wonderingly. "But you have to know which way to steer the ship. How can you do that without knowing all about stars and planets?" At the booth behind, Drew West finished his drink, got up, and sauntered out of the bar, carrying his jacket loosely over his arm to conceal the briefcase he was holding.
Campbell bit his lip awkwardly. "Look, I, er . . . I don't want to sound like a schoolteacher or anything, but astrology and astronomy aren't really the same thing."
"No, of course they're not—everyone knows that," Thelma agreed brightly. "Astronomy is restricted to what you can see through telescopes, but astrology covers a lot more because it's revealed directly to the mind, right? I read all about it in Thinking Woman's Monthly Digest."
"Er, not quite . . . If you want, I'll tell you what the differences really are. But I should warn you, you may find you have to change some ideas you might have grown pretty fond of."
"Oh, would you, Larry! Just imagine—a real starship officer taking all this trouble just for me! My sister will be so mad when I tell her."
In the men's room outside the bar, Drew West had picked the lock of the briefcase and begun selecting interesting papers which he passed over the partition for Joe Fellburg to photograph in the next cubicle. Five minutes later, when Fellburg entered the bar carrying Campbell's briefcase inside a false-bottomed leather portmanteau, the booth at which West had been sitting was taken. So Fellburg edged his way through the throng and stopped partway to the bar to count change from his pocket for the cigarette machine, in the process putting down the portmanteau next to Thelma's seat. The briefcase stayed behind as Fellburg moved on, but the movement of his foot to slide it behind the chair toward Thelma's waiting hand was so smooth that Campbell, on the far side of the table, didn't even register anyone's being nearby as he extolled the wonders of the heavens and expounded on their mysteries.
Clarissa Eidstadt rapped the end of her pen sharply on the top of Herman Thoring's desk in the administrative section of Globe I to emphasize her point. "Look, mister, I've got my job to do too. I'm the team's publicity manager, okay? That means I need to get information to the public. How am I supposed to get information out without proper communications? So do something about it."
Thoring held up his hands protectively. "Okay, Clarissa, I hear what you're telling me, and I'll do what I can. But you have to understand I've got a lot of other responsibilities and obligations to think about. This mission is important to all kinds of other people too." Thoring looked like a person born to carry responsibilities and bear obligations. The tanned dome of his head reflected the light inside a semicircle of black, frizzy hair, and his eyes looked like poached eggs behind thick, heavy-rimmed spectacles wedged above his fleshy nose. He was in shirtsleeves with cuffs rolled back, vest unbuttoned, and tie-knot slipped a couple of inches below his opened collar.
Clarissa tossed up a hand in a curt gesture of finality. "Well, if you don't have the authority to change anything, I'm wasting my time. I thought you were in charge around here. Who do I talk to?"
As it was supposed to, the remark hit a sensitive spot. Thoring's knuckles whitened and a vein stood out on his temple. "You're already in the right office," he managed indignantly. "I'm the Senior Program Director from Global Communications Networking and have full responsibility for media liaison. It's a very important position, and I've told you I'll do everything I can."
"Yeah? Phooey. Important? Who says so? What's `media liaison' anyway? I wanna talk to the captain."
"What captain?"
"Vent? Vant? . . . whatever. What's the driver called?"
"You mean General Vantz?" Thoring looked appalled.
"That's him. Where do I go?"
Thoring shook his head and moaned despairingly. "Look, Clarissa, believe me—you can't go raising something like this with General Vantz. He wouldn't know anything about it anyway. This would come under the mission's Communications Director, and I report directly to him. Okay?"
"Then I wanna talk to the Communications Director."
Thoring raised a hand to his brow, closed his eyes and fiddled with the bridge of his spectacles for a few seconds, then shook his head again and looked back at Clarissa. Before he could say anything, one of the women from the secretarial pool in the outer office called, "I'm through to New York, Mr. Thoring. They're sorry, but Hepperstein is in conference at the moment. Can he call you tomorrow?"
Thormg sighed, stood, and walked round the desk to the open doorway. "No, it can't wait until tomorrow," he said, sounding agitated. "He has to get back to me today. Make sure they get a message to him, and that he knows it's from me personally."
"Okay."
"Who are you trying to kid?" Clarissa asked as Thoring came back to his desk and sat down. At the same time she allowed a hint of doubt into her voice, and marshaled an expression that was a shade more respectful. "I bet you don't even know who the Communications Director is. Why would your job involve dealing with someone like that?"
Thoring lifted his chin and allowed himself a quick smirk of satisfaction. "Well, you'd be surprised, lady. For your information, my level of responsibility on this mission requires a working familiarity with all kinds of confidential material that you don't know about. That's why you have to trust me when I say I'll do as much to help your interests as I can. But that's all I can say. Just accept for now that I have a lot more to worry about than you think."
Clarissa's belligerence evaporated. She leaned forward, glanced furtively across at the open doorway, and hissed in a conspiratorial whisper. "What?"
Thoring's voice lowered itself instinctively. "Come on, Clarissa—you know better than that," he muttered, tapping the side of his nose.
"But 1 wanna know," Clarissa insisted, her eyes wide with excitement. "Is it gonna be a group-sex experiment in space? Or maybe we're going into another dimension. You can tell me. Do I look like somebody who'd go spreading things around—especially something said in confidence by a Media Liaison Director."
Thoring frowned, bunched his lips perplexedly for a second, and then whispered, "I can't do that
. . . but if I told you it's big, would you stay off my back and let me get on with my job?"
"But of course. I wouldn't wanna interfere with something that might endanger the national interests or something."
"Well, you're pretty close to the mark," Thoring said, nodding somberly. "That's just what it is. You could help us a lot by backing off a little."
"How big is it?" Clarissa asked, covering the side of her face with a hand and murmuring out of the corner of her mouth. "Have they found cosmic energy pyramids on Mars? Are we gonna fight the KGB for them?"
"Nothing like that. But I'll tell you this—the Mission Director is Daniel Leaherney, deputy head of the U.S. National Security Council. His second-in-command will be Charles Giraud, who's connected with the French government. They and their senior staff are on board now, shuttled up yesterday without any publicity. That should tell you enough."
"Never heard of them, but they sound important," Clarissa said. "This is exciting. What else?"
Thoring sat back in his chair suddenly and shook his head. "That's more than I should have mentioned. I can't say any more, Clarissa . . . but will you stay outta my hair from now on, please?"
"1 never realized . . .You must have a lot on your mind."
"That's what I'm trying to tell you."
"Okay, I get it. Don't worry—the secret is safe. You can count on me. You know, I always wanted to be an espionage agent with the CIA or something. I figure I'd be good at it. Do you, er . . . do you have people like that working for you?" Clarissa looked at Thoring hopefully.
"Uh? Oh no, I'm afraid not."
"Too bad. Oh well, maybe if you want a secret message taken to the Communications Director, or something like that, you could let me know."
"What? Oh yes, sure. If anything like that comes up, I'll give you a call."
"Okay, well, I guess I'd better let you get on." Clarissa got up and crept furtively over to the door. She opened it a fraction, peered out, and then looked back over her shoulder at Thoring. "I'm sorry I bothered you over something so trivial."
"Oh. think nothing of it. We get it all the time . . . but we have to keep up our cover, you understand."
"That's what I thought." Clarissa nodded a final, solemn reassurance, made an O in the air with her thumb and forefinger, and disappeared. Thoring stared disbelievingly at the door for a long time after she had gone. Then he blinked himself back to reality, shook his head, and returned his attention to the papers on his desk.
"The figures for on-board fuel-pellet manufacturing capacity, emergency reserves of chemical propellants, and the range corrections factored into the radar calibration procedures all point to a distance much greater than that of Mars," Thelma said to the rest of the team, who were holding a cramped after dinner conference in the cabin that Zambendorf shared with Abaquaan, West, and Fellburg. She gestured at the photo prints lying among other papers on the bunk beside her. "And the flight-profile from Campbell's duty roster gives a voyage of something nearer three months than fifty days."
"I still think the Asteroids is a possibility," Drew West said, lounging on one of the upper bunks. "There's been a lot of talk in recent years about our vulnerability in strategic minerals—in fact, right back to the last century. There's no end of just about everything out there."
Silence reigned for a few seconds. Joe Fellburg made a face. "Too many things don't fit," he said. "Why all the secrecy? Why the military?"
"Protecting our eternal interests," Abaquaan answered, sitting on the floor with his back to the door.
"Who from?"
"Well, it could only be the Soviets," West said.
"Out at the Asteroids?" Clarissa looked inquiringly at Thelma and Fellburg. "Do they have anything that could match the Orion at that range?"
Fellburg shook his head. "Not yet. They've been concentrating on near-Earth applications. The Japanese are more interested in Venus and Mercury."
"The Soviets did develop a series of fusion drives as part of their Mars-base program," Thelma said. "But if they'd gone a long way in scaling them up to anything like the Orion, we'd know about it."
Clarissa nodded as if that confirmed what she already thought. "And besides, Leaherney and Giraud don't fit into that either," she said. Leaherney used to be chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Economic Affairs and is a onetime U.S. ambassador in Brussels; Giraud was a member of the French cabinet. You wouldn't pick guys like that to head up a prospecting expedition."
The cabin fell quiet again for a while. Everybody looked at everybody else. There were no new suggestions. At last Zambendorf stood up, stepped over Abaquaan's legs to get to the coffee pot by the washbasin, and poured himself a fresh cup. He stirred in a spoon of sugar and turned to face the others again. "Then it has to be as I've been saying," he told them. "No other hypothesis explains all of the facts nearly as well. A low-gravity, low-temperature, icy environment . . . It has to be a moon of the outer planets."
"With not only an atmosphere, but a high-pressure one at that," Thelma agreed, nodding.
Fellburg rubbed his nose between thumb and forefinger for a few seconds, and at last nodded slowly. "I can't fault it . . . And you know something?—the European probe that arrived there two years ago and sent down those surface landers that were all supposed to have failed soon after they reached the surface—that story has always sounded strange to me too."
Abaquaan looked up and turned his head from side to side. "So what are we saying, then—it has to be Titan? We're agreed?"
"It appears extremely probable at least," Zambendorf said. "But the more interesting question, by far, is why."
Why would the Western powers equip an elaborate mission, heavy with scientists from every discipline and experts from many fields, to such a destination, provide it with military protection, and go to great pains to conceal its true purpose from—as in all probability it had to be—the Soviets? Why would they place such a mission in the charge of senior political figures experienced in international negotiation and diplomacy? And why—perhaps most significant of all—were there linguists and so many psychologists among the professionals being taken along, specialists at understanding and communicating with thinking intelligences? In short, just what had the landers from the European probe found under the murky, impenetrable cloud canopy of Titan, Saturn's mysterious moon, equal in size to the planet Mercury?
And, of particular interest to the people gathered in Zambendorf's cabin, why was it considered highly desirable for someone like Zambendorf to be there?