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dragon-servants existed as he stood staring without moving. For he was seeing
his world for the first time as it looked from beyond the sky.
It was a sphere.
And behind it, scattered across distances he had no way of estimating, were
more shining worlds than he knew even how to count.
17
DAVE CROOKES PRESSED A KEY ON A CONSOLE IN THE ORION'S Digital Systems and
Image Processing Laboratory, and sat back to watch as the sequence began
replaying again on the screen in front of him. It showed one of the Taloids in
the view recorded twenty-four hours previously watching a Terran figure make a
series of gestures, and then turning its head to look directly at another
Taloid standing a few feet behind. A moment later the second
Taloid's head jerked round to look quickly at the first Taloid and then at the
Terran.
"There!" Leon Keyhoe, one of the mission's signals specialists, said from
where he was standing behind Crookes' chair. Crookes touched another key to
freeze the image. Keyhoe looked over his shoulder at two other engineers
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ifemaker.txt seated at instrumentation panels to one side. "The one in the
brown helmet has to be saying something at that point right there. Check the
scan one more time."
"Still no change," one of the engineers replied, nipping a series of switches
and taking in the data displays in front of him. "There's nothing from VLF and
LF, right through to EHF in the millimeter band ... No correlation on
Fourier."
"Positive correlation reconfirmed on acoustic," the other engineer reported.
"Short duration ultrasonic pulse bursts, averaging around, ah . .
. one hundred ten thousand per second, duration twenty to forty-eight
microseconds. Repetition frequency is variable and consistent with modulation
at up to thirty-seven kilocycles. Sample profile being analyzed on screen
three."
Keyhoe sighed and shook his head. "Well, it seems to be definite," he agreed.
"The Taloids communicate via exchanges of high-frequency sound pulses. There's
no indication of any use of radio at all. It's surprising I
was certain that those transmission centers down on the surface would turn out
to be long-range relay stations or something like that." Readings obtained
from the Orion had confirmed the Dauphin orbiter's findings that several
points on the surface of Titan emitted radio signals intermittently and
irregularly. Probes sent below the aerosol layer had revealed the sources to
lie near some of the heavily built-up centers from which the surrounding
industrialization and mechanization appeared to have spread.
The patterns of signal activity had correlated with nothing observed on the
surface so far.
Joe Fellburg, who was wedged on a stool between Dave Crookes' console and a
bulkhead member, rubbed his chin thoughtfully for a second or two. "Do you buy
this idea that Anna Voolink came up with about alien factories?" he asked,
looking up at Keyhoe.
"Well, we've got to agree it's a possibility, Joe," Keyhoe said. "Why?"
Anna Voolink was a Dutch NASO scientist who had been involved several years
before in a study of a proposal to set up a self-replicating manufacturing
facility on Mercury for supplying Earth with materials and industrial
products. She had speculated that Titan's machine biosphere might have
originated from a similar scheme set up by an alien civilization, possibly
millions of years previously, which had somehow mutated and started to evolve.
What had caused the system to mutate, why the aliens should have chosen Titan,
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and what had happened to them since were questions that nobody had ventured to
answer even tentatively.
Fellburg leaned forward to prop an elbow against the side of the console and
gestured vaguely at the screens. "It occurred to me that if everything down
there did evolve from some superadvanced version of what NASO was talking
about setting up on Mercury, then maybe radio could have been the primary
method of communication in the early days. But if the aliens were any kind of
engineers at all, you'd expect them to have provided some kind of backup,
right?" He looked from Keyhoe to Crookes. Crookes pinched his nose, thought
for a second, and nodded.
"Makes sense, I guess," Keyhoe agreed.
Fellburg spread his hands. "So couldn't the answer be that the primary system
went out of use maybe because of a mutation error or something like that and
the secondary became the standard? What we're picking up from those centers
could be just a remnant of something that doesn't serve any purpose any
more coming from a few places where it hasn't quite died out
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ifemaker.txt yet."
"Mmm . . . it's an interesting thought," Keyhoe said.
"I wonder if the Taloids would still be capable of receiving anything,"
Crookes murmured after thinking the suggestion over for a second or two.
"I suppose that would depend on where their blueprint information comes from .
. . their 'genetics,' " Keyhoe said.
Fellburg rubbed his chin again. "Well, if it's not functionally relevant
anymore, and if their evolution is driven selectively the same as ours is, I
guess there wouldn't be any strong selection working either one way or the
other. So probably some of them can receive radio and some of them can't. Some
sensitive ones might still be produced."
Dave Crookes smiled to himself. "If that's true, I wonder what all our radio
traffic over the last few weeks might have been doing to them," he said. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] - zanotowane.pl
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