by Hogan, James
conceptual abilities to utilize more than a tiny fraction of the potential
they're surrounded by. But with us giving direction and them providing the
working skills, it should be possible to get the act together and run it for
mutual benefit."
Whaley looked at him curiously for a second or two. "I can see our angle," he
said. "What's in it for the Taloids?"
Methers spread his hands. "What every backward race wants when it meets a more
advanced culture—access to greater wealth and power, security, knowledge . . .
whatever."
"That's true of the Taloids too?" Whaley sounded surprised.
"I wouldn't mind betting on it, anyhow," Methers said.
Gorsche nodded. "Genoa is also a fairly small state that's constantly being
attacked by larger enemies, and Padua is one of them. I'd have thought there's a
good chance that the Genoese would be extremely appreciative of any help we
might give them for defending themselves. And that incident with the Paduans
will have provided a very convenient demonstration of the kinds of things we
could offer."
Ramelson looked from side to side. All the faces were watching him expectantly,
waiting for his endorsement of the policy being proposed. He sat back and
drummed his fingertips absently on the arms of his chair while he thought over
what had been said. At last he nodded. "It's certainly worth exploring further,
anyway. Do I take it that the other people you've put this to are in agreement
also?"
Gorsche nodded. "It's more or less Dan Leaherney's own recommendations, and the
president has approved," he said.
Ramelson looked satisfied and turned to Buhl. "Then let's get a confidential
policy memorandum off to Caspar, confirming our position," he said. "The sooner
he knows where he stands, the sooner we'll start seeing some results."
"That's what I wanted to discuss next," Buhl said, reaching for some papers in
his briefcase. "In fact I've got a draft here for you to look at. Maybe we can
go through it while we're all here together."
On the other side of Washington, D.C., Walter Conlon and Patrick Whittaker were
having breakfast at a Howard Johnson's. "I imagine Gerry Massey must be pretty
pissed," Whittaker said. "After the job that he and Vernon did all through the
voyage out ... I mean, they've collected enough proof to debunk just about
everything that Zambendorf has said and done since the mission left."
"That's right," Conlon agreed over a plate of scrambled eggs and hashbrowns, but
without sounding especially perturbed.
Whittaker looked puzzled. "But hasn't it all been a waste of time?"
"Why?"
"Well . . . who cares anymore?" Whittaker shrugged. "Compared to what's happened
on Titan now, all that's trivial, isn't it? Anyone who tried to make a big thing
now out of whether or not Zambendorf had pulled a few tricks would just be
making an ass of himself, and Massey's smart enough to know it. I assumed that
was why Massey and Vernon haven't been announcing any great revelations."
Conlon shook his head. "They probably watched Zambendorf just to help pass the
time during the voyage," he said. "Massey's also smart enough to have figured
out that I wouldn't have sent him all that way just to expose a stage psychic .
. . not after he learned where the mission was really bound for and why,
anyway."
Whittaker frowned. "You mean his job never was to blow Zambendorf out of the
water?"
"Not unless he wanted to, anyhow," Conlon said, without looking up from his
meal. "No—GSEC and the rest had their cover story, so I had to have mine. Massey
figured that out a long time ago. Before the mission left I arranged with one of
the ship's senior communications officers for Massey to have access to a private
channel direct into my section of NASO at Washington, free from any restrictions
or censoring . . . purely as a precaution. Massey wasn't told about it until
they were well into the voyage."
"So what's he really there for?" Whittaker asked, intrigued.
"I don't know," Conlon said. Whittaker looked totally bemused. Conlon explained,
"I'm not absolutely certain why GSEC sent Zambendorf there, but it wasn't to
entertain at parties in the officers' mess. I suspect they intend to use his
ability to influence public opinion as an aid to pushing the government in a
direction that suits their interests."
Whittaker looked horrified. "You're joking, Walt."
"Uh-uh." Conlon shook his head. "His antics could become a significant factor in
the formulation of major international policy."
"But what, specifically?" Whittaker asked. "What exactly do they intend doing
with him?"
"They couldn't have had any definite plans until they found out what exactly the
situation was on Titan," Conlon said. "But they've learned a lot by now that
they didn't know then. I've got a feeling that someone should be passing more
specific orders to Zambendorf very soon now. And when Zambendorf finds out what
he's really there for, that's when Massey will know what his job is."
20
GRAHAM SPEARMAN PEERED INTO THE WINDOW OF THE COLD chamber in one of Orion's
biological laboratories, where an automatic manipulator assembly was slicing
test specimens from a sample of brownish, rubbery substance recovered from the
wreckage of the bizarre walking wagons destroyed in the encounter with the
Paduan Taloids. The cold chamber was a necessity since most Taloid pseudoorganic
materials tended to decompose into evil-smelling liquids at room temperature. In
the work area around Spearman, the displays and data presentations were showing
some of the findings from electron and proton microscopes, gas and liquid
chromatographs, electrophoretic analyzers, isotopic imagers, x-ray imagers,
ultrasonic imagers, and just about every kind of spectrometer ever invented.
Spearman had already described the incendiary chemical thrown by the catapults
mounted on several of the Paduan war vehicles; it had turned out to be a
substance rich in complex oxygen-carbon compounds that would be highly
inflammable in Titan's reducing atmosphere once ignition temperature had been
attained by the reaction of a fast-acting outer acid layer upon a metallic
target surface. The catapults themselves had been shown by video replays also to
be organic, and suggested enormous, finely sculptured vegetables that ejected
their missions either by releasing stored mechanical strain-energy or by
compressed gas accumulated internally.
In his late thirties, with thick-rimmed spectacles and a droopy mustache, and
wearing a tartan shirt with jeans, Spearman was the easygoing kind of person
that Thelma could find interesting without running the risk of ending up being
used as an ideological dumping ground if she spent time talking to him. The
problem with many scientists, she found, especially the younger ones, was that
their successful intellectual accomplishment in one field could sometimes lead
them to overestimate the value of their views on anything and everything, which
tended to make conversation a survival skill by turning every topic into a
minefield. Spearman provided a
refreshing contrast by holding no political
opinions, having no pet economic theory for solving all the world's problems at
a stroke, and no burning conviction about how other people should conduct their
lives to make it a better place.
"I've never seen anything quite like this," he said, turning back and waving an
arm to indicate the sample behind the window. "It's capable of growing under the
direction of large, complex director molecules, sure enough, but you couldn't
say it's alive. It's kind of halfway in between. ... It has a primitive
biochemistry, but nothing approaching life at the level of cellular metabolism.
You see, there aren't any cells."
Thelma looked intrigued as she swiveled herself slowly from side to side in the
operator's chair in front of the microscopy console, while Dave Crookes listened
from where he was leaning just inside the doorway. "Then what's it made of?"
Thelma asked. "How does it grow without cells?"
Spearman sighed. "A comprehensive answer will probably take years to unravel,
but for the moment think of it as something like an organic crystal, but more
complicated . . . with variations in structure that you don't get in crystals."
He gestured at the sample in the cold chamber. "That's a part of one of the
legs. It does have a rudimentary vascular system to transport nutrients for
renewing itself, an arrangement of contractile tissues that enable it to move,
and a network of conductive fibers that transmit electrical discharges in
response to applied mechanical force. And that's about all. What it suggests is
that the complete structure could respond by moving itself if something pulled
it—a kind of passive friction-reducer."
"An organic wheel," Thelma said.
Spearman grinned. "Sure—that's just about what it is."
"But it couldn't do anything else, like reproduce itself or something like
that?" Crookes asked.
Spearman shook his head. "No way. As I said, it can move and regenerate its
form—parts of it anyway. But there's no way you could say it's alive."
Thelma frowned to herself. "So how could something like that ever have evolved
in the firsi place if it can't reproduce itself?" she asked.
"It couldn't have," Spearman replied simply.
"So where did it come from?"
"The only thing we can suggest is that the Taloids created it."
Thelma and Crookes exchanged puzzled glances. "But how could they have?" Crookes
protested. "I mean, their technology is back in the Middle Ages. You're talking
about something that might be crude compared to the living cells we know, but
surely it's still a pretty impressive feat of bioengineering."
"Astonishing," Spearman confirmed. "In fact I don't think any genetic
engineering of ours could touch it—not without naturally occurring
macromolecules already available to work with, anyhow."
"Well, that's the point," Thelma said. "How could the Taloids have done it?"
Spearman moved a few paces across the lab, then turned and spread his hands.
"We've already found plenty of examples of quite complex hydrocarbons and
nitrogenous compounds in the soil, very much like the molecules believed to have
been precursors of life on Earth. But apparently they never progressed much
further on Titan, probably because of the low temperature and absence of strong
ionizing radiation and other mutagenic stimulants. Well, our best guess is that
the Taloids somehow learned to manipulate such raw materials, and over a period
of time developed techniques for manufacturing the kind of thing you see here."
He waved toward the cold chamber again. "And I mean manufacturing. That stuff
didn't grow naturally. It accounts for their peculiar houses too, as well as a
lot of other things we've seen."
John Webster, an English genetic engineering consultant from the Cambridge
Institute for Molecular Biology, nodded from a stool in front of a cluttered
workbench jammed into a corner among shelves of bottles and racks of electronic
equipment. "That's the way it looks. It's our culture turned upside down. We
grow our food and our offspring, and make artifacts out of metals that we
extract from rocks; the Taloids' food and offspring are produced on assembly
lines, while they grow artifacts—developed from organic substances which they
discovered in their rocks and soils. That explains all those 'plantations' that
we've been wondering about: They're Taloid factories."
"That's right—they did the same as we did, but the other way around," Spearman
said. "Man learned to make mechanical devices to mimic the actions of living
organisms in his familiar environment—to lift weights and move loads, and so on.
The Taloids found they could manufacture artificial devices too—organic ones—to
mimic the only form of life they knew."
"It's a good way of looking at it," Crookes agreed. "But that still doesn't
explain how the Taloids could engineer processes at the molecular level when
their culture is centuries behind ours." He gestured to indicate the banks of
instrumentation and equipment all around them. "We had to invent all this before
we even knew what a protein was, never mind how to splice genes into plasmids.
The Taloids couldn't make anything even remotely comparable to all this stuff."
"They never needed to," Spearman said. "They're surrounded by it already."
It took Thelma a moment to grasp what he was saying. "You're kidding," she said
incredulously.
Spearman shook his head. "Man learned how to use enzymes and bacteria to make
wine and cheese thousands of years ago without having to know anything about the
chemistry involved. Who's to say that the Taloids couldn't have learned to
domesticate the life forms that they found all around them too? We take wool off
sheep to make overcoats; they take wire from wire-drawing machines." He
shrugged. "It's the same difference."
"Everything about them is us the other way around, and taken back three or four
centuries," Webster said. "We were practical artisans first, and from those
beginnings we developed engineering and the physical sciences. Biochemistry came
later. The Taloids developed applied biology first, but without any real
comprehension of biological science, and now they're only just beginning to
dabble in the physical sciences."
"That seems strange," Crookes commented. "You'd think that all the advanced
hardware down there would have given them an intuitive comprehension of it from
early on."
"Why should it have?" Spearman asked. "Human beings are advanced biological
systems, but that doesn't give them an intuitive understanding of how their
brains and their bodies work. That knowledge could only come later, when
suitable instruments became available . . . and it's still far from complete.
Human consciousness operates at a level way above that of the neural hardware
that supports our mental software, and the world of raw sensory data which that
hardware reacts to. We don't perceive the world as consisting of pressure waves,
photons, forces, and so on, but as people, places, and things. Our awareness
arises from the interaction of abstract symbols that are far removed from the
&
nbsp; original physical stimuli—shut off, as it were, from any direct knowledge of its
own underlying neurological and physiological processes. So we can think about
the things that matter without knowing anything about what the trillions of
nerve cells in our brains are doing, or even being aware that we have any."
Crookes frowned for a moment. "So what are you saying—that the Taloids are
advanced electronic systems, but that doesn't give them any intuitive
understanding of how they work either? Their awareness operates at a higher,
abstract level in the same way?"
"Just that," Spearman replied.
Thelma nodded as the implications became clearer. "So just because the Taloids
are computers, it doesn't mean necessarily that they think with machine
precision and possess total information recall, does it? They might not be able
to remember a conversation from yesterday word for word, or behave the same way
in the same situation every time . . . just like us."
"That's what Graham's getting at," Webster said. "At its basic hardware level,
the human brain is every bit as mechanical and predictable as an electronic
computer chip: A neuron either fires or doesn't fire in response to a given set
of inputs. It doesn't go through agonies of indecision trying to make up some
microscopic mind about what to do. At that level, there isn't any mind to make
up. 'Mind' emerges as a property of organization that becomes manifest only at
the higher level. ... In the same kind of way, a single molecule doesn't possess
a property of 'elephantness'; a sufficiently large number of them, however,
organized in the correct way, do. Taloid minds are almost certainly a result of
complexity transcending their underlying hardware in the same way."
Spearman moved back to the cold chamber, stooped to look at what was going on
inside, and entered a command into the control panel below the window. "If you
showed a Taloid a piece of holoptronics from the inside of a computer processor,
I think it'd be about as mystified as someone in the Middle Ages trying to make
sense of a rabbit brain," he said over his shoulder. "We understand machines
because we were able to begin with the simple and progress through to the more
complicated—from pulleys and levers, through dynamos and steam engines, to
