Titan

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Seen from the air, the expedition base camp was an ugly brown flower. A ragged wound had opened in the soil just cast of Titantown and had begun discharging Earth people.

It looked like it would never stop. As Cirocco watched from Whistlestop's gondola, a blue glob of gelatin shaped like a pill oozed from the ground and fell on its side. The encapsulating material quickly turned to water and sloughed away from a silvery crawler-transporter. The vehicle churned through the sea of mud and made its way to a rank of six similar machines parked beside a complex of inflatable domes before discharging its Rye passengers.

"These folks came in style," Gaby observed.

"Looks that way. And that's just the landing party. Wally won't bring his ship in close enough to get picked up."

"You sure you want to go down there? " Gaby asked.

"I have to. Surely you know that."

Calvin looked it all over and sniffed.

"If it's all the same to you," he said, "I'll just stay up here. It might get nasty if I went down."

"I can protect you, Calvin."

"That remains to he seen."

Cirocco shrugged. "Maybe you'd like to stay, too, Gaby."

"I go where you go," she said, simply. "Surely you know that. Do you think Bill's still down there? He might have been evacuated by now."

"I think held wait. And besides, I have to go down to get a look at that."

She pointed to a shiny heap of metal a kilometer west of the camp, sitting in its own flower of overturned dirt. There was no pattern to it, no hint that it had ever been more than a scrap heap.

It was the bones of Ringmaster.

"Let's hit the silk," Cirocco said.

"... . and says she was actually working in our interests throughout the alleged aggressive incident. I can offer you no concrete proof of most of these statements. There can he no proof, except the pragmatic one of her behavior over a suitable time. But I see no evidence that she is a threat to humanity, now or in the future."

Cirocco sat back in her chair and reached for her glass of water, wishing it was wine. She had talked for two hours, interrupted only by Gaby amplifying or correcting details of her account.

They were in a round dome that served as mission command headquarters for the ground party. The room was adequate for the seven assembled officers, Cirocco, Gaby, and Bill. The two women had been brought there promptly when they landed, introduced to everyone, and asked to begin the debriefing.

Cirocco felt out of place. The crew of the Unity and Bill were dressed in spotless, wrinkle-free red and gold uniforms. They smelled clean.

And they looked entirely too military for Cirocco's tastes. The Ringmaster expedition had avoided that, even eliminating military titles except Captain. At the time Ringmaster was launched, NASA had been at pains to erase its military origins. They had sought U.N. auspices for the trip, though the notion that the expedition was anything but American was a transparent fiction. Still, it had been something.

Unity, by her very name, testified that the nations of Earth were cooperating more closely. Her multi-national crew proved that the Ringmaster experiment had drawn the nations together in a common purpose. I

But the uniforms told Cirocco what that purpose was.

"Then you counsel a continuation of our peaceful policy," Captain Svensen said. He spoke through a television set on the fold-up desk in the center of the room. Aside from the chairs, it was the only article of furniture.

"The most you can lose is your exploratory party. Face it, Wally. Gaea knows that would he an act of war, and that the next ship would not even be ma

The face on the screen frowned, then nodded.

"Excuse me for a moment," he said. "I want to talk this over with my staff." He started to turn away, then reversed the motion.

"What about you, Rocky? You didn't say if you believe her. Is she telling the truth?"

Cirocco didn't hesitate.

"Yes, she is. You can bank on it."

Lieutenant Streikov, the ground commander, waited until he was sure the Captain had nothing more to say, then stood. He was a handsome young man with an unfortunate chin and- though Cirocco found it hard to believe-he was a soldier in the Soviet Army. He seemed little more than a child.

"Could I get you anything?" he asked, in excellent English. "Perhaps you're hungry after your trip back here"

"We ate just before we jumped," Cirocco said, in Russian. "But if you had any coffee ... ? "

"You didn't really finish your story," Bill was saying. "There's the matter of getting back down after your conversation with God."

"We jumped," Cirocco said, sipping her coffee.

"You .... it

She and Bill and Gaby were in one "corner" of the round room, their chairs drawn together, while the Unity's officers buzzed at each other around the television set. Bin looked good. He walked with a crutch and his leg apparently hurt when he stood

on it, but he was in high spirits. The Unity's doctor said she could operate on him as soon as he was aboard, and thought he would he nearly as mobile as before.

"Why not?" Cirocco asked, with a faint smile. "We brought those chutes all the way up as a safety measure, but why not use them?" His mouth was still open. She laughed, relenting, putting her hand on his shoulder. "All right, we thought about it a long time before we jumped. But it really wasn't dangerous. Gaea held the top and bottom valves open for us and called Whistlestop. We did it free-fall for the first 400 kilometers, then landed on his back." She held out her cup while an officer poured more coffee, then turned back to Bill.

"I've talked enough. What about you? How did things go?"

"Nothing so interesting, I'm afraid. I spent my time in therapy with Calvin, and picked up a little Titanide."

"How old was she?"

"How...he language, you idiot," he laughed. "I learned how to sing goo-goo and wa-wa and Bill hungry. I had a great time. Then I decided to get off my ass and do something since you wouldn't take me along. I started talking to the Titanides about something I knew a little about, which was electronics. I learned about coppervines and batteryworms and IC nuts, and before long I had a receiver and transmitter."

He gri

He shrugged. "Depends on how you look at it. You kept thinking in terms of a radio that would reach Earth. I can't build that. What I have isn't very strong-I can only talk to Unity when it's above, and the signal only has to punch through the roof. But even if I'd built it before you left, you probably would have gone, wouldn't you? Unity wasn't here yet, so the radio would have been useless."

"I suppose I would have. I had other things to do."

"I heard." He grimaced. "That gave me the worst moments of the trip," he confessed. "I'd started to like the Titanides, and then out of nowhere they all get this dreamy look and hurry out into the grassland. I thought it was another angel attack, but none of them came back. All I ever found was a big hole in the ground."

"I noticed a few when we came in," Gaby said.

"They've been drifting back," Bill said. "They don't remember us."

Cirocco's mind had been wandering. She was not concerned about the Titanides. She knew they would be all right, and now they would not have to suffer in the fighting. But it was sad to know Hornpipe would no longer remember her.

She had been watching the Unity people, wondering why no one came over to talk. She knew she did not smell very good, but didn't think that was the reason. With some surprise, she realized they were afraid of her. The thought made her grin.

She realized Bill had been talking to her. "I'm sorry, what was that?"

"Gaby says you haven't told the whole story yet. She says there's something more, and that I should hear it."

"Oh, that," Cirocco said, glaring at Gaby. But it had to come out soon, anyway.

"Gaea, uh ... she offered me a job, Bill."

"A job? "' He raised his eyebrows, smiled tentatively.

"A 'Wizard,' she called it. She tends to the romantic. You'd probably like her; she likes science fiction, too."

"Just what did the job entail?"

Cirocco spread her hands. "General troubleshooting nature unspecified. Whenever she had a problem I'd go there and see what I could do. There are-literally-some unruly lands down here. She could promise me limited immunity, a sort of conditional passport based on the fact that the regional brains would remember what she did to Oceanus and not dare to harm me while I traveled through them."

"That's all? Sounds like a chancy proposition."

"It is. She offered to educate me, to fill my head with a tremendous amount of lore in the same way I was taught to sing Titanide. I'd have her support and backing. Nothing magic, but I'd be able to cause the ground to open up and swallow my enemies."

"That I can believe."

"I took the job, Bill."

"I thought so."

He looked down at his hands, seemed very tired when he looked up again.

"You're really something else, you know?" He said it with a trace of bitterness, but was taking the news better than Cirocco had expected. "It sounds like the kind of job that would appeal to you. The left hand of God." He shook his head. "Damn, this is really a hell of a place. You may not like it, you know. I was just starting to, when all the Titanides disappeared. That shook me, Rocky. It really seemed like someone had just put away his toys because he was tired of the game. How do you know you won't be one of her toys? You've been your own boss; do you think you still will be?"

"I honestly don't know. I just couldn't face going back to Earth, back to a desk job and the lecture tour. You've seen over- the-hill astronauts. I could land a job on the board of directors of some big corporation." She laughed, and Bill smiled slightly.

"That's what I'm going to do," he said. "But I'm hoping for the research department. Leaving space doesn't scare me. You know I'll be going back, don't you?"