The Computer Connection

Natoma came along, not because I needed her for Hic-Haec-Hoc but because you don’t shoot Saturn in a week, it’s more like a month and there’s a limit. The standby wasn’t too boring. We were entertained by the broadcast of Ice-O-Rama, a penguin sitcom. Zitzcom has just discovered that his daughter, Ritzcom, has accepted an invitation from Witzcom to spend the night with him on an iceberg. There are hilarious complications. The antarctic night lasts three months, and Zitzcom doesn’t know that it was Ritzcom’s twin sister, Titzcom, who accepted the invitation in a snit because her beau, Fitzcom, didn’t invite her to the penguin slide-in. Oh, bbls of laughs.

I’d warned Nat that Titan was a mining moon (they quarry the organic layer and ship it out in frozen blocks) but she didn’t really understand until we’d boarded the freighter and located our private cabin for two. That was the bribe. No passengers; no crew; just deck officers and no doubt a couple of them had been willing to doss anywhere for a substantial cut. The freighter stank. The compost it shipped in-jet left a permanent aroma of the grave.

I’d been smart enough to be prepared; a huge wicker hamper with enough deli for months, clean linen and blankets. A freighter to Saturn is no luxury jet, and although there’s a captain there’s no such thing as a captain’s table, a steward, formal meals. It’s all catch-as-catch-can, with the staff helping itself to the frozen food and drink stocks whenever so inclined. You merely endure and survive at the minimum, which is another reason why Titan will always remain a mining moon.

We stayed in our tiny cabin a lot, talking, talking, talking. So much to catch up on. Natoma grieved with me over Poulos and tried to cheer me up. She wanted to know all about CNA-Drone. I told her all I could about DNA-Cloning, which wasn’t much, but then the technique isn’t much, still in its infancy. Then she insisted on knowing why I had deep depressions, and what big L was. I had to tell her all about Lepcer.

“You must never, never, never run another physical risk,” she said severely.

“Not even for your sake?”

“Most of all never for my sake. There will be no big L this time. I know it because I have second sight, all the Guess women do, but if you ever run a risk again I’ll have you roasted over a slow fire. You’ll wish you had the big L then.”

“Yes’m,” I said meekly. “That linear explosion wasn’t my fault, you know.”

She pronounced a Cherokee word that would probably have shocked our brother.

Nat had been boning up, practicing reading XX. “Titan is the largest of Saturn’s satellites,” she reported. “It is seven hundred and fifty-nine thousand miles distant from Saturn. Its sidereal period is — I don’t know what that is.”

“How long it takes to go around.”

“Is fifteen dot nine four five days. The inclination of its orbit to the ring plane — I looked those words up — is twenty apostrophe. Its—”

“No, darling. That’s the astronomer’s symbol for minutes. They measure space in degrees, minutes, and seconds. A degree is a little zero. A minute is an apostrophe, and a second is a quotation mark.”

“Thank you. Its diameter is three thousand five hundred and fifty miles, and it was discovered by — by — I don’t know how to pronounce this name. It’s not in the dictionary.”

“Let me see. Oh. Not many people do. Huyghens. Hi-genz. He was a very great Dutch scientist a long time ago. Thank you, love. Now I know all about Titan.”

She wanted to ask questions but I promised to take her to what used to be Holland and show her all the sights that still remained, including Hi-genz’ birthplace, if it still existed. Saturn was quite a sight itself as it came looming up. Nat had already charmed her way onto the flight deck and would spend hours staring at the cold, belted, spotted disk and the widening rings inclined ten little zero.

Alas, only the two i

If you think the inspection was tough when we embarked you should have seen what we went through when we arrived. As we came down the long tu

The city was freaky. This is how it was born: The prospectors quarried out the frozen marsh compost to a depth of fifty feet. When it extended for a square mile, the crater was roofed over with plastic by ORGASM (The Organic Systems and Manure Company, Ltd). Narrow streets were blocked out in a rectilinear pattern, houses were built, and there was your mining town on your explosive mining moon. It was dark; the sun was no more than a brilliant arc light, but it did receive a lovely thermal glow from Mama Saturn. It was damp to eliminate any chances of electrostatic sparks. It stank of halogens and methane and the compost choppers.

No hotel, of course, but a residence for visiting clients with clout. I bluffed our way in. “I am Edward Curzon of I.G. Farben, and I ca

I found Hic easily enough on the fourth day. I had a nerve-fire finder and all I had to do was move out beyond the quarrymen in each quarter — checking production techniques, you understand — and take a con. On Day Four the finder pointed and I followed it, hopping and galloping, for about ten miles until I came to a compost hut, rather like the sod houses the primitive pioneers used to build for themselves in nineteenth-century America. It was glittering with crystals of ammonia, as was all Titan. There were spectacular meteorite cracks and craters in the ice cover, and volcanic magma boiled up (“boiled” in the relative sense; Titan’s mean temperature is minus one hundred and thirty little zero Celsius) forming pools of liquid methane. Saturn was rising dramatically behind the hovel, and Hic-Haec-Hoc was crouched inside like a predator about to spring on his prey.

Now, I know the popular impression. Say “Neanderthal” to anyone and an instant image of a caveman carrying a club and dragging a lady by the hair pops into their mind. Well, the Neanderthalers couldn’t do much carrying or dragging; their thumbs were badly opposed. They were incapable of speech because of the inadequate musculature of mouth and throat. Anthropologists are still arguing about whether it was speech and the thumb that produced Homo sapiens. Certainly, Homo neanderthalensis had the equivalent cranial capacity; it just never developed. If you can read XX, look up Homo neanderthalensis and you’ll have some idea of what Hic looked like; a punch-drunk, prizefighting loser. But strong. And like most animals, he lived a life of constant terror.

I’d removed my helmet but I don’t know whether he recognized or remembered me. As No-Name said, he can’t think; but he understood my grunts and signs. I’d been farsighted enough to fill a pocket with sweets and every time he opened his mouth I popped one in, which delighted him. That’s how the Russians used to reward their trained bears.

It was one hell of a session. I could give you the signs in diagram but you wouldn’t understand them. I could give you the grunts in phonetic symbols but they would be meaningless to you. But Hic understood. It’s true that he can’t think, but only in the sense of memory and rational sequence. He can absorb and understand one idea at a time. How long it remains with him depends on how soon it’s dispossessed by survival terror. The sweets helped.