Part 21 (1/2)
”Creamer?”
”No, creamer's okay.”
Ma.s.sey added the items to his list. ”Seeing Liz tonight?” he asked casually as he looked over the sheet, trying to remember anything he might have missed.
”Yep. I'm not sure what we're up to, though. There's dancing at the Amazon, which I like, but a concert in Jefferson Hall that she wants to see. Probably we'll end up doing both.”
”What's the concert?”
”Something cla.s.sical. Brahms and Mahler, I think.”
”Oh. Who was it who said that Wagner's music isn't really as bad as it sounds?”
”Not sure. Oscar Wilde?”
”Could be. I thought it was Shaw.”
”I'd go with either.”
”Yes, it's-” The phone on Ma.s.sey's desk interrupted. He touched a key to accept. To his surprise, the screen activated for a video call; most lines were being restricted to voice in order to conserve bandwidth. It showed a man's face Ma.s.sey didn't recognize.
”h.e.l.lo. Ma.s.sey here,” he acknowledged.
”Gerold Ma.s.sey, the research psychologist?”
”Yes.”
”NASO headquarters, Was.h.i.+ngton. I have a message for you that's come in via the ground station net from Genoa Base, t.i.tan. Can you take it now?”
”Oh . . . yes, of course.” Ma.s.sey's eyebrows rose in surprise. Probably it was something from Zambendorf again; Ma.s.sey hadn't heard from him since the follow-up messages confirming the success of the ruse they had staged from theOrion. Ma.s.sey still wasn't sure how he had ended up as an accomplice to a rogue like Zambendorf, whom he had originally set out with the aim of exposing. But the truth of it was that he had enjoyed himself. Psychologist or not, he still wasn't completely sure why.
”Okay to receive,” he said, tapping in a code.
”Sending it through.”
The caller was not Zambendorf. The face of the NASO operator was replaced by a peculiar,cartoonlike sketch of a cube with legs and a face. A curiously singsong voice that Ma.s.sey didn't recognize said, ”h.e.l.lo, Gerold Ma.s.sey, master of the ancient occult lores of Earth, adept of the higher powers that transcend s.p.a.ce and time.”
Ma.s.sey blinked and turned in his chair to face the screen fully. At the other desk Vernon sat back, staring in astonishment. Ma.s.sey shrugged and sent him a frowning glance. The message continued: ”My name is GENIUS. I am an artificial machine-resident intelligence located in one of the t.i.tan processing complexes. I am originally from a planet that the humans call Asteria, which was the world of the Asterians. Asterians built the machines that came to t.i.tan.”
”It's some gag of Karl's,” Vernon muttered.
Ma.s.sey waved a hand. ”Shh.”
”I have spoken with the master Zambendorf of ancient Terran arts but ask proof. Zambendorf says that you are able to read numbers by mind instantly in time. This I wish to test. Send a reply that you agree. If agreed, Zambendorf will send numbers at four o'clock P.M. precisely, your time. You are to return your received values via the NASO link. I will compare them.”
”What in h.e.l.l is he up to out there now?” Ma.s.sey mused, shaking his head.
GENIUS went on. ”With your reply, send surrounding views outside the window. Also a filter shot of the sun's disk with a foreground object for reference. Thank you very much. Over and out.” The cube vanished.
For several seconds Ma.s.sey and Vernon stared at each other, speechless. ”This isn't real . . . Not even with Karl,” Ma.s.sey said finally, still in a daze.
Vernon shook his head. ”Is it genuine?”
”How would I know?”
”It's a repeat of the stunt that we did from theOrion. ”
”I do know that much, thank you, Vernon.”
They stared at each other for a while longer, baffled.
At last Vernon spoke. ”It has to be some crazy stunt of Karl's. If it's really an alien AI, wouldn't Karl have sent something through ahead to at least warn us? But instead it happens like this. The answer's gotta be that it's something cryptic, and we're supposed to read something into it.” Ma.s.sey contemplated the far wall of the room and didn't reply. Vernon waited, s.h.i.+fted restlessly in his seat, then threw out a hand. ”Why the shots out the window? And what's all this business about the sun?”
”If itis really an AI, it could be monitoring the communications,” Ma.s.sey said at last. ”So Karl let it make its own introductions and tell us the arrangement itself. He didn't want to be seen communicating with us himself in any way.”
Vernon downs.h.i.+fted a gear, seeing the point. ”So no one could say he'd prearranged anything through a code.”
”Exactly.”
”Um . . . So what in h.e.l.l's going on, Gerry?”
Ma.s.sey shrugged. ”Karl obviously wants to repeat hisOrion act. Presumably it's for the benefit of this . . . GENIUS. And for some reason it's crucial that it be accepted as genuine.”
Vernon rubbed his brow. It added up, but it didn't make any sense. ”Do alien AIs care about things like that?” he said.
”I don't know. I've never asked one.”
There was another long silence.
”This stuff with the window and the sun could be to prove that we're sending from Earth,” Vernon said. ”The subtended angle would give our distance from it.”
Ma.s.sey thought about that, then nodded. It made good sense. He put his hands on his desk and stood up. ”Well, we have to a.s.sume that itis genuine,” he said briskly. ”The reasons why will doubtless make themselves clearer in due course. But in the meantime, let's get started. We've got work to do.”
40.
This was going to have to be Zambendorf's star performance. The voiced recitations of the numbers from one to a hundred that Ma.s.sey had sent through earlier were still available as recordings on t.i.tan. This time, however, Zambendorf decided to let Dave Crookes's signals experts take care of merging them with the incoming message from Earth instead of having it improvised by Joe Fellburg.
Rather than involve equipment on the surface as Fellburg had done-which GENIUS might be monitoring-Crookes and his team shuttled up to the orbitings.h.i.+rasagi to use its processors for their preparations. They set up a separate link, off-line from the regular datacomms complex at Genoa Base, to beam the selected numbers up to thes.h.i.+rasagi, where they would be merged with Ma.s.sey's incoming transmission; then the combined signal would be redirected to the NASO relay satellite handling the Earthlink. The resultant beam would come in at Genoa Base to receiving equipment that GENIUS would control. Everything depended on GENIUS accepting the idea that the whole package had come from Earth. From what Zambendorf had seen of them, the Asterians wouldn't have bought it. Graham Spearman hadn't, either, and had figured out the correct answer after a little thought. But a computer programmed to deduce necessary conclusions from what it was presented with as fact just might.
Local time at Genoa Base was synchronized to Greenwich Mean Time, which was five hours ahead of the U.S. East Coast. At nine in the evening locally, therefore, Zambendorf sat back in a chair in the communication room, closed his eyes, and went through a rigmarole of concentrating and tuning in to ”vibrations.”
”Very well. I'm in contact with Ma.s.sey now,” he announced in a dreamy voice. ”What's the first number?”
GENIUS generated two random ten-digit numbers, multiplied them together, and truncated the result to two places.86 appeared on the screen before Zambendorf.
Zambendorf stared at it, closed his eyes for a few seconds, then opened them again and nodded.