Now it was Poole's turn to be embarrassed.
'Stupid of me,' he apologized. 'Must have mistaken you for someone else. Have a good day.'
He was glad of the encounter, and was pleased to know that Danil was back in normal society. Whether his original crime had been axe-murders or overdue library books should no longer be the concern of his one-time employer; the account had been settled, the books closed. Although Poole sometimes missed the cops-and-robbers dramas he had often enjoyed in his youth, he had grown to accept the current wisdom: excessive interest in pathological behaviour was itself pathological.
With the help of Miss Pringle, Mk III, Poole had been able to schedule his life so that there were even occasional blank moments when he could relax and set his Braincap on Random Search, scanning his areas of interest. Outside his immediate family, his chief concerns were still among the moons of Jupiter/Lucifer, not least because he was recognized as the leading expert on the subject, and a permanent member of the Europa Committee.
This had been set up almost a thousand years ago, to consider what, if anything, could and should be done about the mysterious satellite. Over the centuries, it had accumulated a vast amount of information, going all the way back to the Voyager flybys of 1979 and the first detailed surveys from the orbiting Galileo spacecraft of 1996.
Like most long-lived organizations, the Europa Committee had become slowly fossilized, and now met only when there was some new development. It had woken up with a start after Halman's reappearance, and appointed an energetic new chairperson whose first act had been to co-opt Poole.
Though there was little that he could contribute that was not already recorded, Poole was very happy to be on the Committee. It was obviously his duty to make himself available, and it also gave him an official position he would otherwise have lacked. Previously his status was what had once been called a 'national treasure', which he found faintly embarrassing. Although he was glad to be supported in luxury by a world wealthier than all the dreams of war-ravaged earlier ages could have imagined, he felt the need to justify his existence.
He also felt another need, which he seldom articulated even to himself. Halman had spoken to him, if only briefly, at their strange encounter two decades ago. Poole was certain that, if he wished, Halman could easily do so again. Were all human contacts no longer of interest to him? He hoped that was not the case; yet that might be one explanation of his silence.
He was frequently in touch with Theodore Khan as active and acerbic as ever, and now the Europa Committee's representative on Ganymede. Ever since Poole had returned to Earth, Ted had been trying in vain to open a channel of communication with Bowman. He could not understand why long lists of important questions on subjects of vital philosophical and historic interest received not even brief acknowledgements.
'Does the Monolith keep your friend Halman so busy that he can't talk to me?' he complained to Poole. 'What does he do with his time, anyway?'
It was a very reasonable question; and the answer came, like a thunderbolt out of a cloudless sky, from Bowman himself as a perfectly commonplace vidphone call.
33 Contact
'Hello, Frank. This is Dave. I have a very important message for you. I assume that you are now in your suite in Africa Tower. If you are there, please identify yourself by giving the name of our instructor in orbital mechanics. I will wait for sixty seconds, and if there is no reply will try again in exactly one hour.'
That minute was hardly long enough for Poole to recover from the shock. He felt a brief surge of delight, as well as astonishment, before another emotion took over. Glad though he was to hear from Bowman again, that phrase 'a very important message' sounded distinctly ominous.
At least it was fortunate, Poole told himself, that he's asked for one of the few names I can remember. Yet who could forget a Scot with a Glasgow accent so thick it had taken them a week to master it? But he had been a brilliant lecturer once you understood what he was saying.
'Dr Gregory McVitty.'
'Accepted. Now please switch on your Braincap receiver. It will take three minutes to download this message. Do not attempt to monitor: I am using ten-to-one compression. I will wait two minutes before starting.'
How is he managing to do this? Poole wondered. Jupiter/Lucifer was now over fifty light-minutes away, so this message must have left almost an hour ago. It must have been sent with an intelligent agent in a properly addressed package on the Ganymede-Earth beam but that would have been a trivial feat to Halman, with the resources he had apparently been able to tap inside the Monolith.
The indicator light on the Brainbox was flickering. The message was coming through.
At the compression Halman was using, it would take half an hour for Poole to absorb the message in real-time. But he needed only ten minutes to know that his peaceful life-style had come to an abrupt end
34 Judgement
In a world of universal and instantaneous communication, it was very difficult to keep secrets. This was a matter, Poole decided immediately, for face-to-face discussion.
The Europa Committee had grumbled, but all its members had assembled in his apartment. There were seven of them the lucky number, doubtless suggested by the phases of the Moon, that had always fascinated Mankind. It was the first time Poole had met three of the Committee's members, though by now he knew them all more thoroughly than he could possibly have done in a pre-Braincapped lifetime.
'Chairperson Oconnor, members of the Committee I'd like to say a few words only a few, I promise! before you download the message I've received from Europa. And this is something I prefer to do verbally; that's more natural for me I'm afraid I'll never be quite at ease with direct mental transfer.'
'As you all know, Dave Bowman and Hal have been stored as emulations in the Monolith on Europa. Apparently it never discards a tool it once found useful, and from time to time it activates Halman, to monitor our affairs when they begin to concern it. As I suspect my arrival may have done though perhaps I flatter myself.'
'But Halman isn't just a passive tool. The Dave component still retains something of its human origins even emotions. And because we were trained together shared almost everything for years he apparently finds it much easier to communicate with me than with anyone else. I would like to think he enjoys doing it, but perhaps that's too strong a word.'
'He's also curious inquisitive and perhaps a little resentful of the way he's been collected, like a specimen of wildlife. Though that's probably what we are, from the viewpoint of the intelligence that created the Monolith.'
'And where is that intelligence now? Halman apparently knows the answer, and it's a chilling one.'
'As we always suspected, the Monolith is part of a galactic network of some kind. And the nearest node the Monolith's controller, or immediate superior is 450 light-years away.'
'Much too close for comfort! This means that the report on us and our affairs that was transmitted early in the twenty-first century was received half a millennium ago. If the Monolith's let's say Supervisor replied at once, any further instructions should be arriving just about now.'
'And that's exactly what seems to be happening. During the last few days, the Monolith has been receiving a continuous string of messages, and has been setting up new programs, presumably in accordance with these.'
'Unfortunately, Halman can only make guesses about the nature of those instructions. As you'll gather when you've downloaded this tablet, he has some limited access to many of the Monolith's circuits and memory banks, and can even carry on a kind of dialogue with it. If that's the right word since you need two people for that! I still can't really grasp the idea that the Monolith, for all its powers, doesn't possess consciousness doesn't even know that it exists!'