Babylon said, "I didn't think—I mean, it never occurred to me—"
"You didn't think I was interested in that? Or capable of it, maybe? Really, Dr. Babylon! I guess you've never been at Yerkes or the Max-Planck Institute. There's whole colonies of us back on Earth. They made us, you know. Loosened up the skull so the brain could grow, changed around our face structure and throat musculature so we could make words—I make them pretty well, don't I? They used to think we'd come in handy for getting into small places where human beings couldn't go. And we did. We came in even handier in free-fall, though. So," he said wistfully, "where I wound up was Sun One. Or one of me did. Heaven knows how many of me there are, scattered around the Galaxy—and not a girl chimp among the lot of us. Now," he said, stealing a glance at the tiny watch face almost hidden in the fur of his wrist, "I'd best go out and scout the territory. You just make yourself comfortable, Dr. Babylon. I won't be long—and then we're off!"
The lander was shaped something like an earthly garbage truck, square and equipped with hatches and endless- belt buckets to load up with whatever was at hand. It didn't matter what. All the tachyon receiver's plasma tanks needed was nuclear particles to engineer and shape into whatever elements were needed to reform the objects transmitted. The best substance was the densest, which was why the lander descended clear to the surface for solid matter instead of scooping up gases anywhere in Cuckoo's atmosphere.
But the lander was a great deal bigger than any earthly garbage truck. Jen Babylon saw it through a port as they crept furtively through the empty corridors, and he decided it had to be a hundred meters in length, more than half of that in its other dimensions. They did not enter the main cargo section; there was a small built-in control section at one end, like the cab on a truck, and that was their destination.
Ben Pertin was waiting for them as they arrived, and sprang forward to grasp Babylon's hand. "You know," he confessed, "I was beginning to think that I'd dreamed you being here—wishful thinking, you know! I've had so much of it these years—but it's true, you're here. And just in time!"
"In time for what?"
Pertin looked surprised. He pulled at one of his greasy pigtails in exasperation. "Why, to go and get some language samples, of course, and bring them back for processing."
"Processing how? With what? In Boston I had a ten- million-dollar lab—what do I do here?"
Pertin said irritably, "Oh, hell, Jen, we have equipment! Pmals and integrators—we've got the farlink computer that taps into almost anything in the Galaxy, although I admit it's hard to get time on it. Anyway, you can always tachtran data back to yourself in Boston, you know!"
"But—"
"Now, that's enough 'but,' Jen!" Pertin snarled. "We don't have time to argue. This thing's going to take off in about five minutes. It's under robot control, but Doc's tinkered with the programing. It will bring us right down to where the other party was lost—"
"Hey," said Babylon. " 'Lost'? What do you mean, lost?"
"Oh, that's all right," Pertin said reassuringly. "We didn't know what we were up against- that time. Now we're warned. We'll be okay, Jen."
"You're sure of that?" Babylon demanded.
Pertin hesitated, then grinned weakly. "How can you be really sure of anything?" he asked. "We've got a real good chance, though, and of course if worse comes to worst we all just hop in the tachyon transmitter and we're right back here in the orbiter. Now, look, there isn't much time. This is a robot lander, and it uses more G-forces than most of them, so you'll have to strap yourself in. Doc? Help him out, will you?" He was fastening straps around himself as he spoke. "Next time you go down," he said, crisscrossing webbing across his chest, "you'll go de luxe. We've got landers that'll let you down easy as a nesting dove—have to, you know, so we can fly the autochthones around. They're built so flimsily that a good sneeze will wreck them. Not much gravity on the surface of Cuckoo, you know."
He rambled on, while the chimpanzee secured Babylon's harness and sprang into a niche of his own. Pertin didn't bother to fasten himself; evidently he had enough confidence in those simian arms to dispense with assistance. And then they waited.
Pertin said, with a note of alarm, "Hey, we should have left before this. Doc? Did you screw the program up?"
"Not a chance, Ben Line! You know me better than that!" the ape protested.
"Then what the devil's holding us up? I'd better take a look myself." And, aggrieved, Pertin began to unsnap his harness.
Before he got out, Doc Chimp flung himself across the room to the door. "Wait," he snapped, his monkey face contorted in worry. "Somebody's coming!"
Somebody was. Now even Jen Babylon could hear the sound from outside, faint, staccato hissing like malfunctioning air brakes.
"It's a damn Scorpian," Pertin whispered, his face woebegone. "We've had it!"
A discolored metal cube sailed in through the door and halted itself in midair with a rush of steam. Metallic optics tilted themselves toward Jen Babylon, and a drumroll of sound struck his ears. Babylon recognized it as language, but it was not one of the galactic tongues he knew. Doc Chimp came to the rescue. "Here, take my Pmal," he said. "Didn't think you'd need one for this, but—" He shrugged.
The robot rattled peremptorily again, and the Pmal translator echoed in Babylon's ear: "Jen Babylon. You were notified. You were not to come to Cuckoo. The consequences are grave."
The words had an eerie familiarity for Babylon: of course, it was the same message he had received on Earth. Perhaps even the same robot. "What are you going to do?" he asked apprehensively.
"I am going to take action," the robot thundered. "Since you would not remain on your foul damp planet, events must take their course. I propose to join you in this expedition to discover for myself the nature of this wrecked spaceship. Then we will see."
"We'll see that you're going to blow Cuckoo up!" Pertin flared defiantly.
"That is one of the available options," the robot acknowledged. "It is strange and worrisome. It presents a threat to our orderly existence, and that cannot be permitted. But that decision has not yet been reached."
"I suppose you're going to try to prevent us from going there now," Pertin said. "Well, you won't get away with it!"
"I have no such intention," the robot declared. "I have merely revised the programing to allow a short delay. I suggest you frail organics restrain yourselves; this lander will boost within fifty-five seconds 1"
FIVE
As the robot lander made its occasional course corrections, it spun lazily sometimes this way, sometimes that. The port by Jen Babylon's head sometimes showed the great sweep of black, oppressive nothingness that was the external sky, broken only by the distant spiral glitter of the Galaxy that contained his home. Then there was a shudder and a slow swing, and he was looking directly down on the vast bulk of Cuckoo. It did not grow as they approached. It had seemed endless even in the first minutes; but as they descended the scale enlarged. Mottled blurs resolved themselves into mountain ranges and seas. Pale-hued splotches became clouds—cloud banks hundreds of thousands of kilometers across, many of them, with tints in every frequency of the spectrum of visible light. From where he clung behind Babylon's neck, Doc Chimp chattered: "Impressive, isn't it? A world with air and seas and land— twenty thousand times the diameter of Earth! Half a billion times the area!"
"Give it a rest, Doc," Ben Pertin begged, staring at the instrument panel. "We're about to enter the atmosphere— anyway, Jen's head is bulged out with facts and figures by now. We don't want it blowing up."