Saturn Rukh (31 page)

Sandra tried to talk to Lowereye, but it was soon obvious that what Uppereye had learned during the night had not been passed on to Lowereye. She sighed and started in over again.

“Sandra,” she said, pointing to herself.

came the reply. But instead of the rolling chord vibrating up from below in an ultrabass rumble, it came as a bass chord directly from Lowereye’s head.

“The eyes
talk!”
yelled Sandra in surprise.

“That is only logical,” replied Seichi. “We have already observed that the rukh’s body is controlled by only one eye at a time, so only one eye can use the body to speak with. It must often be necessary for the intelligence behind the other eye to be able to communicate. They have air sacs in their neck, so they certainly could have developed the necessary vibratory control over their bladder orifices needed to produce speech. The speech tones of the eyes are necessarily pitched up a few octaves from the speech tones of the body because of the smaller bladder size.”

“That’s going to make it a lot easier to talk with them,” said Sandra. “If we can get them to use eye-talk rather than body-talk, then we won’t have to always have Jeeves in the loop to hear those sounds we can’t hear with our own ears.”

“Sun come,” said Uppereye, pointing to the direction of the rising sun. “Uppereye go.”

“Wait!” said Sandra. When Uppereye didn’t halt, Sandra realized she would have to teach that word to Uppereye in the next lesson. She searched around in her memory for a phrase that contained words that Uppereye
did
know. She finally found them.

“Not go!” she blurted out, and Uppereye came back.

“There is one more thing I need to show them,” she said to Seichi. “I’m going to climb up onto the airlock platform. You two stay down here and
don’t look up. “

“What are you going to do?” asked Seichi.

“They think that humans have hard heads with one big eyeball, like they have, and tough elastic neon yellow bodies. All they’ve seen of us is the outside of our saturnsuits. I’m going to show them what a human being
really
looks like.”

“Sandra!” interjected Dan. “Don’t do it! It could be dangerous!”

“I’ll be able to hold my breath long enough for the airlock door to cycle,” said Sandra, as she climbed the rungs to the platform door.

“But someone needs to keep an eye on you in case you get into trouble in the airlock,” replied Dan in a concerned tone.

“I volunteer!” interjected Pete over the link.

“Don’t worry, Sandra,” said Chastity. “I’ll make sure that I’m the only one watching you through the airlock window.”

Once in the airlock portal, Sandra unfastened her backpack with her oxygen supply and hung it from a safety hook inside, where the umbilical could reach her helmet intake. Leaving her helmet on, she proceeded to strip in the cold and gusty Saturn morn, dropping her clothing on the door of the airlock in her haste. She had originally been thinking of pointing out the various parts of her body as she unclothed them, but the “wind chill” factor from the frequent gusts billowing through the clearing around
Sexdent
made her drop that idea. Tomorrow she would name the various body parts to Uppereye using drawings on the portable console. Now completely naked in front of the two giant staring eyes, she took a deep breath, and deliberately blinking her eyes often to help protect them from the ammonia fumes in the atmosphere, she lifted the helmet from her head, shook out her hair, and pulled on it with one hand to show its structure.

Holding the helmet aloft she quickly turned around so the eyes could see her from all sides. As she turned, she could hear and feel sonar pings from the two eyes as they looked inside her. Her pirouette finished, she dropped the helmet back on her head, turning the air supply to high as she did so, to flush the ammonia-laden Saturnian air out of the helmet. Once she could safely do so, she used her held breath to say: “Close that airlock door, Chass! It’s
cold
out here!”

Before the door could rise shut, however, an errant gust of wind whistled through the airlock and Sandra’s pink silk panties flew off the door and sailed across the clearing to land in front of Lowereye. The massive foreclaws of the giant caterpillar picked up the limp piece of underclothing. Solemnly the giant eye inspected the item, marveling at the three openings and their elastic bands. After toying with the object awhile, Lowereye realized that its whole foreclaw would fit into the larger opening, while the individual pincers would fit through the other two smaller openings. Using its other foreclaws to help, it drew the underpants snugly onto its upper left foreclaw like a rock singer pulling on a fingerless glove.

With the show over and the airlock door closed, Uppereye waved good-bye to Seichi and Dan and left. Imitating the wave with its “gloved” hand, Lowereye followed.

“Looks like a one-eyed, two-fingered Michael Jackson,” said Pete from an upper holoviewport, making sure the viewport imager got a good picture of the dressed-up alien. “I bet I can sell this to the InterRock magpage.”

“Say,” said Chastity loudly through the echoing confines of
Sexdent
as she watched Sandra get dressed through the inner airlock window. “The eyes have seen only one half of the human race. How about one of you guys imitating Sandra for the education and amusement of Peregrine’s eyes tomorrow night?”

“No way!” “Not me!” came the rapid responses from Rod and Pete.

“Just as well,” concluded Chastity with a wry smile. “It’s so chilly out there, the important bits would be all shriveled up anyway.”

~ * ~

“Disgusting!” remarked Petro as he and Petra made their way back over the feathers to their nesting niches on Petra’s keel. “The four-legged vermin were almost pleasing to the sight with their bright yellow-green skin, their large shiny eye, and the bright light they emitted from the top of their heads. But it was all false. A visual lie! Hidden under that beautiful exterior is nothing but a bluish-pink blob with hair-feather patches in strange places and two tiny squinty eyes. They look like deformed gizzard worms with legs.”

“They must realize they are ugly,” said Petra, trying to defend her newfound friends. “That is why they cover their ugly bodies with beautiful things. Look at you. Doesn’t your claw look better now that it has that shiny pink thing on it?”

“It does look nice,” Petro had to admit, rotating his panty-covered foreclaw in front of his eye.

“What a marvelous new idea,” mused Petra as she settled into her niche. “Putting things on your body to make yourself more beautiful.”

~ * ~

When the news about the successful language lessons with the obviously intelligent rukhs reached Earth, there was mixed reaction. The scientists, news channels, and the general public were thrilled that another intelligent species had been found for the human race to talk with. Within just hours, you could buy rukh tee-shirts, rukh baseball caps, and rukh-shaped gliders and balloons. Within days, the Peaceful Planet Protectors were petitioning the United Nations to put the Rukh People of Saturn under a UN protectorship, with Triple-P as its sponsor, since none of the commercial nations could be trusted. Within weeks, there were video games and animated television shows featuring battles between fleets of human-powered airplanes and dirigibles against flocks of gigantic, man-devouring rukhs.

Art Dooley, however, was very unhappy, as he watched his major investment in the mission evaporate away. “That
sinks
it,” Art said, when he first heard the news from the chief scientist of the mission team. “There’s no way we’re going to be allowed to set up meta production facilities on Saturn. Although the most suspicious greenie has to admit that full-blown meta production for the next million years won’t even begin to deplete the large stock of helium gas on Saturn, even I have to admit that it would be a very bad idea to operate unshielded nuclear reactors in the living space of friendly intelligent beings. Besides, we were planning on dropping the used reactors when we were done. That would only make it worse. After the reactors have gone down where it is hot enough, the reactors would melt, releasing volatile radioactive waste products, which would then be brought up by the next thermal column carrying the food supply for your intelligent friends. As soon as the crew makes it back home, they’ll be paid off and the Saturn meta project will be closed down.”

“I admit it is bad news for Space Unlimited,” said the chief scientist, “but it’s good news for the science community. Now that we have identified a good reason to visit Saturn, the science budget for manned deep space exploration to the planets will have to expand. Soon, we will be searching all the outer planets and moons for signs of life. Perhaps even the planetoids in the Kuiper Belt.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” said Art grimly. “Finding an intelligent species on Saturn may sound like good news to you scientists, but in reality it’s bad news for both of us. Yes, for a few years you scientists will get increased funding to send orbiters and balloon probes to Saturn to continue conversation with the rukhs—with the two-and-a-half-hour time delay between sentences that implies. But as for setting up a crewed orbital station around Saturn, forget it. Just to set it up will cost tens of billions—we know, we’ve priced it. And to keep it running will cost more billions every year. What you scientists don’t realize is that governments have to make a profit on their investments—not immediate profits, but profits sometime in the foreseeable future. Those governments that ignore the forces of the marketplace don’t survive over the long run. Look at the former Soviet Union and its flirtation with communism and state-sponsored military expansion and space exploration—it took over seventy years for the market to exert its forces, but it did. Tell me, Doctor. What is the human race going to get back from its investment of billions of dollars per year to talk to the rukhs? Do the rukhs have any advanced technology that we can use?”

“No,” replied the chief scientist. “They seem to have no technology at all. They are intelligent enough, but they haven’t had access to any materials with which to make tools.”

“You forgot to make the case that we might learn some new biology from them,” Art reminded him. “How different is their biology?”

“Since they live at the same temperature we do, they use the same carbon chemistry that we do. In fact, the information Sandra obtained using the nanoimager on some of the samples seems to indicate that they use the same DNA helix and genetic code that we do. It is now suspected that life on Saturn was seeded from spores in rocks blasted off from Earth billions of years ago.” He paused as he tried to think of
something
that would make further interaction with the rukhs worthwhile. “But... their culture and language are unique—”

“And you expect the U.S. government, or any government, to spend billions of dollars a year on ‘cultural exchanges’?” retorted Art. “I’m afraid not. Without the motivation of a commercial return from the production of meta, there will be no permanent base orbiting Saturn, and no realistic way to maintain communication with the rukhs. It looks to me like these initial conversations between the rukhs and the humans are going to lead nowhere, as soon as the beancounters controlling the government purses realize the rukhs are nothing but noble savages.”

~ * ~

“We’ve just passed the forty-ton marker in the meta tanks,” Pete announced two months later as he came in from checking out the meta factory. “Four more months and we’ll be on our way home to collect our billion.”

That night at dinner they were all talking about what they would first buy with their riches. The only one who wasn’t there was Seichi, who had taken the last nighttime shift and was starting a long Saturnday by sleeping in. Rod and Pete were arguing over which was the better sports car, a Toyota-Benz Tsunami or a Rolls-Skoda Rocket.

“You guys can keep your sports cars,” remarked Chastity. “I’m going to get me an armload of diamond bracelets and rings, and go back to Idaho and dazzle my daddy right out of his pulpit. He said I’d never amount to anything.”

“I thought you said he wasn’t speaking to you,” said Rod.

“Mom finally got up enough spunk to tell him otherwise,” Chastity replied. “Knowing Dad, the fact that I’ll soon be a billionaire probably made it easy for him to ‘forgive’ me.”

“I’m going to buy a big mansion on the Mississippi,” said Sandra dreamily. “And wait there until my colonel comes for me …” She looked coyly at Rod, who was trying to figure out what he should say in response when the voice of Jeeves boomed throughout the ship.

“EMERGENCY! REACTOR EXCEEDING THERMAL LIMIT! INITIATING SHUTDOWN!”

Rod was up the ladder in an instant, with Chastity right behind him. With the commander console gone, Rod went to the scottyboard. The console was already activated and a red warning icon blinked rapidly on the screen.

“Damn!” Rod exclaimed as his test pilot eyes scanned the rest of the screen, looking for other problems. “Just when things were going so good ...” The lights flickered as the power from the reactor failed. The console screen dimmed, then recovered. There was now a change in the icons in the power sector of the console. The icon for the prime power was now red, while the icon for the meta-powered internal backup power now had a green on in it.

“Jeeves! Wake Seichi!” he commanded. “We’ve got to get that reactor going or we’re as good as dead!”

There was a clang as a habitat hatch was shoved open and Seichi scrambled out onto the control deck in his underwear, eyes blinking as he tried to wake up. Within seconds his fingers were flying over the screen on the scottyboard as he analyzed the situation. When he turned to look at Rod, his face was grim.