Alas, only the two inner rings remain. Despite violent protests by ecologists and cosmologists, the Better Building Conglomerate had been permitted to harvest the third outer ring for some kind of better building aggregate. There was a housing crisis and BBC paid enormous taxes. One infuriated astronomer had been euthanized for burning the chairman of the board.
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 tunnel to Mine City we were searched over and over again for combustibles, quasicombustibles, ferrous metals, anything that could produce a spark or a flame. Titan lived on a perpetual brink of disaster. One spark outside and the methane atmosphere could turn the moon into a nova.
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 cannot understand why you did not receive my message from Ceres. Kindly contact Directeur Poulos Poulos to verify.” I also tipped in a lordly manner and did what it had taken me years to learn; behaved quietly as though I took it for granted that my orders would be obeyed. They obey.
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.
After I’d signed, grunted, bullied, and sweeted him into obedience it was hell getting Hic into the extra thermal I’d packed out, but he couldn’t come in out of the methane naked. Questions would be asked. I got him sacked at last and back we schlepped to Mine City, Colossus of Compost, Mother of Methane, Daughter of Destruction, with the two-ringed Saturn behind us. Damn Sequoya, he was right about Mankind-F. How can you fight a bod you agree with?
After a careful inspection Natoma said, “He must be shaved from top to bottom. We’ll take him back as your feebleminded brother.” She looked at me perplexedly. “Guig, how the devil did he ever get out here?”
“Stowaway, probably. A Moleman can endure months of that cold, and he ate anything that was handy.”
Between signs and sweets we managed to bathe and shave Hic-Haec-Hoc. Natoma decorated him with graffiti which made him look like an average. Hic liked Nat and was comfortable with her. I think maybe he never had a mother. On the other hand he also liked his bath. I’m sure he never had one before.
He slept on the floor of our cabin during the freighter in-jet. Only one trouble; he didn’t like any of our hamper food and the compost stench made him hungry. I couldn’t get any for him — all sealed in the freight hull — and he started eating the most lunatic things; our linen, fire extinguishers, luggage, books, playing cards. We had to keep a constant watch (he ate my watch, by the way) or he might have chewed a hole in the freighter hull.
He’d become accustomed to Titan’s methane atmosphere and didn’t like the air in the jet. Natoma took care of that by spraying insecticide up his nose. Altogether, a problem child, and he was so brute-strong that you had to be cautious with him. But Natoma handled him beautifully. I think her experiences with the Erie warriors probably gave her the expertise.
As we started our approach to Earth, Natoma gave a thank-you luncheon party for the deck officers. She used the last of our provisions and even heated some of them up, a tremendous luxury. How did she do it on a jet where there were no ignition tools? She made a bow-drill and sawed away until she got an ember going. Shredded plastic for tinder. Chunks of plastic for fuel. And then a fire in an aluminum basin. No fool she. The officers were enchanted, and so appreciative that two of them proposed and all of them made plans to smuggle us out of the spaceport with no passport problems for my idiot “brother” who’d lost his on Titan. (And no warning to the Extro network which, of course, they knew nothing about.) We would be home free.
And when we put down we discovered that we’d acquired a hitchhiker.
14
At my age you learn to accept the unknowable with grace. You may ask, then, why the difficulty in accepting the Rajah, and the ease of accepting the spacehiker? Patent. The Rajah was the answer to a fact, an explanation which I could not yet accept because an integral part was missing. The hitchhiker made its appearance from an unknowable spacewhere. Neither explanations nor motivations were involved. It was a fact which could neither be denied nor fitted into the cosmic construct. That fact had to be accepted as Ding an sich, a thing in itself.
Impossible to name its original habitat. Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto, which had not yet been visited, much less explored for indigenous fauna and flora? The asteroid belt? Perhaps a refugee from the halo of millions of comets shuttling in from space, around the sun and out again? It might even be a reject from some contrauniverse, spat into our system through a minuscule White Hole.