Read Ebook: The towers of Titan by Bova Ben Emshwiller Ed Illustrator

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Ebook has 330 lines and 12873 words, and 7 pages

Illustrator: Ed Emshwiller

Release date: December 5, 2023

Original publication: New York, NY: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, 1961

The TOWERS of TITAN

Illustrated by EMSH

The landing port at Titan had not changed much in five years.

The ship settled down on the scarred blast shield, beside the same trio of squat square buildings, and quickly disgorged its scanty quota of cargo and a lone passenger into the flexible tube that linked the loading hatch with the main building.

As soon as the tube was disconnected, the ship screamed off through the murky atmosphere, seemingly glad to get away from Titan and head back to the more comfortable and settled parts of the Solar System.

The passenger, Dr. Sidney Lee, stood by the window-wall of the main building and watched the ship disappear into the dark sky. He was tall and lean, seemingly all bone and tendon, with graying dark hair and faintly haunted eyes set deep into a rough-hewn, weather-worn face. When the ship was nothing more than another star overhead, he turned and looked at the place.

Lee walked over to the papers processor and pushed his credentials into its slot. After a few wheezes and clanks its green light flickered on and the papers fell into the "return" bin properly stamped and approved. At the same time, his lone bag slid along a conveyor belt and onto the pickup table.

With his credentials back inside his jacket and the bag in hand, Lee looked toward the two clerks. They were studiously avoiding his eyes, searching intently through some schedules that they kept on hand for just such emergencies.

"Sid! Hi!"

He turned at the sound of her voice.

"I'm sorry to be late," she said, hurrying across the big empty room, "but we never know when the Ancient Mariner is going to arrive. It's not a matter of whether it'll be on schedule or not ... just a question of guessing how late it's going to be."

He smiled at her. "Hello, Elaine. It's good to see you again."

She hadn't changed either, and this time he was glad of it. She was still slim and young, her hair a reddish gold, her eyes gray-green. She was dressed with typical casualness: comfortable boots, dark slacks and sweater that outlined her trim figure, and a light green scarf for a touch of color. Outwardly, at least, she seemed cheerful.

"Come on," she said, "I've got a buggy in the parking area. I wanted to get a few more of the old gang to come out and meet you, but there's not many of them left, and they're all pretty busy...." Her voice trailed off.

"I didn't expect a brass band and a key to the city," Lee said. Then he added, "You're pretty gay for a female scientist," he said.

"I'm always gay when I meet old friends again."

He said nothing.

"I wish you'd cheer up," Elaine coaxed.

"I will; give me time."

They entered the parking building and got into a bubble-top car. Elaine gunned it to life, and they slid out of the near-empty parking area, through the pressure doors, and into Titan's unbreathable atmosphere.

"Have you been here straight through since I left?" he asked.

"No. I spent about eighteen months on Venus, slushing through the swamps in search of ruins that couldn't possibly have survived a century in that climate."

"And?"

"That's it," she said, shrugging. "Something ventured but nothing found. So I asked to be returned here."

"It's got you, too, hasn't it?"

Her face became serious for the first time. "Certainly it's got me. It's got all of us. Do you think we'd stay out here otherwise?"

"Anything new turned up?"

Elaine shook her head. "Nothing you haven't seen in the reports. Which means nothing, really."

He lapsed into silence and watched the frozen landscape slide by as the car raced along Titan's only highway. They crossed a bleak, frozen plain, bluish-white in the dim twilight from the distant Sun. The stars twinkling in the dark sky overhead made the barren scene look even colder. The road climbed across a row of hills, and as they made a turn around the highest bluff, Saturn came into view.

No matter how many times Lee had seen the planet, it had always thrilled him. Now, five years later, it was still an experience. Three times larger than the full moon as seen from Earth, daubed with brilliant yellow, red and orange stripes, and circled about its middle by the impossible-looking rings, Saturn hung fat and low on the horizon, casting shadows stronger than the Sun's.

"It's a compensation, isn't it?" Elaine said.

Soon they were down on the plain again, but now it was a shattered, broken expanse of jagged rock and ice. A greenish methane cloud drifted over the face of Saturn, and Lee finally turned his eyes away.

"You can see the towers from here," Elaine reminded him.

"I know," he said. He could not make out any detail, but there they were, just as they had been for--how long? Ten thousand years? A hundred thousand? Five towers jutting straight up from the bleak plain, clustered around a central, taller tower.

"Is the machinery still running?" he asked, pointlessly.

"Of course."

"There was some talk a year or so back about trying to stop it."

She shook her head. "They wouldn't dare."

The machine had been discovered more than ten years earlier, when the first Earthmen landed on Titan. Saturn's largest satellite was devoid of life, a world of dark and cold, of hydrogen atmosphere and methane clouds, of ammonia seas and ice mountains.

And there in the midst of it all stood the machine: a brazenly unconcealed cluster of mammoth buildings, with its five stately towers surmounted by the soaring central sixth. And within, row upon row of unexplained machinery, fully automated, operating continuously in perfect order.

Alien.

The discoverers soon concluded that the machine was unbelievably old, older than the Egyptian pyramids, perhaps even older than the Martian canals. And it was running smoothly. For untold centuries, for uncounted millennia, it had continued to operate efficiently, tended only by automatic machines.

A clear challenge to the space-rovers from Earth. Who made this machine? How does it work? Why is it here? What is it doing?

As soon as its discovery was made known, the machine was visited by a steady stream of Earthmen--physicists, archeologists, engineers of a thousand different specialties, and soldiers, politicians, men who were now forced to believe the inevitable. The machine was photographed, x-rayed, blueprinted, analyzed spectroscopically, philosophically, even theologically.

Who built it? How does it work? Why is it here?

No answers.

Dr. Sidney Lee, an anthropologist who had made a name for himself by unraveling the history of the ruins on Mars, arrived on Titan full of optimism and enthusiasm. Twenty months later he was taken from Titan to a psychomedical center on Earth--completely irrational and suffering from man's oldest dread: the unknown.

Returning to the underground center that had grown over the years near the machine, to house the living and working quarters of the tiny scientific community on Titan, was something like returning home for Dr. Lee. Someone had seen to it that he got his old quarters back again. Most of the people he had known from five years ago had gone elsewhere, but a few remained.

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