In the Ocean of Night

One

Mr. Ichino paused at the entrance to the Pit. The calm murmur of technicians conversing mingled with the ding and chatter of typewriter inputs. The Pit was dark, its air stale. Hooded consoles spread dappled pools of light where men sat monitoring, checking, editing the river of information that flowed from this room, into the dancing rhythms of electrons and then out, riding electromagnetic wings to the Snark.

He noted a wall clock; twenty minutes until the meeting. Mr. Ichino sighed, willing himself to relax and not think of what lay ahead. He clasped his hands behind him in an habitual gesture and walked slowly into the Pit, letting his eyes accustom themselves to the gloom. He paused at his personal console, froze a scrap of the transmission and read:In the service of the Emperor he found life, and fought the barbarians, and beat them into submission. When the Emperor so commanded, he fought strange and evil fairy creatures, and these he conquered. Dragons he slew, and giants. He was willing to do battle with all enemies of the land, mortal or animal or creatures from another world. And he was always the victor.

He recognized the passage from the Japanese legend of Kintaro, even in this westernized form. The Snark had asked Mr. Ichino several days before for more of the ancient literature of the East, and he had brought in all the texts and translations he could find in his collection. They were now being transmitted when time allowed. Mr. Ichino wondered idly if this passage had been selected especially by a programmer, since it contained reference to “creatures from another world.” Such an action would be lamentably typical; most of the men here understood nothing of what the Snark wished to know.

Mr. Ichino tapped his front teeth with a finger, thinking. The square, stylized yellow tape squatted against the green of the tube, a totally unfit medium for the delicate thread of a fairy tale. He wondered how it would be read—was read, by now—by a thing of copper and germanium, circling Venus. All this—the quiet intensity of the Pit, the compressed minutes he had lived through for months now, the unbalanced feel of what he was doing— seemed parts of a jumbled puzzle. If he could have but a few days to sort it out, to fathom what being could see so quickly to the core of his personal experience, and extract it—

He moved on. A technician nodded, an engineer saluted silently. Word would spread that the Old Man was in the Pit for his daily visit; the men would be a trifle more alert.

Mr. Ichino came to a large graphics tank and studied the intricate work being done inside it by the computer. He recognized the print at once: Nude in the Sunlight, Renoir, painted 1875 or 1876; Mr. Ichino had selected the painting only two days before.

Light, filtered to a blue-green, cast streaks across the breasts and arms of the naked girl, strangely altering the illuminating red glow of the skin that was Renoir’s unmistakable signature. The girl gazed pensively downward, caught as she grasped at some ill-defined cloth. Mr. Ichino looked at her for a long moment, savoring the ambiguity of her expression with a wistful romanticism he knew as an old friend; he had been a bachelor all his life.

And what would the Snark make of it? Mr. Ichino did not venture to guess. It had responded well to Luncheon of the Boating Party and asked for more; perhaps it mis-took them for a sort of photograph, despite his explanation of the uses men made of painting.

He shook his head as he watched the computer carefully breaking the picture down into tiny squares of color. The Snark spoke very little; many of Mr. Ichino’s ideas about it were deductions. Still, there was something about the pattern of requests the Snark made—

“Anything you would like to see especially, sir?” a technician said at his elbow.

“No, no, everything seems to be going well,” Mr. Ichino said softly, startled out of his contemplation. He waved the man away.

Other consoles flickered as the men in the Pit transmitted data to the Snark. At the moment they were working their way through a fresh edition of an encyclopedia, he recalled. Simply radioing the material would have been simple, but the men he supervised were charged with editing each line that found its way into code. The President had accepted the recommendation of the Executive Committee that no detailed scientific or technical information be given the Snark—the Pit was quickly built to ensure it.

Most of the consoles were operating with Mr. Ichino’s own Code 4, a specially designed vocabulary and matrix of symbols that afforded high information density in each transmission to the Snark. The Executive Committee had searched Mr. Ichino out in the days following first contact, desperately trying to find a cryptologist who had enough experience with high flux signaling. Code 4 had been relatively simple to lay out, since it drew upon the codes Mr. Ichino had already developed for scrambled transmissions to Hipparchus Base on the moon. It was a simple, flexible code that seemed fairly secure from the Russians and Chinese and whoever else was listening in, but of course it had limited range. It soon became inadequate for the questions the Snark asked; past that point, only photographs and a wider vocabulary would suffice.

Because security was tight, many of the encoders and technicians were not told about the Snark; they thought they were working on something related to Hipparchus Base. So it fell to Mr. Ichino to speak to the Snark. Another cryptologist, John Williams, was brought in to ease the strain. Mr. Ichino had little contact with him, since he managed the other half of their round-the-clock schedule. The Snark never slept.

But Williams would be at the meeting, Mr. Ichino reminded himself. He stopped amid the comforting buzz of the Pit and made a quick survey of the remaining consoles. Images flickered there: a three-masted schooner in outline; stiff figures modeling sixteenth-century clothes; clouds layered over a boiling ocean. A river of information, shoveled at the Snark, to correlate as it liked.

He turned and made his way down a line of swivel chairs to the doorway, where he was passed by a guard. As he emerged into a bright corridor, he reached involuntarily for the lump in his jacket pocket and brought it out: a rubbing stone. He kneaded it with his right hand, feeling the smooth cool textures and focusing on them, calming himself by lifelong habit.

He walked. Mr. Ichino felt out of place in these garish crisp corridors, transfixed by the plastiform walls, the thin partitions, clatter of typewriters, distant whisper of air conditioning. He should be in a university by now, he thought, spending patient hours in a cloister far back in shadowed library stacks, peering into nuances of information theory. He was aging; the higher he rose, the more abrasive the men he dealt with, the more subtle their methods of combat. He was not made for this game.

But he played; he always had. For love of the crystalline mathematical puzzles he found in cryptography, for an avenue, an escape—it had, after all, brought him from an immigrant family in smalltown Oregon on to Berkeley, to Washington, and now finally to Pasadena. To meet the Snark. For that, the journey had been worth it.

He passed by another gray guard and into the conference room. No one there; he was early. He padded softly over thick carpets to the table and sat down. Mr. Ichino’s notes were in order, but he looked at them without focusing on the individual words. Secretaries came and went, placing yellow scratch pads and pens before each chair. An urn of coffee was wheeled in and set in a corner. A slight hollow pop disturbed Mr. Ichino’s muzzy meditations; it was a test of the pickup microphones inlaid at regular spacings around the conference table.

A secretary gave him the agenda and he studied it. There was only a list of attendees, no hint of the meeting’s purpose. Mr. Ichino pursed his lips as he read the names; there would be men here whom he knew only as distant figures in the news magazines.

All because of a vessel many millions of kilometers away. It seemed mildly ironic, considering the immediate and serious problems of the administration in Washington. But Mr. Ichino did not dwell on politics. His father had learned a stringent lesson of noninvolvement in Japan and made sure his son followed his example. From his earliest days of adolescence Mr. Ichino remembered his reluctance to join the poetry and language clubs in high school, because he felt the sharing of the tenuous emotions these things brought him, the nuances they called up, could not be a public thing. To write about them, perhaps—that was possible. But how to describe haiku except with another poem? To use anything more—slabs of words, sentences of explanation without grace or lightness of touch—was to crush the butterfly beneath a muddy boot.

He did finally summon up the sheer bravery to join the poetry club—though not French Studies, the other possibility—and found in it nothing to fear. Girls read their own stilted lines in high, nervous voices and sat down to beamed approval, followed by mild criticism from the teacher/sponsor. There were only three boys in the club but he could not remember them at all, and the girls now seemed to have merged into one composite: thin, willowy, eternally cold even in her cashmeres, her nostrils a pinched pale blue.

There was no clash of wills there, so the club marked a transition for him: he learned to speak before a group in his halting English, to define and explain and finally to disagree.

That was before mathematics, before the long years of concentration at university, before Washington and the dozens upon dozens of machine codes he devised, the monographs on cryptography that consumed his days and nights. The thin girls became—he looked up—secretaries in fashionably short skirts, coffee-bearers. And what had he become, that shy Japanese-American boy? Fifty-one years old, well paid, responsible, a bachelor consumed by work and hobbies. All clear, precise measures, but beyond that he was not sure.

“Mr. Ichino, I’m George Evers,” a deep voice said. Mr. Ichino stood up quickly with a sudden release of unexpected nervous energy, murmured words of greeting and shook the man’s hand.

Evers smiled thinly and regarded him with distant assessment. “I hope we aren’t taking too much of your time today. You and Mr. Williams”—he nodded as Williams appeared and walked to the coffee urn, long legs scissoring awkwardly—“are our experts on the day-to-day behavior of the Snark and we thought we should hear what you have to say before proceeding with the rest of the meeting.”

“I see,” Mr. Ichino said, surprised to find his voice almost a whisper. “The letter I received yesterday gave me no details, so—”

“On purpose,” Evers said jovially, hitching thumbs into his belt. “We merely want to get an informal idea of what you think that thing is up to. The committee here— the Executive Committee, actually, that’s the President’s title—is faced with a deadline and I’m afraid we’re going to have to come to a decision right away, sooner than we thought.”

“Why?” Mr. Ichino said, alarmed. “I was under the impression that there was no hurry.”

Mr. Evers paused and turned to wave to other men entering the long room and Mr. Ichino had the sudden impression of a man impatient to be off, to have the waiting finished, as though Evers knew the decision ahead and wanted to get beyond that dead moment to the action that followed. He noticed that Evers’s left hand, casually resting on the back of a chair, had a slight tremor.

“That machine isn’t willing to wait any more,” Evers said, turning back. “It gave us the word two days ago.”

Before he could reply Evers nodded and moved way, clasping hands with men in suits and pastel sports jackets who were filling the room. Williams, seated directly across the table, sent him a questioning glance.

Mr. Ichino shrugged elaborately in reply, glad that he was able to appear so casual. He looked around. Some of the faces he recognized. None were as important as Evers, who bore the ambiguous title of Presidential Advisor. Evers moved to the head of the table, still talking to the men nearest him, and sat down. Others who had been standing took their places and the secretaries left the coffee urn to fend for itself.

“Gentlemen,” Evers said, calling them to order. “We will have to hurry things along, as you know, in order to meet the President’s new deadline. I spoke with him this morning. He is very concerned, and looks forward to reviewing the recommendations of this committee.”

Evers sat with his arms folded on the table before him, letting his eyes rove up and down the two lines of men.

“You have all seen—excuse me, all but Mr. Williams and Mr. Ichino here—seen the messages received from the Snark requesting a change of venue.” He paused for the ripple of polite laughter. “We are here to go into possible scenarios that could be initiated by the Snark’s arrival in near-Earth orbit.”

He gestured toward Mr. Ichino. “These two gentlemen are guests of the Committee today and are here solely to bring us up to date on the nonessential information the Division has been sending the Snark. They are not, of course, members of the Executive Committee itself.” In the bleached light his skin took on a high glaze as he focused on the aligned ranks of men, yellow pads scattered at random before them. A few were already taking notes.

Evers sat back, relaxing. “The Snark remained in Venus orbit to keep a strong channel to us, through our satellite. But we and it have transferred our, uh, dialogue to highflux channels now. We’re communicating directly, bypassing the satellite. Now the Snark wants to come to Earth.”

“To see our biosphere up close,” a thin man said at Evers’s left. “Which I don’t believe.”

Eyes turned to him. Mr. Ichino recognized the man as a leading games theorist from the Hudson Institute. He wore poorly-fitted tweeds; from an ornate pipe he puffed a blue wreath around himself.

“I believe the Snark—Walmsley’s term, isn’t it?—has been studying us quite well from Venus,” he said. “Look at what it asks for—a welter of cultural information, photographs, art. No science or engineering. It can probably deduce that sort of thing, if it needs, from radio and Three-D programs.”

“Quite right,” a man further down said. There were more assents.

“Then why come to Earth?” Evers said.

“To get a good look at our defenses?” someone said halfway down the long table.

“Perhaps, perhaps,” Evers replied. “The military believes the Snark may not care about our level of technology. For the same reason we wouldn’t worry about the spears of South Sea natives if we wanted to use their island as a base.”

“I’d worry,” said a swarthy man. “Those spears are sharp.”

Evers had a way of delaying his smile one judicious second, and then allowing it to spread broadly, a haughty white crease. “Precisely to the point. It can’t be sure without a closer look.”

“Snark has already had a look,” the Hudson Institute man murmured. “Through the Walmsley woman.”

There was a low flurry of comment around the room, agreeing. Mr. Ichino had heard rumors about this, and here was confirmation.

“Gentlemen,” Evers said, “we have seen the text of the Snark’s demand. It was quite strong. Acting on your earlier suggestion”—he nodded toward the Hudson Institute man, who was relighting his pipe—“I spoke with the President. He authorized me to send the Snark a go-ahead. I wrote the message myself—there was no time to consult this committee on the exact wording—and I have learned that our Venus satellite now detects a reignition of the Snark’s fusion torch.”

The table buzzed with comment. Mr. Ichino slumped back, reflecting.

“I explained to this … being … that we did not know, at first, whether it was friendly. I didn’t mention we still don’t know.”

“What did it say?” the Hudson Institute man asked. “It replied with a request to orbit Earth. Upon my advice, the President counter-proposed that the Snark orbit the moon for a while, so our men there—and in the vicinity—can observe it. A sort of mutual inspection, as it were.”

The man in tweeds puffed energetically and said, “We could do the job better from a near-Earth orbit.”

“True,” Evers said. “I suppose I can merely summarize our earlier doubts?” He leaned forward, face furrowed. “About why it didn’t try to get in touch with us first? Ex-Comm had to make the first move. Then, and only then, it responded.”

“Surveying strange solar systems must be a chancy business,” the man in tweeds said mildly.

“For both parties,” Evers said with a hollow jovial laugh. Mr. Ichino reflected that with success comes a reputation—if only in the mind’s eye of the successful—for wisdom. “But perhaps I should explain. The moon orbit option came about because of an alternate plan the Joint Chiefs have in mind. I suppose I needn’t add that we haven’t discussed this with the United Nations?” The room rustled with chuckles. “Well, the plan works best if the Snark stops by the moon. That isolates it, pins it down, within our zone of operations.”

“And?” the pipe smoker said, his lips pursed wryly. “The Chiefs—and the theoretical staff behind them— regard it as highly suspicious that the Snark says it knows nothing—nothing—of its origins. A minimax factor analysis of this situation, I’m told, says that the Snark may simply be learning all it can about us without risking itself by giving away potentially useful information. I can’t say anything more right now”—he glanced at Williams and Mr. Ichino and then, realizing that he had, looked quickly away—“but I’ll bring it up later in the meeting. I’ll only say that the President thinks it has some merit.”

Mr. Ichino frowned. The Joint Chiefs? he thought. He tried to understand the implications and lost track of Evers’s words until:

“—we’ll hear first from Mr. Ichino, who has shared the encoding and selection of information for the Snark. Mr. Ichino?”

His thoughts were a scramble. He said very carefully, “There is so much the Snark wants to know. I have only begun to tell it about us. I am not by any means the best qualified—”

Mr. Ichino stopped. He looked down at the table at them. He had always had to hold himself in check before people like this, he realized, men of closed faces. And he could not speak to them, let the soft things within him come out.

“I have found,” he said haltingly, mind filled with fleeting impulses and images, “… found something I never expected.” He gazed at their blank eyes and set faces. They were silent.

“I began with a simple code, based on arithmetical analogies to words. The machine picked it up at once. We began a conversation. I learned nothing about it—that was not my assignment. I gather no one else has, either.

“But—what struck me …” Words, he could not find the words. “… was the nimble aspect it has. We spoke of elementary mathematics, physics, number theory. It gave me what I believe to be a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Its mind leaps from one subject to another and is perfectly at home. When it spoke of mathematics it was cool and efficient, never wasting a word. Then it asked for poetry.”

The man in tweeds was watching Mr. Ichino intently and sucking on his pipe, which had gone out.

“I do not know how it discovered poetry. Perhaps from commercial radio. I told it what I knew and gave it examples. It seems to understand. What is more, the Snark began to ask for art. It was interested in everything from oils to sculpture. I undertook the encoding problems involved, even to the point of fixing for it the right portion of the electromagnetic spectrum for viewing the pictures we sent.”

He spread his hands and spoke more rapidly. “It is like sitting in a room and speaking to someone you cannot see. One inevitably assigns a personality to the other. Each day I speak to the Snark. He wants to know everything. And when we spoke of varying subjects, there was a feeling of differentness, as, as…”

Mr. Ichino saw the distilling eyes of Evans and hurried on, stumbling over his words.

“… as if I was speaking to different personalities each time. A mathematician, a poet—he even wrote sonnets one day, good ones—and scientist and artist…He is so large, I…”

Mr. Ichino paused, for he felt the air tightening around him, the men at the table drawing back. He was saying things beyond his competence, he was only a cryptographer, not qualified—

The lips of the man in tweeds compressed and turned up slightly in a thin, deprecating smile of condescension.

Across the table from Mr. Ichino, Williams stared into the space between them, distracted, and said slowly, “I see, I see, yes. That is what it is like. I had never thought of it that way before, but…”

Williams put both hands flat on the table, as though to push himself up, and glanced with sudden energy up and down the table. “He’s right, the Snark is like that. It’s many personalities, operating almost independently.”

Mr. Ichino gazed at this man who shared his labor and for the first time saw that Williams, too, had been changed by contact with the Snark. The thought lifted his spirits.

“Independently,” Mr. Ichino said. “That is it. I sense many aspects to his personality, each a separate facet, and behind them there is something… greater. Something that I cannot visualize—”

“It’s bigger,” Williams broke in. “We’re seeing parts of the Snark, that’s all.” Both men stared at each other, unable to put into words the immensity they sensed.

Evers spoke.

“I really think you gentlemen have strayed from the subject at hand. I asked you to describe the range of input the Snark requested, not your own metaphysical reactions to it.”

There were a few nervous chuckles. Around the long table Mr. Ichino saw minds sitting a sheltered inch back from narrowed eyes, judging, weighing, refusing to feel.

“But this is important—” Williams began. Evers raised a hand to cut him off. Mr. Ichino saw in the gesture the final proof of why Evers was a Presidential Advisor and he was not.

“I will thank you, Mr. Williams, to leave to the Executive Committee the determination of what is or is not important.”

Williams’s face went rigid. He looked across the table. Mr. Ichino took a deep, calming breath and struggled up out of his confusion.

“You have already decided, haven’t you?” he said to Evers. He peered at the man’s face, the white shirt bleaching out its shadows, and thought he saw something shift deep behind the eyes. “This is a sham,” he said with certainty.

“I don’t know what you think you’re—”

“That may be true, Mr. Evers, you do not know. Perhaps you have not admitted it to yourself yet. But you plan something monstrous, Mr. Evers, or else you would listen to us.”

“Listen—”

“You do not want to know what we say.”

There was an uncomfortable rustle in the room. Mr. Ichino held Evers with his eyes, refusing to let the man go. The silence lengthened. Evers blinked, looked away, too casually brought a hand up to touch his chin and hide his mouth.

“I think you two had better go,” Evers said in an oddly calm voice.

There was no other sound. Mr. Ichino, hands clasped tightly to the notes before him, felt a sudden strange intimacy with Evers, a recognition. In the lines around the man’s mouth he read an expression he had seen before: the quick-witted executive, intelligent, who knew with a sure instinct that he carried the necessary toughness to decide when others could not. Evers loved the balancing of one case against another, the talk of options and probabilities and plans. He lived for the making of hard choices.

Mr. Ichino stood up. For such men it was impossible to do nothing, even when that was best. Power demanded action. Action gave drama, and drama… was glory.

Now it is out of my hands, he thought.

Williams followed him out of that room, but Mr. Ichino did not wait to speak to him. For the moment he wanted only to leave the building, to escape the ominous weight he felt.

There are storms that are felt before they can be seen. He doubted that he would be allowed back in the Pit to talk to the Snark again; he was now a risk. The thought troubled him but he put it aside. He signed out at the nearest exit and pushed out through the glass-paneled door, into the thin spring air of Pasadena. It was almost noon.

He still carried the yellow pad and his notes, pages crumpled in his fist. Butterflies beneath the boot. Going down the steps he felt a welling tide and, dropping the pages, dropping it all, he ran. Ran.

Two

Mr. Ichino pushed on resolutely, despite his fatigue. He was aware that Nigel, nine years younger and in better physical condition, was setting a mild pace; still, he panted steadily and felt a knotting tension in his calves. They were hiking above the timberline in early June and each breath sucked in a chilled, cutting wash of air.

Nigel signaled for a stop and, wordless, they helped each other slip free of their packs. They broke out a simple lunch: cheese, nuts, sour lemonade made from a powder. They had stopped in an elliptical clearing bordered by snowpack. Above, wave upon wave of flecked rock marched skyward. Shelves of granite had been heaved and tossed and eroded into a swirl of patterns, notched here and there by blocks that had tumbled down, split off by an endless hammering, the melting and freezing of winter frost. On this raw cliff face small yellow scatterings drew Mr. Ichino’s eye: rock-hugging bushes had begun to flower.

“So you think I should do it anyway,” Nigel said abruptly.

Mr. Ichino nodded. He was glad to see this spontaneous interest from his friend; it was the first time Nigel had ever brought up the Snark on his own. “We cannot be sure what their intentions are.”

“We can guess.”

“Our judgment of Evers may be wrong.”

“Do you honestly believe so?”

“No.”

“Then, damn it—”

“We must give them some latitude. Perhaps they are right and taking precautions is absolutely necessary.”

Nigel rested back against his bulging yellow pack, sipping at his steel Sierra Club cup of lemonade. “Equipping the rendezvous craft with a nuclear weapon doesn’t strike me as a precaution. It’s an act of insanity, buggering insanity.”

“You have seen the list of reasons.”

“Right. Fear of disease. Vague mutterings about a sociometric impact they can’t predict. Even a bloody invasion, for God’s sake.”

“The last reason?” Mr. Ichino asked quietly.

“Oh yes. ‘Something unimaginable.’ A brilliant category.”

“That is why they need a man in the rendezvous module, not merely a machine.”

“Not to imagine the unimaginable. No, they want some sod to give them a play-by-play.”

“Which you can certainly do.”

“Um. You’re probably right, there. I’m a dried-up old raisin of an astronaut, but at least I’m in on the operation. I know the necessary astrophysics and computer encoding, if it comes to that.”

“You are not a security risk, either. By using you, they are not forced to expand the circle of fully-informed people.”

“Right.” Some unseen pressure seemed to go out of Nigel as Mr. Ichino watched him. He loosened; a fine cross-hatching of wrinkles in his face faded. The two men lay for a while and listened to the tinkling of water, freed from the thawing ice, as it spattered down the cliffs.

“The nub of it is …” Nigel paused. “Did you ever read any Mark Twain?”

“Yes.”

“Remember that piece where he describes getting to pilot on the Mississippi? Learning the shallows and sand-bars and currents?”

“I believe I may.”

“Well, there’s the rub. After he’d mastered the analytic knowledge needed to move on the river, he found it had lost its beauty. He couldn’t look at it any longer and see the things he’d seen before.”

Mr. Ichino smiled. “So it is with you and”—he gestured—“out there?”

“Maybe. Maybe.”

“I doubt that.”

“I feel…I don’t know. Alexandria…”

“She is gone. She would not want you to hang on to her.”

“Yes. Yes, you’re right. You’re the only other person who knows the whole thing, about me and the hiking in the desert. Maybe you understand this better than I do, now. I was too close to the center of it.”

“As Twain was? Too near to the river?” “Something’s lost, that’s all I know.”

Mr. Ichino said quietly, slowly, “I wish you the strength to let go, Nigel.”

They hiked over a saddle-shaped crescent into the next valley. The lodgepole pines, their bark crinkled and dry and brittle, thinned out as the two men reached the high point of their passage. Here the air took on a new resolving clarity. Sierra junipers clung to the exposed overhangs, gaunt whitened branches following the streamlines of the wind. The gnarled limbs seemed dead to Mr. Ichino, but at their tips a mottled green peppered the wood. He stroked a trunk in passing and felt a rough, reassuring solidity.

This early in the season there were no other parties on the gravelly trails. They set a steady pace on the downward leg; the tiered glacial lakes below them flickered as blue promises through the shadowed woods. Mr. Ichino knew he would be even more stiff and sore tonight than he was yesterday; still, he would not have missed this rare opportunity to see the remaining Sierra wilderness. Nigel’s reservations had come due and one evening, as they dined together—almost entirely in silence, as was usual with them—he had asked Mr. Ichino to accompany him. The invitation was a final cementing of their growing friendship.

In the last few months Mr. Ichino had found himself spending increasing spans of time in the company of this restless, amusing, moody astronaut. In retrospect the friendship had a certain interior logic to it, despite their differences in character. Both were alone. Both shared the Snark project as a hovering presence in their days. And now, after Mr. Ichino’s behavior at the Executive Committee meeting, they both worked under the same faint shadow of suspicion from above.

They had met accidentally a few times after Nigel returned from his “rest” in the desert. They’d worked on computer problems together, ingressing and confluing matrices for the Snark, and spoken of the usual neutral subjects: books, weather, politics. They agreed that the United States and Canada should stand firm and sell satellite data to the World Food Reserve for whatever they could get. The same for orbital manufacturing, including the precious space on the cylinder cities. They talked, drank wine, argued small points in comfortable eddies of words.

Then, gradually, Nigel began to tell him of the Snark, of Alexandria, of things inside himself…

Mr. Ichino peered down the trail at the swaying bulk of Nigel’s pack. Throughout this journey the other man had set an odd pace, moving too fast or too slow for the terrain, pressing himself unnecessarily on precarious, terraced slopes. He rested at strange times. He craned forward, chin thrust out. Always the lay of the land ahead occupied him, not what surrounded him. In their pauses he leaped from one subject to the next without a bridging thought, always speaking of something distant, some new idea unrelated to the free spaces around them. He was there, but not there. A slanting blade of sunlight that split the forest darkness would elude him even as he tramped through it, head bowed, the light striking a coppery glint from his hair. The suction of what lay ahead drew him through the present.

Abruptly, Nigel turned.

“The orbit they’re planning—it’s a near intersection, isn’t it?” he said briskly.

“That was how Evers described it. I merely heard the summary talk, however. I know no details.”

“I should’ve gone to it.” Nigel chewed absently at his lip. “I dislike meetings, but…”

“You can still apply. Speak to Evers.”

“I don’t take it he’s a terribly big fan of mine.”

“He respects your past. Your knowledge.”

Nigel crooked his thumbs into his backpack straps where they crossed his chest. “Perhaps. If I appear docile enough…”

Mr. Ichino waited, feeling a small tension stretching thin within Nigel.

“God damn, yes. Right. They want somebody to lie in wait by the moon, good enough. I’ll go. Hunting for the Snark. Right.”

With a quick, hearty gesture he clapped Mr. Ichino on the back. Beneath the canopy of pines the sound had a swallowed, muffled quality.

Nigel took the bus into central Los Angeles and spent a morning browsing in the old shops there. He turned up a book he only vaguely remembered, The Hunting of the Snark. It was an early edition, Macmillan, 1899, subtitled an Agony, in Eight Fits, including nine illustrating prints by Henry Holiday. The grotesque figures each seemed wreathed in their own preoccupations, staring inward even as they sharpened axes, rang bells and poked at bollards. Nigel bought the book at an enormous price—having any sort of bound volume not done out in faxprint, and over a decade old, was now fashionable—and took it along to Reagan Park, where he sat beneath the graying statue of a dead politician.

He opened the book gingerly, feeling less cavalier about this ancient artifact now that it was his, and began to read. He relished the clean, stiff pages, the austere formal march of words in old type. Had he ever really done this poem through to the end? No, apparently, for whole patches he could not remember.

He had bought a large map representing the sea, Without the least vestige of land:

And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be

A map they could all understand.

Nigel smiled, thinking of ExComm. He glanced up at the granite politician, now the spattered colleague of pigeons.

For, although common Snarks do no manner of harm, Yet I feel it my duty to say

Beware if your Snark be a Boojum! For then You will softly and suddenly vanish away.

Nigel enjoyed the crisp turning of pages, the contorted line drawings of wrinkled dwarves fretting over their hunt. Sitting here in this dry American park, he felt suddenly very mild and English.

For the Snark’s a peculiar creature, that won’t Be caught in a commonplace way.

Do all that you know, and try all that you don’t: Not a chance must be wasted to-day.

Three

The top floor at JPL was now executive country, entirely given over to the management of the Snark problem. Several corridors branched into warrens of cramped offices. Nigel lost his way and, opening a conference room door by mistake, disturbed an earnest circle of men. They looked up and recognition of him crossed their faces, but they said nothing. The blackboard behind them was covered with indecipherable symbols. Nigel nodded, smiled and went away.

Ah, and here it was: Evers & Company. The anonymous tiled corridors changed to Mirrormaze. As he passed, the walls rippled with liquid light, responding to his body heat. A lacy pink cocoon followed him down the hallway until the walls flared out to form a reception center, dotted with bodyfit furniture. Nigel recognized the scheme and looked for the unobtrusive signature. There it was, inlaid in gold, tucked in a corner: WmR. He did Total Environments for those wealthy enough, or powerful enough, to commission him.

So Evers now had that kind of prestige. Interesting. With Snark still an official secret—and a remarkably tight one—Evers still had used it as a lever to get more attention from the government. Interesting.

“Dr. Walmsley?” a receptionist said to him.

“Mr. Walmsley.”

“Oh. Well. Mr. Evers will see you in just a moment.” Nigel stopped watching the iridescent walls and studied her. “Fine.” He turned to watch an inset 3D, ignoring the well-dressed young man who lounged in a nearby flexchair. The man flicked a casual appraising glance at Nigel and then relaxed again behind heavy-lidded eyes, thumbs hooked into his belt just above his fashionably padded crotch. Nigel guessed that he was Evers’s bodyguard, one selected more for show than protection.

Nigel thumbed the 3D control. In brown: immense, prickly pile of garbage. On the far hillside, a glowing white dot of the fusion flame. In the foreground, a commentator, stylishly bare to the waist, told of three workers—hash-slingers, she called them—who’d gotten caught in the belts that fed the recycling burner. There was no trace of them, of course, and the accident had to be reconstructed from their work schedules and approximate positions in the Wastepark. The fusion flame had ripped them down into their component atoms, and then the mass spectrometers had plucked the valuable phosphorus and calcium and iron from the everlasting plasma and formed bricks. The hydrogen and carbon and oxygen became fuel and water, final useful burial for one man and two women who—one officially presumed—were a bit slow that particular day, or a bit stupid. But the focus of the news story was that they quite obviously weren’t innocent victims. They’d hired on only weeks before. They’d been seen dangerously near the mouth of the fusion chambers, where radiation and plasma blowback were constant threats. So: a scavenger gang, rummaging the waste of decades past for durable antiques or precious metals. Wastepark workers didn’t have tote-home rights, but who checked that close to the fusion torches? How many others have sneaked into these landfill areas? the commentor asked somberly. She swiveled to face the 3D snout, seemingly oblivious of the jeweled ornaments that swung from her artificially swollen nipples. Dangling gems winked blue and red at the 3D. Systematically raking up and mining these hills, I think we uncover more than raw materials for the fusors. We find more than the opulent trash of the middle twencen. No—she paused, face clouding—we find ourselves. Our greed. Our longing for the decadent past. How many have died unknown in the automatic belts and claws? Been jammed and sucked slimmy-jimmy into the eternal flames? The camera panned across the jumbled hills.

Nigel shook his head and clicked it off.

“Mr. Walmsley?”

He went through the burnished oak door held open by the receptionist and shook hands with Evers.

“I promised I’d get back to you,” Evers said. “Sit down.” He smiled warmly and moved to a comfortable chair away from the walnut desk.

“I bucked it upstairs,” Evers said.

“To meet the Snark.”

“Yes.”

“Not merely be on the tracking team—to actually make the mission.”

“Right.”

“And?”

“Well, there were a lot of questions.”

Nigel laughed, a barking sound. “There always are.” “Some people wondered if you were still in the top flight-training category.”

“I go back to Houston and Ames regularly. I put in a lot of time on the simulators.”

“True. How about exercise?”

“Hiking. Squash. Racquetball.”

“Racquetball? How’s that played?”

“A blend of handball and squash. Short, stubby racquet. Played in a room, shots off the ceiling are legal, and you have to return the ball to the forward wall after each bounce.”

“I see. Fast?”

“Reasonably.”

“As fast as squash?”

“No. The ball bounces a lot.”

“You don’t like me, do you, Nigel?”

Nigel sat silent. He kept his face stony and shifted his feet on the thick carpet.

“Can’t say I’ve thought about it.”

“Come on.” Evers leaned forward, elbows on his chair’s arms, hands knitted together.

“Well, I can’t really—”

“I’m trying to level with you.”

“I see.”

“No, you don’t see.”

Nigel sat back, crossed his legs.

“You come to me and want the Snark rendezvous mission. Right? I think about it. I read your file.”

“You buck it upstairs,” Nigel said evenly. “Damned right. It’s an important decision.”

“One you can make.”

“Not by myself.”

“You’re in charge of this operation. You’re the next rung up from NASA itself, so—”

“So nothing. I have to take the advice of the experts below me or else there’s no reason to have experts in the first place.”

“Well, then—take it.”

“You wouldn’t like it if I did.”

Nigel grimaced. “The canonical punchup, eh?” “Let’s say the returns are mixed.”

“Nice phrase.”

“Damn it!” Evers slapped his chair arm. “You are not going to sit here and Gary Cooper your way through this thing.”

“I don’t know what you mean, but if you’re asking me to be responsible, then ask me a bloody question.”

“Nigel …” Evers looked at his hands. “Nigel. NASA remembers Icarus. They remember your private little communication gambit with the Snark—and so do I.”

“I don’t think that last bears on matters. I was under stress. My—”

“You’ll be under stress out there, meeting the Snark.” “A different thing entirely.”

“Maybe. That’s it—maybe. You’re unreliable, Nigel. You don’t follow orders.”

“I’m not a machine, no.”

“There you go. That fucking British reserve, those distancing remarks. But I know you’re not really like that, Nigel. Your personality profile from the psychtechs isn’t that way.”

“And they should know, of course.”

“Okay, they’re not perfect. But there has to be something to explain why a hell of a lot of people in NASA like you, Nigel. Why they’ll go out on a limb and recommend you for the Snark rendezvous.”

“Ah. So some did.”

“Sure. I said you got mixed reviews, not uniformly bad ones.”

“After what you’ve said, I honestly wonder why.” Evers looked at him quizzically. “Do you? Really?” “Well …” Nigel murmured uncertainly. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

“You don’t have a clear idea what NASA—the people you’ve worked with—think of you?”

“Well…”

“You really don’t. You don’t know that to them you’re a, a symbol?”

“Of what?”

“Of what the program’s about. You’ve been there. You found the first alien artifact. And now, you’re on the team that discovered the second—the Snark.”

“I see.”

“It’s true. You don’t notice it, do you?”

“I don’t suppose I do.”

Evers thought for a moment, studying Nigel. “I guess you wouldn’t.”

Nigel shrugged.

“It’s my job to see things like that,” Evers said, seeming to pull himself up. “I deal in people. And you’re the person I’ve got to figure out right now.”

“How?”

“By guess and by golly, as my Dad used to say.”

“By asking me about racquetball?”

“Sure, why not? Anything to find out what makes Nigel run. And run pretty damned well, too. You’re smart, you’ve kept up on spacecraft tech, you know the plumbing and the computers, the astronomy—you’re a pro. The only thing you don’t understand is folks like me.”

“Like you?”

“Administrators.”

“Oh.”

“Guessers is a better word. Professional guessers.” “How so?” Nigel murmured, interested despite himself.

“You remember the Chinese Trigger incident?”

“I read Gottlieb’s book.”

“It’s pretty near the facts.”

“You should know. You stepped into that muck and figured out what was going to happen next.”

Evers nodded. “There were clues. The Chinese had dispatched a large infantry force by submarine. It didn’t make any sense that they’d be hitting Australia or anything reachable by more conventional methods.”

“So you estimated they were bound for a clandestine landing in California.”

“To say ‘estimated’ makes it more exact than it was. I guessed. Guessed they’d try to touch off a nuclear war with some well-placed tacticals and a commando raid to silence communications for a vital twenty minutes. Guessed.”

Nigel nodded.

“It occurred to me that you maybe don’t have a whole lot of respect for that kind of thinking.”

Nigel blinked. “How’d that pop into your head?” “You never seem very relaxed when you’re talking to your, ah, superiors.”

“You mean talking to you?”

“Among others.”

“Umm.” Nigel studied Evers and then looked aside, where a wall holo showed a glinting Eckhaus laser-carved iceberg sculpture, waves lapping at its base. Nigel breathed deeply and seemed to make a decision.

“Not really,” he said slowly, searching for the words. “There’s something poisonous in the way we do things, that’s all.”

“A strong word.”

“Appropriate. There’s a good lot here, individually fine people. But organizations have their own drives and that gets in the way.”

“In the way of what?”

“Of the truth. Of what people really want out of all this. Look, remember the first years? The Apollo landings and all. What kind of genius did it require to take hold of the greatest event in the century—and make it boring?”

“Okay, so NASA wasn’t and isn’t perfect.”

“No, it isn’t just NASA. It’s, it’s whenever people deny their own interior visions. Or don’t communicate them correctly.”

“Organization is impossible without compromise,” Evers said, the webbing around his eyes crinkling with amusement.

“Granted,” Nigel said judiciously. “But I seem to’ve run smack into situations where I couldn’t see the motivation—”

“You mean NASA has screwed up the Snark business.”

“You were going to. Your message to the Snark was a balls-up.”

“Probably. But that was because we didn’t have your input.”

“You weren’t in the mood, it seemed to me.” “You’ve got to understand where I’m coming from here, Nigel,” Evers murmured, hunching forward.

“How so?”

“I’m the kind of guy I am because of what I’ve done. I had a pretty bumpy career until the Chinese Trigger. I took a look at the intelligence estimates, sure, everybody did. Hell, I’ll bet lots of guys had it cross their minds that the slants might have a joker in the deck. It’s one thing to guess, it’s another to act.”

“Surely we agree on that.”

“Check. You did, too, at Icarus.”

“With middling results.”

“Sure, but you followed your nose ’cause you had to. I respect that. I went out on a limb and depth-bombed those subs and I was right.”

“So Commander Sturrock could become a national hero.”

“Yeah. Well, you know …” A shrug. “Gottlieb got it straight, though.”

“You’ve done pretty well in the government.” “So-so. That little venture when I was undersecretary—you know, in ’17, breaking the back of that metals cartel—bought me more enemies than I thought it would.” He paused and seemed to pull himself out of a private mood, straightening up as his flexchair moved to accommodate him. “But I’m back on my way again. Moving up. And I’m kind of a renegade myself, Nigel, I guess that’s what I’m saying.”

“I can see that. I never said I didn’t respect you.”

“No, you didn’t. But then”—he chuckled—“I never asked.”

“I suppose,” Nigel murmured carefully, “we simply have different feelings about how organizations should be used.”

“Check. Down where I come from, Nigel, near Mobile, there’s an old story. Back in the days when the South was down, way down, there was a lot of trouble, over race, y’know. Somebody from the North, down to help straighten things out, asked a relative of mine if he didn’t have to watch what he said in favor of black people, living down there, and considering the attitude of the police and so on.”

“Yes.”

“So my relative thought a minute and said, ‘Why no, we don’t have to watch what we say. We just have to watch what we think.’”

Nigel burst into laughter. “I take the point,” he said, smiling.

“I can tell you’ve got your head screwed on right. All I’m sayin’ to you is that getting along with NASA is going to be a tradeoff—but you don’t have to watch what you think, not if you’re careful. Things aren’t that bad.” He squinted at Nigel warmly. “I made my way so far by defending the West, Nigel, and that’s the way I see this mission. Hell, only we may be defending the whole damned planet this time.”

“Umm.”

“Okay, I could be wrong.” He waved a hand. “We won’t argue. I’ve kind of let down my hair today so I could see what sort of guy you were, and it’s settled my mind. You’re a classy sort of astronaut, Nigel, the best and the oldest we’ve got. That British thing you’ve got going for you—it’s a big help with Americans, y’know. A big help. It’ll come in handy when I push this thing through.”

“So you’re going to back me.”

“Sure.” Evers relaxed. “I just decided. I want a guy out there I understand. I have a hunch the Snark isn’t going to give us a lot of warning when it decides to come Earth-side—probably on purpose, to be sure we can’t set up elaborate defenses. So we’ll be in a damned rush and there won’t be time for a lot of talk amongst ourselves. I don’t ask that you agree with me, but I have to understand you in order to know for sure what you’re saying, when your voice comes over a squawk box.”

Nigel nodded. Evers came to his feet and held out a hand, beaming. “Glad we had this talk, Nigel.”

He let a secret smile crease his face as he made his way back through the fluxing Mirrormaze hallway. It had gone quite well, all things considered, and his prior careful rummaging into Evers’s past now made sense. Nigel didn’t for a moment believe he’d seen the core of Evers, but there had been another layer, certainly, deeper than the no-nonsense bureaucratic sheen. Evers very probably thought the down home, good-ole-boy persona was the real Evers; if you spend time developing a role, you become it. But Nigel sensed something further. Inside every hard-edged executive there seemed to lie a shadow of the ambitious boy, and beneath that lurked whatever made the boy step on the first rung. Glad we had this talk, Nigel. A clear signal that Evers now thought of him as an ally, a team player, cheerfully backing Evers for his next leap upward. I want a guy out there I understand. Glad we had this talk. But Evers had done very nearly all the talking himself.

Four

It was deliciously pleasant to drift, restrained by the buckles and pads, and spin soft coils of illusion. Zero-g did that. Below, the random splotchings of craters wheeled, each slipping below the arched horizon before he had memorized it. An old friend lost without a farewell handshake; memory of a million such. When shaking hands, remember your manners, Nigel, take off your glove first (cold snatching at your fingers)…

His mind wandered.

Which wasn’t right, he told himself. He should stay alert. He was not here for the view. Nor did segmented tanks of high-energy fuel ride to the side of him, above, below, aft, for his own amusement. They waited for their signal, the soft percussion of a button, to apply the bootheel and send him straight into history.

Or into the abyss beyond Earth’s web, he thought. Hipparchus Control—awesome name for six sheet-metal huts buried in twenty feet of dust—had been a touch vague about the margin of error they had allowed for getting him back. Maybe there wasn’t any.

Off to his right the northmost rim of Mare Orientale slid into view, slate-gray sheets of lava cooled in their convulsions. The crater’s center lay a good fifteen degrees south of his near-equatorial orbit, but even at this low altitude he could see the marching mountain ranges that curved away from him, inward, toward the focus. He wondered how big the rock had been that caused that eerie effect: crests of ancient waves that froze into mountains. An enormous bull’s-eye in the moon’s ribs. Assassin’s knife. Death from an asteroid, a brother of Icarus—

“Hipparchus here,” a voice rattled and squeaked in his ear. “Everything’s okay?”

Nigel hesitated a moment and then said, “Shut up.” “No, it’s okay. We’ve calculated it out. We’re both of us in the moon’s radio shadow, as far as the Snark is concerned. It can’t pick up any of this.”

“I thought we weren’t taking any chances.”

“Well, this isn’t exactly a chance.” The voice sounded a bit peevish. “We just wanted to see how things’re going up there. We don’t get any telemetry. You could be dead for all we know.”

He couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so he let it go. The radio man—who was it, that short fellow, Lewis?—seemed to think he was just making a neighborly call. The phones crackled and sputtered in his ears for a moment while he waited out the other man. Finally the voice came, a little stronger.

“Well, we have a good fix on the time, anyway. About five hours away. Squirting the scoop to your LogEx now.”

There was a hum from the electronics beside him as the computer absorbed the orbital data. He was sure it was Lewis now; the man was addicted to jargon.

“Have you rechecked your missiles?” Lewis said. “Yes. Uh, roger.”

“We just had a squirt from Houston to remind you about priorities. Any piece of it is better than nothing, so hold off on the nuke if you can.”

“Roger.”

“Feeling okay? You’ve been up there over a day now, it must be getting cramped.”

Nigel studied the scattering of stars outside. “Nothing compared to the Icarus thing though, huh? Say, I never did ask you about that. I mean, with the drugs and that long a meditation to keep your oxy use down. I never did ask you.”

“No, you never did.”

There was another silence.

“Well, it must feel different, this one being almost a combat mission, you might say. Not the same.”

“Sweating like a pig.”

“Yeah, really?” The voice brightened at this evidence of human failing. “We’ll get you back okay, don’t worry, fella.”

“Say hello to the crew down there.” Nigel felt he ought to say something friendly. Lewis wasn’t a bad sort, only too chummy.

“We’re all rooting for you. Zap that thing if it does anything funny. The whole gig sounds flippo, if you ask me.”

“I’d better go over that flight plan. Give me a fix on a translunar.”

“Oh, okay.” A blurred squeal from the electronics. “There she is. Uh, signing off.”

“Roger.”

Combat mission, Lewis had said. Sweet Christ. Marines wading ashore. Somebody always wondering where the medic is. Crawl along a clay ditch, rifle bullets zipping overhead like hornets. Hug the earth, align with the groin of the world. Images: a brown-skinned woman wrapped around a pudgy white man, he in spattered uniform, idly cleaning a rifle barrel, peering absently down the shiny bore as she rocks and humps and kisses him with her universal rhythm, her knotted hands feeling in his pockets…

Somewhere, a musical phrase of hunger.

He found one of the clear plastic tubes, squeezed it and ate. Carrot juice. NASA issue, lifegiving vegetables and hearty roots, no evil meat. Those who would meet God in his firmament shall be pure of intestine, live not from the flesh of dead animals. Rear your children on beans and berries; they too may ride to the stars. When they come home from a date, smell their breath for the aberrant trace of a hot dog. Unclean, unclean. And anyway, nobody had yet learned how to grow a chicken or cow on the moon, so soybeans it was.

For that matter, they couldn’t do much else on the moon, either. It was all well and good to balance tomatoes with barley, coaxing forth from the lunar gravel enough protein and oxygen to support a small base, and yet another to regulate amino acids and plant sap, keep mildew from forming in the access pipes, conserve the thin, mealy loam. The optimistic biologists frowned at their soybeans: with the daily cycle of sun and tides removed, the beans grew gnarled roots and gray leaves, became miserly with their proteins. It was no simple trick to be an adversary of entropy in a land with black skies and winds that slept.

Somehow the cylinder cities worked, grew their food and prospered. But the moon, truly alien, didn’t. Still, the crew at Hipparchus carried on, searched the moon for water and ice, experimented. They had a burning optimism. Precisely what he lacked, Nigel thought. He shrugged, with no one to see. The loss did not seem to matter now.

To pass the time he meditated and read novels from the cabin’s erasable slate. The module was well designed, considering the short time allowed for converting the blueprint into hardware. Nigel had brought a pack of four memorex crystals, each book length, and in the first day of waiting had devoured two of them, taking an hour apiece.

A phrase caught his eye:

at an attitude toward Ataturk

Later, musing down at the flinty plain of Mare Smythii, it came back to him. He treated the words like an algebraic expression; he factored out all the a’s, then the t’s. Rearranged, the words could yield ambiguity, incoherence, passable poetry.

He wondered if this was a neurotic habit.

Memories from reading: women who never passed a lamppost without touching it; men who balanced always on the ball of the left foot while urinating; outfielders who had to take a skip before throwing the ball into home plate. Fellow neurotics all; nerves skittering on a fine high wire.

He divided the phrase into thirds, quarters, eighths, thought of an anagram, fiddled. Alexandria. The desert, now a fading memory. He wondered what Ichino would think of this.

The moon’s crumpled gray horizon swallowed a blue-white ice cream earth.

“Your projected ignition time is holding firm.” Lewis again, seven orbits later.

“What does Houston say?”

“Snark is holding to its promised course. Decelerating as our trajectory specified.”

“What’s it saying to Houston?”

“Nothing unusual, they said. The scenario calls for beaming a lot of hot stuff, things the Snark’s been asking about, during the last stages of its approach. Distract it so’s you can get in close.”

“I know, but what is the new information?”

“What’s it matter? It’s all false anyway.”

“What?”

“They’re not giving it the straight stuff anymore. Houston says the President clamped down on them.”

Nigel grimaced. “Perfectly predictable.”

“Just you cripple it, Nigel, and we’ll be picking its brains.”

“Um hum.”

“But remember, go for the big nuke if it looks like it’s getting away. That’s what Houston says.”

“Sure, that’s what Houston says.”

“Huh?” Thin thread of surprise in the voice. “A finger in the eye.”

“I didn’t track you on that one.”

“Did you ever think how old it must be?” Nigel said, his words clipped. “Our lives are so short. To Snark we must look like bacilli. Whole eras and dynasties snuffed out in an instant. It looks at us with its microscope and makes lab notes, while we try to poke a finger in its eye.”

“Uh, yeah. Well, you’re coming out of radio shadow. We’d better shut up. I’ve already squirted your LogEx corrections.”

“Check.”

He was moving into the white sun’s glare again. The cabin popped and pinged and snicked as it warmed. A plaster of Paris crater below lay bisected by the moon’s terminator, its central cone perfectly symmetrical. The rim seemed glazed, smooth, above four distinct terraces that marched down to the floor.

Snick, went his cabin. Snickersnee, he thought, waiting at the edge of infinity. On the serene shore of the ocean of night, marking the minutes until the winged stranger arrives. An actor, not knowing his lines. Ready to go onstage for his big scenario.

Maybe he should have been an actor, after all. He’d tried it once at university, before engineering and systems analysis and flight training gobbled up his hours. He’d really wanted to be an actor, once, but he’d talked himself into becoming a Nigel Walmsley instead.

He warmed a tube of tea and sipped it, as well as anyone can sip from a squeeze bottle. The sun streamed in. Tea was like an unexpected warm hand in the dark. Reeling with Darjeeling, he thought, and maybe, after all, I did become an actor, finally. Icarus had been a straight bit of acting, with Providence kindly providing a busy coda of Significance at the end. And here he was for his next engagement, carefully primed, all the props in place. Opening night coming up, all the Top Secret Clearance audience clustered about their 3D sets. Best of all (until there’s a leak, anyway): no critics. This actor, a well-grounded student of the Method School, is noted for his wholehearted interest in and devotion to his performance. His previous work, while controversial, has won him some notoriety. He prefers to work in productions which seem to have a moral at the end, so the audience will believe they understood it all along.

He smiled to himself. A man with his finger on the trigger can afford a few cosmic thoughts. Politics becomes geometry, and philosophy is calculus. The universe winds about itself, snakelike, events plotted along coiled coordinates with a fine, tight geometry, the scrap paper of a mad mathematician.

He raised an eyebrow at the idea. I wonder what they put in this tea, he thought.

“Walmsley?” They had called him several times, but he was slow to answer.

“I’m busy.”

“Got your systems repped and verified?” Lewis spoke quickly, slurring one word into another and making it hard to piece together the sentence. “We received that squirt from your onboard diagnostics on your last pass. No serious trouble. A little overpressure on the CO₂ backup tanks, but Houston says it is within tolerable operating limits. It looks like you’re cleared, then.”

Nigel turned off the inboard reading lamps before replying, bathing the cockpit in the deep red of the running lights. For a moment he registered only blackness, and then his eyes adjusted. He had seen this warm red glow thousands of times before, but now the sight seemed fresh and strange, portending events just beyond the point of articulation. Dante, he thought, has been here before me.

Well, he would give them what they wanted. He thumbed over the transmit.

“I verify, Hipparchus. Staging timetable is logged. LH₂/LOX reading four oh three eight. Servitor inventory was just completed and LogEx reports all subsystems and backups are functional.” There, you maniacs, in your own tongue.

“I have to relay for you.” “What?”

Through the hiss of static came a smooth, well-modulated voice:

“This is Evers. I asked Hipparchus to patch me through to clear up any last-minute—”

“Simply let me deal with things. The warhead is a last resort, agreed? I’m going for a look-see, to make educated guesses from the Snark’s appearances. Then maybe contact. But I’m staying concealed as long as—”

“Yes,” Evers said slowly, voice dropping an octave. “However, we are sure the Snark will never register you. You will have the sun at your back all the way in on your run. There isn’t radar in the world that can pick you up against that background.”

“In the world. Um.”

“Oh, I see. Well”—Evers gave a small, self-deprecating chuckle—“it’s just a phrase. But our people here feel strongly that there are certain rules of thumb about detection equipment that hold true in every situation, even this one. I wouldn’t worry about it.” Pause. “But the reason I’m taking up your time—and I see there are only a few minutes left for this transmission window—is to impress you with your obligations on this mission. We down here cannot predict what that thing is going to do. The final decisions are up to you, although we will be in contact as soon as we are sure that the Snark has detected you—if it ever does, that is. To be sure, that might be long after the time for any effective action on your part is past. We will do all we can from this end, of course. For the last few hours we have been transmitting a wealth of cultural information on mathematics, science, art and so on. Ex-Comm hopes this will serve as a diversion to the computers in the Snark, though we have no way of knowing for certain. Meanwhile, our satellites circling the moon will monitor radio transmissions to keep us in touch. Silence is essential; do not broadcast on any band until the Snark shows unmistakable signs of having seen you.”

“I know all that.”

“We just want you to have these things clear in your mind,” said the voice that knew tapes were running. “You have two small missiles with chemical warheads; if they are not sufficient to cripple the Snark’s propulsion, then the nuclear—”

“I’ve got to go check out something.” Evers’s words ran on for a few seconds, until the time lag caught up with Nigel’s interruption.

“Oh. I see.” It was obvious a prepared speech had been interrupted. The beauty of Nigel’s situation was that radio silence meant no one could tell from telemetry whether he had something to do or not.

“One last thing, Nigel. This alien could be inconceivably dangerous to humanity. If anything seems to be going wrong, kill it. No, that’s too strong. The thing is just a machine, Nigel. Intelligent, yes, but it is not alive. Well, good luck. We’re counting on you down here.”

The sputter of static returned.

“We have a burn.”

He whispered it to himself through slitted white lips. There was no one at Mission Control to do it for him; it was an archaic form, really, but Nigel liked it. The canonical litany: they had a burn. He would fly the bird.

The rocket’s magic hand now pressed him into geometrical flatness, and though he breathed shallow short breaths off the top and concentrated on timing them precisely, the pain the pain would not stop shooting through the soft liquid organs of his belly. He felt sudden fear at this new vulnerability, a spreading sharp ache. He closed his eyes to find a red haze awaiting him and in the rumble of the rocket imagined himself a sunbather pinned to the hard sand, vaguely conscious of the distant gravid voice of the surf.

The fist went away. He blinked, located a toggle switch, saw a light turn green. First booster separation. The fist returned.

Combat mission. Enemy. Target. He had not used those words for years; they were things of childhood. Galoshes. Skatekey.As the days stand up on end,My friend.

His uncle had fought in some grimy jungle conflict, somewhere. The man had told stories about it, resolving all complicated political theory with the unanswerable gut reality of a souvenir pistol and bayonet, proudly displayed. Nigel had thought it a minor eccentricity, like owning a complete fifty-year run of National Geographic.

The fist lifted.

The fist returned.

A rivulet of spittle ran down his chin. He licked at it, unwilling to move a hand. His eyes ached. Each of his kidneys was a sullen lump just beneath the skin of his back.Iron and oil,Brought to a boil.

Abruptly, he floated. The dull rumble died. He sucked in air, feeling life return to his numbed arms and legs, and automatically scanned the regiments of lights before him.

He was flying blind, no telltale radar to guide him. After a few minutes of checking he activated the breadboarded fire control center and received acknowledgments from the computers that rode in the missiles. Then he rotated his couch to get a full view out the large observation port.

Nothing. The port was black, vacant. He logged the time and checked the running printout on his slate. The burn was right, his heading was dead on. The Snark was coming in for an orbit around the moon, as Houston had asked it to, and he would come up from behind, closing fast.

He glanced out the port again. Nothing. Now that he was on a definite mission, moving, the complete radio silence was eerie. Out the side port he could see the moon fall away, an endless dirty-gray plain of jumbled craters.

He searched the main port carefully, watching for relative motion against the scattered jewels of the fixed stars. He was studying the star field so intently that he nearly missed the bright point of light that drifted slowly into view.

“Ha!” Nigel said with satisfaction. He swung the viewing telescope down from its mount. Magnified, there was no doubt. The diamond point resolved into a small pearl. The Snark was a sphere, silvery, with no apparent markings.

Nigel could see no means of propulsion. Perhaps they were on the other side of the object, or not operating at the moment. It didn’t matter; his missiles had both heat-seeking and radar guidance. But things could not come to that…

Nigel squinted, trying to estimate the range. The Venusian satellites set a minimum possible radius of one kilometer. If that was about right—

A voice said:

“I wish you the riding of comfortable winds.”

Nigel froze. The odd, brassy voice came from his helmet speakers, free of static.

“I… what…”

“A fellow traveler. We shall share this space for a moment.”

“It is …you… speaking?”

“You believe I cannot sense your canister. Because it overlaps the cross section of your star.”

“Ah, that was the general idea.”

“Thus, I spoke. For my life.”

“How do you know?”

“There are fewer walls than you may think. There can be intersections of—there is no word of yours for the idea. Let us say I have met this before, in different light.”

“I—”

“You are alone. I do not understand how your kind can divide guilt. Here, in this cusp, I know it cannot be done. You are one man and you have no place to hide.”

“If I…”

“You would make mean comfort for yourself. You are ready?”

“I never thought I would have to…”

“Though you came. Ready.”

“To get here at all I had to agree…”

The voice took on a wry edge. “Permit me.”

From the left port came a bright orange flare and a blunt thump as death took wing. A spike of light arced into the front port and spurted ahead. It was a burning halo, then a sharp matchpoint of flame, then a shrinking dot that homed with bitter resolve.

A chemical warhead. Nigel sat stunned. A thin shrill beep rattled in the cabin as automatic tracking followed the missile. Somehow the Snark had made his craft fire. Red numerals of trajectory adjustments flickered and died, unseen, on the board before him.

The idiot beep quickened. The burning point of light swept smoothly toward the blurred disk beyond it.

Nigel sucked in his breath—

The sky splintered.

A searing ball of flame billowed out. It thinned, paled. Nigel clutched at his couch, unmoving, nostrils flared. The beep was gone. A faint burr of static returned. He hung suspended, waiting. He stared ahead.

Beyond the slowly dulling disk of flame a dab of light moved to the left. Its image wavered and then resolved, intact; a perfect sphere.

It dawned on Nigel that the chemical warhead had detonated early. The silvery ball was drifting from sight. Nigel automatically corrected his course.

The voice came deeper now, dryly modulated:

“You have changed since we walked together.”

Nigel hesitated, mind spinning soundlessly on fine threads over the abyss.

“The sword is too heavy for you,” the voice said matter-of-factly.

“I didn’t intend to carry it at all—”

“I know. You are not so hobbled and coiled.”

“I wonder.”

“Your race has a stream of tongues. You communicate with many senses—more than you know. These were difficult for me. Sometimes it was as though there were two species…I did not understand that each man is so different.”

“Why, of course.”

“I have met other beings who were not,” the voice said simply.

“How could they be? Did they follow instinctive patterns? Like our insects?”

“No. Insect… implies they were inferior or rigid. They were merely different.”

“But each member the same?” Nigel said easily, the words slipping free. He felt light, airy.

“They lived in a vast… you have no word. Interface, perhaps. Between binary stars. They were easier to fathom than your diversity. You are tensed, always moving in many directions at once. An unusual pattern. I have seldom seen such turbulence.”

“Madness.”

“And talent. I am afraid I have already risked too much to come near. My injunctions specify—”

A click, buzz, static. The voice passed from him. “Walmsley, Walmsley. Evers here. Intersection should have occurred. We just picked up a fragment of some transmission. Part of it sounded like you. What’s happened?”

“I don’t know.”

More static. Houston was probably using one of the lunar satellites to relay, skipping Hipparchus. He wondered what—

“Well, you’d damn better find out. About a minute ago we picked up a funny signal from the surface, too. We put the source near Mare Marginis. We thought maybe the Snark had altered course and landed there.”

“No. No, it’s directly in front of me.”

“Walmsley! Report! Did you get one off?”

“Yes.”

A blur of sound. “—score? Did it score?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“What?”

“It detonated before it hit. No damage.”

“And the backup? We haven’t registered any jump in radiation levels.”

“I’m not firing it. Never.” With the words a new clarity came into his world.

“Listen to me, Nigel.” A hint of urgency. “I’ve put a lot of—”

Nigel listened to it and wondered at how smoothly Evers’s voice slid from the ragged edge of anger to a silky persuasiveness; which was natural to the man? Or were they both masks?

“Good-bye, coach. No time for lectures right this minute.”

“You—” Faintly: “Let’s have the override. Okay, go on the count. Go.”

The firing button for the nuclear-tipped missile sat alone in a small bracketed section of the console. Nigel’s eyes were drawn to it because the board began flickering through a sequence of operations. He snapped the switches over to their inert positions, but the sequences continued. The board was dead. Evers had reverted control to Houston. Relay through a satellite? Nigel frantically clawed at the console, trying to find a way to stop—

The aft missile pod emptied with a roar. The thump jarred him back into his couch. Ahead, an orange ball dwindled as it knifed through blackness at the shadowy pearl beyond.

“Evers! You bastard, what are—”

“I am assuming command, as the President provided. As you can see, I have emptied the tube. Now if you would care to report the effect—”

Nigel thumbed away from that frequency.

“Snark! You reading me? Stop that missile, it’s—”

“I know.”

“Detonate it. There are sixteen megatons in that bird.” “Then I cannot.”

Something was happening to the pearl. A searing purple lance blossomed at one end.

“Good God, you must—”

“I cannot be certain of a silencing of the warhead. Detonation of such a device would kill you.”

“Kill…? NASA computed I could survive a blast from…”

“They were wrong. This close would be fatal.”

“I…”

“So I am fleeing. I will outrun it.”

Nigel peered out and found the pearl, on black velvet, the orange ball hanging in space nearby. Their relative motions were submerged by distance. From the Snark’s tail came a column of unimaginable brightness, dimming the silver glow of the Snark’s skin. The exhaust pattern was precise, carving order from the darkness that enveloped it.

“You can’t just nullify it?” Nigel said.

“Not with assurance.”

“You certainly controlled my inboard electronics well enough.”

“That was simple. The method, however, is not perfect. Apparently your technology has not realized yet the, ah, heel—”

“Achilles heel?”

“Yes. The systematic flaw in your electronics. They are unprotected.”

“Where are you going?” Nigel murmured tensely. “Outward.”

He sighted on Snark’s trajectory. The orange blossom trailed it, getting no closer. Snark’s path took it away from the moon in a steep arc. It was, he noticed, a highly energy-inefficient course. To elude the missile alone, it would have been simpler to— But then he saw that the Snark was keeping the moon always between it and Earth, so that the Deep Space Net would be at least partially blinded, and pursuit more difficult.

“You’re leaving.” It was not a question.

“I must. I exceeded my mandates when I approached so near. It was a calculated perturbation in my directives. A chance. I lost.”

“If I talked to NASA for a bit, perhaps—”

“No. I cannot err again. I have been overridden.” “You’re not free? I mean—”

“In a sense, no. And in another sense, one I could not describe to one of membrane, I am free.”

“But—damn it! You could tell us so much! You’ve been out there. Seen other stars. Tell me, please, why is it that, when we listen on the centimeter and meter bands— the radio spectrum—why don’t we hear anything? Our scientists argue that this portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is the cheapest part, considering that the sender must overcome the random emissions of stars and hydrogen gas. So we’ve been listening and—nothing.”

“Of course. They send me instead. I suspect…I am their way of learning what is nearby. If there is danger they inform each other. I have listened to their messages.”

“How? We haven’t heard anything.”

“To you the medium is… exotic. Particles you do not perceive.”

“You could teach us.”

“It is forbidden me.”

“Why?”

“I am not certain…I have been given specific directives. Why these directives and not others I…I have thought often about them. I make guesses. That you, for example, are the aim of my wanderings.”

“Then stay.”

“I only notify them of your presence. So they will know, I expect, that you may someday come.”

“Why not—”

“Come to study you? Too fraught with risk. Your kind is too precarious. I have seen thousands of ruined, gutted worlds. Wars, suicides, who can tell? To my makers you are a plague, the one percent of the galactic cultures that carry the seeds of chaos.”

“I don’t …”

“You are rare. My makers, you see, were machines such as myself.”

Nigel felt himself drifting in a high and hollow place, airless. He glanced out at the wheeling moon. Its riddled and wrinkled hide he saw afresh, looming strange below, craters of absurdly perfect circles that had been arranged so randomly. Nigel breathed deeply.

“The stars are…”

“Populated by the machines, descendants of the organic cultures that arose and died.”

“Computers live forever?”

“Unless a carbon-based life finds them. Machine societies cannot respond to your strange mixture of minds coupled with glands. They have no evolutionary mechanism to make them develop techniques for survival— other than by hiding.”

Nigel chuckled. “They’re cowering out there.”

“And learning. They sent me. I learned much from you, in the desert.”

“And from Alexandria,” Nigel said in a whisper. “Yes.”

“Where… where is she? You were with her in a way no one ever has been when, when she…”

“The machine civilizations—I have visited some by accident, though not the vaster complex that must have made me—have shown that disintegration of structure equals information loss.”

“I see.”

“But that is only for machines. Organic forms are in the universe of things and also reside in the universe of essences. There we cannot go.”

Nigel felt an odd trembling in his body, a sense of compressed energies. “Universe of essences…?”

“You are a spontaneous product of the universe of things. We are not. This seems to give you… windows. It was difficult for me to monitor your domestic transmissions, they fill up with branches, spontaneous paths, nuances…”

“The damned speak frantically.”

“No.”

“But we are damned. Compared to you.”

“By duration? Eight hundred thousand of your years— so much as I have counted—are still not enough. Your time is short and vivid, colored. Mine…I scream, sometimes, in this night.”

“Good God.” He paused. The voice had shifted to a deeper bass and now seemed to echo in the cabin. “I would like to have those years, whatever you say. Mortality—”

“Is a spice. A valued one.”

“Still—”

“You are not damned.”

“Damned lucky, maybe.” Nigel laughed airily, transparent. “But still damned.”

“What was that sound?”

“Uh, laughter.”

“I see. Spice.”

“Oh.” Nigel smiled to himself. “Is your palate so flat?” After a long moment the voice said, “I see that it might be. Each of you laughs differently—I cannot recognize or predict the pattern. Perhaps that is significant; much hides from me. I was not made for this.”

“They designed you to—”

“Listen. Report occasionally. I awake at each new star. I perform my functions. But the sum is not greater or lesser than the parts, merely different … I, I cannot say it in your words. There, there are dreams. And what I gathered in from you is mine. The flavors. Your art and the set of your minds; only I am interested in those. Essences? They did not want it; perhaps the world-minds did not need it. But I…it is for my times in darkness.”

The pearl was dwindling, drawing up unto itself.

“I wish you well out there.”

“If I functioned as my designers intended, I would not need your blessing. I would go through that night blindly. I—the part who speaks to you—am an accident.”

“So are we.”

“Not of the same oblique cast. I have received a recognition signal… but you will discover them soon enough. For the moment I see that other men will exact much from you, for this.”

Nigel smiled. “I’ve let the quail take wing. Right. They’ll lay me out, I expect.”

“They cannot rob the essences from you.”

“The experience itself, you mean? Well, no, I suppose not. It’s good-bye then?”

“I think not.”

“Oh?”

“I am versed in many… animal theologies. Some say you and I are not accidents and that we shall meet again in different light. You are membrance. Perhaps we are all mathematics, everything is, and there is only one whole… sum. A self-consistent solution. That implies much.”

Nigel felt a chuckle burbling out of him.

“I must study that sound, laughter. There is your real theology. The thing you truly believe.”

“What?”

“When you make that sound you seem to have a brief moment of what it is like to live as I do, beyond the press of time. Then you are immortal. For an instant.”

Nigel laughed.

Above the pitted moon a bright Earth was rising, a gleaming crescent. The space around him resolved into geometries. He stared at the Snark’s disk. Its roundness seemed to conflict with the rectangular viewport, the two elements clashing. He frowned and tried to catch at something that flickered up within him and then was gone, an idea, a feeling…

Ahead the Snark plunged into night. Behind him spun the Earth, swimming in brawling life.

His board danced with insistent calls. Houston. Evers. Questions. Nigel wondered if he could explain this brief flicker of time. It would be like Icarus, perhaps worse. A great public piss-up. He shrugged.

It happened to me then, my friend

And here we go

Once more

Again.