In the Ocean of Night

One

It came in an instant, neatly dividing her life.

A moment before she had been serenely gliding over the crumpled, silvery moonscape. She was distracted, plotting her next course and chewing sugary raisins. Her sled was coasting through a series of connected ellipses, bound for nearside. Earth was rising, a glinting crystal globe above the warped moon.

There was a thump she felt more than heard. The horizon tilted crazily. She slammed forward into her harness and the sled began to fall.

Her clipboard spun away, there was the shriek of metal on metal; the sled was tumbling. She snatched at the guidestick and thumbed on the maneuvering jets. The right was dead. Some on the left responded. She brought them up to full impulse. Something was rattling, as though working loose. The sled lurched again, digging her harness into her.

The rotation slowed. She was hanging upside down, looking at the blunted peak of a gray-brown mountain as it slid by, uncomfortably close. She was still falling.

The sled was rectangular, all bones and no skin. She could see the forward half and it seemed undamaged. Everything she had heard came literally through the seat of her pants, conducted along the struts and pipes of the sled’s rectangular network. The damage, then, was behind her.

She twisted around, got a partial view of tangled wires and a fuel tank—and then realized she was being stupid. Never try to do a job upside down, even if there are only a few seconds left. And she had minutes to go before impact, certainly. Whatever had happened behind—a tank rupture? pipe blowout?—had thrown her into a new ellipse, an interception course with the low mountain range near the horizon.

She pulsed the maneuvering jets again and the sled rotated sluggishly. Something was forcing the nose down as she turned. She stopped when the forward bumper was nearly parallel to the horizon. She unbuckled automatically and turned.

Impossibly, the right rear corner of the sled gaped open. It was simply gone—tanks, braces, supplies, hauling collar, a search light.

For a moment she could not think. Where was it? How could it have blown away? She looked back along the sled’s trajectory, half expecting to see a glittering cloud of debris. There were only stars.

Training took hold—she leaned over and punched the override button that glowed red on her console. Now the navigation program was disconnected. Since it had sounded no warning, apparently the circuits still believed they were bound on a selenographic survey, working toward nearside. She started the ion engine, mounted slightly below and behind her, and felt its reassuring purr. She checked the horizon—and found she was spinning again. She turned in her couch, somewhat awkwardly, her spacesuit had caught on a harness buckle.

Yes—at the edge of the gaping hole there was a thin haze. A pipe was outgassing, providing enough thrust to turn the sled. She corrected with maneuvering jets and the sled rightened.

She turned up the ion beam impulse and tried to judge her rate of fall. The jagged, pocked surface rose to meet her. She unconsciously nudged the control stick and brought the sled’s nose up. Reflex made her do it, even though she knew on the moon no craft could delay its fall by gliding. No matter; on Earth she could have banked in with wings, but on Earth she would already be dead; the fall would have lasted only seconds.

The ion engine was running at full, but it could only do so much. She corrected again for rotation. The computer automatically kept the ion engine pointed downward, but it would only operate within a small angle. The out-gassing was getting worse, too. The sled shuddered and yawed leftward.

She looked for a place to go down. The explosion—or whatever—must have deflected the sled downward, not to the side. It was still following its original course down a long, rough valley. The end loomed up ahead, a scarred dirty-gray range of rugged hills. She corrected for rotation, surveyed ahead, then had to correct again.

There was a dull gleam ahead. Something lay buried partially in shadow at the base of the hill line. It was curved, part of a dome crumpled against the hill face. An emergency life station? No; she had studied the maps, she knew there was no installation anywhere near her route. That was why she was here, anyway—to chart some points in detail, study oddities, make borings for the vital water tests. In short, to do the things photographs cannot.

She had been watching her gauges, and was not surprised when the radar altimeter showed she was dropping too fast. The ion engine was not delivering full thrust. Yes, one of the missing tanks from the right rear fed the engine. She did not have enough thrust to stay aloft. It was eerie, sliding along in dead silence, running down the carved valley, narrow and straight as a bowling alley, toward the blunted brownish hills ahead. The random splotching of craters below was sharp, clear; she would have to land soon.

The course took her dead into the hill line. Two seconds ticked by—she was counting them now—before she could decide: drop into the valley, land on the flat instead of crashing into the steep slope above. Once made, the decision liberated her. She corrected for rotation again, checked her harness carefully, surveyed the damage one last time. The ground came rushing toward her. The dome—ah, there to the left. Damaged, broken, glinting rubble at its base. It sat at the base of the hill like a copper decoration.

She picked a flat space and leveled the bed of her craft as well as she could. The damned rotation was too much; she spent all of her time now correcting for it. Suddenly the spot she’d picked was there, almost beneath her, the sled was rotating, the nose went down, too far down, she—

The splintering crash threw her forward, straining so hard into the pinching harness she thought the sled was going to go end over end. It tilted, tail high. Everywhere there was dust, metal twisting. The tail came back down in the slow, agonizing fall of low gravity. There was a sudden, fierce pain in her leg and Nikka lost consciousness.

Two

It really was the old Telegraph Avenue, Nigel thought. They had actually encased and preserved it.

He ambled slowly down the broad walkway. This nexus point of legendary Berkley was still a broad pedestrian mall, the way he’d known it in 2014. On impulse Nigel hooked his hands into his hip pockets, a gesture he somehow associated with those early earnest days. There were few people on the mall this May afternoon, mostly tourists nosing about the memento shops near Sather Gate. A flock of them had got off the BART car with him and followed him up Bancroft. Chinese and Brazilians, mostly, chattering amiably amongst themselves, gawking, pointing out the sights. They’d all stopped to read the plaque set in concrete where Leary finally died in his desperate bid for hip redemption; some had even taken photographs of it.

A bird coasted in on the prevailing Bay breeze and fluttered to a perch in one of the eucalyptus trees dotting the mall. When Nigel had studied astrophysics here in 2014, Telegraph was still a gray pallor of concrete, greasy restaurants and the faint tang of marijuana and incense. Well, the rich flavor of incense remained, drifting into the street from open shop doors. That scruffy, noisy Telegraph he remembered was now charming and soothing as it basked in the yellow spring sunlight. Nice, yes, but in the worst sense of the word. The zest of the past was missing. The hub of student life had shifted north of the campus, amid the rambling houses of redwood; anyway, Berkeley was no longer the cauldron of the avant-garde. Now Telegraph was an embalmed tribute to its former self.

He checked himself: was Telegraph frozen in the past, or merely Nigel Walmsley? At forty-six such a question was worth pondering. But no—as he passed an open shop door the sounds of antique music filtered out. “White Rabbit.” Gracie Slick, Surrealistic Pillow. A genuine collector’s item in the original pressing. The shop was almost certainly using a fax crystal, though, he noted with the purist’s disdain that gave him such an odd, eccentric pleasure. Fully half of a music buff’s delight lay in the careful hoarding of such details. They weren’t playing it right, either; that particular number should have been so loud he could have heard it a block away. Nigel wondered what the original Airplane would have thought of using their music to promote tourism. The Chamber of Commerce had done the same job on them that New Orleans did on Jelly Roll Morton, decades before.

“Greetings of the day, sir!” a young man said as Nigel turned the corner onto Bancroft.

Nigel realized he must have been concentrating on the Airplane more than he thought, or he would have overheard their chanting. Six men and women were swaying rhythmically, singing monotonously and clapping. Four continued; a man and a woman broke off and came to join the one who had spoken.

Nigel said sourly, “You do keep on, don’t you?”

“Yes, yes,” the man said in a calm, self-assured manner. “We are here today to reach those who have not received the word.”

“I have already.”

“Then you are a believer?”

“Not bloody likely.”

The woman stepped forward. “I am grieved that the word has not manifested itself in the correct light for you. I am sure if you will but listen we can bring you to the Integrated Spirit.”

“Look—”

“Thus we proceed to fullness,” she said grandly. One of the men held up a card on which was circulating, in faxprint, Universal Law. Absolute Guide. Eternalities. Golden Unity.

“Through the Visitor?” Nigel said with a small smile. If they were going to bother him, at least he could have some fun with them. The Snark was known as the Visitor in the popular media, but luckily, he’d managed to keep his face and name relatively obscure in the foofaraw that followed the Snark’s abrupt departure. Publicly, NASA attributed the whole incident to imponderable alien ways. The story stuck pretty well, because there was no recording of his conversation with Snark—he’d seen to that, by the time he’d left lunar orbit—and Nigel had kept quiet, for a price. The price, of course, was Evers’s head on a gold-trimmed platter, and an impervious position in NASA for Nigel. The official word given the media was that the Visitor made a few obscure comments, complimented mankind on its development, and adopted a tendrils-off policy, lest it interfere disastrously with humanity’s progress. Some people in the scientific community knew the whole story, but there seemed no reason to go public with those tidbits until the moon was thoroughly searched for the Mare Marginis transmitter. Whatever had sent that brief, scrambled signal during his colloquy with the Snark was probably gone, in Nigel’s opinion. Or else they’d gotten a wrong fix on the source location; Mare Marginis was bare of anything artificial. So this New Son now running on about the Visitor— Nigel had tuned him out as soon as the words “transcendent” and “etheric cosmic connection” came into play—knew blessed little of what had gone on. They’d never even caught on to the reason for Alexandria’s resurrection, busy as they were trumpeting a bona fide New Son miracle. Above all else, Nigel did not want them turning her into some grotesque parody of a modern saint, as Our Lady of the Spaceship.

“Do you not agree, sir?”

Nigel, who had been lazily basking in the spring sun, tried to recall what the man had been saying. “Ah, divine origins?”

“It’s really super simple if you look at it right,” the man said.

“How so?”

“That the Visitor proves the New Revelation.”

“It predicted the visit, then?”

“Not literally, of course.” The man knitted his brows in concentration. “The Revelation frequently cites the multiplicity of life, however—even though the scientists had given up the idea.”

“Stopped listening for radio signals from other worlds, you mean?”

“Why, yes. Scientists lost faith. The Revelation proved them wrong.”

Nigel wondered idly what they would think when and if they heard the straight story on the Snark. “So life is common?”

“It is the nectar of the divine workings. A natural outcome of the universal evolution.”

“And we’re totally natural?”

“We are the fruit of the universe.”

“The Visitor—”

“Was a salute, sir. A real nice gesture. But our evolution hasn’t got anything to do with the Visitor.”

“That’s why you back the social concerns issues and downplay the moon program?”

“The issue is sure tough, but that’s kind of it, yeah.” “Goes along with your two hours extra off each work day, too.”

“Our Order requires us to spend these special hours of the day renewing our faith through times of quietness together. Time for spiritual tasks.”

“And loafing.”

“We’re real sorry. You must admit faith is more important than—”

“Than getting sandbagged by more efficient economies like Brazil or China or Australia?”

“It is time to put aside our gross material past. Not worship it. Rise—”

Abruptly the four chanters turned and clapped their hands smartly. Nigel noticed that a flock of tourists was ambling toward them, curious. The New Sons went into their routine.

“Love you not God, sir?” they sang in unison. “Damned un—”

“God is the Father. We love the Father, we were made by his hand,” the melody swung on.

“Fathers don’t make children with their hands,” Nigel shouted.

“We love the universe. The universe is love!”

“We love you, brother,” the woman sang.

“We love him! We love him!”

They paused. “Can’t we just be good friends?” Nigel said lightly, and turned away.

He slipped into and through the pack of curious tourists and around a tight grove of slender redwoods that bisected the mall. He’d kept matters light, humorous, but if that nit of a New Son followed him…

He saw her, and a hand clutched at his heart. He froze in midstride, studying her jawline, the same sleek hair, pert curved nose, the slight upward turn of the lip—and then she tilted her head to peer into a shop window and the illusion died: she was not Alexandria. He had seen her this way five times now, mirrored in the face of a stranger in a crowd. And it was the only way he would see those features again other than in the frozen memory of photographs. If they had had children it might have seemed different; they would carry some echo of her. Children, yes; sometimes they were only a parody of their parents, but at least they formed some fleeting connection, some bridge across time.

Nigel shook himself and walked on.

He tried to see remnants of the Telegraph he knew. All the world was coming to be like this, new and strange and adrift, somehow, from its past. Perhaps people were trying to forget the crisis years. They harked back to the ’70s and ’80s of the last century and skipped over the stinging memories of the ’00s and ’10s. And, for the other side of the coin, the New Sons, another kind of turning away from reality. Ah, well, the Sons bit had to be a passing phase; the pendulum had to swing. They’d been around for decades, after all.

And so, he thought, thrusting his hands into his pockets and walking faster, had he. Maybe Ichino was right, with his talk of retirement. Nigel knew he probably shouldn’t let himself be so influenced by another’s thinking—Ichino was nine years older, after all, with a different perspective—but the two of them had spent so much time together these last years, after the Snark business. They’d worked together on elaborate computer codes, trying to get a response from the retreating Snark. Long after NASA had given up they’d continued, Nigel certain that if Snark knew it was talking to him personally it might open up, answer. But hopes faded, time blurred…

These moods had come on him more often of late, memories snagging in the brain and refusing to let go. He was damned if he was going to start living in the past, yet in the present he’d lost all momentum. He was drifting, he knew. Even the most intense moments—Icarus, the last weeks with Alexandria, the scorched days of possession in the desert—blurred. It was no use whatever to say: Remember the consuming strangeness, the heady experience. Because those dead years dwindled, the walls that encased them thinned and let in a pale light from the present. Whatever he’d sought became misty.

He shrugged, shrouded in his thoughts. As he was turning a corner something caught his eye.

The sky flickered. He looked north. Above the University buildings and the Berkeley hills a dull yellowish glow seeped through a stacked cloud formation, as though something vastly brighter were illuminating them from behind. Nigel stopped and studied it. In a moment the effect faded. The phenomenon was silent and seemed to possess a kind of ponderous swelling pressure; he felt a sense of unease. He studied the sky. There was nothing else unusual, only a flat vacant blue. A crescent moon hung in the haze and smog above San Francisco.

Commercial satellite 64A, nicknamed High Smelter, happened to see it first. Its orbit, 314 kilometers up, took it over the Pacific north woods. From this height—a mere hair’s width, on an astronomical scale—the earth is a swirl of white clouds, masking mottled brown continents and twinkling oceans. There are no traces of man. No checkerboard farmlands, no highways or cities. They are invisible on this scale.

But the core fuser crew on duty in High Smelter saw the orange egg born in the woods quite clearly. It began as a fat, bright flare. The mottled egg billowed up and out, a scarlet searing wall that boiled away the forest. The blister swelled, orange cooling to red. Cloud decks evaporated before it. The egg fattened into a sphere and at last the chilling signature appeared: a mushroom, vast and smoky. Flames licked at his base. A deep rumble rolled over the forest. On the ground, animals fled and men turned to stare, unbelieving.

Three

The scene played itself out for her again. That afternoon she and Toshi had played sanshi, as usual, then quick showers and a drink in a small café nearby. But this time Alicia was waiting for them in the bar and as Nikka looked on she and Toshi unraveled their story of deception, intrigue, snickering assignations in friends’ apartments, all covered with a thin veneer of professed love, it’s-all-for-the-best-Nikka, we’re-all-adults-here, it’s not really the sexual thing at all, you understand, and on and on and on. She came home afterward and carefully, neatly put away her sanshi racket and clothes. She took another shower. She drank something warm and alcoholic, she couldn’t remember quite what. Then she thought she would lie down for a moment and she remembered well the sensation of falling onto the bed, of an absolute limitless time involved in the downward flowing toward it, of descending, of seeming to take forever. The falling, that was how she remembered Toshi. That was the end of it, the injured center of the self plunging down to absolute dark oblivion. She had stayed there three days, never getting out even for food or the doorbell or the telephone, sure she was sick, sure she was dying, hating herself for never saying anything in the bar, always being silent and pleasant and smiling. Nodding when they said it all, nodding, understanding, and all the time falling helplessly backward into that swirling black, falling—

“Alphonsus calling Nikka Amajhi. Alphonsus…” Slowly she came out of it. The cobwebs of memory faded. She shook her head. Her leg throbbed and she moved it reflexively, which made it hurt more. She looked down at it and saw a sheared strut jammed against her thigh. The porous elastic mesh of the skinsuit was intact, though, so she probably only had a bad bruise. She fumbled—and the radio monitoring light went on with a reassuring glow.

“Nikka here. I’m down at”—she read the coordinates—“from unknown causes. Something blew the back off my sled.”

“Injuries?”

“Don’t think so.”

“We got your Mayday some minutes ago. There’s no sled near there, but another survey craft has just changed course to reach you. It’s pretty close and I think it can be there in a short while.”

Nikka noticed something on the dash and suddenly froze. “Hold on. I’m checking something.” She worked quickly and silently for several minutes, unbuckled herself from the pilot’s couch and awkwardly, favoring her leg, climbed halfway down the sled to check connections. In a few moments more she was back in the couch.

“I hope that survey craft hurries up.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“I just checked my oxygen reserve. I have about fifty-six minutes.”

“Is that your emergency bottle? What happened to the rest?”

“It wasn’t a very soft touchdown. My wheels blew and the front end pranged.”

“Better check the front.” The voice from Alphonsus had suddenly acquired an edge.

She got down, taking the general purpose tool with her, and worked on the front of the sled for several moments. It was a mass of twisted metal and wire. Nikka could slip her fingers to within a foot of the oxygen bottles there, but no further. Her skinsuit gave her good manual dexterity and she knew she could probably worm a few fingers closer to one of the bottles, but at that angle she still could not remove the seal. Most of the bottles had ruptured on impact but two still might have positive pressure. For several more moments she pried at the front of the sled, rested a moment and then tried again. Nothing moved.

“Alphonsus.”

“Right. One oh five should be there within ten minutes.”

“Good, I’ll need it. I was running on direct air lines from the bottle in front. The line vacced just after landing—the cylinder I was using ruptured. I guess I blacked out. My console switched my line to the emergency bottle behind the couch and I’m running on that. The forward bottles are pinned in by tubing and the bumper. The nose is completely folded back over.” Nikka looked up at the sky. “I should be able to see that—”

There was a brilliant, soundless flash. Something came out of the coppery dome on the hillside and arced away. Above the distant horizon there was a sudden yellow explosion, a ball that thinned and disappeared in a few seconds. “Something—” Nikka began.

“We’ve lost the survey craft, one oh five. Their carrier is gone.” There followed a babble of voices that went on for several minutes. Nikka stood silently looking at the great dome about three hundred meters away. It was immense, definitely artificial, a dull crushed ball clinging to the hillside. The sudden flash seemed to have come from somewhere at the base.

It was several minutes before Alphonsus spoke again. “I’m afraid something has—”

“Never mind, I know. I saw it happen. That ship is gone.” She described the dome. “I saw it shoot at something over near the horizon, around coordinates”—she estimated the numbers and gave them—“and it made a hit. That must be what blew the back off my sled. The people in the one oh five weren’t so lucky.”

There was a silence, punctuated by bursts of solar static. “Nikka, look, we don’t understand what’s going on. What is that thing?”

“Damn it, I don’t know.” She paused. “No, wait, there’s only one thing it could be. Obviously we’ve never built anything like this. It’s huge, and it looks like a sphere that crashed here. I think it’s related to the Snark.”

“The Snark didn’t leave anything.”

“Are we so sure? Or maybe this was here before. That signal the Snark mentioned, something from the moon, remember? Maybe this was it.”

“Maybe. Look, this is pointless. We’ve got to get something over there to have a look at it and pick you up. That’s what I’ve been worrying about. With all the time we’ve lost, I don’t think we can get any craft to you, even if we can be sure it wouldn’t be destroyed.”

“That’s what I’ve been thinking. I have about half an hour left.” Nikka said the words but she could not believe them. Half an hour was nothing, a long telephone conversation, the length of a news program.

“God, there’s got to be a way out of this. Look, the whole front end is designed to interlock. Can’t you take some of it apart and get at the bottles?”

“When everything was straight it locked. I’ve tried prying things loose and it’s impossible.”

“Those thirty minutes assume movement and exercise. That’s only an average. Why don’t you lie down and relax?”

“I’ll never make it. I might pick up another fifty percent that way, but how fast do you think my metabolism will slow down after something like this?”

“Good point.” There was another drifting silence. There did not seem to be very much more to say. The simple arithmetic came out only one way, no matter how you did it. The toolbox had no torch, so she couldn’t cut away the metal in front.

Alphonsus was saying something, but she couldn’t focus on the voice. She sat and looked out at the rugged plain, dotted with boulders, cratered, sleeping silent in the glaring day. And soon—less than an hour—she would join them. It seemed so incredible; an inch away, just beyond the plastiform faceplate, was total vacuum, total silence, total death. She was a bubble of vapors and fluids, musk and acrid saline tastes, muscles and instincts and life. Only a thin skin separated her from this still world and soon there would be even less distinction.

“Nikka Amajhi. Nikka Amajhi.”

“I’m still here.”

“We’ve been trying to think of something, but—” “There isn’t anything.”

“Is there anything nonregulation on your sled? It isn’t regulation, but you might have taken along a torch or some extra tools or—”

“No.”

“Well”—the urgency crept into his voice—“look around you. There might be something—”

“Wait.” Nikka thought furiously. “I can’t possibly lever the front end off those oxygen bottles. You know why I was chosen to do all this survey work—I’m light, small, so I conserve on fuel. I can’t brute-force my way into anything.”

“Wait… Nikka, we’ve just gotten a squirt from Earth. There’s been a fusion explosion in the northwestern United States. Not a war, apparently. Some kind of accident.”

“So what? I don’t give a damn about that.”

“We might—”

“I’m going to die out here, you bastards!”

“Nikka, look… The point is that Earth wants us to monitor any deep space traffic. In case one of the major powers is pulling something—well, never mind. We’re going to be pretty busy here but we’ll give you all the help—”

“Fine, fine. Just shut up. I’m wondering … This wreck here is a ship, obviously—maybe I can get some help. Break into it. Find—”

“Well, sure, try anything—”

“It’ll probably kill me outright. That’s still better than… I’m going to walk over there now.”

She cut him off before he could say more. Walk to it, no; she ran, knowing the difference in oxygen consumption was not that much. She felt a surge of energy, a quickening of the pulse. It was good to be on the ground again, free, not falling like a helpless wounded bird.

She was so carried away, so sure the coppery thing spelled salvation, that she was totally unprepared when she ran smack into nothingness. Her nose slammed into her faceplate, showering the helmet with tiny red droplets of blood. She fell in a tangle of arms and legs.

She sat up, shook her head. Something buzzed in her ear; her life system, reporting the blood. She worked a control in the back of her helmet and a tape brought a coagulant pill around on a loop near her mouth. She took it, had some water and stopped to think.

It was hard to focus on things. Her head throbbed and there was a gritty taste in her mouth. The impact had destroyed that bounding certainty in her, but she forced herself to get up and stand.

At first she thought she must have stumbled, but no— there were the marks in the dust where she slid backward. She must have hit something. But there was… nothing…

She stepped forward, reached out and felt a definite pressure against her palm. She ran her hand up and down, and to the sides for several meters each way. Something invisible—she almost laughed at the thought—was pushing against her hand. No, not pushing, just there. Solid, a wall. She pulled her hand away and looked at the palm. It had a curious mottled look, clots of brown and orange against the black plastiform.

Partly from caution, but mostly because she needed something to do while she tried to think, Nikka turned and walked back to the sled. The invisible wall was at least a hundred meters from the dome, and she began to have an inkling what it was. At the sled she selected a long piece of tubing wrenched free by the impact and went back to the wall. She thrust the tubing forward, made contact and held it firmly against the pressure. No, it was not a solid wall. She could feel a curious soft resistance to it; the pipe went in slightly and stopped when she could push no harder. She held it firmly, waiting. Nothing seemed to happen. After a few moments she drew it back.

The end of the aluminum pipe was blurred, indistinct. It had melted. Somehow this obstacle was delivering heat to whatever thrust against it.

Despite her impatience she felt a sudden cold fear. Holding the tube against the steady resistance, she turned and walked. The invisible wall did not come to an end. After three minutes of walking she stopped and looked back. Her footsteps described a large, gently curving arc with the dome at its center. She blinked back sweat, feeling it sting her eyes and wishing she could rub them. There didn’t seem to be anything more to do than carry on. She walked further, tracing out the curve of the invisible wall until she came against an outcropping of rocks at the base of the hill. She was no closer to the dome, and minutes had trickled by.

She turned and walked back toward the sled, stumbling in the gray loose rock of the valley floor. She knew with a grim finality that she was never going to reach the dome, would never find anything to help her. Help was far away. She had no way to get to the reserve bottles, even supposing some of them were not ruptured.

A strange feeling of dread and despair rose in her as she looked back at the shattered vessel. Alien. Hostile.

She stumbled again, kicking up dust—was that the first sign of oxygen loss? She bit her lip. First there was an excess of carbon dioxide, they said; her lungs would react to that rather than the lack of oxygen. She stepped over the lip of a small crater. A boulder had rolled into it, crushing the lip on one side. She sagged against the boulder and found a place to sit. She noticed that she was panting. There was a sour, acrid taste to her breath. She hoped it was a sign of fatigue and not something worse. How long did she have? She checked the time and tried to estimate her air consumption rate. No, she couldn’t trust that. She had been running, working—she could have anything from ten to twenty minutes left.

She remembered the lectures and the diagrams about oxygen starvation. They seemed distant and unreal. Bursting capillaries, straining heart—just words.

She grimaced. There was nothing to do but sit here and pass the time, wait to die. That was why she was here anyway, because she waited for things to happen. If she had stood up and said she didn’t want this job, they wouldn’t have sent her out here. Her flight reflexes were excellent, yes, she was light, they checked all that and more. But she always felt uneasy about it, as though she was missing some talent the others had. Maybe simple mechanical abilities—she was an electronic technician, really, not a mechanic.

But she was qualified, she could spot the likely sites for water boring from above and pilot skillfully around them for a better look. She was young and had endurance and was reliable. So she started the flights and got used to them, coming and going on her own schedule with the warm, smug feeling of being free to travel on a world where others spent their days inside cramped laboratories, buried ten meters inside the moon’s gray skin.

Come half of a million kilometers, she had told her parents, to be locked inside? See so little of those cold hard mysteries around them, have no adventure? So she thought, feeling glamorous, and forgot the danger.

It was easy to relax into the routine, just as it was so deliciously simple to learn the sled’s acrobatics, memorize the quilted green map, make herself ready.

It was the same with Toshi back on Earth, before all this. She had sat there certain of her status, sure Alicia presented no threat, and the girl took Toshi away almost without a nod. She had let Alicia take him, found it easier to be silent and pleasant and smiling, the same way she was forced into this job, and now she was going to die for it, gasp out her last breath because she recoiled from the heat of conflict, couldn’t take that tight nervous clenching in the stomach—

Slowly, very slowly, she stood up. The idea was only a glimmering, but as she turned it over in her mind it became real.

But could she lift the sled? She’d never tried. Was there some way to do it? Alphonsus would know, they had more experience in these things, she could call and ask—ridiculous, no, there was no time for that. She turned and started walking smoothly, evenly, saving her energy. The dust crunched beneath her boots and she studied the sled intently as she approached.

Black shadows hid some detail, but she was sure the knock-off joints near the couch were not damaged. The sled was made for quick disassembly, segmented into modules that separated for maintenance.

Lift it? Impossible; it massed nearly a thousand kilograms. Nikka began to work. She disconnected pipe networks and wiring configurations and split off several of the supply flasks. She worked quickly, methodically, measuring each movement to conserve energy. Each valve seated firmly, each strut folded away. The knock-off joints snapped away cleanly and the sled broke in two. The tangled mass of the front was free.

The landing wheels were hopelessly crushed, but the front section was lighter than the other two-thirds of the sled; the ion engine was most of the sled’s mass.

Nikka walked around to the crumpled fender and found two good handholds. Even bent over in the light gravity, she could still get good footing by brushing away the blanket of powder beneath her boots. She set herself, got a good grip and pulled. The sled section seemed to resist, caught up on a small outcropping and then slid, slid over the dust. She grunted, pulled, it slid further. The dust was a good lubricant and once started, the sled section would glide for several meters with one pull.

Gradually, she worked it toward the hillside. It left a ragged track in the brownish dust and she lapsed into a rhythm—pull, take two steps, scrape dust aside so that she could get a good purchase on the rocks beneath, pull again. Her arms and legs strained and her back ached. Her air was beginning to foul, curling through her helmet with a weight of its own. It was a long, weary struggle to the invisible shield, but each step brought her closer and after a while her euphoria made the sled section seem lighter. She almost thought she could hear the brass as it scraped over rocks, mingling with the crunch of dust underfoot.

She should have called Alphonsus. They should know what she was doing. But they would find the dome whether they reached her in time or not. She was absolutely alone; life depended solely on her own effort.

Nikka was panting heavily by the time she reached the invisible demarcation. She bumped into it, nose pressing against faceplate. She remembered the bloody nose and noticed the caked dry blood inside her nostrils for the first time. It seemed as though that had happened a year ago.

She stopped and studied the air bottles, rejecting the ones with obvious splits or burst seams in them. There were two at one end which seemed intact, but she could not read their meters because of the twisted metal wrapped over them. Stopping only an instant to judge, she detached a strut and wedged it under the sled section. By leaning against it she forced the front part of the sled against the invisible shield.

She couldn’t be sure this would work. The aluminum pipe had melted, but the sled had steel and alloys in it that might not. She leaned against the strut, keeping the pressure against the part of the sled nearest the bottles. In higher gravity she would not have been able to lift the sled, even with the strut as a lever arm, but in low-g she could. Her shoulders ached.

Quick darts of flame shot down her back. She could see no change in the sled bumper, but then it slipped slightly to the left. She adjusted her footing, moved the strut to support the sled’s weight and then saw that a dark fluid was dripping slowly downward from where the sled had been. It must be a liquid metal, running down the face of the shield. Nikka tilted the strut forward, increasing the pressure.

After some moments the front face of the sled began to blur and run together. The twisted metal sagged at one point, then another. Slowly, agonizingly, a thin stream of liquid metal began to stream down the face of the invisible shield. A thin gray vapor puffed from it. It collected in spattered pools on the dust below. The sled tilted again—each time Nikka adjusted her balance, canted the strut to better advantage and kept up the pressure.

Through the film of perspiration on her faceplate she judged the shifting weight of the sled section and tried to compensate for it. Her air was getting thick and close. She had to struggle to focus her attention. Occasionally she glanced up at the crumpled copper dome above. An hour or two before, she had never seen it, never suspected she would find something so strange and alien in the midst of a selenographic survey. If she ever got out of this she was going to find out what that dome was and why there was a shield around it. Maybe its defense systems were acting sporadically without knowing what they were doing.

The sled tilted to the left again and she quickly brought the strut around to correct its balance. The liquid metal now ran in a steady stream; a vapor cloud formed above the sled. The twisted metal slowly gave, rippled and flowed away; in one quick rush the last obstacle to the oxygen bottles melted and was gone.

Nikka dropped the strut and frantically climbed over the sled. She twisted at the oxygen bottles but they refused to give. She leaned over, feeling the blood rush suddenly into her head, and struggled to focus her eyes. A pipe had lodged against them, pinning them in their mounts. She pushed futilely at the pipe and tried to dislodge it. It was stuck.

She scrambled back to the side of the sled and found the strut again. If she forced it against a rock—there, that was it—and tilted the sled, so; yes, it rose up again, presenting the pipe to the invisible shield. She wedged the strut into place and then worked her way around, near the shield so she could use her body weight against the sled and tilt it further over. She strained against it; the sled gave a bit and then the pipe came up against the shield. Her hands were wedged firmly against the pipe and she could see that her right upper wrist was being forced slowly against the shield. The weight of the sled shifted further and pinned her hand.

She had to decide—drop it, start all over, or let the heating work against both the pipe and her hand. She decided to let things be. The pipe was already hot; she could see vapor rising from it as the metal boiled away. She shifted her hand as best she could to relieve pressure, but she could not get it away.

She waited, adjusted her feet again, and studied the pipe intently. Its firm edges began to blur and run together. She could feel nothing in her right hand. Nikka tried to move her fingers and felt some faint sensation as reward. She braced herself and pulled as strongly as she could against the pipe. It slowly gave, bending away from the invisible wall, and an oxygen bottle popped free of its mount under the pressure.

She was gasping. She grabbed the bottle as it rolled across the sled and forced open its safety warrant valve. There was no answering reading on the smashed dial. She held a finger against the nozzle and felt no pressure. The bottle was empty. Without thinking, not allowing herself to feel any despair, she reached for the next bottle.

The pipe still forced it against its mount, but she wormed it away and the bottle popped free. This was it, she thought. There were no other bottles not already ruptured. Nikka tripped it open and the meter registered positive. She swung it around to her back mount without hesitation, screwing the cluster joints into place automatically.

The gush of air washed over her in a cool steady stream. She collapsed across the sled section, unmindful of the invisible shield, the tangled metal that gouged her even through her suit, the glare of the sun above. The bottle was good for at least three hours. If she rested and kept still Alphonsus might get through.

Something tingled at her wrist and she lifted her right hand to look at it. Against the mottled colors of the plastiform there was a spreading red patch.

The tingling sharpened into a dull, throbbing pain. As she watched, the blood ran down her wrist to her elbow. She lay absolutely still. She was bleeding into free space. Her suit fitted firmly against her skin, so the rest of her body felt no immediate pressure drop.

As she watched, a small group of bubbles formed in the blood and burst slowly. A thin veil of vapor rose from her hand as the blood evaporated.

She stared at it, numb. Exposure to vacuum meant death, surely. How long did it take? A sudden pressure drop should force nitrogen narcosis. How long? A minute, two? She took a deep breath and the air was good. It cleared her mind and she looked up again at the dome. It seemed to loom over her.

Blood against metal. Life against machine. She lifted her feet and rolled off the sled. Her ears popped; her body pressure was dropping. It was a hundred meters to the sled. In her repair kit there was tape, organic seals— something to close off the wound.

She took a step. The horizon shifted crazily and she almost lost her balance. A hundred meters, one step at a time. Concentrate on one, only one. A step at a time.

Her ears popped again but by now she was moving. Scarlet drops spattered into the dust. The pain had turned into a fierce burning lance.

She slipped and quickly regained her balance, and in the movement glanced back for an instant. The silent and impersonal dome squatted above her. In less than an hour it had done all this to her, brought her to the edge; perhaps it could do more. But she was in charge of her life at last. She wasn’t going to simply let things happen to her. And she was damned if she was going to die now.

Four

Mr. Ichino put his lunch bag aside and lay down on the tufted grass that grew in patches here. He cocked his hands behind his head and peered up into the canopy made by the massive pepper tree that rustled softly in a light midday wind. Yellow dabs of sunlight speckled him and shifted and danced. Mr. Ichino felt an inner calm that came from having made a decision and put it behind him for good. He suspected Nigel’s telephone call from Houston was designed to stop him from reaching that final point and tendering his resignation. But if that were so, Nigel was too late. Mr. Ichino’s letter was now worming its way through channels, and in a month he would be free of the stretching tensions he felt in his work; and he could then walk a bit more lightly through the years that remained to him. Precisely how many years that might be was a minor issue, though the incidence of pollutive diseases these days did not seem reassuring. He had never smoked and had watched carefully what he ate, so that—

“Sorry I’m late,” Nigel’s voice came from above him. Mr. Ichino blinked lazily and drifted up from his reflections. He nodded. Nigel sat beside him.

“Had a devil of a time getting in from the airport.”

“I see.”

“Snagged a bite on the way,” Nigel said, indicating Mr. Ichino’s paper bag. “Go ahead and eat.”

He sat up and carefully unfolded the wrapping papers for his sandwich and vegetables. “Then you did not truly intend to have lunch here.”

“No.” Nigel glanced at him sheepishly. “When I called I had to have some reason to get you away from JPL. I didn’t want to be overheard or have anyone wondering what we were talking about.”

“And why is that?”

“Well, first off, your prediction was dead on.”

“How?”

“NASA’s going to keep the Marginis operation as in-house as possible. They’ll use retreads like me—they have to. There aren’t that many younger types who’re trained for a variety of jobs.”

“The cylinder cities are too specialized?”

“So NASA says.”

“That seems a weak argument.”

“These things aren’t relentlessly logical. It’s politics.” “The old guard.”

“Of which I am, blessedly, one.”

“You were successful?”

“Right.” Nigel beamed. “I’ve got a lot of swotting up to do on computing interfaces and that rot.”

“You know the material well.”

“Not well enough, the specialists say.”

“The specialists wish to go themselves,” Mr. Ichino murmured lightly.

“Check. Quite a round of throat-slitting going on back there, I gather. Had to be careful not to slip on the blood.”

“Yet you survived.”

“I collected on a lot of old debts.”

“The legacy of Mr. Evers.”

Nigel grinned slyly.

“I have never truly approved of that, you know,” Mr. Ichino said carefully.

“I’m not bursting with pride over it,” Nigel’s voice took on a hesitant, guarded note.

“We have all conspired, implicitly, to conceal the truth.”

“I know.” Nigel nodded with a touch of weariness. “But it was necessary.”

“To protect NASA.”

“That was the first-order effect. It’s the second-order effect I was after—keeping NASA from getting itself gored by outsiders, so they’d have a free hand and a bigger budget. Money to explore the moon.”

“And you have been proved correct.”

“Well—” Nigel shrugged. “A lot of other people felt the same way. Finding that wreck was pure accident.”

“The girl would not have been flying there had the lunar budget not been expanded.”

“Yes. Nifty syllogism, eh? Logical to the last redeeming comma.” Nigel chuckled with hollow mirth.

“You are not convinced.”

“No.”

“It has worked out well.”

“I don’t like lying. That’s what it was, that’s what it is. And you can’t ever be sure, there’s the rub. We think the politicians and the public and the New Sons and God knows who else, we think they’d be horrified to learn that Evers fired a bomb at the Snark, drove it away. And blew our chance. Hell, he could’ve been risking a war, for all he knew. And the backlash might’ve gutted NASA so that we’d never have got to search for the Marginis wreck. But we don’t know that would have happened.”

“One never does.”

“Right. Right.” Nigel fidgeted with his hands, flexed his legs into a new sitting position, stared moodily out at the knots of people lunching in the park. Mr. Ichino felt the unbalanced tensions in this man and knew Nigel had something more to say. He pointed toward the western horizon. “Look.”

A noontime entertainment. A darting flitter craft was beginning a cloud sculpture. The pilot chopped, pruned, extruded and sliced the taffy-white cumulus. A being emerged: serpentine tail, exaggerated fins, knotted balls of cotton for feet. The event was admirably timed—as the flitter shepherded the remaining puffs into place, to shape the snouted face, the eyes turned ominously dark. The eyeballs expanded and purpled and suddenly lightning forked between them, giving the alabaster dragon a surge of life. In a moment a wall of thunderheads split the beast in two, sullen clouds churning. Claps of thunder rolled over the park. Above Los Angeles a hazy rain began.

When Mr. Ichino looked again at Nigel he could perceive from his new posture that some of the tension had drained away. In its place was Nigel’s familiar pensive enthusiasm.

“You learned more?” Mr. Ichino said.

“A lot,” Nigel said absently. “Or rather, a lot of negative results.”

“About Wasco?”

“Right. The Wasco event, as it’s called. Can’t label it a bomb because nobody dropped it. It was buried about a kilometer in bedrock. Must’ve come near on thirty megatons. A pure fusion burn.”

“I heard there was little radiation.”

“Surprisingly little, yes. Cleaner than any bomb we know of.”

“Not ours.”

“No, certainly not ours. The cover story is that a lot of experts think it was a human accident, but I never met anybody who buys that. No, it was alien. Triggered by the Marginis wreck at the same time that survey craft one oh five was getting snuffed.”

“But why? If the wreck thought it was being attacked…”

“Don’t look for order in any of this. It’s a malfunctioning ship, period. It nearly got that girl, then plugged one oh five and some standing order inside it made it touch off the Wasco explosion. The fusion device was there, probably stored in an arsenal or a base—look, it’s all a balls-up, a pack of guesses. We don’t know much for dead certain.”

“Aren’t the men working at the wreck in danger if they know so little of what caused this?”

“I suppose. Though the wreck has a blind side—the hill it’s on masks most of the sky in that direction. That’s how those three fellows got to the girl in time. They took a shuttle across Mare Crisium at low altitude, landed on the other face of the hill and simply walked around it. The wreck doesn’t fire at anything on the ground, apparently. So they carried her out, in shock but repairable.”

“They did not try to penetrate the invisible screen?” “No point. Leastwise, not then. Some physicists have taken a knock at it since—they say it’s high-frequency electromagnetic, with an incredible energy density—but they failed.”

“Ah.”

Nigel cast him a sidelong glance. Mr. Ichino smiled. Wind rippled the pepper tree and murmured through the park and brushed by them. “And where are you leading, Nigel?”

“That obvious, eh?” he said dryly.

“You know I am retiring. I cannot work on this riddle any longer.”

“I know, but—”

“You do not think you can talk me out of it, I hope?” “No, I wouldn’t be that thick. But you’re wrong about not taking part in all this.”

Mr. Ichino wrinkled his brow. “How?”

Nigel hunched forward eagerly. “I read the prelim study on the Wasco crater. It’s a mammoth hole and the land’s scraped clean in a seventy-five-kilometer radius. But there’s where the detective work ends. Whatever housed the fusion device is obliterated.”

“Of course. There is nothing to be learned there. The only possible research must be done on the moon.”

“Perhaps, perhaps,” Nigel said lightly. “But suppose there was something stored at Wasco. Why? Easier to salt stuff away on the moon.”

“Unless you were working on Earth.”

“Exactly. Now, we haven’t a clue how old that wreck is. It probably had some sort of camouflage going earlier so nobody picked it up on the Marginis search. But if the wreck has been there a longish time, there might have been ancient operations on Earth.”

“And you wish to look for traces of that.”

“Ah… yes.”

“Interesting.”

“It’s simply a matter of where you retire.”

Mr. Ichino gave a puzzled glance.

“Well, say you spend some time this winter in the north woods.” Nigel spread his hands and shrugged, his offhanded-and-reasonable gesture. “See if there is any history of unusual activities there.”

“It sounds outlandish.” “This is outlandish.”

“Do you honestly think this has any reasonable probability of success?”

“No. But we aren’t being reasonable. We’re guessing what’s near on to unguessable.”

“Nigel.” Mr. Ichino leaned forward from his position and touched Nigel’s wrist. The other man’s eyes were earnest, excited. There was something in this dynamic tension Mr. Ichino recognized in himself, as he had been decades before. Nigel was, after all, nine years his junior. “Nigel, I want to end with this. I do not feel at peace here.”

“If you tried you might get to work on the Marginis wreck.”

“No. Age, inexperience—no.”

“Right then, granted. But you can make a contribution by running down this nagging bit—there may be something to be learned up there. Some trace, a fragment—I don’t know.”

“NASA will uncover it.”

“Of that I’m by no means sure. And even if they did— can we trust them to pass it on? With the New Sons so powerful now?”

“I see.” Mr. Ichino’s face became absentmindedly blank, concentrated. He licked his lips. He gazed around the tranquil park where in the distance the air rippled with summer heat. He noticed that Nigel was wisely giving him time to let the words and arguments sink in. Still, Mr. Ichino fretted uncertainly. He studied the people lounging and eating around them, dotted on the emerald lawn at the intervals decreed by privacy. Office workers, newspaper readers, derelicts, welfare stringers, the elderly, students, the dying, all sopping up the forgiving sun. Down the flagstone path came businessmen, always in pairs, always talking, earnestly not here and earnestly going someplace else. Commonplace. Ordinary. It felt so odd to speak of the alien in the midst of this relentlessly average world. He wondered if Nigel was more subtle than he seemed; something in this atmosphere made it possible for Mr. Ichino to change his mind.

“Very well,” he said. “I will do it.”

Nigel smiled and at the corners of his upturned mouth there seeped out a boundless, childlike glee; a seasoned anticipation; a regained momentum.