In the Ocean of Night

One

Nigel squinted at the faxscreen memo:

Nigel pursed his lips. Sandwiched into the jargon were some interesting points. Basic design of the group was the intensive core with a wide-based backup system, the model most favored by research theorists. The three teams were the intensive core. He could look forward to a grueling time of it; the pressure from Earthside would be intense.

Most importantly, he’d got the position opposite Nikka Amajhi.

Nigel nodded to himself and turned away from the faxscreen. The corridor was empty; indeed, the entire main section of Site Seven had appeared nearly deserted since he’d arrived four hours ago. Most of the staff was burrowing out more tunnels. Nigel padded down the tubular hall and consulted the site diagram. There, that was the working area. He found the right door in short order and went in.

A slender woman sat tinkering with electronics in a corner. The room was dim to allow maximum visibility at the two massive communications consoles that faced the far wall. Here was the nexus of the work to be done. The woman glanced up casually.

“Lost?”

“Conceivably.”

“The nearest map is—oh. A moment. You are…?”

“Nigel Walmsley.”

“Oh! I am Nikka Amajhi.”

“Oh.” Absurdly, he felt uneasy.

“I understand we will work together.”

She stood up and held out a hand. Her handshake was forthright, no-nonsense. In her face he found an air of half-concealment, as though more emotions bubbled beneath than made it to the surface.

“You’re the inside worker.”

“Can’t you guess from my size?” She made a pretty bow, coming halfway up on her toes in the light gravity and balancing on one. Her jumpsuit fit snugly and something in the gesture, in the intersection of her hourglass waist and flaring hips, the artful grace of her, struck him as with a nearly physical blow. He licked his lips and found them dry.

“Oh. Yes. They wouldn’t want a hulk such as me hauling his carcass through those tunnels.”

“You couldn’t. You’re too big.”

“And too old.”

“You do not look it.”

Nigel murmured something polite and shifted the topic to an oddment of electronics that caught his eye. He recognized the trouble they were having. Knowing someone else by reputation, because of something they’ve done, has its hazards. The work or deeds of another become a kind of halo around them, preventing a clear picture. At times the reputation-halo was useful—at parties, where it could be used to keep people at a distance, or as a special key into places one could otherwise not go. But the halo was false. His was Famous Astronaut or Brave Man. But he was no more that than he was exclusively any of the dozen or so other aspects of his life. It was the same with Nikka. He knew her as a quick-witted woman, already famous in the media. She was probably something entirely different from his preconceptions. Well, there was nothing for it: lacking subtlety, he would have to bull his way through.

“That was a brave thing you did,” he said abruptly. “What?” she said, mystified.

“When you were shot down.”

“Oh. That?” She looked directly at him, vexed. “That was simply staying alive. Doing what anybody would do. There was nothing brave to it.”

Nigel nodded. “Now you can ask me what it was like to talk to the Snark.”

Puzzlement crossed her face; her eyebrows curled downward. Then she exploded with mirth and slapped him on the arm. “I see! We must do this ritual sweeping out of the cobwebs! Of course.” She laughed merrily and Nigel felt a weight lift from them. “Very well, I shall—do you say, bite?”

“Right. English isn’t your—”

“Native tongue? No. I am Japanese.”

“So I’d gathered.” Yet, he thought, she has none of the shyness I expected her to have. But that, too, was part of the unwanted halo.

“And your friend the Snark?”

“It said our desk calculators will probably outlive us.” “So I’ve heard. But it always takes a Lewis Carroll to make a Snark.”

“Yes,” he said, sensing behind her laughing liquid eyes a more serious intent. “Yes, doesn’t it?”

Two

Mr. Ichino dozed a bit, late in the morning. He spent most of the day making the cabin fit to live, and as he worked he thought of Japan. Already the images of his visit were fading. He had gone, thinking to regain some fraction of himself, and instead had found a strange parody of the Japan his parents had known.

Perhaps it was the National Parks of Preservation. His ticket to the Osaka Park, despite its price, gained him admission only to the lesser portions. There the grasses and foliage were soot-stained, a dead gray. The great towering trees were withered and dusty. To call this a park seemed a deliberate joke and Mr. Ichino had become angry, only to be soothed by a young woman attendant and then sold another, vastly more expensive ticket. This unlocked a wrought-iron gate at one edge of the grimy forest, in time for the daily appearance of the trained nightingales. Their song burst over him suddenly as he crossed a tinkling stream. Fog shrouded the treetops in the ravine and Mr. Ichino stood ankle-deep in the chill waters, transfixed by the lilting merry song. Later, there came larks. Their trainers assembled in a shoreside clearing. The cages were lined up in a row and simultaneously the doors opened, releasing a fluttering cloud of the birds. They flew vertically upward, hovered below the lazy clouds and warbled for many minutes. The lesser larks returned early and occasionally flew into the wrong cage; the best lasted eighteen minutes aloft, and returned un-erringly.

He could not afford many visits to the Parks, so he spent hours in the city streets. The pollution victims who begged on corners and in doorways disturbed him, but he could not take his eyes away. The healthy passed by these creatures without a thought, but Mr. Ichino often stood at a distance and studied them. He recalled his mother saying, in quite a different context, that the deaf seem as fools and the blind were like sages. Those who could scarcely hear, in their effort to catch what others were saying, would knit their brows, gape their mouths and goggle their eyes, cocking their heads this way and that. But the blind would sit calmly, immersed, their heads bowed a trifle as if in meditation, and thus appear quite thoughtful. He saw in them the half-closed merciful eyes of the Buddha images which were everywhere. They sang softly, chiri-chiri-gan, chiri-gan, and ate of parched soybeans and unpolished rice, and to Mr. Ichino they were the only natural people left in this jumbled island of sleazy cities. Amid the pressing crowds Mr. Ichino drifted, letting his time run out, and then came back to America. He had learned that he was not Japanese, and the truth was more than a little disturbing. He had felt a kinship with the remnants of the fragile natural world in Japan, but that was all. A strange logic, he knew: the deformed seemed more human than the abrasive, competitive, healthy ones. He had emptied his pockets into their alms bowls, and wished he could do more. But he could give only momentary shelter to these crippled beings. And in a truly natural world they would be quickly snuffed out. Yet they seemed, cowering there in twos and threes, brushed aside by the earnest business of the world, somehow in touch with a Japan he had once known—or dreamed of—and forever lost. Yes, an odd logic.

The Many Paths Commune, nestled into the Oregon hill country, had proved larger than he had expected. Mr. Ichino had already found five tumbled-down shacks, cabins or sheds within two hundred meters of the Commune Center. Since the property extended another kilometer along the riverbed, snaking down westward to the Willamette, there were probably many more.

With his own cabin made livable by late afternoon, he was moved to explore the Commune, to observe its ruins, its memories. Puffing slightly in the chill air, he angled down the face of a hill. The deer had worn their own vast system of interlocking trails. The hillside was wrinkled like a face, but the early fall rains had already blurred the paths again. Mr. Ichino had tried to follow the deer trails but it was hard to keep each step along the way from starting small landslides. He worked his way down toward the river. Half hidden ahead was a large Buckminster Fuller dome. Whatever had covered it was completely gone. The beams were of solid pine but the joint connections were rusted and decaying; several had broken away.

This must be the main cabin, where the patriarch lived with his reported two brides. The people in Dexter who rented him this site were full of stories about the rise and fall of the Many Paths, most of them rumors about sexual excesses committed by the patriarch. Mr. Ichino still didn’t have a clear idea why Many Paths failed after twelve years. The most prevalent theory in Dexter was that the patriarch had one revelation too many about the nature of expansive love. There were rumors of a murder or two that split the commune into factions.

Mr. Ichino stopped to rest by the dome. A rusted stove and some scattered brown bottles lay in mute testimony to the impermanence of man’s things. Further away there was a pile of lumber that might have been a woodshed and a lean-to outhouse near the river. The current was fast and deep here, rippling the cold water. The stream bed was filled with rocks and boulders of all sizes and a tributary creek exposed high layered walls of conglomerate soil. Some of the trees behind the dome had had to contort themselves to keep pace with the eroding bank; in places their exposed roots had grown huge for support.

Mr. Ichino studied it, hands in pockets. The cropland nearby was rocky and unforgiving. It seemed more likely to him that Many Paths failed more for economic reasons than for social ones. Apples and a few other crops took to this sort of land, but he couldn’t conceive of making a living from farming here. The Dexter people said Many Paths had had a novelist or two and an artist living here, so probably that was their main income.

Mr. Ichino made a trail through rotted leaves and loam back toward the cabin where he lived. He smiled to himself. The Many Paths people were probably city kids—(kids? He reminded himself that they were probably his age by now)—full of idealism and guilt. He could vouch for the fact that they knew little of carpentry. The support beams in his cabin were inaccurately laid and the shank fasteners not driven in far enough. The rest of the cabin was adequate, though, so probably they had somebody reasonably competent around when it went up. It was the only building left that was livable, mostly because Dexter folk had repaired it over the years for a hunting lodge.

Mr. Ichino disliked hunting, though he was no vegetarian. He hated seeing things die. It was alarming enough to note what an enormous effect your mere passage had on the forest, an unknowing giant lumbering through web after fragile web of biological universes. Mr. Ichino studied the deep bed of moist leaves he was walking over. Every step he took crushed a world. Chop a log for firewood and suddenly a panicky swarm of ants is covering the ax blade. Move a stump in your way and a warm, slumbering black salamander finds himself in the middle of winter and scuttles off. Kick a rock and a frog jumps.

He stood by the creek listening and something caught his attention. A rustle of leaves, the faint snap of a twig. Something was moving along the opposite bank of the creek. A thick stand of pine blocked his vision. Mr. Ichino could see a dark form flitting between the trees. It was difficult to judge distance and size in the quilted shadows but the form was certain: it was a man. Mr. Ichino brushed aside a frond to have a better look and instantly the shadow across the creek froze. Mr. Ichino held his breath. The dark form among the trees seemed to slowly fade away, with no detectable sound or sudden movement.

After a moment Mr. Ichino could not be sure he saw it any more at all. It seemed odd that a man could disappear so silently. For a moment Mr. Ichino wondered whether he had really seen anyone there or whether it was his own isolation playing tricks with his eyes. But no, he had heard the sound, of that he was sure.

Well, there was no point in worrying over shadows in the woods. He decided to put the matter out of his mind. But as he climbed upward toward his cabin some uneasiness remained and he unconsciously quickened his pace.

There were no signs of the Wasco blast here, two hundred kilometers from Wasco and deep in Oregon’s coastal margin of woods. The local people still told stories of the disaster, of hardships, of relatives or friends incinerated—but Mr. Ichino was fairly sure most of it had only a slim factual backing. How could he find the traces Nigel thought were here, among folk so given to tall stories?

He had rummaged through town records, consulted the cramped little libraries, talked to the elderly ones who had grown up here. From the detail and hyperbole he had extracted no concrete ideas. What next? Winter would come soon, confining him. What could he do? Mr. Ichino shook his head and labored back to the cabin.

Three

Nikka allowed the weak lunar gravity to pull her slowly down the narrow shaft. She held her arms above her head; there was no room to keep them at her side. Her feet touched something solid. She felt around with her boots until she found a small hole in the side, off to an angle. She slowly twisted until she could sink into it up to her knees.

She looked up. The head of Victor Sanges was framed in the tunnel mouth six meters up. “You can start down now,” she said. “Take it slowly. Don’t be afraid of falling. There’s enough friction with the walls to slow you down.”

She wriggled into the narrow side channel and in a moment was stretched flat on her back, working her way forward by digging in her heels and pushing with her palms against the rough plastiform sheeting. Through the translucent material she could see the coppery metal of the ship itself. It had a dull sheen unlike any metal Nikka had ever seen. Apparently it puzzled the metallurgists as well, for they still could not name the alloy. Every few meters the walls had a curious semicircular series of whorls; otherwise this tube was featureless. Nikka passed one of the glowing white phosphors the maintenance crew had stamped into the plastiform when this section of the ship was pressurized. It was the only apparent lighting in the tube; perhaps the aliens had needed none. The tunnel narrowed here, following no obvious scheme. The ceiling brushed against the side of her face and she had a sudden unreasoning fear of the oppressive weight of the ship above her. Her breath was trapped, moist and warm, in front of her face and she could hear only her own amplified breathing.

“Sanges?” A muffled shout came in reply. She worked her way further on and felt her heels come free of the floor. Quickly she wriggled through and into a spherical room two meters in diameter. A chill seeped into her legs and arms as she waited for Sanges. She wore a thermal insulation suit and the air circulated well through the tunnel, but the ship around them was in equilibrium with the moon surface at minus 100 degrees Centigrade. During full lunar night things were much worse, but the thermal inertia of the ship helped take the bite of cold away. The engineers refused to heat the tunnel air, just as they refused to pressurize any more of the strange network of corridors than proved absolutely essential. No one knew what effect air would have on the ship as a whole—thus the plastiform walls.

Sanges slowly crawled out the small opening and into the cramped spherical room. “What is this?” he said. He was a small, wiry man with black hair and intense eyes. He spoke slowly in the ruby glow that enveloped them.

“The Bowl Room, for want of any other name,” Nikka replied. “That red light comes directly out of the walls; the engineers don’t know how it works. The lights are in a weak period right now. They get brighter later on and the whole cycle repeats with a period of 14.3 hours.”

“Ah.” Sanges pursed his lips.

“The natural assumption is that their day was 14.3 hours long.” She smiled slightly. “But who knows? There isn’t any other clue to back up that guess.”

Sanges frowned. “But—a room, perfectly spherical. Nothing else on the wall. What could they use it for?”

“A free-fall handball court, that’s my theory. Or a drying room for underwear. Maybe it’s a shower, only we don’t know how to turn on the water. There’s a patch over there that looks odd”—she pointed to a burnished splotch above her head—“but with that plastiform over it I can’t guess what it is.”

“This room is so small. How could anyone—” “Small for who? You and I are both here because we’re practically midgets compared to the rest of the human race. Alphonsus imported you especially for the occasion, didn’t they? I mean, you were on Earth when we found this. They shipped you up because you know electronics and you can wriggle through these tubes.”

“Yes.” The man nodded. “The first time I ever thought being small was an advantage.”

Nikka pointed to a hole halfway up the wall. “This next part is the worst squeeze in the whole trip to the computer link. Come on.”

She worked her way into the hole and down into a comparatively open length. Abruptly the passage narrowed. Nikka braced herself and got through by expelling her breath and pushing hard with her heels. There was an open space that temporarily eased the pressure, and then ahead she saw the walls narrowing again. She pushed and turned, trying to wedge herself flat on the tilted floor of the passage. Not only was it contracted here, but the tube was tilted at an awkward forty-five degrees.

She could hear the soft sounds of Sanges’s struggles behind her. The tunnel seemed to press at her and she gave herself over to an endless series of pushes and wriggles, rhythmically turning forward against the steady hand of gravity and the clutching of the walls.

The passage became almost unbearably tight. She began to doubt that she had ever made it through this space before. The air seemed impossibly foul. The ship was a bruising presence, a massive vise squeezing the life from her. She stopped, thinking to rest, but she could not seem to get her breath. She knew there was only a little way further to go, and yet—

Something struck her boot. “Go. Go on.” Sanges’s muffled voice was very close. There was a thread of panic in it.

“Easy, easy,” Nikka said. If Sanges lost his nerve, they would be in a pretty fix. “We have to take our time.”

“Hurry!”

Nikka braced her feet against the walls and pushed. Her arms were above her head and with one more lunge she found the edge of the passageway above. She pulled slowly up the incline and in a moment was free of the constriction.

Here it was almost possible to stand. The open bay was an ellipsoid with most space taken up by dark oval forms. They were seamless, apparently storage compartments of some kind with no obvious way of opening them. A short path marked off by tape wound between them. No one was to venture beyond that tape or try to investigate the dead alien machinery that lay further on. That would come later when men knew more of the ship and how it worked. Only the white phosphors in the plastiform illuminated this room; they cast long shadows near the walls that gave the room an oddly ominous cast. Though it was almost possible to stand upright, the shadowed mass of the ship seemed to close on her from every direction.

Sanges struggled up out of the tube and slowly got to his feet. “Why did you slow down back there?” he asked sharply.

“I didn’t. You have to pace yourself.”

“What does that mean?” he said quickly.

“Nothing.” She looked at him appraisingly. “Claustrophobia is a funny thing and you have to keep your wits about you. You should try it some time the way I first went through—in an s-suit with oxygen gear and a helmet.”

“It’s a Godforsaken way to—”

“Precisely. God didn’t make this ship and men didn’t either. We have to learn to adapt to it. If strange things bother you that much, why did you volunteer for this job?”

Sanges clamped his lips together firmly and nodded. After a moment Nikka turned and led the way down the narrow path to an immense black panel set into one wall. There were two man-made chairs in front of it. She indicated one for Sanges and sat in the other. Sanges looked at the imposing board, with its multiple layers of switches laid out before him. He turned his head and studied the dark forms further away. “How can we be sure the pressure is good here?” he said.

“The plastiform is tight,” Nikka said as she turned on some extra phosphors. “The alien superstructure seems to be intact. The whole ship is modular, as far as we can tell. When it crashed, most of the other components were pulverized, but this one and two others—about forty percent of a hemisphere—remained intact. Some things in the other passages were thrown around, but otherwise this section is still in one piece.”

Sanges studied the room and tapped nervously with his fingers on the console board.

“Careful of that! I’m turning on the console now and I don’t want you hitting any of the switches.” She pressed something like a vertically mounted paper clip and two blue lights flickered on the board before them. In a moment the black screen above the board changed subtly to a shade of light green.

“Where does the power come from?” Sanges said. “We don’t know. The generators must be in one of the other modules but the engineers don’t want to go too deeply into there until we understand more. The power is AC, about 370 hertz—though that varies, for some reason. We took this panel off and tried to trace the circuitry but it’s extremely complicated. In another passageway the engineers found a huge vault of micro-sized electronic parts, apparently part of a memory bank. Most of the vault is thin films of magnetic materials on a substrate. The whole vault is at very low temperature, far colder than the surrounding ship.”

“Superconducting memory elements?”

“We think so. That’s not quite my line, so I haven’t had much to do with it. There are small-scale oscillations in magnetic fields among the circuitry, so probably the fields switch the superconducting elements on and off. Makes a great switching circuit, as long as it operates in vacuum. The trouble is, we don’t know where the cooling comes from. There is no circulating fluid; the walls are just cold.”

Sanges nodded and studied the array of hundreds of switches before him. “So this computer is alive, or at least its memory is. After all this time. With most of the ship knocked out. Remarkable.”

“That’s why we are taking so much care with it. It’s a direct link into whatever the aliens thought worth storing.” She tried a few of the switches experimentally. “It appears the power is on. More often than not this board is dead. The ship’s power is unstable. Okay, I am going to call Nigel Walmsley and start work. Watch what I do, but don’t touch the board. Most of the procedure for starting is written up; I’ll give you a copy at the end of this shift.”

She took a throat microphone and yoke and fitted it over her head. “Nikka here.”

“Walmsley, madam,” a voice came from the speaker mounted on the wall. “If world security were at stake, would you spend the night with a man whose name you didn’t even know?”

Nikka smiled. “But I know yours.”

“True, true. Still, I could have it changed.”

“Victor Sanges is here with me,” Nikka murmured officially, before Nigel could say anything more. “He’s the inside man for Team One.”

“Charmed, I’m sure. See you in the mess later, Mr. Sanges. Nikka, I’m picking up the screen quite well but I’m getting bored with that same green haze all the time.”

Sanges turned and looked at the television camera mounted over their heads. “Why don’t you simply pick the signal up from the circuits that feed the screen?” he asked Nikka.

“We don’t want to fool with the circuitry. Watch this, it’s the same opening sequence I always use just to see if the memory array is unchanged.”

Each switch had ten separate positions available; she altered several, glancing at the notebook at her elbow. A swirl of color formed and suddenly condensed into a pattern of symbols; curls, flashes, marks tantalizingly close to something like Persian script. In the middle of the display was a diagram involving triangles locked together in a confusing pattern.

“This was the first readout we ever got. Most sequences available don’t seem to give any image at all. Maybe they are vacant or the readout goes to some other console. This picture by itself is useless, because we don’t know what the writing means.”

“Is there much of it?”

“No, and I don’t think we could decipher very much even if we had a lot of printed symbols. The first Egyptologists couldn’t unravel a human language even though they had thousands of tablets, until the Rosetta Stone was discovered. That’s why we’re concentrating on the pictures, not the script. Eventually maybe Team Three can make some sense out of the words, but for the moment we are stuck with looking at pictures and figuring out what they mean.”

Nikka touched some of the switches and another image formed on the screen. This was also familiar. It showed two circles overlapping and a line bisecting the chord of one. An apparent caption ran down the side. “Lewis has tentatively identified one of those captioned squiggles as the word line. He compared with six or seven other figures in this sequence and so far that’s the only guess he’s been able to make. It’s a painful process.”

She ran quickly through a number of other punching sequences and stopped to admire the last. It was a magnificent shot of Earth as seen from somewhere further out from the sun. A thin crescent moon peeked around it; whorls and streaks of cloud obscured most of the dark land.

“The colors are wrong,” Sanges said. “It’s too red.” “It wasn’t made for human eyes,” Nikka said. “Nigel, I’m trying a new sequence. Alter 707B to 707C.”

She said casually to Sanges, “If this setting is in some way fatal, if it fries me to this chair, at least somebody will know which sequence to avoid next time.”

Sanges looked at her in surprise. She punched the sequence and got a few lines of symbols. “No help. Log, Nigel.” The next was an array of dots. Then came a slightly altered array. As they watched, the groupings changed smoothly, rotating clockwise.

“Nigel, measure this. How fast is the rotation?” There was a pause. “I make it a little over seven hours.”

Nikka nodded. “Half the 14.3 hours that the lights in the Bowl Room take to cycle. Put that on special log.”

Sanges made notes. Nikka showed him a color-coded array of dots which one of the astrophysicists had identified as a chart of the stars within thirty-three light years of the sun. The apparent size seemed to be related to their absolute magnitude. If the correspondence was exact, it meant a slight alteration in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram and gave some support to one of the newer theories of stellar evolution. Sanges nodded without saying anything.

She tried some new sequences. More dots, then some lines of squiggles. A drawing of two intersecting spheres, no captions. Dots. Then what appeared to be a photograph of a machined tool, with captions. “Log, Nigel. What does it look like to you?”

“Abstract sculpture? A particularly sophisticated screwdriver? I don’t know.”

The next sequence showed the same tool from a different angle. Next, more dots, then—Nikka jerked back.

Feral dark eyes glared out at them. Something like a large rat with scales stood in the foreground, erect on hind legs. Pink sand stretched to the horizon. Its forepaws held something, perhaps food, in long nails.

“My,” Nigel said. “Doesn’t look at all friendly.”

“No caption,” Nikka said. “But it’s the first life form we’ve ever gotten. Better put this through to Kardensky.”

“It is an evil-looking thing,” Sanges said intensely. “I do not know why God would make such a creature.”

“Value judgment, tsk tsk,” Nigel said. “Perhaps God wasn’t consulted, Mr. Sanges.”

Nikka thumbed another sequence.

Four

Mr. Ichino stood at the small sink and slowly washed the dishes after supper. The taste of the canned chili lingered in his mouth. It was the real thing, no soybeans, and the only luxury he allowed himself these days. He had never quite got accustomed to handing someone a dollar bill when buying a newspaper and not getting any change in return. Even so, he would pay almost any amount to have an occasional meal with real meat in it. It wasn’t as though he had any true objection to vegetarianism, though he had never understood why it was better to kill plants than animals. It was just that he liked the taste of meat.

The day’s long twilight had begun to settle. He could no longer make out the ridgeline several miles away. Dense white clouds drifted in from oceanward; it would probably snow tonight.

A flicker of motion caught his eye. The window over the sink was partly fogged and he reached up to rub a clear spot. A man came staggering out of the forest a hundred meters away. He took a few agonized steps and collapsed into a drift of snow.

Mr. Ichino wiped his hands and rushed to the door. He slipped on his heavy lumber jacket as he went out the door and blinked as the sudden cold reached his unprotected face. The man was barely visible in the snow. Mr. Ichino cleared the distance in a loping stride, puffing only slightly. The work he had done around the cabin had cut away pounds and sharpened his muscle tone. When Mr. Ichino reached the man it was clear why he had fallen. There was a burn in his side. It passed through layers of parka, a shirt and extra insulation. An area a foot wide was matted and blood-soaked. The man’s ruddy face was clenched and tight. When Mr. Ichino touched near the wound the man groaned weakly and flinched.

It was obvious that nothing could be done until the man was inside. Mr. Ichino was surprised at how heavy he seemed, but got the arms over his own shoulder in a carry position and managed to stagger the distance back to the cabin without stumbling or pitching the body into the snow. He laid the man out on the floor and began to undress him. Stripping away the clothes was difficult because the harness of a backpack had knotted itself around the wound. Mr. Ichino used a knife to cut away the shirt and undershirt.

Cleaning, treating and bandaging the wound took more than an hour. Dirt and pine needles were caught among the blackened, flaky skin and as the heat of the cabin reached it the capillaries opened and began to bleed.

He lifted the man again and got him into the cabin’s second bed. The man had never awakened. Mr. Ichino stood regarding the face, now relaxed, for long moments. He could not understand how anyone had sustained such an injury out here in the middle of unoccupied forest. What was more, why would anyone be here in the first place? Mr. Ichino’s first thought was to try for the emergency call station fifteen kilometers away. The nearest fire road was only four kilometers and the Rangers might have it clear of snow by now. Mr. Ichino kept a small jeep there.

He began to dress for the walk. The going was mostly uphill and it would probably take several hours. As he made himself a thermos of coffee he glanced out the window and noticed that snow was falling again, this time in a hard swift wind that bowed the tops of the pines. A gust howled at the corners of the cabin.

At his age such a march was too great a risk. He hesitated for a moment and then decided to stay. Instead of making coffee he prepared beef broth for his patient and got the man to sip a few spoonfuls. Then he waited. He mused over the strange nature of the wound, almost like a cut in its clean outline. But it was a burn, undeniably, and a bad one. Perhaps a burning timber had fallen on him.

It was only after some time that he noticed the pack lying where he had cast it aside. It was a large one, with aluminum tubing, many pockets and insulation; quite expensive. The upper flap was unbuttoned. Sticking out the top, as though it had been jammed in hurriedly, was a gray metal tube.

Mr. Ichino fished it out. The tube thickened at its base and small metal arches like finger grips ran down the side. It was a meter long and had several extrusions like toggle switches.

He had never seen anything like it before. The lines of the thing seemed awkward. There was no telling what it was. Gingerly he put it back.

He checked his patient, who had apparently fallen into a deep sleep. Pulse was normal; the eyes betrayed nothing unusual. Mr. Ichino wished he had more medical supplies. He found a name stenciled on the pack, Peter Graves.

There didn’t seem to be anything to do but wait. He made himself some coffee. Outside the storm grew worse.

Five

Sanges had another bad moment crawling out the tube at the end of the shift. Nikka had to push him through one of the narrow segments of the passage and the man glowered at her when they reached the lock. They suited up in silence and cycled out onto the flat, dusty floor of the moon. Two hundred meters away—not far from the spot where Nikka had crashed—a surface pressure lock of Site Seven was sunk into the lunar rock. More excavations were partially completed in the distance. Gradually a network of tubes was being punched by lasers, ten meters beneath the shielding rock and dust. Set that deep, the quarters suffered little variation in temperature between lunar day and night and even the incessant rain of particles from the solar wind made radiation levels only slightly higher than those on Earth.

Nigel Walmsley met them after they cycled through to the suiting bay. Sanges acknowledged Nigel’s greeting but fell silent, his mind apparently still on the tunnels of the ship.

“Are you free for dinner in Paris tomorrow?” Nigel asked Nikka.

“Um.”

“Well, perhaps some elegant preheated rations and processed water, then?”

Nikka looked at him speculatively and agreed. She went to shower while Nigel by unspoken convention wrote the debriefing report for the shift’s findings. Aside from the large ratlike creature and the 7.15 hour rotation period, there was little remarkable to report. Progress was slow.

When Nikka emerged, followed by Sanges, all three made their way into the communicating corridor. It was a swirl of yellows and greens, spiraling around and splashing out onto the deck, making the corridor seem deceptively long. At the tucked-in cafeteria Nigel made a show of opening the door for Nikka with a certain self-satirizing grace. On a world where people were selected to minimize demands on the life-support system, he seemed tall and heavy.

They selected their rations from the few choices available, and on their way back to a table Nigel overheard a conversation between three men nearby. He listened for a moment and then interjected, “No, it was on Revolver.”

The men looked up. “No, Rubber Soul,” one of the men said.

“Eleanor Rigby”? another man said. “Second disc of the White Album.”

“No, neither,” Nigel said. “You’re both wrong. It was on Revolver and I have two hundred dollars which says so.”

The other man looked at each other. “Well …” one of them began.

“I’ll take that,” another said.

“Fine, look it up and then check with me.” Nigel turned and walked to where Nikka and Sanges sat listening.

“You’re English, aren’t you?” Sanges said.

“Of course.”

“Isn’t it a bit unfair to take advantage of someone else when you are arguing about a music group who were English themselves?” Sanges said.

“Probably.” Nigel began eating.

“Anything new?” a voice came at his elbow. All three looked up. Jose Valiera stood smiling.

“Ah, Dr. Valiera,” Nigel said. “Please sit.”

Valiera accepted the invitation and smiled at the other two. “I’m afraid I haven’t had the time to read your debriefing report.”

“There wasn’t very much in it,” Nikka said. “But there is something I want to ask you. Is there any real chance of our getting a supplementary appropriation so we can get more people here?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Valiera said warmly. “But my guess is no. After all, we got a nice large shot of money just two months ago.”

“But that was simply based on what we knew when the shield went down,” Nigel interjected. “Since then the engineers have uncovered a wealth of things that need investigation.” He wrinkled his brow. “Seems silly not to give us more.”

“We’ve also uncovered the computer link,” Nikka pointed out. “Surely that’s going to cause a splash.”

Valiera looked uncomfortable. “It will when there are results. You should realize not all of what we discover is immediately released to the press, and some portions even the Congress does not know about.”

“Why’s that?” Nigel said.

“It has been decided that there are good sociometric reasons not to spread results from here too rapidly, however interesting they may seem. Some advisors of the Congress feel the impact might be severe if something truly radical is uncovered.”

“But that’s precisely why we’re here. To uncover something radical. That is, radical in the sense of fundamentals,” Nigel said, looking intently at Valiera.

“No, I believe I see the point,” Sanges said. “The entire issue of extraterrestrial life and intelligences superior to ours is emotionally loaded. It must be treated with delicacy.”

“What good is ‘delicacy’ going to do us if we can’t get the money to pursue our research?” Nikka said quickly.

“This craft has been lying here for at least half a million years, according to the estimates from solar wind abrasions of the outer skin,” Valiera said patiently. “I believe it will not vanish overnight, and we do not need an army of people here to swarm all over it.”

“After all, we are going to have three shifts a day to get full use of the computer module,” Sanges said reasonably, spreading his hands. “We are already exploiting the ship as much as we can.”

“Nobody has done more than glance at many of the passages,” Nikka said.

Sanges scowled and said ponderously, “Our First Bishop spoke only today about the wreck. He, too, advises a path of moderation. It was not pointful to make discoveries without understanding their full implication.”

Nigel made a crooked grin. “Sorry, that doesn’t quite count as an argument with me.”

“I am sorry you have not found it within yourself to open your eyes, Mr. Walmsley,” Sanges said.

“Ah, yes. I am a proponent of Cartesian dualism and therefore not to be trusted.” Nigel grinned. “I’ve never really seen how you can be a scientist or a technician and believe all that ugly business about demons and the dead rising.” He wondered if they would catch the reference to Alexandria.

Valiera said mildly, “You must understand, Mr. Sanges is not a member of the more fundamentalist wing of the New Sons. I’m sure his beliefs are much more sophisticated.”

Nigel grunted. He suppressed the impulse to bait them further.

“It has always amazed me that the New Sons were able to incorporate so many different views within one religion,” Nikka said. “It would almost seem that they were more interested in the ordering effect of religion than any particular doctrine.” She smiled diplomatically.

“Yes, that’s really the point, you see,” Nigel said. “They don’t just get together to exchange theological gossip. They like to change society around to fit their beliefs.”

Sanges said intently, “We are spreading the great love of God, the Force that drives the world.”

“Look, it’s not love that makes the world go round, it’s inertia,” Nigel said in clipped tones. “And all this mellow merde about you fellows getting two hours off to pray every day, and special holidays—”

“Religious measures dictated by our own faith.”

“Yes, strangely popular, too, aren’t they?” Nigel said. “What do you mean?” Sanges said.

“Just this. Most people have had a damned hard time of it these last decades. A lot have died, we aren’t rich anymore, none of us, and we’ve had to work like billy-hell to keep our necks above water. Hard times breed bad religions—it’s a law of history. Even people who don’t go in for that sort of thing can recognize a good dodge when they see it. If they become New Sons they get extra hours off work, little privileges, some political influence.”

Sanges clenched his fists. “You are making the most base and vile—”

Valiera broke in. “I think you gentlemen should calm down and—”

“Yes, right, I think so,” Nigel said. He got to his feet. “Coming along, Nikka?”

In the corridor outside Nigel allowed his face to twist into a grimace and he smacked a fist into his palm. “Sorry about that,” he said. “I tend to let things run away with me that way.”

Nikka smiled and patted his arm. “It is often an easy thing to do. The New Sons are not exactly the most tolerant people, either. But I must say your view of them is rather cynical, isn’t it?”

“Cynical? ‘Cynic’ is a word invented by optimists to criticize realists.”

“It didn’t seem to me you were being wholly realistic.” He opened the corridor door for her in an exaggeratedly polite fashion. “I wish it were so. It’s no accident that Sanges is a full-dress New Son and was assigned to this site. Valiera didn’t say so, but the rumors have it that the only reason we got money through Congress this time was by a high-level deal with the New Sons faction. They held out for a large representation of their own people— scientists and technicians, yes, but New Sons, too—before they would turn over their votes.”

Nikka looked shocked. “I hadn’t heard that. Are there a lot of New Sons here? I haven’t been paying attention to the new people.”

“I’ve noticed, being one of them.” He smiled. “I’ve nosed about a bit myself and I think quite a few of our comrades are New Sons. Not all admit it or show it like Sanges, but they are.”

Nikka sighed. “Well, I hope Valiera can keep them in line.”

“Yes, I hope he can,” Nigel said solemnly. “I certainly hope he can.”

Later he lounged alone in his box of a room, unable to sleep. The work here absorbed him but so far gave precious little back. He kept in close touch with Kardensky’s group, who were carrying on along much the same lines as Ichino had started—cross-correlations with the Snark’s conversations, systemic analysis of whatever the teams could extract from the wreck, and so on. So far it resembled, for Nigel, some awful childhood dream of swimming through mud: frantic struggles only slowed you, made you sink faster.

He shrugged. His attention seemed to focus more these days on Nikka than the gritty problems of decoding.

And why was that? he wondered. It was dimwitted, really. He made small jokes, kept up a line of patter, and afterward felt slightly ridiculous.

He drummed fingers on his knee. It was almost as though—yes. With a shock he realized that he had forgotten how to deal with women from scratch, from the beginning. Closeness with Alexandria—and yes, Shirley, for a time—had robbed him of it.

Well, he would simply have to relearn the tricks. For Nikka, the trouble might easily be worthwhile. He didn’t subscribe to the Theory of Types—that men were drawn to the same categories of physical attributes, or personality traits, again and again—because Nikka resembled Alexandria not at all; still, they shared a certain directness, an unflinching devotion to what was rather than what might be hoped. And physically, Nikka’s delicious contained energy, her implied sensuality—

He shook his head. Enough of that. He despaired of analysis; the real world was always more fine-grained than opinions about it. Life was discrete; nonlinear; a nonzero-sum game; noncommutative; clearly irreversible; and events multiplied, compressed, rather than merely adding. The past filtered the present. He saw Nikka through the lens of Alexandria—and in truth, he would have it no other way. To wish otherwise was to rob him of his past. Now, together, he and Nikka studied this wreck and the communications lines between here and Kardensky’s staff buzzed with analogies, comparisons. They studied the wreck as though the builders were vaguely, conveniently human. An illusion, certainly. And he’d sent Ichino off on a flight of fancy, really, a near-certain dead end. He missed the man; talking with him, going off on hikes, he’d felt some warming connection. Was the loss of that why—despite his being where he wanted to be, working on the only thing that mattered any more—he felt these collapsing moments of depression?

Nigel snorted, exasperated with himself, and rolled over to seek sleep.

Six

Mr. Ichino woke with a start; he had fallen asleep sitting up.

The fire smoked and sputtered. He stirred the smoldering embers and tossed on new wood. In a few moments the cabin had lost its slight chill. He stood, massaging a sore muscle in his back, and watched the flames dance.

Graves was still unconscious, his breathing regular. The wound had stopped bleeding and the bulky compresses around it seemed secure. Mr. Ichino knew he would not quickly fall asleep again; he made himself a mixture of hot water, lemon juice, sugar and rum and turned on his radio. In the burr of static he eventually found the twenty-four-hour Portland in-depth news station.

As his rocking chair creaked rhythmically, the radio made a low murmur and the wind wailed hollowly outside. Against this calming background the news seemed discordant. The war was still going on in Africa and another country had come in on the side of the Constructionists. The government policy on DNA alterations in laboratory babies was under heavy attack by the New Sons. Most commentators agreed, though, that simple body modification was inevitable; the controversy had now shifted to the issue of intelligence and special talents. There were suspicions that a second major dieback was beginning in Pakistan. The water scarcity in Europe was getting critical.

Finally there came some news about the Mare Marginis wreck. The emergency photographic survey of the moon was complete. There was no sign of other crashed vehicles. This by itself did not mean very much, though, because the Marginis ship’s force screen had been observed to alter color three times before it was finally penetrated. Scientists guessed this was a remnant of some defense mechanism whereby the ship’s screen absorbed almost all light, making it appear dark. If the ship was in flight it would be hard to see optically against the background of space. Apparently, until men ruptured it the screen functioned most of the time and was slowly running down. If other wrecks existed on the moon, their screens might still be intact, in which case it would be very hard to see them from orbit. An extensive search for recurring dark patterns, which might formerly have been assumed to be shadows, was underway.

Mr. Ichino listened to a few more news items and then switched the radio off. The point about the screen was interesting, but he had expected more by this time. Men were inside the ship now and there should be some results. But nothing came through the news or from Nigel. Perhaps they were simply being very cautious in their exploration of the wreck. The ship’s defense system had shut on and off in an unpredictable manner; current thinking seemed to be that whatever had shot down the two survey craft had awakened recently, since otherwise it would have downed the Apollo missions long ago. With the screen penetrated, perhaps all the other defense systems were dead, too. But it would be foolish not to be cautious.

Mr. Ichino turned from the radio, checked Graves again and then looked at the man’s pack once more. He put the gray metal tube aside and began taking out the other items—dehydrated food, maps, clothing, simple tools, a writing case and some paper. At the very bottom of the pack were several rolls of microfilm and a compact viewer. Mr. Ichino felt a slight embarrassment, as though reading another’s personal mail.

Well, there was good reason to look. Graves might be a diabetic, or have some other special medical problem. Mr. Ichino put the microfilm through his own large wall viewer, made another drink and began reading.

His credit cards, passes and serial biography all attested to Peter Graves’s wealth. He had made his fortune early in land speculation, before the government regulated it, and retired. For the last ten years he had pursued a strange hobby: trapping the unusual, finding the elusive. He used his money to look for lost Inca trails, search for sea monsters, uncover Mayan cities. Graves carried a portable library about himself. Reasonable; it probably helped him with uncooperative officials. Most of the film concerned something else altogether. There were clippings and notes from as far back as the nineteenth century. Mr. Ichino studied them and pieced together a history.

Graves had become interested in the Wasco explosion because it was an immediate mystery. He never believed the murky official explanation. So, with his bias for the unusual, he carried out an extensive background study of the entire north woods. His correspondence showed that Graves had launched a terribly expensive surveillance program.

Mr. Ichino felt a prickly sensation of surprise. Graves had done precisely what Nigel wanted, and what NASA might eventually get around to once the Marginis wreck was understood. Graves had searched for whatever connection surfaced, whatever unlikely intersection of legend and fact was possible. He had employed low-flying planes with silent engines to search for anything or anyone fleeing the blast area. He had run down the tag ends of details, studied old maps, employed thinktank sessions to produce outlandish ideas.

And once he’d adopted an hypothesis, Graves hired guides and went in search of the elusive creature he suspected was a connection to the Wasco event…

The Salish Indians called it Sasquatch. The Hudson’s Bay Company report of 1864 gave evidence of hundreds of sightings. The loggers and trappers who moved into the Pacific Northwest knew it mainly by its tracks and thus it gained a new name: Bigfoot.

Men saw it throughout the north woods of the United States and Canada. In the nineteenth century over a dozen murders were attributed to it, most of them involving armed hunters. In 1890 two guards posted to watch a mining camp on the Oregon-California border were found dead; they had been crushed, slammed to the ground.

All this led nowhere until 1967, when an amateur investigator made color motion pictures of a Bigfoot at a range of less than fifty yards. It was huge. It stood seven feet tall and walked erect, moving smoothly and almost disdainfully away from the camera. It turned once to look back at the photographer, and revealed two large breasts. A thick black fur covered it everywhere except near the cleft of bones that surrounded the eyes. Scientific opinion was divided on the authenticity of the film. But a few anthropologists and biologists ventured theories…

For both social and economic reasons, the Pacific Northwest was relatively sparsely settled. Thick forests cloaking the rough western slopes of the Rockies could hide a hundred armies. Bacteria and scavengers on the forest floor digest or scatter bones or even artifacts left behind; the remains of logging projects do not last more than a decade. If Bigfoot built no homes, used no tools, he could escape detection. Even a large, shy primate would be only a melting shadow in the thick woods.

Most animals have learned to run, to hide, rather than fight—and their teacher has been man. Several times over the last million years the glaciers have retreated and advanced in a slow, ponderous cycle. As water became trapped in expanding glaciers the seas fell, exposing a great land bridge connecting Alaska and northern Asia. Across these chill wastes from Asia came mammoth, mastodons, bison and finally man himself. Man has known many forms between the apes and Neanderthal. As man himself pushed out from the cradle of Africa he drove these earlier forms before him. Peking or Java man may have been part of this outward expansion. Perhaps Bigfoot was pushed into other climates by this competition. They crossed the great land bridge during one glacial cycle, found the New World and settled there. But men followed and eventually the two came into conflict for the best land. Man, the smarter and the better armed, won out and drove the Bigfoot back into the forest. Perhaps the Sasquatch legend came from those ancient encounters.

Scientific expeditions in the 1970s and ’80s failed to find solid evidence of Bigfoot. There were indirect clues: crude shelters made of fallen branches, footprints and paths, dung which showed a diet of small rodents, insects and berries. Without a capture the cause gradually lost its believers. Population pressure opened cities in northern California and Washington until one by one the areas where Bigfoot had been seen shrank away.

Among Graves’s papers was an extensive map of southern Oregon around Drews Reservoir. It was covered with small arrows and signs in pencil detailing an erratic path northward. Mr. Ichino traced the path until it abruptly stopped about twenty kilometers from his cabin. It ended in a completely wild stretch of country, hilly and thick with pine, one of the most isolated spots still remaining in Oregon. There were other papers, a contract with two guides, some indecipherable notes.

Mr. Ichino looked up from the wall viewer, rubbing his eyes.

Something thumped against the wall of the cabin as if brushing by.

Mr. Ichino reached the window in time to see a shadow fade into the deeper black of the trees at the edge of the clearing. It was hard to see; flurries of snow obscured the distance. In the fading light it was easy to be mistaken.

Still, the sound had not been his imagination. It might have been a load of snow falling from a high pine branch, but Mr. Ichino thought not.

Seven

After evening meal Nigel stood in the tubeway, flipping a coin absently, wondering what to do in his few hours of free time. Study up, he thought, most probably. He flipped the coin again, glanced at it. It was a British one-pence, a lucky piece. An imperfection caught his eye. Next to the date—2012—was a flaw, a blister of metal about a tenth of a millimeter across. It appeared on the back face, which depicted the swirling spiral of the galaxy overlaid with the British lion—a passing tribute to the short-lived Euro-American space ventures. Nigel made a quick estimate: the disk of the galaxy was about 100,000 light-years in diameter, so—the result surprised him. The small blister, on the scale of the galaxy, represented a sphere one thousand light-years across. Within that speck would drift over a million stars. He stared at the tiny imperfection. He had known the numbers all along, sure enough, but to see it this way was another matter. A thousand-light-year volume around the earth was a vast expanse, well beyond the power of a man to visualize in concrete terms. To see it represented as a fleck in the galaxy suddenly filled Nigel with a sense of what the Snark must see, and what they were dealing with here. Civilizations like grains of sand. Vast corridors of space and time. He flipped the coin, his hands feeling oddly chilled.

“Ah—hello, there.”

Nigel looked around to find Sanges at his elbow. “Hello.”

“The Coordinator sent me to ask you over to his office.”

“Right. Well, just a minute. Got to shake hands with the wife’s best friend.”

“Ah…I didn’t know you were married.”

“I’m not. Means I’ve got to piss.”

“Oh. That’s amusing.”

Sanges was waiting when Nigel came out of the men’s room, which struck him as odd: why did he need an escort to find Valiera’s office?

“Did you see the new directives on staff?” Sanges said conversationally as they strode along.

“Wouldn’t take the time to blow my nose on ’em.” “You should. I mean, you should read them. It looks as if we aren’t going to get any additional staff.”

Nigel stopped, looked at Sanges in surprise, then continued walking. “Bloody stupid.”

“Probably so, but we have to live with it.”

“The news doesn’t seem to bother you very much.” Sanges smiled. “No, it doesn’t. I think we should go very slowly in our work. Care will be repaid.”

Nigel glanced at him and said nothing. They reached Valiera’s office and Sanges gestured him in, while remaining outside himself. Valiera was waiting for him and began with a series of good-humored questions about Nigel’s accommodations, the work routine, scheduling and the quality of food. Nigel was grateful that the moon, with no atmosphere, afforded Valiera no chance to go on about the weather. Then, abruptly, Valiera smiled warmly and murmured, “But the hardest aspect of my job, Nigel, is going to be you.”

Nigel raised his eyebrows. “Me?” he said innocently. “You’re revered. And you seem to have a special talent for surviving, even when the men above you in the organization do not. It will be difficult for me to administer with a famous man under me.”

“Then don’t.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Let events develop. Don’t manage them.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Why?”

“I’m sure you understand.”

“ ’Fraid not.”

“I am under pressure,” Valiera said carefully. “Others want this job. If I don’t get results—”

“Yes, yes, I fathom all that.” Nigel hunched forward. “Everybody wants results, like cans coming off the end of a production line. The Achilles heel of treating research like that is that you can’t program it from the top down.”

“There are some parameters—”

“Sucks to parameters. We haven’t a clue what this caved-in pile of litter is yet.”

“Granted. I’m here to be sure we find out.”

“Only that’s not the way to do it. Look, I know how governments run. Promise them a timetable and they’re yours. They don’t want it right, they want it Friday.”

Valiera clasped his hands together and nodded sagely. “There’s nothing wrong with schedules, though.”

“I’m not at all bloody sure.”

“Why not?”

“Because”—he threw up his hands, exasperated—“if you want it done by the weekend, that already assumes there will be a weekend, in those terms—that there’ll still be business as usual. But if you’re after something that really alters things, then it doesn’t just explain and clarify, it changes the world.”

“I see.”

“And that’s what you can’t program, you see.”

“Yes.”

Nigel realized that he was breathing a bit quickly and Valiera was staring at him oddly, head tilted to the side.

“You speak like a visionary, Nigel. Not a scientist.”

“Well. I suppose.” Nigel rummaged about for words, embarrassed. “Never been one for definitions, myself,” he said softly as he rose to go.

Eight

Nigel squinted at the screen before him and said into his throat microphone, “Afraid I don’t understand it either. Looks like another one of those meaningless arrays of dots to me.”

“Meaningless to us, yes.” Nikka’s voice blossomed in his ear, tinny and distant.

“All right then, I’ll put it in passive log.” Nigel punched a few command buttons. “While you were cycling that, I got a reply from Kardensky’s group. Remember the rat? Well, it’s not a rat or any other kind of rodent we know of, it’s apparently not standing on Earth and it’s probably at least a meter tall, judging from the apparent bone structure in its ankles.”

“Oh! Then it’s our first picture of extraterrestrial life,” Nikka said, excited.

“Quite so. Kardensky has forwarded it on to the special committee of the NSF for publication.”

“Shouldn’t we go through Coordinator Valiera?” There was a note of concern in her voice.

“Needn’t worry about that, luv. I’m sure the New Sons have a tight rein on what comes out of the NSF. They needn’t rely on Valiera.”

“Valiera isn’t a New Son,” Nikka said testily. “I’m sure he’s impartial.”

“I didn’t say he was a New Son, but on the other hand I don’t think it’s wise to assume he isn’t. ‘I frame no hypotheses,’ as Newton said. Anyway, look, we should be getting on with it.”

Nigel shifted uncomfortably in his chair and turned down the illumination above his console. The small, cramped room was about five degrees colder than he liked. Site Seven had been thrown up rather quickly and some of the niceties, such as adequate insulation and a good air circulating system, had been neglected.

He studied his notes for several moments. “Right, then, let’s try sequence 8COOE.” He made a notation. The difficulty of prospecting for information in a totally unfamiliar computer bank was that you had no way of knowing how the information was catalogued. Intuition told him that the first few settings on the alien console should be more general than later settings, just as if it were a number setting in ordinary Arabic notation. The rub there was that even in terrestrial languages the logical left-to-right sequence was no more common than a right-to-left sequence or up-to-down or any other frame one could imagine. The aliens might not even have used a positional notation at all.

So far they had been reasonably lucky. Occasionally, similar settings on the console yielded images on the screen that had some relationship. There were the common arrays of dots, including those that moved. The sequences which called these forth had some of the same prefixes. Perhaps this indicated a positional notation, and perhaps it was merely lucky chance. So far he had asked Nikka to use only a portion of the switches available on the console. Some of them certainly would not be simple catalogue numbers for information retrieval. Some must represent command modes. The third switch from the right in the eighteenth tier, for example, had two fixed positions. Did one mean “off” and the other “on”? Was one “file this data” or “destroy it”? If he and Nikka kept to a small area of the board, perhaps they would not encounter too many command modes before they got some information straight. They didn’t want to run the risk of turning off the computer entirely by proceeding at random through all the switches.

Nigel studied the screen for a moment. An image flickered on. It seemed to show a dark red image of a passageway in the ship. There was a bend in the corridor visible and as he watched some of the Persian-like script appeared on the screen, pulsed from yellow to blue and then disappeared. He waited and the pattern repeated.

“Mysterious,” he said.

“I don’t believe I’ve seen that passageway,” Nikka said.

“This must be something like the three photos Team One reported from the last shift. They are from unrecognizable parts of the ship.”

“We should check with the engineers,” Nikka said. “But my guess would be that all these show part of the ship that was pulverized on landing.”

Nigel pursed his lips. “You know, it just occurred to me that we can deduce something from the fact that this script goes on and off with a period of several seconds. Our friends the aliens must have been able to resolve time patterns faster than a second or so, if they could read this.”

“Any animal can do that.”

“Just so. But whoever built this ship might not be just any animal. For example, the little switches on the console imply something finger-sized to manipulate them. True enough, we know animals must be able to see things moving faster than on a one-second time scale, or else they’ll be overrun and gobbled up pretty quickly. It’s interesting to note the aliens were similar to us in at least that way. Anyway, let’s go on. I’ll log that”—he punched a few buttons—“for Team One to check.”

He chose a few sequences which differed from earlier ones only in the last “digit” and the screen showed no response at all. “Are you sure that switch is still working?” Nigel asked.

“As far as I can tell. The meters here show no loss of power.”

“Very well. Try this.” He read off a number.

This time the screen immediately sprang to life: a confused red jumble of nearly circular objects.

A long black line traced across the screen. It penetrated one of the odd-shaped blobs; there were small details of dark shading inside this blob alone. The others did not show it.

“Odd,” Nigel said. “Looks to me like a photomicro-graph. Reminds me of something from my student days, biology laboratory or something. I’ll send it to Kardensky.”

He dialed for the direct line through Site Seven to Alphonsus, obtained a confirmation and transmitted directly on the links to Earth. This took several minutes. Simultaneously the signal was logged into tape storage at Site Seven; Alphonsus served only as a communication vertex. Nigel made some notes and gave Nikka another sequence.

“Hey!” Nikka’s voice made him look up from his writing. On the screen something in a slick, rubbery suit stood against a backdrop of low ferns. It did not appear to have legs, but rather a semicircular base. There were two arms and some blunt protrusions below them, with a helmet on top opaqued partially. Through it a vague outline of a head could be seen. Nigel had a conviction that the site was Earth. The pattern of the fronds was simple and somehow familiar.

The figure in the suit showed no more detail, but he was not what attracted Nigel’s attention. There was something else, taller and obviously not wearing a suit. It was covered with thick dark fur and stood partially concealed in the ferns. It held something like a large rock in massive, stubby hands.

Nikka and Nigel spoke about it for several moments. The suited figure seemed strange, as though it violated the way a creature should stand upright against gravity. But the tall creature, heavy and hairy and threatening, made Nigel feel a vague unease.

Try as he might, he could not shake the conviction that it was human.

Nigel had opened his mouth to say something more when an excited male voice spoke into the circuit. “Everyone in the ship, out! Engineering has just reported an arc discharge in passage eleven. There are power surges registered on another level. We’re afraid it might be a revival of the defense system. Evacuate at once.”

“Better get out, old girl,” Nigel said ineffectually. He was safe, buried beneath meters of lunar dust near the living quarters. Nikka agreed and broke the circuit.

Nigel sat for long moments looking at the creature on the screen. It was partially turned away, one leg slightly raised. Somehow, though, he had the sensation that it was looking directly at him.

Nine

Peter Graves’s fever abated through the day and he awoke in the night. He babbled at first and Mr. Ichino fed him a broth heavy with the warm tang of brandy. It seemed to give the man energy.

Graves stared at the ceiling, not seeming to know where he was, and rambled without making sense. After a few minutes he suddenly blinked and focused on Mr. Ichino’s weathered face for the first time.

“I had ’em, you see?” he muttered imploringly. “They were that close. I could have touched ’em, almost. Too quiet, though, even with that singing they were doing. Couldn’t run the camera. Makes a clicking sound.”

“Fine,” Mr. Ichino said. “Don’t roll onto your side.” “Yeah, that,” Graves murmured, staring mechanically down at his shirt. “The big one did that. Bastard. Thought he’d never drop. The guide and me kept pumpin’ the slugs into him and that flamethrower they had was goin’ off in all directions. Orange. Blew the guide right over and he didn’t get up. The flash lit up every… every…”

Graves’s dry, rasping voice trailed off. The sedatives in the broth were taking effect. In a moment the man breathed easily. When he was sure Graves was asleep Mr. Ichino pulled on his coat and went outside. The snow was at least a meter deep now, a white blanket that dulled the usually sharp outline of horizon on the opposite hill. Flakes fell in the soft silence, stirred by the breeze. It was impossible to reach the road.

Mr. Ichino struggled across the clearing, glad of the exercise. Perhaps it wasn’t necessary to get help now. The worst was probably over. If infection didn’t set in—with all the antibiotics he had, it wasn’t likely—Graves could recover without professional care.

He wondered what all the babble had meant. “The big one” might be anybody. Something had made the wound, for certain, but Mr. Ichino knew of no weapon that could cause that large a burn, not even a laser.

Mr. Ichino shook his head to clear it, black curls falling into his eyes. He would have to cut his hair soon. One forgot things like that, living away from people.

He looked upward and found Orion immediately. He could just barely make out the diffuse patch of light that was the great nebula. Across the dark bowl of the sky he found Andromeda. It had always seemed incredible to him that in one glance he could see three hundred billion stars, an entire galaxy that seemed a sprinkle of light far fainter than the adjacent stars. Stars like grains of sand, infinite and immortal.

In the face of such infinity, why did man’s attempts at worship seem so comic? Or horrible.

Tonight on the news there had been a report about one of the tattooed New Sons who had finally covered his entire body with design work. The plan had been that the work would be done slowly, so that the last lines would be completed near the time of the man’s death. But this one had hurried the job and then cut his throat, willing his body to be skinned, tanned and presented in a frame to the Bishop as a sacrifice to the truth of the New Revelation.

Mr. Ichino shuddered and turned back to the cabin. A man was standing with his back toward Mr. Ichino, looking through the cabin window. Mr. Ichino stepped forward. Amid the falling snow it was hard to see him clearly, but the man was big and did not move. He seemed bent over in order to see something on the side wall of the cabin. Yes, that would be Graves. The bed was not on a direct line of sight through the window.

Mr. Ichino came closer and something must have given him away. The man turned swiftly, saw him and moved with startling speed around the cabin corner. The figure moved smoothly despite the thick drifted snow. In an instant he had melted into the shadows.

When Mr. Ichino reached the ground outside the window the snow had already begun to obscure the man’s tracks. If they were boot marks they were of an odd sort—strangely shaped, unusually deep and at least sixty centimeters long.

Mr. Ichino followed them a way into the woods and then gave up. The man could easily get away in the blackness. Mr. Ichino shivered and went back to the cabin.

Ten

“When did the pressure fail?” Nigel said into his throat microphone. Nikka had just resumed contact.

“About forty minutes ago. I got a warning from Engineering that the plastiform had ruptured while they were rigging emergency power in the passage above this one. There was enough time, so I crawled out to the lock, got some air bottles and dragged them back in here. There’s an emergency pressure seat under the console but somebody forgot to issue bottles for it.”

“Are you in the seat now?”

“No, they found the leak. Pressure is rising again.” Nigel shook his head and then realized she couldn’t see the gesture. “Merde du jour. I’ve got some bad news about some of our stored data. Several days of our logged material, the stuff we’ve been transmitting to Alphonsus for links to Earth, is gone.”

“What?”

“While you were off the line I got a polite little call from Communications. Seems they fouled some of their programming. The subroutine which transmits stored tape data to Alphonsus was defective—it erases everything before it transmits. Alphonsus was wondering why they were getting long transmissions with no signal.”

“That’s ridiculous. Everything from Site Seven has been lost?”

“No, only ours. Each team has its own file number and something happened to ours alone. We’ve lost quite a bit of material, but not all of it.”

It was the first time Nigel had ever heard Nikka sound genuinely angry. “When we get off this watch I want to go see Valiera.”

“Agreed. As far as I can figure out we’ve lost those pictures of what looked like molecular chains and most of everything from yesterday. But look, those can be recovered. Let’s have a go at the photograph you found just before Engineering called.”

Nigel studied the image when it formed on the screen before him. The alien photograph showed land of a dark, mottled brown, the oceans almost jet black. Somber pink clouds laced across the land and still eddies caught in the rising mountain peaks. At the shore a slightly lighter line suggested great breakers thundering against the beaches. There were traces of shoals and deep currents of sediment.

“What part of Earth is that?” Nikka murmured. “Can’t say. Reminds me of some map I’ve seen, but I can’t remember which. I’ll log this for transmission to Alphonsus. Maybe they can find a contemporary shot of the same place.”

The next few sequences yielded nothing. There followed complexes of swirling dots, and then a pattern that remained fixed. “Hold that,” Nigel said. “That’s a three-dimensional lattice, I’m sure. Look, the little balls are of different sizes and colors.”

“It might be a molecular chain model,” Nikka said. “Or maybe a picture of the real thing.”

“Precisely. I’ll log that, too. And I’m going to tell Communications to not transmit anything until I have a chance to look over their programs. We don’t want these lost as well.”

“Wait a second, Engineering is calling—” Nikka broke off.

Nigel waited, drumming his fingers on the console. He hoped the message he had sent to Kardensky wasn’t intercepted. He needed the information and photos Kardensky could provide.

“There’s another damned leak,” Nikka said suddenly over the speaker. “Engineering threatened to come in here and drag me out—I’d like to see them do it—if I didn’t come. I’ve got enough air in the bottles but—Oh, my ears just popped—”

Nigel threw down his pencil in disgust. “Never mind, come on in. You and I are going to see Valiera.”

“It was an impossibly dumb thing to do,” Nigel concluded. He glared at Valiera. “If for some reason the images were erased by the alien computer when we read it out on the screen, that material is lost. Forever.”

Valiera made a steeple with his fingers. He tilted his chair back and glanced at Nikka and Sanges. “I agree the situation is intolerable. Some of our hardware isn’t functioning right and I think it’s mostly due to the fact that everything is disorderly around here. Remember, we are just setting up Site Seven and mistakes are bound to happen. Victor, here, is looking into the entire Communications net and I expect his recommendations shortly.” Valiera looked significantly at Sanges.

“Yes, I expect I can get things in order soon,” Sanges said.

“I don’t think this should be taken so calmly,” Nikka said abruptly. “It’s possible that we have lost some irreplaceable information from the wreck’s computer bank.”

“And it’s not as though Mr. Sanges has suffered a great loss, is it?” Nigel said with a thin smile. “Team One hasn’t made much headway on their inventory search.”

Sanges bristled. “We have been working as hard as you. I see no reason—”

“Now, none of that,” Valiera said. “True, Team One is only now getting its footing, but you must realize, Nigel, that their task is much harder. They are compiling an inventory, using the alien script. Until they have cracked the code and know what the script means, they will not have any solid results.”

“Then why do they not abandon the use of script and try to find things by pictures?” Nikka asked mildly. “That’s the path we are following and it seems to work.”

“Why, what have you found?” Valiera unconsciously narrowed his eyes slightly with a new alertness.

For a long moment there was only the thin whine of air circulation fans in the room. “Some things that look like molecular chain models, photographs of Earth from orbit, a picture of some early primate, apparently,” Nigel said slowly. “A few other things, and of course that large rat.”

“I have seen most of what you refer to in the briefings,” Sanges said. “I would dispute your interpretation of several of them, but of course that can be worked out in time.”

“Quite so,” Nigel said. “Nikka and I are trying to uncover as much as possible so we will have some idea of how the computer works, and what’s available through it. I will be interested to see what the experts say about that rat, particularly.”

“Well,” Valiera said distantly, “that will of course take some time to work out.”

“What do you mean?” Nikka said.

Valiera pursed his lips and paused. Nigel studied him intently. He had seen this sort of administrator before. Valiera had apparently been an excellent pilot but somewhere along the way he had acquired the bureaucrat’s habit of judging every statement’s impact before it was uttered. There was an air of calculation about the man.

“The National Science Foundation has decided not to release any of the pictures you are recovering from the alien console. It is thought that the impact at this time might be undesirable.”

“Damn! Undesirable how?” Nikka said sharply.

“We want a serious scientific study of everything that comes out of Site Seven. Releasing information now would just inundate the NSF and strain an already fragile budget,” Valiera said, spreading his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

“I quite agree,” Sanges said. “Many people will find such photographs as the large rodent quite unsettling. It is our duty to release information only when it is well understood. The First Bishop has stressed this point several times.”

“Ah, and I’m sure the First Bishop is an authority on cultural shock and exobiology.” Nigel raised an eyebrow at Sanges.

“The First Bishop was present when the New Revelation was manifested to the world,” Sanges said sternly. “He has a great and abiding knowledge of man’s ways and the best course for humanity. I should think even you could see that.”

“Nigel, I’m sure you know the New Sons are not hostile to the existence of extraterrestrial life,” Valiera said diplomatically. “The New Revelation grew out of the discovery of life on Jupiter, after all. The First Bishop merely makes the point that man is specifically wedded to this planet, so things extraterrestrial will probably seem quite foreign to man, even frightening.”

“Are you going along with the New Sons, then?” Nikka asked.

“No, of course not,” Valiera said quickly, “I merely think I should take a position in between these two diverging views.”

“Diverging they are, yes,” Nigel said. “I don’t think extraterrestrial life has to be so bloody frightening. And I don’t necessarily think our limited knowledge about how we evolved falls in with the First Bishop’s dogma.”

“What do you mean?” Sanges said severely.

“Never mind. I simply think we should keep our minds open. Release of all the data we recover from the computer is an essential. We need the best minds working on this problem, not just a committee of the NSF.”

“Nonetheless,” Valiera said mildly, “the judgment of the Congress and the NSF has been made and we must go along with it.”

Nigel leaned back and drummed his fingers on his knee.

Nikka exchanged glances with him and turned to Valiera. “Let’s drop that topic for now. Nigel and I agreed on the way over here that we need a separate link to Alphonsus to insure no loss of computer files occurs again.”

“That seems a reasonable proposal,” Valiera said. His face lost some of its lines of tension.

“It won’t take very much trouble or time to install a separate transmission link near the console itself,” Nikka said. She took a pad of paper and sketched a circuit configuration. “I want to locate a computer file inventory inside the ship itself, so there will be a separate inventory available to whoever is at the console at all times. That way even if something is erased in Communications by accident, there will be another copy that can be transmitted to Alphonsus for permanent storage.”

“That seems rather a lot of work and expense—” Sanges began.

“Expense be damned!” Nigel said suddenly. “We’re not running a shoestring operation here. That ship is at least half a million years old. It’s still armed and it can teach us more in a few years than mankind might learn in a century. I’m not going to let—”

“I think your proposal is well taken,” Valiera broke in. “I’ll tell Engineering to give you every assistance with it.”

“I want a separate link to Alphonsus,” Nikka said. “A complete separate subsystem.”

“I’ll see that you get it immediately. We have enough equipment to spare. And now”—Valiera glanced at his wristwatch—“I believe it is time for the New Sons’ hour of withdrawal and meditation, Mr. Sanges.”

“You’re setting time aside for that?” Nigel said in dis-belief. “Even here?”

“We must compromise on all things, Nigel,” Valiera said, smiling.

Nigel grimaced, got to his feet and left the room. The slamming door made a booming echo.

Eleven

He stood on a high ledge and watched the flames eat their way down the valley. The dry tan grass caught readily and burned with a crisp roar, a sound like many drummers beating. Through the pall of black smoke he could see the scattered small creatures who had set the fire going. They were gesturing to each other, following the flames at the edge of the valley floor, carrying small torches to insure there was no break in the fire wall.

Before the flames ran the elephants. Their long, loping shamble had a touch of panic to it now; they made low cries to each other as they rushed toward disaster.

From his ledge he could see the dark line of swamp-land that lay before the elephant herd. The image danced in the shimmering heat, but he could make out the grassy bogs now only a kilometer from the elephants. At each side of the swamp, near the valley wall, waited small bands of the fire-carrying creatures.

It was too far to make out any detail but they seemed to be dancing, their long poles twirling high in the air.

Far away, beyond the moist swampland, lay a dryer upper plateau. On it he could see a huge herd of foraging animals, probably antelope or wild cattle; a vast ocean of game. Yet the creatures with fire ignored the herd; they drove the elephants and waited to butcher when the animals were caught in the mire.

Why did they run the risk of trampling or the searing pain as an elephant tusk skewered them? To show courage? To have more tall tales around the late night hearth? To fuel the myths and legends that grew with each retelling beside the firelight?

How did they learn to cooperate so, moving in and out in an elaborate dance as they probed the prey for weakness? Who taught them to make tribes, kindle fire, form the delicate web of family? So nimble a craft, acquired so quickly. It was hard to believe these creatures were driven by the slow, ponderous hand of evolution, the workings of—

A shifting of shadows caught his eye. He turned. One of the creatures stepped from behind a spindly tree. It was scarcely a meter high, shaggy, with hands and feet that seemed swollen. The deep-set eyes darted left and right, checking the terrain, and the small erect creature shifted the pointed stick it carried in its hand.

The wind shifted slightly and brought the rank, sweaty smell of the creature to him. Neither of the two moved. After a moment the creature shuffled its feet, took the stick in one hand and raised the other, palm outward. It made a series of low, rumbling grunts. The palm it held up was wrinkled and matted with coarse hair around the sharp nails.

Nigel raised his palm in the same gesture. He opened his mouth to reply and the image drifted away in a curl of smoke. Light rippled and danced. A hollow drumming enfolded him, dense in the thick air.

Someone was knocking on his door.

He brushed some papers from his lap, swung his feet to the floor and took the two paces to the door. When he opened it Nikka was standing awkwardly in the passageway.

“My doctor has advised me never to drink alone,” she said. She held up a small chemical flask of transparent liquid. “The purest stuff, distilled at Alphonsus for the purposes of scientific research and the advancement of man’s knowledge.”

“A most interesting specimen,” Nigel said judiciously. “Come, bring it inside for further study.”

He settled on his bunk and gestured to a chair. “I’m afraid there’s not much place to put anything down. There’s an extra glass in the cupboard, and I’ll join you as soon as I finish the drink I’m on.”

She looked with interest at his glass. “Fruit juice?” “Well, one must mix the canniforene in something.” Her eyes widened. “But that’s illegal.”

“Not in England or America. Things are pretty wretched in England and all the mild euphorics are allowed—nay, encouraged.”

“Have you ever smoked LSD?” she asked with a touch of respect in her voice.

“No, didn’t really feel the need. It’s not the sort of thing you smoke, anyway. Not that I mind smoking, mind you; I prefer to take cannabis that way. But I’ve been drilled that you don’t smoke anything on the moon—too dangerous—so I had this canniforene smuggled up with the lot from Kardensky. Cost me a packet—two hundred dollars, that bet, remember?—to get it through.”

She mixed in some fruit juice with her alcohol, tested the mixture and smiled. “Do you find the routine here so wearing?”

“Not at all. It’s dead easy. I haven’t even been here long enough for the low-gravity high to wear off. But while you were rigging up the link to Alphonsus I decided to have a skull session over the Kardensky stuff. Canniforene gives me ideas sometimes, lets me see connections I wouldn’t otherwise.”

Nikka frowned and opened her mouth to say something. Nigel waved his hand elaborately, murmuring, “Ah, I know. Buggering up my mind for a lot of over-the-counter insights. Well, I can’t feel it doing me any harm. It’s given me some sparks of creativity in the past that helped my career a lot. And anyway, Nikka, it’s delicious. Very fashionable stuff, that, it’s much the rage. All the hominids are doing it.”

“All right,” Nikka said, “I might even try some myself. But look, I thought you were going to meet me in the gym an hour ago.”

“I was, wasn’t I? Well, it’s a dreary lot of exercise machines they have in there and I was busy with my cogitating here.”

“You should do it, you know. Valiera will be onto you about it pretty soon. If you don’t do the exercises eventually you can’t return to Earth at all.”

“When they put in a swimming pool I’ll be there.” He took a sip of his drink and studied a sheet of paper nearby.

“That won’t be too long, now that we’ve struck ice. Besides, Nigel, the exercises make you feel good. Look—” She nimbly turned in the air and did a one-handed flip, landing neatly on her feet. “I’ll admit it’s not all that hard in low gravity.”

“Yes, yes,” Nigel said, looking at her curiously. He guessed that she was a bit uneasy at visiting him in his digs. She was a naturally physical sort of person, so anxiety would probably show up as increased activity; thus the gymnastics.

“Sit down here, I’ve got some things to show you.” He handed her a color photograph of Earth taken from orbit. “That’s the same picture we got on the console awhile back. Kardensky had it shifted into approximately our color scale, so it doesn’t look red to us.”

“I see. What part of Earth is it?”

“South America, the southern tip, Tierra Del Fuego.” Nigel tapped a fingernail on the slick surface. “This is the Estrecho de Magellanes, a narrow strait that connects the Atlantic and Pacific.”

Nikka studied the photo. “That’s no strait. It’s sealed up at four or five spots.”

“Right. Now look at this.” He snapped down another print of the same area, dealing as though he were playing cards. “Kardensky got this by request from Geological Survey, taken last year.”

“It’s open,” Nikka said. “It is a strait.”

“That spot has always been clear, ever since Europeans reached the New World. This picture we got from the wreck’s memory bank must be how it looked before erosion cleared the strait.”

Nikka said quickly, “This gives us another way of direct dating, then.”

“Precisely. Rates of erosion aren’t known all that well, but Kardensky says this picture is at least three-quarters of a million years old. It ties in pretty well with the radiation damage estimates. But that’s not all.” Nigel collected notes, photographs and a few books which were lying about his bed. “Somebody in Cambridge has identified those lattice-works we found.”

“What are they?”

“Sectioned views, from different angles, of physostig-mine.”

“Isn’t that …”

“Right. I’m a bit rusty at all this but I checked with Kardensky and my memory from the news media is right—that’s the stuff they use as an RNA trigger. That, and a few other long chain molecules, are what the NSF is trying to get legislation about.”

Nikka studied the prints he handed her. To her untrained eye the complex matrix made no sense at all.

“Doesn’t it have something to do with sleep learning in the subcortical region?”

Nigel nodded. “That seems to be one of its functions. You give it to someone and they are able to learn faster, soak up information without effort. But it acts on the RNA as well. The RNA replicates itself through the DNA—there’s some amino acid stuff in there I don’t quite follow—so that there is a possibility, at least, of passing on the knowledge to the next generation.”

“And that’s why it’s illegal? The New Sons don’t want it used, I’ve heard.”

Nigel leaned back against the wall and rested his feet on the narrow bunk. “There’s one point where our friends from the Church of the Unwarranted Assumption may have a point. This is dangerous stuff to fool about with. Biochemists started out decades ago using it on flatworms and the like. But a man isn’t a worm and it will take a bloody long series of experiments to convince me using it on humans is a wise move.”

He paused and then said softly, “What I’d like to know is why this molecule is represented in an alien computer memory almost a million years old.”

Nikka held out her glass. “Could you give me a drop of that canniforene in fruit juice? I’m beginning to see it might have a use.”

“Quite so,” Nigel said dryly.

“There are some other points too. That long black line against the mottled background we found, that’s a DNA molecule entering a—let me look it up—pneumococcus. A simple step in the replication process, Kardensky tells me.” He put aside his papers and carefully mixed her a drink. “That’s what I was having off on, hallucinating about, I suppose, when you knocked.”

Nikka drank quickly and then smiled, shaking her head. “Interesting taste. They mix it with something, don’t they? But explain what you mean, I don’t see where all this points.”

Nigel chuckled and turned thumbs up. “Great. I’m hoping the fellows who peeked inside the packages from Kardensky won’t see it either.”

“What do you mean? They were opened?”

“Sure. All the seals were off. The canniforene was disguised, so it got through. The rest was just books, papers, photos and a tape. I don’t know what the censors—New Sons I’d imagine—thought of it all.”

“Incredible,” Nikka said, shaking her head in disbelief. “You’d hardly believe this was a scientific expedition at all. It seems more like—”

“A political road show, yes. Makes one wonder why our schedule has been so frequently interrupted.”

Nikka looked puzzled. “Our shed-yool?”

“Yes, you say sked-jule, don’t you? What I mean is that we seem to get interrupted on our shift a great deal, more than the other teams. We lost several hours today from that electric high tension, for example—”

“High tension?”

“In American that’s, uh, high voltage.” “You’ve never lost your Englishisms.” “We invented the language.”

“Say, could I have some more of that…” “So soon?”

“It has some aspects…”

“So it does. Think I’ll indulge in a nip.”

“Exotic slang. Old World charm.”

Nigel collected the papers and piled them on the floor, feeling his heels lift and float beneath him. The room was so cramped there wasn’t space for a desk.

When he lofted back to his bunk he was surprised to find Nikka there. She kissed him.

Nigel made a formal gesture, not totally explicit, currently fashionable throughout Europe. Nikka raised an eyebrow in reply. She came to him as an eddy of warmth.

“You’re enough to stiffen a priest,” he said admiringly. “Haven’t tried.”

She unfastened the brass buckle at her side. Forthright, he thought. Direct.

She hovered over him and her small, elegantly peaked breasts swayed slowly. The period of oscillation, he thought distantly, depended on the square root of the acceleration of gravity. An interesting fact. Something stirred within him and he saw her diffused in the mellow cabin light, a new continent in the air. His clothes had evaporated. She knelt and his stomach muscles convulsed as a warm wave enclosed his penis. He blinked, blinked and merged into billowing yellow cloudbanks of philosophy.

Twelve

They went for hikes outside, laboring up the hillsides, slipping in the powdery dust. Nigel wanted to see Earth and he had not realized until he arrived here that Mare Marginis was aptly named, for it appeared from Earth on the very margin of the moon, only a third of it visible. To see the Earth they had to scale a steep hill. Nikka was concerned that the exercise might overtax him, but she had not allowed for his training; he panted continuously but did not slow until near the summit.

“Beautiful,” he said, stopping with hands on hips. His voice rasped over the suit radio.

“Yes. I can see home.”

“Where?”

“Yokohama. There.”

“Right. And there’s the western United States.” “Clouds over California.”

“But not Oregon.”

“Where your Mr. Ichino is?”

“Right. I wonder why I haven’t heard anything from him.”

“Ummm. Even that enormous blast crater is invisible from here. Funny. But, look, isn’t it too soon to expect results?”

“Probably. He may be snowed in, too.”

“After all, he hasn’t gotten a peep out of you, either.” “True. We’ve been so damned busy.”

“And censored.”

“Dead on,” he said with a dry chuckle.

“No way around it.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“Oh? How?”

“I’m thinking of getting an unbreakable channel through to Kardensky.”

“That will be difficult.”

“But not impossible. Maybe we can route it through someplace else.”

“On Earth?”

“No, here. The moon. How about Hipparchus Base?” “It’s only an outpost. When they struck the ice lode at Alphonsus, Hipparchus became a backwater.”

“Um.” He fell silent.

“Look at it,” he said at last. “Earth. Hanging there like some sort of nondenominational angel.”

“Careful. Call it that and the New Sons will claim they thought of it first.”

“They would. Quite their style.”

“Why can’t they stick to one world at a time? Why pull the strings here?”

“They like to muck about. Power, you know—it’s an addictive drug.”

They watched their planet, half of it visible over the mottled horizon. Nikka pitched a stone down the baked hillside. The only sound was a whirring of air circulation in their suits.

“Incredible,” Nigel said intently. “Nobody’s noticed, but this is going to be the first true moon colony. The wreck will always have a covey of scientists poking into it, decade after decade.”

“The cylinder cities will have their own base. Probably bigger.”

“That electromagnetic gun of theirs? If we build it at all.”

“Don’t you think they will?”

“Maybe. The media are certainly singing about the idea.”

“Shouldn’t we?”

“Oh—” Nigel shrugged and then realized it was invisible inside the suit. “Probably. The cylinder cities will be good manufacturing sites, I’ll give you that. And they’ll sop up sunlight, then beam power down in microwaves. Photovoltaic conversion, the lot. That’ll be a big help— the coal liquefaction plants are being closed, you know, now that benzopyrene is proving to be a carcinogen. The Europeans are getting desperate for energy sources again.”

“Can’t they buy enough alcohol fuel? Brazil’s sugar cane crop is immense this year.”

“Not enough; they’re streets behind the worldwide demand.”

“Then we’d best build cylinder cities and more solar collectors as quickly as possible.”

“Ummm, yes, I suppose. But that’s not why the space community idea is being brushed off and taken out of the closet.”

“Why is it?”

“The New Sons. I think they’re using this as a smoke screen.”

“I heard there is widespread support.”

“Oh yes, they’re thick on the ground—and the pun is intentional.”

“A smoke screen? For what?”

“Not for what, against what. Against us. To deflect attention and money from the program here.”

“Oh. You’re certain?”

“No.” Nigel kicked at a rock. They watched it tumble downhill, flinging up a silvery cloud of dust in its wake that rose and fell with ghostlike smoothness. “No, that’s the hell of it. I must guess at all this. But I know that congressional committees don’t suddenly take up big spending bills, putting them on the top of the docket, for no reason whatever. Something’s happening.”

“I feel quite naive.”

“Don’t. See, the games played up at the top of the pile—they’re still merely games. Politics, public relations, oneupmanship, showbiz—those words have gotten to be synonyms.”

“Competition is fun.”

“Of course. ‘This show was brought to you through the miracle of testosterone.’ But there’s got to be more to it than that. More than another zero-sum game.”

“That’s why you never went into the higher echelons? So you could be free to use your influence for what you truly wanted—to come out here and turn your back on all that?”

“Eh?” Her tone took him by surprise. “Turn my back? No, look—look at that sherbet planet of ours. Here we are, the furthest out. Nothing but night beyond us. And still the view dominating the sky is bloody old Earth. Turn my back? We’re still looking at ourselves.”

That evening, after a grueling session at the consoles, she came again to his room. Their lovemaking had a more desperate edge to it, Nigel sensed. He felt himself pressing her to him with a furious energy, and wondered at himself. The silken movements, so electric, had their own life. Considered as a designed act, it was in the mind’s eye a slow churning of bloated and gummy organs, dumb to the ethereal, a rising with involuntary spasms from ancient ooze. But beyond that lay joy, an airy joy, with a burning pressure that lifted away the convenient carapace of mannerisms he wore. It took place in a spherical space so intense that people had to go in pairs; one could scarcely bear to go alone.

Yet, even lying at the place where all the lines of her converged, his head cradled between her thighs, Nigel felt himself slipping away from her, from the gliding moment, and into the riddles that chipped away at his focus. He felt a lazy peace with Nikka, a sensation he hadn’t had since Alexandria, but the stretching tension remained, a double pull both toward this woman and to the ruined ship outside, as though both were links in an unseen circle. He fumbled with these thoughts and the knot they made inside him, and in the act fell asleep, with Nikka’s salty musk in his nostrils, his arms heavy and sluggish as though they had supported an unseen weight.

He awoke in the middle of the night. He took elaborate pains to slide out of the bed without waking her and switched on only the small reading lamp in the corner.

The mass of material from Kardensky was imposing but he worked at it steadily, reading as fast as he could. The riddles of the past had an annoying habit of slipping away as he tried to pin them down. Much was known, but it was for the most part a collection of facts with the interrelationships only implied. It is one thing to find a wide variety of tools, mostly stone, chipped or polished for some particular use. But how to put flesh on these bones? How, from a chipped flint, to deduce a way of life?

He rather wished he had paid more attention to such matters at University, rather than swotting up the readings just before term examinations.

There was a lot of talk and data about apes, but the evidence was quite strong—man’s prehuman ancestors didn’t look or act like the present great primates. Just because Fred is your cousin doesn’t mean you can learn much about your grandfather by studying Fred’s habits. It was all so interwoven, so dense. There was a jungle of theories and test mechanisms that were supposed to explain man—big game hunting, fire, then selection for bigger brains. And that implied prolonged infant and female dependency; loss of the estrous cycle so the woman was always available and interested; the beginnings of the family; taboos; tradition. All factors, all parts of the web.

The Hindu temple monkeys are ordinarily peaceful in the jungle. But once they become pets, take to living in the temples, they multiply freely and form large troops. One troop, stumbling on another, suddenly flies into a fierce rage and attacks. They are animals with time on their hands; deprived of the need to hunt, they have invented warfare. As man did.

Nigel sighed. Analogies with animals were all very well, but did this mean man followed the same path? Admittedly, men were the cleverest prey one could find. War has always been more exciting than peace, robbers than cops, hell than heaven, Lucifer than God.

When asked why they live in small groups, the Bush-men of the Kalahari reply that they fear war.

Tribes, clans, pacts. Africa the cauldron, Africa the crucible. Olduvai Gorge. Serengeti Plain. The Great Rift that circled the planet, a giant baseball seam, splitting, twisting, churning the dry, dusty plains of Africa. Earthquakes and volcanoes that forced migration and pushed the hunter onward in search of game.

Here is where ritual began, some said: the great peace that comes of doing a thing over and over again, every step spelled out in fine detail. The numbing, reassuring chant, the prescribed steps of the dance—creating a system where all is certain, all is regular, a substitute pocket universe for the uncertain and unpredictable world outside.

A dry rattle of turning pages cut the silence of the room as he read. He skimmed through an analysis of ritual as the social cement. Running living leaping soaring. Nigel made a small bitter laugh. Only once and all together. Joyful singing love forever.

He grimaced.

The birthplace: a dry, straw-colored plain with scattered bushes, dark green clumps near swamps and water holes, the long winding ribbon of green that lines the course of a small river. The language of fur, horns, claws, scales, wings. The serene logic of sharp yellow teeth and blunt clubs. A creature who walks upright, leading a ragged troop behind. Jaw and mouth thrust forward, a trace of muzzle. Low forehead and flattish nose. He climbs trees, he seeks water, he learns and remembers.

Reason and murder. The rich, evil smell of meat.

The women, who stayed behind during the hunt to gather roots and berries, now prefer vegetables and fruits and salads. In a man’s restaurant the menu is thick steaks and roast beef, rare.

A skull, three hundred millennia old, showing clear signs of murder. But with such built-in tension, such rivalry, how did men ever come to cooperate? Why did they erupt from the bloody cradle of Africa, products of an entirely new kind of evolution? Ramapithecus to Australopithecus africans to Homo erectus to Neanderthal to Walmsley, the litany which should explain everything and said nothing, really, about the great mystery of why it all happened.

Genes, the brute push of circumstance, Darwin’s remorseless machine. Flexibility. The complexity of uncommitted structures in the brain, they said. Nerve cells with subtle interconnections not fixed at birth, but patterned by the stamp of experience.

Hands, eyes, upright gait. An excited male chimp snaps a branch from a tree, brandishes it, rears up on two feet and drags it away. Other chimps follow, chittering among the trees, tearing away branches and waving them. They jump through the green leaves and land in the clear, scampering out a few meters into the withered grass. It is some form of display, a celebration of the troop.

Inference, deduction, circumstantial evidence. A boy about sixteen years old lies on his right side, knees slightly drawn up and head resting on his forearm in a sleeping position. He seems small at the bottom of the dark trench. A pile of chipped flint forms a stone pillow beneath his head and near his hand is a beautifully worked stone axe. There are roasted chops and antelope legs, wrapped in leaves; the boy will need something to eat in the land of the dead.

Circles and animals drawn on the walls, colored clay smeared on faces and pebbles. Art follows religion, at least a hundred millennia old. Domesticated animals, the client allies of dogs and cats and cattle. And always the restlessness, the outward thrust, aggression, war.

Man would rather kill himself than die of boredom. Thus—novelty, gambling, exploration, art, science…

“Wamm ymm doing?” Nikka said. She peered at him drowsily.

“Studying up. Looking for clues.”

Nikka threw back the covers and lay gazing at the low ceiling. She took a deep, cleansing breath and sat up. Her black hair curled and tumbled slowly in the low gravity. “That was exceptionally fine.”

“Ummmm.”

“It’s never really been this way for me before, you know.”

He looked up. “How?”

“Well, I’m just a lot more easy about it. I guess… there are love affairs and then there are love affairs.”

“Indeed,” Nigel murmured, distracted. “Sex is God’s way of laughing at the rich and powerful, as Shaw or Wilde or somebody said.”

“And we’re neither.”

“Yes.” Nigel went on reading.

“Well, I suppose I don’t really know how to say…” Nigel put his papers aside, and smiled. “You don’t have to. See, it’s simply too early to assess things. And you learn more by plowing through life, sometimes, rather than dissecting it.”

“I… oh.”

“Does that make any sense to you?”

“Some.”

“Ummm. Good.” He picked up his notes.

“Don’t you have an off button that’ll stop you working?”

“Yup,” he murmured absently. “Directly on the tip of my cock.”

“I’ve already tried that.”

“Um. Love me, love my fanaticism.”

“Very well.” She sighed elaborately. “I see there’s not going to be very much more done about romance. I’ve never seen anyone drive himself this way. The others don’t—”

Nigel snorted. “They haven’t a clue about what matters.”

“And you do.”

“Perhaps. There’s a lot I’m still trying to cram into my grizzled synapses. Look.” He rocked forward, threading his hands together. “It’s clear whoever flew this ship knew a bloody huge lot about our ancestors. They must’ve had some kind of operation going here, else why learn so much? And why not study the dolphins, too— they’re intelligent. Though in a vastly different way, of course.”

Nikka pulled on one of his shirts and came to sit beside him. “Okay, I’ll play your game. Maybe we were easier to talk to.”

“Why?”

“Well, they must have been somewhat like us. There are many things about this wreck we can understand. Their technology isn’t totally mysterious. They must have had some of the same social forms. They even had war, if that’s what their defensive screen and attack system means.”

Nigel nodded slowly. “Someone picked up the survivors of this wreck, too, or we would have found some traces of their bodies.”

“So they had more than a one-ship expedition.” “Perhaps. It’s hard to pin down. A half million years is a long time. We can’t even be sure of very much about ourselves a half million years ago. How did we domesticate animals? Evolve the family system and sprout onto the savanna, away from the forests? How did we learn how to swim? Hell, apes won’t cross a stream more than a half-meter deep or ten meters wide. Yet it all happened so fast.”

Nikka shrugged. “Forced evolution. The great drought in Africa.”

“That’s the usual story, yes. But all this”—he waved a hand at the walls—“bases on the moon, science and technology and warfare and cities. Is it all just spelling out the implication of big game hunting? Hard to believe. Here, listen to this.”

He picked up a small tape player and placed it on his knee. “I’ll keep the volume down so we don’t wake anyone. This is a war chant from New Caledonia. Part of the anthropology packet. I suppose Kardensky thought I would find it amusing, since he thinks my taste in music is rather along the same lines.”

The tape clicked on. A long droning song began, loud and deep and half-shouted to the beating of drums. It was sung with feeling but strangely without pattern. There was no sustained rhythm, only occasional random intervals of cadence that came like interruptions. A dull bass sound filled the room. For a few moments the chanters sang in unison and their voices and the drum beating seemed to gain in power and purpose. Then the rhythm broke again.

“Spooky stuff,” Nikka said. “What people sang this?” “The most primitive human society we know. Or knew—this recording is sixty years old and that tribe has disintegrated since. They’re the losers—people who didn’t adjust to larger and larger groups and better ways of warfare and toolmaking. They seemed to lack some trait of aggressiveness that ‘successful’ societies such as ours display all too much of.”

“That is why they’re gone now?”

“I suppose. Somewhere in the past we must have all been like those tribes, but something got into us. And what was that something? Evolution, the scientists say; God, the New Sons think. I wish I knew.”

Fatigue claimed them. Nigel muttered a good-night and fell asleep within a few moments. But Nikka remained awake. She lay staring into the darkness and the listless, random chant ran through her mind over and over.

They had to stop work in the wreck for two days as all hands pitched in and finished the life support systems. Nigel and Nikka worked in the hydroponics bubbles, huge caverns scooped out of the lunar rock by nuclear vaporizers. They sealed the fractured walls, smearing them with a gritty red dye that dried into an oily hardness. At the end of the second day Nigel was sore from exertion and limped from a pulled muscle in his back. He left the spontaneous celebration in the dining hall and returned to the console room. Nikka noticed his absence and followed; she found him dozing in the console chair, his face shadowed in the green running lights.

“You should sleep at home.”

“Came here to think.”

“So I noticed.”

“Um. Wasn’t being blindingly brilliant back there, was I? That hydroponics lashup did me in.”

“I don’t think you should’ve had to do it. Valiera sat it out and he’s no older than you.”

He wagged a finger at an imaginary opponent in the chilly, layered space of the room. “That’s where you’re wrong. Valiera would like nothing better than evidence of my physical incapacity to—what’s the usual phrase?— ‘contribute fully to the work here.’ No, I’ve got to watch the fine points. They’re fatal.”

“We should have more help, not be required to… well, I guess it doesn’t matter. I’d like to have an on-site specialist or two, though, to back us up. Maybe in, well, cultural anthropology,” she said.

“Too pedestrian,” Nigel muttered.

“How so?”

“There’s more at stake here.”

“Things seem pretty innocuous so far.”

Nigel snorted, a kind of brusque laughter. “Maybe.” “But you don’t think so.”

“Just a guess.”

“Do you know something I don’t?”

“What you know isn’t the point. It’s the connections.” “Such as?”

“Did you read the research on the Snark?”

“I got through most of it. There wasn’t a lot of data.” “There never is, in research, until you’ve already solved the problem anyway. No, I mean about its initial trajectory.”

“I didn’t think we knew that.”

“Not precisely, no. It was under orders to cover its tracks. But some fellows worked backward from its various planetary flybys and got a pretty fair fix on what direction it was heading.”

“What part of the sky it came out of, you mean?” “Right. Old Snarky came out of the constellation Aquila. That’s a supposedly eagle-shaped bunch of stars—Altair is among them.”

“Fascinating,” she said dryly.

“Wait, there’s one more bit. I rummaged around a few years back, studying Aquila. In Norton’s Star Atlas you’ll find that there were twenty fairly bright novas—star explosions—between 1899 and 1936, distributed over the whole sky.”

“Um. Hum.”

“Five of them were in Aquila.”

“So?”

“Aquila is a small constellation. It covers less than a quarter of one percent of the sky.”

Nikka looked up with renewed interest. “Does anyone else know this?”

“Somebody must. A fellow named Clarke brought it up once—I found the reference.”

“Big novas?”

“Sizable. The 1918 Nova Aquila was one of the brightest ever recorded. Aquila had two novas in 1936 alone.”

“So the Snark was at work?”

“Not him. I’m convinced he’s reconnaissance, period.”

“Or a pointer?”

“How’s that?”

“A pointer dog. The kind that sights the quail.” “Damn.” Nigel sat very still. “I hadn’t thought of it quite that way.”

“It’s possible.”

“Hell, yes, it is. Snark wouldn’t need to know what his designers intended.”

“Every now and then he squirts them his findings.” “And they… use the information.”

Nikka said briskly, “It’s just an idea. Those novas— how far away were they?”

“Oh, they varied,” Nigel said absently. “The important point is that they’re all along the same line of sight, seen from here. As though the cause were moving toward us.”

“Nigel, it’s just—”

“I know. Just an idea. But it… fits.”

“Fits what?”

“The wreck out there.” He waved airily. “Some living creatures came here, far back in our past. That ship carried what the Snark called organic forms, not supercomputers.”

“Animals, I think you said.”

“Yes, Snark called us animals, too. No insult intended. He thinks of us as special.”

“Why?”

“We’re uncommon, for one thing. Most life is machine life, he said. And we’re…”

“We’re what?”

Nigel felt oddly uneasy with the word. “Of the universe of essences.”

“What does it mean? I read your classified summary but—”

“I haven’t a clue what it adds up to.”

“The beings in that wreck were in the universe of essences, too, then. They came here to get something.”

“Or give something.”

Thirteen

After a day of dazed babbling, Graves awoke in the morning able to speak clearly. Mr. Ichino fried synthetic yeast steak and as they ate Graves confirmed most of the deductions Mr. Ichino had made from the microfilm.

“I’d been on their trail for weeks,” Graves said, propped up in bed. “After them in a ’copter first, then on foot. Got a few long-distance photos, even found some of the vegetation they’d nibbled at, a few rabbit bones, things like that. My trackers pinpointed likely spots. My guide and me, we spotted some just as this damn snow started. Hard as hell, tracking them through this mess.”

“Why not stop?” Mr. Ichino asked.

“They had to slow down sometime. Everything does in the winter up here. If I outlasted them I could maybe move in when they were hibernating or something. Take captives.”

“Was that how you got this?” Mr. Ichino gestured at the bandage over Graves’ ribs.

Graves grimaced. “Yeah. Maybe they weren’t holed up at all, just stopped for a while. I came up on ’em in one of those circular clearings that used to be a root system for redwood trees. Got in close. They were sitting around a kind of stone block with something made out of metal on top of it, all of them kind of looking at it and humming, swaying back and forth, a few beating on the ground.”

“You mentioned that earlier when you first woke up.” “Uh, huh. I thought the sound would cover me, all that chanting. My guide circled around to come in at a different angle. They were worshiping that damn thing, that rod. I got a picture and moved and the one up front, the one who was leading them, he saw me. I got scared. Took a shot at him with my rifle, thinking to run them off maybe.

“Then the leader grabbed that rod. He pointed it at me. I thought maybe it was a club, so I got off another shot. I think I hit him. Then he did something to the end of the rod and a beam came out, so close I could feel the heat in the air. Something like a laser, but a lot wider beam width. I was pumping slugs into him like crazy. He wouldn’t go down. He got my guide—killed the boy. Next time he fired he clipped me in the side. But I’d got the son of a bitch by then, he was finished.

“The others had run off. I got over to him and pulled that rod away from him and took off, not even looking where I was going. I guess they picked up my trail a little later—I saw some of them following me. But they’d learned a lesson. They stayed away, out of easy rifle range. Guess they thought I’d drop finally and they’d get their goddamn rod back. Until I saw your smoke I thought I was finished.”

“You nearly were. That burn cut deep and it could have caused infection. I’m surprised you could stand the pain.”

Graves winced, remembering it. “Yeah. Had to keep going, wading through the snow. Knew they’d get me if I stopped, passed out. But it was worth it.”

“Why? What did it get you?”

“Well, the rod,” Graves said, startled. “Didn’t you find it in my pack?”

Mr. Ichino suddenly remembered the gray metal tube he had examined and put aside.

“Where is it?” Graves sat up and twisted out of the bed, looking around the cabin. Mr. Ichino walked over to the man’s pack. He found the tube lying under it in a corner. He must have dropped it there.

“Oh, okay,” Graves said weakly, dropping back onto the pillow. “Just don’t touch any of those things on the end. It goes off real easy.”

Mr. Ichino handled it gingerly. He couldn’t understand its design. If it was a weapon, there was no butt to absorb recoil or crook into the man’s shoulder. No trigger guard. (No trigger?) A slight raised ridge on one side he hadn’t noticed before. (A sight?)

“What is it?”

“Don’t ask me,” Graves replied. “Some new Army gadget. Pretty effective. Don’t know how they got it.”

“You said the Bigfoot were… worshipping it?” “Yeah. Gathered around, some kind of ceremony going on. Looked like a bunch of New Sons or something, wailing away.” He glanced quickly at Mr. Ichino. “Oh, sorry if I offended you. I’m not one of the Brothers, but I respect ’em.”

Mr. Ichino waved it away. “No, I am not one of them. But this weapon…”

“It’s the Army’s, for sure. Who else has got heavy stuff like that? I had to get certificates as long as my arm to carry around that rifle I had. I’ll turn it in when I get back, don’t worry about that. Only thing I care about is the photographs.”

Mr. Ichino put the tube on the kitchen sideboard, frowning. “Photographs?”

“The ones I got of them. Must have three rolls, a lot done with telescopic lenses. They’ll prove the Bigfoot are still up here. Get me some press coverage.”

“I see. You think that’ll do it?”

“Sure. This is my biggest find, easy. It’s even better than I thought it would turn out. The Bigfoot are smart, a lot faster than some ordinary game animal. Might not be the missing link or anything, but they’re close. Damned close.” His voice was fading with fatigue, a sibilant whisper.

“I believe you should sleep.”

“Yeah, sure… sure. Just take care of that film in the pack. Don’t let anythin’, you know… the pack…”

In a few moments he began to breathe regularly.

Mr. Ichino found the film in a side pocket of the pack that he had missed before. They were clear, well-focused shots on self-developing film. The last one, of the clearing, was still in the camera. Seen from behind, the Big-foot were just dark mounds, but the tube could be seen clearly resting on a rectangular stone at the far end of the clearing.

The Bigfoot seemed to know how to use it, as well. But worship it? A strange act.

Mr. Ichino smiled. Graves had become so engrossed with his pursuit of the Bigfoot that he had lost sight of his original aim. The Wasco event first drew his attention— how did Bigfoot relate to that? Graves had not had time to ask.

Use of that gray tube would certainly keep the Bigfoot free of men. Woe to the unlucky hunter who stumbled on a band of Bigfoot with the fire weapon.

Still…it seemed highly unlikely that the creatures could survive indefinitely with men all around them. True, they were masters of concealment—or so the historical record implied. But did they merely hide in the thick forests…or was there a place where they could retreat? A refuge from the storm of mankind…

A place with still-functioning life systems. A warren which sheltered its charges, mutely following ancient instructions. Commands now robbed of their point, but still carried out.

A subterranean Eden for these early men, spilling with food and warmth and mating grounds. A holy place that evaporated one day in a spray of nuclear sleet, leaving one or two foraging bands of Bigfoot in the wilderness, small tribes who had somehow wandered from Eden and perhaps had wished to return but were now adrift in a sea of trees and a world of men, pursued by machines that beat at the air with spinning wings and carried a fanatic hunter, a man born in some place surely far distant from Eden…

Fourteen

Sitting upright in bed next to him, eyes hooded by the cone of light from the reading lamp above, her raised knees forming a tent from the sheets, she seemed all blades of bone and a soft sheen of skin. She had slumped down in concentration, reading the faxes of their day’s output, seeking correlations. Nigel sat upright and, surveyed from his high angle, she gave the appearance of a terrain, a perspective of hills and secret valleys flowing together to a sum of great wealth. A spreading river valley. A world so rich that each stretch of tendon and alignment of bone gave onto new acreage, fresh forests, clean divisions between the bushy recesses and the new knobbed mountains.

“Ummm?” She sensed his attention. “Nikka…”

Something in his voice made her look up.

“Have you… ever… felt that there is someone inside who is always apart?”

“How…?”

“Always watching. Every so often…do you feel that there is a… way you ought to be seeing the world? Another way?”

“You mean… better?”

“Better, yes. Different.”

“More of it.”

“All of it. That we ought to be…be immersed in it.” After a time: “I think we all feel that. Sometimes.” “Certainly.” He sighed. “But we go on. Business as usual.”

“Not always. We learn something. Or some do, anyway.”

“Else what’s the point of growing older?”

“If we don’t get wiser? I suppose.”

“Um.” He stared distantly at the unintelligible faxes in his hand.

“Why…?”

“I don’t know, really.”

“Maybe it has something to do with this.”

“This?”

“The work.”

“Oh. Yes. I suppose. But this has always been with me, right on from the first. When I was a little runt.”

“We’re trying to sense something new here. Something bigger…”

“Yes. Maybe that makes me feel this way.”

“What way?”

“There are times when I despair of ever knowing anything, anything at all, fundamentally.”

“Well,” Nikka said, clearly groping for words, “more study…”

“Hell. No, it’s … Nikka, the world is dense. There are layers. I keep feeling—and it’s not simply this bloody wreck, no, it’s everything, it’s life—I ought to be getting it. The grainy… grainy…”

“Yes?”

“I don’t know. I can’t say it.”

“In your society,” she said softly, “there are not many ways to approach this. In mine there are perhaps a few more.”

“Right.” He nodded, a faint flash of irritation crossing his face. “Look, I’m not getting very far, talking this way.”

“It is not a talking sort of thing.”

“No. And it keeps coming to mind while I work on these faxes.”

“The fact that we see so little.”

“We understand even less than we see. What can we assume we have in common with the builders of that smashed ship? The only similarity was our—to quote the Snark—animal nature.”

“I wonder if we, we animals, felt the same way about the others, then.”

“Others?” He raised an eyebrow. “The computer civilizations? The abacus superminds?”

“You always say that as though it were a joke.”

He shrugged. “Maybe it is.”

“Perhaps that is what we may all have in common.” “What?”

“Contempt for machines.”

“I suppose.” He became suddenly thoughtful. “We made them, after all, not the other way around.”

“Yet we are uncommon.”

“Unstable. Suicidal. We reach too far. And the god-damned desk calculators—”

“Outlast us.”

“Fair humbling, isn’t it? If we animals could only get ourselves in order…”

“And communicate …” Nikka smiled, leading him on. “Is that what you mean?”

“Something along those lines. Maybe these aliens came to find another intelligent organic life form. They had our limitations—mortality, war. But they came seeking.”

“Perhaps they wanted to tell us about something God-awful coming to get us from Aquila.”

“What good would that do? A million years ago we had no technology.”

“Then they could, well, give it to us.”

“They didn’t.”

“No. But maybe they tried to pass on something else.” “It must be that. They couldn’t get anything from a tribal society like ours.”

“Yes. Though they could get contact, of course. It must be damned lonely, being an animal in a galaxy of desk calculators.”

“Whatever they brought us, I can’t see that it’s done us a load of good.”

“Ummm. Plenty of technology, but we’re still suicidal. One war—”

“Bang.”

“Quite.”

“Then we must press on here. With the decoding.” Grimly: “Quite.”

Mr. Ichino watched the snow stream through the box of light cast out from the window. The minute dabs of white were like leaves in a churning river of air, swept through the yellow beam and away into vastness. It was a light snowfall, adding perhaps only a few centimeters to the drifts. But it was more than enough to seal him and Graves into this stale space for a few more days.

“You… you takin’ care of my… stuff …”

“Of course,” Mr. Ichino said mildly, turning back to study Graves’s lined face. “You need not trouble yourself about it. Rest.”

Graves rolled his eyes weakly, searching the cabin. “Don’t wan’… them…”

“Sleep.”

Graves turned on his side heavily and closed his eyes. Mr. Ichino studied the tubular weapon, now lying on an upper shelf of the kitchen where it could not be disturbed. It was clearly alien, he now realized. Perhaps a talisman given the Bigfoot long ago, a parting gesture, something to help their survival. Perhaps.

“Rest,” he said softly. “Rest.”

Nikka was resting, wide-hipped and heavy-lidded beside him, and somehow the cannabis went down with slick ease, mixed well into a fruit drink, and Nigel found himself sitting up late into the night, ragged and rusty-eyed, planning. They really had to do something. Events were crowding them now and if Valiera—he was sure it was Valiera, there was a certain sliding look to the man’s eyes—if Valiera chose, he could press them even further. But Jesus, it was so fucking classically dumb, all this New Sons rubbish that seeped somehow out of the midlands of America, and Nigel had never understood it. These unfathomable mysterious Americans with their four score and seven and tramping out the wineyards or vineyards or whatever, things every schoolboy was supposed to know but if even a fraction of them did they’d be the most bloody insufferable bores in creation, miniature fonts of redneck wisdom. Thinking that he’d understood these creatures was a laugh, they’d slipped away from him time and again with their filmed eyes and folk sayings (What’s the state animal of Mississippi? A squashed cat in the middle of the road. He’d never known if it was a joke or not.) and their obscure obsession with traditions when they plainly had none, all the same running round the other end and constantly pushing what was new, the latest, rave of the week, new new new. Neutrinos, little massless particles streaming through the earth as though it wasn’t there. New trinos. And never for a moment thinking what has happened to all the old trinos, perhaps washed up on some star as War Surplus. Nigel laughed to himself and it came out as a giggle. A small thin one. And at once the slick veneer he had kept up fried away and he saw that he was on the edge again, stretched thin in an awful hollow place, wanting something and not truly knowing what it was any more. Back at Icarus, yes, he’d seen it clearly then, and somehow the need had washed away from him in those years with Alexandria and, God help her, Shirley. But now he had been drifting for vacant years. Nikka was a help but there was beneath the skin of things a resolving element he could not touch. Or was he simply and purely an aging man who had seen better days and knew it, and the truth of that plucked at him and stung, stung?

Fifteen

Nigel leaned against the wall at the back of the 3D gallery. Figures jostled on the screen, kicking a ball, falling, forming pincer moves and making blocks. He had never much liked soccer but now he could see the logic of it, the need men had for it. Hunting game in small groups, running and shouting and knowing who was your enemy, who was your friend. In-group and out-group, simple and satisfying. And not a vegetarian in the lot.

A few men sat watching the 3D. A goalsman missed a shot and one of them laughed. The screen flickered and a woman appeared. She gave the camera a sultry smile, held up a small green bottle and said, “Squeeze it for a lift! It’s got upgo! Try—”

Nigel turned to leave and bumped into Nikka. “You’ve got it all?” she said.

Nigel showed her the packet of papers and photographs he carried under his arm. “Everything we’ve found, including the bits we don’t understand.”

“Shouldn’t we tell Team One we’re going off shift early? They might want to—”

“No, we don’t want anyone fooling around with the computer memory now. As long as we don’t know what erased the sequences today, no one should touch the console.”

Nikka gestured down the corridor and they began walking. “You called Valiera?” she said.

“Yes, he said come by any time. I think we shouldn’t delay any longer. And I’d just as soon not have Sanges put his oar in until we’ve seen Valiera.”

Nikka shrugged. “You may be a little harsh on him. His heart must be in the right place, otherwise he wouldn’t be in this expedition. We needn’t think the worst of him just because he’s a New Son. There are bastards who are New Sons and there are bastards who aren’t, and I don’t see much difference.”

“Maybe,” Nigel said noncommittally. They were at Valiera’s office door. He knocked, held the door for Nikka and followed her in. Sanges and Valiera sat looking at them, silent, waiting.

Nikka stopped for a moment, surprised, but Nigel showed no sign and fetched a chair for her from the back of the room. They exchanged pleasantries and Valiera said, “I understand from Mr. Sanges that some of the sequences you found are now inaccessible.”

“Yes,” Nikka said. “We think something has erased them. There must be some method for retrieval and disposal of information, and it’s logical that some command through the console will achieve this. As long as any of the three teams tries new sequences we run the risk of losing information.”

“But if we cease exploring, we will find nothing,” Sanges said reasonably.

“We came here to ask for a halt to all work at the console until the material we have has been assimilated,” Nigel said. “We simply don’t have enough information or people to handle the material here. What we need is cross-correlations, diversity—anthropology, history, radiology, some physics and information theory and lots more. The NSF should release what we’ve found and ask for a consensus—”

“I really think it’s far too early for that,” Valiera said smoothly. “We have hardly begun to—”

“I feel we have enough to think about,” Nikka said. “We have two photos now of those tall hairy creatures—”

“Yes, I’ve seen one of those in your shift report. Interesting. Might be an early form of man,” Valiera said.

“I’m pretty well sure that it is,” Nigel said. He leaned forward in his chair. “I’ve made a few tentative conclusions about what we found and I think they point in an extremely significant direction. I’ll submit a summary later, with full documentation. But I think I should send a preliminary conclusion to the NSF immediately, to get others to working on it, to get some spectrum of opinion. I think there’s a fair chance the aliens who crashed here may have had a significant effect on human evolution.”

There was a tense silence. Sanges shook his head.

“I don’t see why …” Valiera said.

“It’s just an early idea, I’ll agree. But it seems a bit odd, doesn’t it, that we should so quickly stumble on things like the physostigminian derivative, viewed along each of the major symmetry axes? There are DNA traces, some other long chain organic molecules we can’t identify, and Kardensky just got back to me on those furry creatures. The people in Cambridge can’t fit it into the usual scheme of primate evolution. They’re large, probably fairly advanced, and may be a variant form no one has dug up yet. Those fellows are used to looking at bones, you know, and it’s hard to tell very much detail under all that fur.”

“That is surely why we need to find out more,” Sanges said.

“But we can’t risk missing any more entries in the computer memory. Not after losing some today,” Nikka said earnestly.

“Right.” Nigel carried on briskly. “And the matter might be of supreme importance—information from the past can’t be replaced. What’s been bothering me for days now is that it seems a great coincidence that this ship was here between five hundred thousand and a million years ago. Current theories of our own evolution place a number of developments in that same time bracket,” Nigel said.

“But we began evolving long before that time,” Valiera said.

“True enough. But a lot of our progress has been made over the last million years. We learned many things then—forming large groups, big game hunting, all the nuances of family relationships, taboos. Art. Religion. I think there’s a chance these aliens had something to do with that. Man has always been an anomaly, a species that evolved in a wink of an eye.”

Sanges said deliberately, “And you think this was due to the aliens using physostigmine, altering our ancient genetic material?”

“We can almost do that now,” Nikka said. “We’re learning to take traces of the RNA complex. There is legislation about it.”

Valiera looked at her with distant assessment and then turned to Nigel. “I’m no professional anthropologist of course, but I think I see a hole even in what you said just now. If these aliens simply taught these things to our ancestors, how do you explain the parallel evolution of hands, larger brains, two-footed stance and all that? It’s the side-by-side mental and physical evolution that is so interesting about early man. But teaching an animal to do something when he hasn’t got the physical ability is useless.”

Nigel looked concerned and sat and thought for a moment. “Right, I see your point. That removes the driving link between physical and mental evolution. But look, do you see, it could be selective help. That is, you could wait until some small band of primates developed a special trick—say, throwing sharpened stone knives instead of closing in and using them by hand. You could then teach them to better use that new ability. Show them how to use spears—they’re more useful than knives for big game. With a direct hand on the RNA features you could speed up evolution, give it a nudge when it strays from the path you’ve designed. Man was still being shaped by his environment a million years ago. I should think a push in the right direction—depending on your definition of right— would have large long-term effects.”

In a sudden burst of nervous energy Sanges stood and leaned back against the edge of Valiera’s desk. He folded his arms and said, “Why would anyone do this? It would take so long—what would be the point?”

Nigel spread his hands. “I don’t know. Control, maybe. The most striking thing about man is how he learned to move small bands of roving hunters, to big game operations involving hundreds or thousands at a time. How did that cooperation come about? It seems to me that’s one of man’s most efficient features, and on the other side of the spectrum he’s plainly antagonistic toward his fellows. War is an expression of that tension.”

Valiera made a thin smile and said, “Why bother to control something little better than an animal?”

“I do not believe we can even guess,” Nikka said. “Their aims could even be economic, if we could be trained to make something they wanted. Or it could be that they wished to pass on intelligence itself to us. Those furry creatures—the ones we have pictures of—were probably half-intelligent already.”

“Yes,” Nigel said quickly, “even with the crude methods we have now, the physostigminian derivatives can train animals to do amazingly detailed jobs. They can make a man believe anything.” He looked wryly at Sanges. “Or almost anything.”

Sanges sniffed disdainfully. “This entire idea is incredible.”

The thumping sound woke both Mr. Ichino and Graves. It was a ponderous booming that cut through the thin murmur of wind.

“What’s … what’s ’at?” Graves muttered.

“An aircraft,” Mr. Ichino said, though he did not believe it. He stood at the window and peered through the starless night. He could make out the nearest tree. There was no light whatever from the direction of the slow drumming.

“Nothing, I expect,” he said. “Would anyone be using a helicopter to search for you?”

“Ah… yeah, maybe. A guide back in Dexter. He’d miss me by now.”

“He may see our light.”

“Yeah.”

“No matter. In a day or two I can hike out.”

“Good. No rush, I s’pose.”

Mr. Ichino turned on the cabin radio to distract Graves from the slow, rolling bass notes that seemed to become stronger the longer he listened. The radio gave a whistling static but no stations. Mr. Ichino fiddled with the dials. Something had failed in the radio but he did not want to take the time to repair it. He moved to the fire-place and threw on some cedar shingling. It caught merrily, popped and crackled and covered the distant thumping rhythm.

“There. It was getting cold.”

“Yeah. Hell of a storm,” Graves said.

Valiera made a small smile.

“Much as I appreciate your coming to me with this, Nikka and Nigel,” he said judiciously. “I think you should consider things from a broader point of view.”

“They could certainly try,” Sanges murmured dryly. “I happen to know,” Valiera went on, “that Mr. Sanges’s religion holds that the Bible—and all earlier texts—contain a metaphor for creation. They have no true dispute with the modern view of man’s evolution.”

“Certainly not,” Sanges put in. “As you would know if you’d taken the time—”

“They will even agree that life could originate elsewhere,” Valiera overrode him, “since the necessary conditions seem to exist throughout the universe. But they do hold that Earth was the host to our life—”

“Divine natural origin,” Sanges said. “A very important principle to us.”

“And there are other opinions about man’s origins, too,” Valiera went on. “I believe that we, as a scientific expedition, should not try to stir up these issues without definite proof.”

“But the only way to get proof,” Nikka said sharply, “is through further study—bring in as many specialists as we can.”

“Once released to even a small body,” Sanges said, “this sort of thing has a habit of filtering through to the press.”

“That’s the NSF’s problem, isn’t it?” Nigel said with a slow, deliberate coolness.

“It is a difficulty for all of us,” Valiera said.

“The fact remains that we are requesting that we transmit all of this to Earth,” Nigel said.

“Don’t keep it in storage,” Nikka said. “With the sloppy procedures here it’s too dangerous. We could lose—”

“You merely attempt to circulate your own, your own theories about this,” Sanges said savagely. “To destroy beliefs without—”

Valiera waved a hand and Sanges abruptly stopped, mouth hanging open for a moment before he snapped it shut.

“And I believe you do an injustice to Mr. Sanges’s beliefs,” Valiera said mildly. “The New Son theology is subtle and—”

“Oh yes,” Nigel said. “He’s quite the subtle type. Tell me, Mr. Sanges—when you go fishing, do you use hand grenades?”

“I don’t believe sarcasm—” Valiera began. “Whatever it takes to wake you two up,” Nigel said lightly, raising his eyebrows.

“Wake us to what?” Sanges said.

“To reality. We’re making a request.” Nigel looked at Valiera. “Act on it.”

“You wish to transmit freely to Earth?” Valiera said. Nikka: “Yes. Now.”

Nigel: “Under both our names.”

Sanges curled his lip. “Your names, too?”

“Of course,” Nigel said. “We’ll take the blame for this.”

“Already dividing up the credit. You want to be the first to publish on the Marginis wreck.”

“A bit of a memo,” Nigel said. “That’s all.”

“We’ll need your signature,” Nikka said to Valiera. Valiera tilted back in his chair and narrowed his eyes, visibly weighing matters. “I’m sure you understand the need for security in this affair—”

“Security be damned,” Nikka said.

“… and I know I have your full support in my task of keeping all sides balanced in any dispute. I gather Mr. Sanges here does not feel this information is more than highly preliminary and should not be spread around. I believe if I were to ask them, the other teams would feel much the same way. I must say I can see their arguments quite clearly and I think they are valid.”

Nigel’s hand trembled as he leaned forward, intent on Valiera’s words. He thought he saw some slight shift in the man’s face, an odd tightening around the mouth.

“I believe that, as your Coordinator, I must turn down this proposal. To be sure, I can and will take the matter under advisement in future—”

“Ah yes, well, I see,” Nigel said. He silenced Nikka with a glance and smiled in an airy, resigned way that lifted the tension in the room. He crooked a finger at Nikka and sighed.

“We’re sorry about that, but we of course bow to your decision.” He stood up suddenly, the thrust almost lifting him clear of the floor. “We’d best be getting on, Nikka,” he said woodenly. Very calmly he took her arm and they left. Nigel nodded good-bye at the two men and closed the door.

Outside he leaned against the corridor wall. “An education in cynicism, this, isn’t it?”

“They’re a bunch of damned lunatics,” Nikka said fiercely. “They’re not scientists at all, they’re—”

“Indeed. It’s quite clear now that Valiera is a New Son.”

Nikka stopped, startled. “Do you think so? It would certainly explain a lot.”

“Such as the numerous delays we’ve had. I’ve noticed the other teams haven’t had the lost tapes, the air failures, the high tension arcs. It would make a great deal of sense if our Mr. Valiera and Mr. Sanges were in bed together.”

“I must say though,” Nikka said, “you took it very well. I expected you to blow up all over them.”

“Well? I’m glad my little bit of play-acting went over successfully. We’re going to move now, that’s why I didn’t want to show them I was concerned. Go ahead, why don’t you, and start suiting up in the lock.”

Nikka looked puzzled. “For what? I thought we weren’t going to continue the shift.”

“We’re not. But I had an inkling that something like this might happen; that’s why I pushed so hard for the direct link to Alphonsus. I want to transmit all this stuff”— he held out the package of papers he carried under his arm—“and be sure Alphonsus retransmits to Earth immediately. If we go through them I don’t think Valiera can stop it.”

Nigel stood at the narrow port and watched her cross the plain toward the imposing ruin. It was bordered now by entwined tire trails and jumbles of equipment. In the distance a party of doll-sized figures worked at a boring site. The lunar sunset made a giant from Nikka’s shadow. The white glaring ball was pinned to the horizon. Here, he thought, the winds always slept. Nothing stirred except by the hand of man. A gas molecule, escaping from a blowoff valve, would travel some ten thousand kilometers before meeting a fellow molecule from the same puff of gas. On Earth, the distance between collisions was smaller than the eye could see. A strange place, with different scales of time and length. The footprints Nikka made would, if left, survive for half a million years, until the fine spray of particles from the solar wind blurred them. Against such an immensity the dispute with Sanges and Valiera seemed trivial.

But of course, it wasn’t really, he told himself. He and Nikka had barely shown a tip of the iceberg, talking to those two. The evidence for some attempt at communication, at manipulation, was pretty clear. But he’d omitted the bits about the novas in Aquila, the computer civilizations—elements that might, in time, converge.

So he and Nikka had conspired this one-shot gesture, this fist-shaking runaround of Valiera’s sly network. They would be able to get through a cache of information before Sanges and Valiera caught on, and perhaps that would spring open a few minds back Earthside, air out the politics of how the Marginis wreck was being handled.

Perhaps, perhaps…

Nigel sighed. He should feel the zest of conflict now, he knew, but it eluded him. From Icarus to Snark to Marginis, he’d been after something he could not define, an element he felt only as a pressing inner tension. It had made him an outsider in NASA. It had become a transparent but steady barrier between him and almost everyone else; he could not understand them, fathom their motives, and they clearly didn’t comprehend Nigel Walmsley at all. There had been moments, of course, with Alexandria, and lately with Ichino and Nikka, moments when he broke through to the edge of what he was, lost the encasing armor Nigel Walmsley had built up over these years, slipped free to a high vantage point. And straightway came down, of course, for the moments passed as a flicker, and the realization of them came after the event itself. For that was the nature of them; they were not states of analysis, but new seas of awareness. Seas, with tides of their own.

“Nigel,” the wall speaker rasped. Nikka.

“Right,” he said when he’d flipped on his console transmission switch. “Let’s give them that stuff right off.”

“Do…do you really think this is…”

“Come on. No cold feet, now.”

“I don’t like political infighting.”

“And I don’t fancy being tedious, my dear, but…” “All right, all right.”

Nigel punched through to Alphonsus. Elsewhere in the building, in Communications, this would register. If Sanges was at his bright-eyed best, he’d probably be monitoring through Communications, or—worse—have already put a watch on this line. So it came down to a simple matter of time. If they could get enough raw data through to Kardensky’s group, and the contacts Nigel had cultivated there, a bit of boat-rocking would result. If not, this stunt would probably earn him and Nikka a swift boot in the pants and one-way orders shipping them Earthside.

“Here it comes,” Nikka said.

In the gloomy bay the man-made electronics glowed with a reassuring yellow and orange. Nikka shifted uneasily. The shadowed bulk of machinery around her stood silent, brooding, ominous. She told herself that her reaction was stupid. There was no reason to be jumpy. She had worked at the alien computer interface many times and this was no different.

She shook herself mentally and set to work. The transmission rig could read either electronic input from the alien bank or could scan the faxes already made. She and Nigel had planned to send both. She took a shelf of pages and photographs and stacked them neatly in the rig’s feeder. They had, she knew, probably only a few minutes before someone in Communications would be ordered to cut the transmission. So they had to be fast. Nikka set up the board for simultaneous sending of both faxes and data directly from the alien computer memory. This done, she pressed the final command to start the signal.

Nigel had been silent as she did this. She tapped the signal into his console. He could watch it as it went, freeze the process if anything was fouling up.

“Here it comes,” she said.

There was a grunt of effort behind her.

“What do you think you’re—”

She whirled around. Sanges was struggling up from the plastiform rim of the tunnel.

“Routine business,” she said, her voice thin.

“No, it’s not,” Sanges growled. He got his feet clear of the tunnel and stood upright. In the dim light he seemed larger than Nikka had remembered.

“You and him—I thought you might—”

“Look, I’m just sending Alphonsus some of the old material.” Nikka kept her voice casual.

“It doesn’t look like it to me. That screen”—he pointed to where technicolor images quickly shifted and danced—“is sending directly from the ship’s core. Not filed data—new data.”

“I—”

“We thought you might have something special set up in here. Something you’d put in since your last watch. But this—”

“I tell you again—”

“This is a direct violation of the Coordinator’s directives.”

“Why don’t you call him, then?” Nikka spoke mildly and backed toward the console, her heart fluttering.

“And let you send the whole damned business out while I’m going through channels? Ha!”

“I really don’t understand at all what you are—”

He lunged abruptly.

Nikka swiveled and kicked high, heel turned outward to take the impact. Sanges caught it in the shoulder and shifted his weight with surprising speed.

Nikka came down too heavily from the kick, losing balance. Sanges danced to the side. Nikka got herself into position and tried to remember what she had learned, long ago and far away, about personal defense.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Sanges said.

“Don’t you.”

“I will see to it that you and Walmsley never work again.”

“We’ll see.”

“I warn you.”

“So I heard.”

“I order you—”

“You haven’t the authority.”

“Then—”

He lumbered forward. His hands were held down, palms up. He clearly intended to get her into a bear hug and sling her around. If he could then reach the console switches he could stop transmission.

She turned, back to him, and brought up her elbow. She felt her arm smack into him with a satisfying thud. Sanges wheezed out his air. He wheeled away. Caught himself. Turned.

Nikka backed away. She needed space to maneuver. She felt the console rim press against the small of her back.

Time. She needed time. The data was going out. A few more minutes and—“Listen, Sanges.” Maybe she could kick the son of a bitch in the balls. “Listen—”

Sanges feinted to the right. Nikka moved to block his way. He shifted weight and dodged to the left. She turned to follow. He slammed into her with full force. Nikka tried to strike him but he lurched forward. Her arms were pinned. Together they sprawled backward. Nikka felt herself tipped over, past the safety guard on the console. The small switches of the alien terminal knifed into her back. They were crushing delicate wire switches, clicking them over from active to passive, calling new entries forth—

“Stop! We’re wrecking it!”

“Let me—” Sanges grunted and flailed at the power switch. He wrenched it over to the OFF position. The screen above them faded.

“There,” Sanges said. “I hope you realize the damage has been caused totally by your—”

“Look,” Nikka said quietly, panting.

She pointed at the alien terminal. Some switches were alight, winking redly in the shadows, following a sequence of their own. The lights danced and rippled.

“It’s running on its own.”

“An internal power supply?” Sanges wheezed, his face flushed.

“It must be. Something we did activated—”

The wheeling dabs of yellow pulsed, flickered, pulsed. “Some very complex program is running,” Nikka said. “Not simple one-to-one data retrieval. An action sequence of some kind—”

A dim glowing lamp caught her attention. “Nigel’s online input—it’s still active. He’s still reading this.”

“Here.” Sanges reached over and switched off the connection. The lamp remained steady. Sanges clicked the toggle switch back and forth. “Funny,” he said. “Something’s happened.”

A silence grew between them in the dark bay, now lit only by the twinkling, shifting array of alien console lights. Each tiny fleck of solid-state electronics flared briefly into life and then died momentarily, part of a jiggling rhythm.

“Nigel’s getting this, whatever it is, and we can’t turn it off,” Nikka said. “We can’t stop it.” Her words were swallowed in the cold stale space surrounding them.

Nigel had turned off all the room’s illumination, to improve contrast as he monitored the readout Nikka was transmitting. He sat far forward into the console, its plastiform arms enveloping him, its hood lowered to maximum depth. Nikka’s series began. Nigel hunched over and tracked the flow of data. The images flared into being and were erased with blurring speed. The large rat, three different views. Rotating pinwheels of orange and blue. Ancient photographs of Earth. Molecular chains. Chemical arrays. The hairy, shambling creatures. The beings in rubbery suits. Star charts. Indices. Data. Nigel tracked it at the limit of his speed, mentally checking off each category as it was recalled from storage and sent on electromagnetic wings to Alphonsus, Earth, Kardensky, freedom.

The screen jumped.

Froze.

Sputtered an array of dots, lines, ripplings—

… Nigel perceived it first as a faceless blank space. He peered at it intently. Something in it made him shiver.

He frowned. He moved his eyes to the side. He tried to look away.

And found that he could not.

It came to him out of the screen like a trembling high shriek, in color, a mottled green blister swelling toward him.

It hit him in the face and Nigel Walmsley disintegrated.

Sixteen

A day had passed briefly, scarcely more than an interval of wan light that seeped through the roof of clouds. Now the twilight gathered and Mr. Ichino sat rocking, his face a solemn mask, and turned the weapon over in his thin, bony hands. Could he feel the strangeness in it, or was that imagination?

A further conversation with Graves at lunch had clarified matters a bit, but Mr. Ichino was sure much would never be explained. Graves had mapped all Bigfoot sightings over the past century and found there were recurrent patterns, preferred routes through the mountains, and there he had sought the shambling beasts with helicopters and infrared eyes. Mr. Ichino had selected this place for a similar reason: studying the Oregon back country, he had noted that a series of shallow valleys and passes connected this region with the Wasco area. Merely a guess, a convenient reason to settle in these forgiving woods, but it had brought Graves to him. And perhaps that was the end of it—there might well be no other bands of Bigfoot. The Wasco blast must have caught most of them, burrowed deep inside their winter warren.

Where they had… what? Waited for some promised return? For the Marginis wreck? The Bigfoot had clearly known the aliens, perhaps worked for them, learned from them. These early men might well have worshipped the all-powerful, godlike aliens.

It would be a simple, natural thing to transfer that worship to their gods’ possessions that were left behind when the aliens abandoned Earth.

In the distant past the Bigfoot must have collected the bits and pieces of their gods’ leavings and carried them along when the higher forms of men drove them deeper into the forests. Dragged them through that vast retreat, perhaps used them to survive.

And the tribes with weapons would live longest, of course. A band of Bigfoot that worshiped an alien refrigerator wouldn’t find it of much use when it was cornered and had to fight, Mr. Ichino thought, smiling.

Graves spoke in his sleep, mumbling, and thrashed against his bedding. Mr. Ichino looked over at him.

Graves would make his name with this discovery. He had brought the Bigfoot at last into the light.

Mr. Ichino found the film in Graves’s pack. It made an orange kernel in the fire and in a moment there were no traces.

He carried the tube—how had they made it so tough, to last this long?—out into the clearing, and stood with it in the darkening chill of evening.

Minutes passed. Then they came.

There were not many. Six stepped away from the shelter of the black tree line and formed a semicircle around him. Mr. Ichino had the feeling more were waiting out of sight, their presence hanging in the air.

In the light thrown through the open cabin door behind him he could see one of them clearly. The head was very human. A thick forehead slanted into flaring nostrils. Glittering, sunken eyes darted quickly, seeing everything. Yet it moved without anxiety or tension.

Massive, muscled arms hung almost to its knees as it crunched forward through the snow. Bristly black hair, shiny in the cabin light, covered the entire body except the nose, mouth and cheeks. A faint sour animal smell drifted in the light breeze.

Waiting in this soft stirring of air, Mr. Ichino recalled the misted valley in Osaka Park, where the larks fluttered free and poised, warbling. In his mind’s eye they blended with the twisted beggars who ate parched soybeans and sang chiri-gan in pressing, littered streets. All brushed aside by the earnest business of the world; all vulnerable and vanishing.

Despite the legends of the Bigfoot, Mr. Ichino did not feel any tingling fear. He looked about him, moving slowly and calmly taking in the scene. They had human genitalia and to the right he could see a female with heavy breasts. They stopped ten meters from him and waited. Even slightly hunched over, there was dignity in their bearing.

He held the weapon out at arm’s length and stepped forward. They did not move. He placed it gently, slowly, on the snow and stepped back

Let them have it. Without hard, factual proof Graves’s story would be dismissed, or at least matters could be delayed.

Otherwise, the fanaticisms afoot in the land would fix on these battered fossils for an Answer, a Way. A spotlight of any kind would be fatal to these creatures. They would be hunted down, once Graves reached civilization with that tube.

This weapon was the final argument. It linked the Big-foot unquestionably with the aliens.

Mr. Ichino gestured for them to pick it up.

Take it. You’re just as alone as I am. Neither of us has any use for the madness of man.

One came forward hesitantly. He stooped and smoothly swept it into his arms, cradling the tube.

He looked at Mr. Ichino with eyes that flashed in the orange cabin light. He performed a bobbing, nodding motion.

Behind the Bigfoot the others made a high chittering noise that rose and fell. They sang for a moment and made the bobbing motion again. Then they turned and padded gracefully away. In a moment they were lost in the trees.

Mr. Ichino looked up. Clouds were scudding across the stars. Between two of them he could see the white starkness of the moon.

There had been someone up there who had seen it too, perhaps, buried in cold electrical memory. Did he sense that these children-ancestors were as much a part of nature as the trees, the wind?

Let them go. Nature had nearly finished its grinding work, nearly snuffed them out. But at least they could go with grace, alone, unwatched. Any wild thing could ask that much of the world.

After a long time Mr. Ichino went back inside, leaving the silence to itself.