In the Ocean of Night (23 page)

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

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

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

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

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

“Then why come to Earth?” Evers said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evers spoke.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know what you think you’re—”

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

“Listen—”

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

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

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

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

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

Now it is out of my hands,
he thought.

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

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

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

TWO

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

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

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

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

“We can guess.”

“Our judgment of Evers may be wrong.”

“Do you honestly believe so?”

“No.”

“Then, damn it—”

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

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

“You have seen the list of reasons.”

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

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

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