In the Ocean of Night (24 page)

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

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

“Which you can certainly do.”

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

“I believe I may.”

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

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

“Maybe. Maybe.”

“I doubt that.”

“I feel…I don’t know. Alexandria…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abruptly, Nigel turned.

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

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

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

“You can still apply. Speak to Evers.”

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

“He respects your past. Your knowledge.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A map they could all understand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

THREE

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

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

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

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

“Mr. Walmsley.”

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

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

Nigel shook his head and clicked it off.

“Mr. Walmsley?”

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

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

“I bucked it upstairs,” Evers said.

“To meet the Snark.”

“Yes.”

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

“Right.”

“And?”

“Well, there were a lot of questions.”

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

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

“True. How about exercise?”

“Hiking. Squash. Racquetball.”

“Racquetball? How’s that played?”

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

“I see. Fast?”

“Reasonably.”

“As fast as squash?”

“No. The ball bounces a lot.”

“You don’t like me, do you, Nigel?”

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

“Can’t say I’ve thought about it.”

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

“Well, I can’t really—”

“I’m trying to level with you.”

“I see.”

“No, you
don’t
see.”

Nigel sat back, crossed his legs.

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

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