In the Ocean of Night (25 page)

“One you can make.”

“
Not
by myself.”

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

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

“Well, then—take it.”

“You wouldn’t like it if I did.”

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

“Nice phrase.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m not a machine, no.”

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

“And they should know, of course.”

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

“Ah. So some did.”

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

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

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

“Well…”

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

“Of what?”

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

“I see.”

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

“I don’t suppose I do.”

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

Nigel shrugged.

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

“How?”

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

“By asking me about racquetball?”

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

“Like you?”

“Administrators.”

“Oh.”

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

“You remember the Chinese Trigger incident?”

“I read Gottlieb’s book.”

“It’s pretty near the facts.”

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

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

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

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

Nigel nodded.

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

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

“You mean talking to you?”

“Among others.”

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

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

“A strong word.”

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

“In the way of what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How so?”

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

“Surely we agree on that.”

“Check. You did, too, at Icarus.”

“With middling results.”

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

“So Commander Sturrock could become a national hero.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

“Umm.”

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

“So you’re going to back me.”

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

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

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

FOUR

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

His mind wandered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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