In the Ocean of Night (26 page)

“We just had a squirt from Houston to remind you about priorities. Any piece of it is better than nothing, so hold off on the nuke if you can.”

“Roger.”

“Feeling okay? You’ve been up there over a day now, it must be getting cramped.”

Nigel studied the scattering of stars outside. “Nothing compared to the Icarus thing though, huh? Say, I never did ask you about that. I mean, with the drugs and that long a meditation to keep your oxy use down. I never did ask you.”

“No, you never did.”

There was another silence.

“Well, it must feel different, this one being almost a combat mission, you might say. Not the same.”

“Sweating like a pig.”

“Yeah, really?” The voice brightened at this evidence of human failing. “We’ll get you back okay, don’t worry, fella.”

“Say hello to the crew down there.” Nigel felt he ought to say something friendly. Lewis wasn’t a bad sort, only too chummy.

“We’re all rooting for you. Zap that thing if it does anything funny. The whole gig sounds flippo, if you ask me.”

“I’d better go over that flight plan. Give me a fix on a translunar.”

“Oh, okay.” A blurred squeal from the electronics. “There she is. Uh, signing off.”

“Roger.”

Combat mission,
Lewis had said. Sweet Christ. Marines wading ashore. Somebody always wondering where the medic is. Crawl along a clay ditch, rifle bullets zipping overhead like hornets. Hug the earth, align with the groin of the world. Images: a brown-skinned woman wrapped around a pudgy white man, he in spattered uniform, idly cleaning a rifle barrel, peering absently down the shiny bore as she rocks and humps and kisses him with her universal rhythm, her knotted hands feeling in his pockets…

Somewhere, a musical phrase of hunger.

He found one of the clear plastic tubes, squeezed it and ate. Carrot juice. NASA issue, lifegiving vegetables and hearty roots, no evil meat. Those who would meet God in his firmament shall be pure of intestine, live not from the flesh of dead animals. Rear your children on beans and berries; they too may ride to the stars. When they come home from a date, smell their breath for the aberrant trace of a hot dog. Unclean, unclean. And anyway, nobody had yet learned how to grow a chicken or cow on the moon, so soybeans it was.

For that matter, they couldn’t do much else on the moon, either. It was all well and good to balance tomatoes with barley, coaxing forth from the lunar gravel enough protein and oxygen to support a small base, and yet another to regulate amino acids and plant sap, keep mildew from forming in the access pipes, conserve the thin, mealy loam. The optimistic biologists frowned at their soybeans: with the daily cycle of sun and tides removed, the beans grew gnarled roots and gray leaves, became miserly with their proteins. It was no simple trick to be an adversary of entropy in a land with black skies and winds that slept.

Somehow the cylinder cities worked, grew their food and prospered. But the moon, truly alien, didn’t. Still, the crew at Hipparchus carried on, searched the moon for water and ice, experimented. They had a burning optimism. Precisely what he lacked, Nigel thought. He shrugged, with no one to see. The loss did not seem to matter now.

To pass the time he meditated and read novels from the cabin’s erasable slate. The module was well designed, considering the short time allowed for converting the blueprint into hardware. Nigel had brought a pack of four memorex crystals, each book length, and in the first day of waiting had devoured two of them, taking an hour apiece.

A phrase caught his eye:

at an attitude toward Ataturk

Later, musing down at the flinty plain of Mare Smythii, it came back to him. He treated the words like an algebraic expression; he factored out all the a’s, then the t’s. Rearranged, the words could yield ambiguity, incoherence, passable poetry.

He wondered if this was a neurotic habit.

Memories from reading: women who never passed a lamppost without touching it; men who balanced always on the ball of the left foot while urinating; outfielders who had to take a skip before throwing the ball into home plate. Fellow neurotics all; nerves skittering on a fine high wire.

He divided the phrase into thirds, quarters, eighths, thought of an anagram, fiddled. Alexandria. The desert, now a fading memory. He wondered what Ichino would think of this.

The moon’s crumpled gray horizon swallowed a blue-white ice cream earth.

“Your projected ignition time is holding firm.” Lewis again, seven orbits later.

“What does Houston say?”

“Snark is holding to its promised course. Decelerating as our trajectory specified.”

“What’s it saying to Houston?”

“Nothing unusual, they said. The scenario calls for beaming a lot of hot stuff, things the Snark’s been asking about, during the last stages of its approach. Distract it so’s you can get in close.”

“I know, but what is the new information?”

“What’s it matter? It’s all false anyway.”

“
What?
”

“They’re not giving it the straight stuff anymore. Houston says the President clamped down on them.”

Nigel grimaced. “Perfectly predictable.”

“Just you cripple it, Nigel, and
we’ll
be picking
its
brains.”

“Um hum.”

“But remember, go for the big nuke if it looks like it’s getting away. That’s what Houston says.”

“Sure, that’s what Houston says.”

“Huh?” Thin thread of surprise in the voice. “A finger in the eye.”

“I didn’t track you on that one.”

“Did you ever think how old it must be?” Nigel said, his words clipped. “Our lives are so short. To Snark we must look like bacilli. Whole eras and dynasties snuffed out in an instant. It looks at us with its microscope and makes lab notes, while we try to poke a finger in its eye.”

“Uh, yeah. Well, you’re coming out of radio shadow. We’d better shut up. I’ve already squirted your LogEx corrections.”

“Check.”

He was moving into the white sun’s glare again. The cabin popped and pinged and
snicked
as it warmed. A plaster of Paris crater below lay bisected by the moon’s terminator, its central cone perfectly symmetrical. The rim seemed glazed, smooth, above four distinct terraces that marched down to the floor.

Snick, went his cabin.
Snickersnee,
he thought,
waiting at the edge of infinity.
On the serene shore of the ocean of night, marking the minutes until the winged stranger arrives. An actor, not knowing his lines. Ready to go onstage for his big scenario.

Maybe he should have been an actor, after all. He’d tried it once at university, before engineering and systems analysis and flight training gobbled up his hours. He’d really wanted to be an actor, once, but he’d talked himself into becoming a Nigel Walmsley instead.

He warmed a tube of tea and sipped it, as well as anyone can sip from a squeeze bottle. The sun streamed in. Tea was like an unexpected warm hand in the dark.
Reeling with Darjeeling,
he thought, and maybe, after all, I did become an actor, finally. Icarus had been a straight bit of acting, with Providence kindly providing a busy coda of Significance at the end. And here he was for his next engagement, carefully primed, all the props in place. Opening night coming up, all the Top Secret Clearance audience clustered about their 3D sets. Best of all (until there’s a leak, anyway): no critics.
This actor, a well-grounded student of the Method School, is noted for his wholehearted interest in and devotion to his performance. His previous work, while controversial, has won him some notoriety. He prefers to work in productions which seem to have a moral at the end, so the audience will believe they understood it all along.

He smiled to himself. A man with his finger on the trigger can afford a few cosmic thoughts. Politics becomes geometry, and philosophy is calculus. The universe winds about itself, snakelike, events plotted along coiled coordinates with a fine, tight geometry, the scrap paper of a mad mathematician.

He raised an eyebrow at the idea.
I wonder what they put in this tea,
he thought.

“Walmsley?” They had called him several times, but he was slow to answer.

“I’m busy.”

“Got your systems repped and verified?” Lewis spoke quickly, slurring one word into another and making it hard to piece together the sentence. “We received that squirt from your onboard diagnostics on your last pass. No serious trouble. A little overpressure on the CO
₂
backup tanks, but Houston says it is within tolerable operating limits. It looks like you’re cleared, then.”

Nigel turned off the inboard reading lamps before replying, bathing the cockpit in the deep red of the running lights. For a moment he registered only blackness, and then his eyes adjusted. He had seen this warm red glow thousands of times before, but now the sight seemed fresh and strange, portending events just beyond the point of articulation.
Dante,
he thought,
has been here before me.

Well, he would give them what they wanted. He thumbed over the transmit.

“I verify, Hipparchus. Staging timetable is logged. LH
₂
/LOX reading four oh three eight. Servitor inventory was just completed and LogEx reports all subsystems and backups are functional.” There, you maniacs, in your own tongue.

“I have to relay for you.” “What?”

Through the hiss of static came a smooth, well-modulated voice:

“This is Evers. I asked Hipparchus to patch me through to clear up any last-minute—”

“Simply let me deal with things. The warhead is a last resort, agreed? I’m going for a look-see, to make educated guesses from the Snark’s appearances. Then maybe contact. But I’m staying concealed as long as—”

“Yes,” Evers said slowly, voice dropping an octave. “However, we are sure the Snark will never register you. You will have the sun at your back all the way in on your run. There isn’t radar in the world that can pick you up against that background.”

“In the world. Um.”

“Oh, I see. Well”—Evers gave a small, self-deprecating chuckle—“it’s just a phrase. But our people here feel strongly that there are certain rules of thumb about detection equipment that hold true in every situation, even this one. I wouldn’t worry about it.” Pause. “But the reason I’m taking up your time—and I see there are only a few minutes left for this transmission window—is to impress you with your obligations on this mission. We down here cannot predict what that thing is going to do. The final decisions are up to you, although we will be in contact as soon as we are sure that the Snark has detected you—if it ever does, that is. To be sure, that might be long after the time for any effective action on your part is past. We will do all we can from this end, of course. For the last few hours we have been transmitting a wealth of cultural information on mathematics, science, art and so on. Ex-Comm hopes this will serve as a diversion to the computers in the Snark, though we have no way of knowing for certain. Meanwhile, our satellites circling the moon will monitor radio transmissions to keep us in touch. Silence is essential; do not broadcast on any band until the Snark shows unmistakable signs of having seen you.”

“I know all that.”

“We just want you to have these things clear in your mind,” said the voice that knew tapes were running. “You have two small missiles with chemical warheads; if they are not sufficient to cripple the Snark’s propulsion, then the nuclear—”

“I’ve got to go check out something.” Evers’s words ran on for a few seconds, until the time lag caught up with Nigel’s interruption.

“Oh. I see.” It was obvious a prepared speech had been interrupted. The beauty of Nigel’s situation was that radio silence meant no one could tell from telemetry whether he had something to do or not.

“One last thing, Nigel. This alien could be inconceivably dangerous to humanity. If anything seems to be going wrong, kill it. No, that’s too strong. The thing is just a machine, Nigel. Intelligent, yes, but it is not alive. Well, good luck. We’re counting on you down here.”

The sputter of static returned.

“We have a burn.”

He whispered it to himself through slitted white lips. There was no one at Mission Control to do it for him; it was an archaic form, really, but Nigel liked it. The canonical litany: they had a burn. He would fly the bird.

The rocket’s magic hand now pressed him into geometrical flatness, and though he breathed shallow short breaths off the top and concentrated on timing them precisely, the pain the
pain
would not stop shooting through the soft liquid organs of his belly. He felt sudden fear at this new vulnerability, a spreading sharp ache. He closed his eyes to find a red haze awaiting him and in the rumble of the rocket imagined himself a sunbather pinned to the hard sand, vaguely conscious of the distant gravid voice of the surf.

The fist went away. He blinked, located a toggle switch, saw a light turn green. First booster separation. The fist returned.

Combat mission. Enemy. Target. He had not used those words for years; they were things of childhood. Galoshes. Skatekey.

As the days stand up on end,