In the Ocean of Night (36 page)
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.
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.
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.