“Compared to us, the way we do things, those preening dandies can’t tie their shoelaces without an instruction manual. They don’t know.”
“Ah.” He enjoyed watching the flush of eagerness and zest stealing the cool and proper manner from her features. Watching her this way, chattering on about indices and margins and accountable funds, suspended halfway between the soft and easy Alexandria of the night, emerging into the precise, efficient executive of the day, he knew again why he loved her.
He left for the Lab a few minutes after Alexandria, as soon as he could finish the dishes, and barely caught his bus. It meandered along Fair Oaks, three-quarters filled even this late in the morning. Nigel pulled his personal earjacks out of his pocket and plugged into the six-channel audio track. He tuned out a jingle suitable for morons, a sportscast ditto, paused at the news—psychologists were worrying about a sudden surge in infanticide—and flicked over the “classical” channel. A short trumpet voluntary ended and a soupy Brahms symphony began, heavy with strings. He switched off, pocketed his earjacks and studied the view as the bus labored up the Pasadena hills. A ruddy-brown tinge smothered the land. He slipped his nose mask on and breathed in the sweet, cloying smell. Some things never improved. He was aware that the political situation was worsening, people were jittery about imports/exports, but it seemed to him that air smelling fresh-scrubbed, as though from the night’s rain, and a bit of Beethoven on the way to work were, all in all, more important issues.
Nigel smiled to himself. In these sentiments he recognized an echo of his mother and father. They had moved back to Suffolk shortly after the Icarus business, and he had seen them regularly. Their compass had shrunk into the comfortable English countryside: clear air and string quartets. The more he rubbed against the world, the more he saw them in himself. Stubborn he was, yes, just like his father, who had refused to ever believe Nigel should have gone to Icarus or, indeed, should have stayed on in America after that. It was precisely that same stubbornness that made him remain, though. Now, when he spoke amid these flat American voices, he heard his father’s smooth vowels. Angina and emphysema had stolen those two blended figures from him, finally, but here in this sometimes alien land he felt them closer than before.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory was a jumble of rectangular blocks perched on a still-green hillside. As the bus wheezed to a stop he heard chanting and saw three New Sons handing out literature and buttonholing at the main gate. He took one of their handouts and crumpled it up after a glance. It seemed to him their promotional field work was getting worse; overtly mystical appeals wouldn’t work with JPL’s staff.
He passed through three sets of guards, grudgingly showed his badge—the Lab was a prime target for the bombers, but it was a nuisance nonetheless—and made his way down chilly, neon-bleached corridors. When he reached his office he found Kevin Lubkin, Mission Coordinator, already waiting for him. Nigel moved some issues of Icarus, the scholarly journal, out of a chair for Lubkin, pushed them into the heap of papers on his desk and raised the blinds of his window to let one pale blade of light lance across the opposite wall. He worked in a wing without air conditioning and it was a good idea to get some cross-ventilation going as soon as possible; the afternoon was unforgiving. Then, too, he adjusted the blinds each morning as a ritual beginning of work, and so uttered nothing more than a greeting to Lubkin until it was done.
“Something wrong?” he asked then, summoning up an artificial alertness.
Kevin Lubkin, distracted, closed a folder he had been reading. “Jupiter Monitor,” he said tersely. He was a burly, red-faced man with a smooth voice and a belly that had recently begun to bulge downward, concealing his belt buckle.
“Malfunction?”
“No. It’s being jammed.”
He flicked a blank look at Nigel, waiting.
Nigel raised an eyebrow. An odd tension had suddenly come into the room. He might still be relaxed from breakfast, but he wasn’t so slow that he could be taken in by an office sendup. He said nothing.
“Yeah, I know,” Lubkin said, sighing. “Sounds impossible. But it happened. I called you about it but—”
“What’s the trouble?”
“At two this morning we got a diagnostic report from the Jovian Monitor. The graveyard shift couldn’t figure it out, so they called me. Seemed like the onboard computer thought the main radio dish was having problems.” He took off his creamshell glasses to cradle them in his lap. “That wasn’t it, I decided. The dish is okay. But every time it tries to transmit to us, something echoes the signal back after two minutes.”
“Echoes?” Nigel tilted his chair, staring at titles on his bookshelves while he ran the circuit layout of the J-Monitor’s radio gear through his mind. “Two minutes is far too long for any feedback problem—you’re right. Unless the whole program has gone sour and the transmissions are being retaped by Monitor itself. It could get confused and think it was reading an incoming signal.”
Lubkin waved a hand impatiently. “We thought of that.”
“And?”
“The self-diagnostics say no—everything checks.”
“I give up,” Nigel said. “I can tell you’ve got a theory, though.” He spread his hands expansively. “What is it, then?”
“I think J-Monitor is getting an honest incoming signal. It’s telling us the truth.”
Nigel snorted. “How did you muddle through to that idea?”
“Well, I know—”
“Radio takes nearly an hour to reach us from Jupiter at this phase of the orbit. How is anyone going to send Monitor’s own messages back to it in two minutes?”
“By putting a transmitter in Jupiter orbit—just like Monitor.”
Nigel blinked. “The Sovs? But they agreed—”
“No Soviets. We checked on the fastwire. They say no, they haven’t shot anything out that way at all in a coon’s age. Our intelligence people are sure they’re leveling.”
“Chinese?”
“They aren’t playing in our league yet.”
“Who, then?”
Lubkin shrugged. The sallow sagging lines in his face told more than his words. “I was kind of thinking you might help me find out.”
There was a faint ring of defeat in the way the man said it—Nigel noted the tone because he had never heard it before. Usually Lubkin had an aspect of brittle hardness, a cool superior air. Now his face was not set in its habitual aloof expression; it seemed open, even vulnerable. Nigel guessed why the man had come in himself at 2
A.M., rather than delegating the job—to show his people, without having to tell them in so many words, that he could do the work himself, that he hadn’t lost the sure touch, that he understood the twists and subtleties of the machines they guided. But now Lubkin hadn’t unraveled the knot. The graveyard shift had departed into a gray dawn, so now he could safely ask for help without being obvious.
Nigel smiled wryly at himself. Always calculating, weighing the scales.
“Right,” he said. “I’ll help.”
TWO
The solar system is vast. Light requires eleven hours to cross it. Scattered debris—rock, dust, icy conglomerates, planets—circles the ordinary white star, each fragment turning one face to the incandescent center, receiving warmth, while the other faces the interstellar abyss.
The craft approaching the system in 2031 did not know even these simple facts. Swimming in black vastness, it understood only that it was once again nearing a commonplace type of star and that the familiar ritual must begin again.
Though it was carrying out a long and labored exploration of this spiral arm, it had not chosen this particular star at random. Long before, cruising at a sizable fraction of light speed somewhat below the plane of the galaxy, it had filtered through the whispering radio noise a brief signal. The message was blurred and garbled. There were three common referents the craft could piece together, however, and these resembled an ancient code it had been taught to honor. The machine began to turn in a great arc which arrowed toward a grouping of stars; the jittery message had not lasted long enough to get a precise fix.
Much later, during the approach, a stronger radio burst peaked through the sea of hydrogen emission. A distress call. Life system failure. A breach in the hull, violation of the vital integrity indices—
