The gas giant had been a disappointment. The nonrandom radio emissions were natural in origin, keyed to the orbital period of its reddish inner moon. Methodically, the craft analyzed the larger moons and found only ice fields and gray rock.
As it whipped by the giant planet on an artful parabola, it decided to focus on the water world. The signals from there were clearly artificial. But as it did so, a brief radio burst caught its attention. The signal showed high correlations, but not enough to rule out a natural origin; there were many well-ordered phenomena in nature. Incredibly, the source was nearby.
Following standing orders, the ship retransmitted the same electromagnetic signal back at the source. This happened several times, quite quickly, but with no sign from the source that the ship’s transmission had been received. Then, abruptly, the signal stopped. Nothing spiked up from the wash of static.
The ship pondered. The signal might well have had a natural cause, particularly in the intense magnetic fields surrounding the gas giant planet. Without further investigation there was no way to decide.
The source seemed to be the fifth moon, a cold and barren world. The ship was aware that this moon was tidelocked to the gas giant, keeping the same side eternally facing inward. Its revolution with respect to the ship was therefore rather slow. It seemed unlikely, then, that the source of the radiation would have slipped below the visible edge so quickly.
As well, the signal strength was low, but not so weak that the ship could not have detected it before. Perhaps it was another radiation pattern from the belts of trapped electrons around the planet, triggered by the fifth moon rather than the first.
The ship thought and decided. The hypothesis of natural origin seemed far more likely. It would cost fuel and time to check further, and the region near the gas giant was dangerous. Far wiser, then, to continue accelerating.
It moved sunward, toward the warming glow.
Nigel worked late on a search-and-survey program to pick up the Snark’s trail. He hadn’t much hope of it working because Jupiter Monitor wasn’t designed for the task, and the Snark’s departing velocity would carry it out of range soon. But there was a lift to his steps as he left and he hummed an old song in the darkened corridors. As a boy he’d watched the old film cassettes and had an ambition to be John Lennon, to strut and clown and warble and become immortal, launch himself into history with his vocal cords. It had been years since he’d remembered that obsession. The period lasted for a year or so: gathering memorabilia, hiring a guitar by the week, rummaging through a song or two, posing in profile for the mirror (backlighting himself in blue, sporting a cap, fluffing out his hair), learning the surprisingly undated slang. The dream faded when he learned he couldn’t sing.
Near the entrance he did a little two-step, whistling, lifting, lilting, and then pushed out into the dimming spring sunlight.
The exit guard stopped him. She looked at his badge photograph and then back at his face.
“Can’t match up this ruined visage with that cherubic photograph?”
“Oh, sorry. I knew you worked here, sir, and I’m new, I hadn’t seen you. I saw you on Three-D when I was a girl.” She smiled prettily at him and he felt suddenly considerably older.
He trotted for the bus, snagged it and waved to the guard as he swung aboard.
Fame. Lubkin envied him for it, he knew, and that fact alone was enough to make him wince and laugh at the same time. Hell, if he’d wanted the limelight he’d have stayed in the most visible part of the program, the cylinder cities being built at the Lagrange points. Create a world, fresh and clean. (Cylcits, the 3D called them, a perfectly American perversion of the admittedly whorish language—almost as bad as skyscraper, from the last century.)
No. He’d been lucky, is all, fearsomely lucky, to get even this post.
When they pried him and Len out of the shoe-box accommodations of the Dragon, and then tiptoed away from the legal scuffle, Nigel had learned a lot. The attacks from The New York Times were mosquitoes compared to what awaited them at NASA. Still, the public experience prepared him for private infighting. Parsons, who was head of NASA at the time, had sent Nigel off as a boy, really, quick and serious, able to lower his breathing rate and slow his metabolism at will with self-hypnosis. The Icarus furor made him a man, gave him time to water the bile that built up inside him, so that some humor remained.
Admittedly, he was less than a second Lindbergh. But he slicked down his hair and when the Night of the Long Knives loomed up within NASA, he went public with the facts. He snared a retrospective interview on 3D, made some well-timed speeches, flashed his teeth. When asked about Cheshire-cat-David’s role in the mission, he invented a limerick about him that NBC cut from their early evening show, but CBS left in.
Business picked up. He appeared on a mildly intellectual talk show and revealed a better than passing acquaintance with the works of Louis Armstrong and the Jefferson Airplane, both of whom were coming back into vogue. He was interviewed during a long hike through the Sierras’ Desolation Wilderness, wearing a sweat suit and talking about meditation and respect for closed lifesystems (such as Earth). Not great material, no. But 3D execs proved to be an odd breed; anything that tickled their noses they thought was champagne.
He was inordinately lucky. Something would boil up from his subconscious and he would put it into a sentence or two, and suddenly Parsons or Cheshire Dave would be in trouble. He hit them about duplicity in the Icarus incident, about cutting the cylinder cities program (truly stupid, that; the first city was already giving birth to whole new zero-g and low-temperature industries that could save the American economy).
And in the sweet rushing fullness of time, Parsons was no longer director of NASA.
Cheshire Dave was execing somewhere in Nevada, his grin slowly coming unstuck.
A news commentator said Nigel had a talent for telling the right truth at the right time—right for Nigel—and it was doubly surprising when the faculty left him, utterly, after Parsons resigned. Some NASA execs urged him to keep it up, kick over a few more clay-footed troglodytes. But they did it in secluded corners at cocktail parties, muttering into their branch-water-and-bourbons about his maneuvering skill. He shrugged them off, and knew their feral admiration was misplaced. He had done in Parsons and Dave out of sheer personal dislike, no principle at all involved, and his subconscious knew it.
As soon as the irritants vanished, the sly Medici within him slid into slumber, the venom drained from him and Nigel returned to being a working astronaut.
Such as it was.
NASA sensed his potential power (once stung, twice paranoid) and—lo—retained him and Len on active status. Len opted for orbital maintenance work. Nigel wangled for the moon.
The older men were thoroughly married and nearing forty, reeking of oatmeal virtues. NASA was having to pay its way in economic payoffs, so they wanted the moon explored quickly, for possible industrial uses. The cylcits needed raw materials, Earth needed pollution-free manufacturing sites, and it all had to come at low rates. So into an age leached of glory came the return of gallant men, bleached hair cropped close to the skull. Into their ranks he wormed his way, for an eighteen-month sojourn at Hipparchus Base on the moon.
His rotation schedule back on Earth turned into a permanent post. The economy was reviving, men could be trained who were younger, quicker of eye, leaner and harder. He and Len still kept up their minimum capability requirements in the flight sim at Moffatt Field, and every three months flew to Houston for the full two-day primer.
Someday he might get back into zero-g work, but he doubted it. His waist thickened, the loyal sloshing of his heart now ran at a higher blood pressure and he was forty-one.
Time, everyone hinted, to move on.
To what? Administration? The synthetic experience of directing other people’s work? No; he had never learned to smile without meaning it. Or to calibrate the impact of his words. He said things spontaneously; his entire life was done in first draft.
He stared out at the carved Pasadena hills. Some other career, then? He had written a longish piece on Icarus, some years back, for Worldview. It had been well received and for a while he’d contemplated becoming immersed in litbiz. It would give him a vent for his odd, cartwheeling verbal tricks, his quirky puns. Perhaps it would drain the occasional souring bile that rose up in him.
No, thumbs down to that. He wanted more than the act of excreting himself onto pieces of paper.
He snorted wryly to himself. There was an old Dylan lyric that applied here: the only thing he knew how to do was to keep on keepin’ on.
Like it or not.
FIVE
“It started in on my ankles this afternoon.”
He stopped, his hand halfway raised to beckon a waiter. “What?”
“My ankles ache. Worse than my wrists.”
“You’re taking the chloroquine?”
