“I know, right,” Nigel said, jerking to his feet. He paced nervously. “You say mine can come right back out, just pop the cork and I’m good as new?”
“Painless.” Hufman regarded him steadily. “We’ll be able to interrogate Alexandria’s diagnostics, or check yours to see if it’s receiving properly, without touching either of you.”
Nigel blinked rapidly, jittery. He hated operations of any kind, could barely tolerate the NASA physicals. But what upset him here was the calm, assured way Hufman and Alexandria talked about the possibility of massive damage to her nervous system. Of a wasting disease, a slow seeping away of function. Then the hemorrhage. Then—
“Of course. Of course I’ll do it. Now that I understand. Of course.”
He flew to Houston for his routine tests and workout. Nigel arrived with two other astronauts, all doing ground work but remaining on standby for deep space operations. They flew in on commercial transport; the days of private planes for astronauts had vanished long before. The other two men were of the usual mold: robust, good-humored, competitive. Nigel weathered the physical tests, including the long-standing worst—cold water, poured in an ear, causing the eyeballs to whirl as the confused brain struggles with input from two semicircular canals, one warm and the other cold; the world tilted madly. Then a day in a practice module, immersed in a universe of switches, manifolds, pipes, tanks, sensors, valves, connectors, hardware without end. They centrifuged him in it, timed his reflexes. He relearned the tricks of breathing under high gs: balloon the lungs and then suck in air in rapid little pants, breathing off the top. Finally, on the fifth day, he arced into a low orbit on a milk-run shuttle craft. In zero g his blood pooled in different parts of his body, fooling the body into thinking that his blood volume had increased. His urine output rose, hormones accumulated, all within the acceptable parameter range. He passed, renewed his credentials, and sped earthward. The shuttle landed in Nevada. He arrived back at their apartment to find that Alexandria had entered the hospital for an overnight biopsy, all standard, and that Shirley was alone there, reading.
He puttered about, unpacking. As they went to bed Nigel realized this was the first time they had spent the night together since the days when he’d first met Shirley, through Alexandria. Even then their intimacy had a forced quality to it, a seeming inevitability without its own intrinsic momentum. Touching her, he worked awkwardly for the right rhythm. They fumbled with each other’s bodies, unfamiliar packages they could not open. At last they gave it up with mumbled apologies, a half-muttered theory about fatigue and the lateness of the hour, and sank into a relieved sleep, back to back, the sheets making a loose tent over the space between them.
In the long afternoons as Alexandria rested, he pored over decades of scientific research and speculations. There was a cycle, he saw: as the twentieth century wore on, the assertion that life was common in the universe rose from the status of an improbability to a common assumption, until the radio listening programs began. Then, after several decades of null results, a certain zest went out of the search. Expensive radio telescopes cupped an ear to the fizzle of interstellar hydrogen, and then, as budgets ran short, the programs died. There was no dramatic change in the scientific underpinning—the evolution of matter seemed to almost require that life arise in many sites—but faith lagged. If the galaxy swarmed with life, why were there no prominent radio beacons left to guide us? Why no galactic library? Perhaps man was simply too impatient; he should listen for a century, calmly, without counting the cost. Nigel wondered how the debate over use of the radio telescopes would shift when word of the Snark became widespread. Did one example of a visitor change the odds that much? Emotionally, perhaps so. The key was the Snark itself.
They still attended parties in the homes of friends, or visited Shirley’s cramped apartment in Alta Dena, but Alexandria found her tolerance for alcohol weakened. She tired early and asked to be taken home.
Her work schedule slipped from three days a week, to two, then one. The Brazilian deal went on, gathering legal complexity, like a ball of wool picking up lint. She fell behind and was given more and more circumscribed tasks to complete.
Nigel resisted Shirley’s persuasions to attend New Sons… meetings? rallies? services? He could not tell whether Shirley went because of Alexandria, or the other way around. Alexandria, knowing him, scarcely mentioned it.
He rose in the early morning and read the New Son books, the New Revelations, the intellectual super structure. It seemed a Tinkertoy religion to him, assembled from the detachable sprockets and gears of earlier faiths. Through the center of it ran the turbine he’d suspected: a parody of the Old Testament God, obsessed with the power of His own name, capable of minute bookkeeping in the lives of the devout, to decide their salvation. This God carried the whole suitcase full of wars, disease, floods, earthquakes and agonizing death to visit upon the unconvinced. And, apparently, believed in preposterous connections between Buddha, Christ, Joseph Smith and Albert Einstein; indeed, had caused them all, with a tweak of the holy hand.
Nigel slammed the New Revelations shut on this mean-minded God, rose and padded quietly into the bedroom. Alexandria lay sleeping, head tilted back and mouth open.
He had never seen her sleep this way before. The thrust of her body seemed to belie the fact of rest. Tense yet vulnerable. He had a sudden perception of death: a small thing moving in from the distance, winging slowly in the night air as she slept. Searching out the house. Through a window. Into the shadowed bedroom. Silent, slow. Fluttering. Fluttering into her sagging mouth.
EIGHT
Lubkin called frequently. Nigel listened but volunteered little; nothing more had been learned about the Snark, so there seemed no purpose in speculating. Lubkin was all atremble over the President’s appointment of an Executive Committee, headed by a man named Evers, to monitor the situation. ExComm, Lubkin called it. The Committee was meeting at JPL in a week; would Nigel come?
He did, begrudgingly. Evers proved to be a deeply tanned, athletic-looking sort, well groomed and noncommittal. He carried the air of one who had been in charge of things for so long that his leadership was assumed, a fact hardly worth remarking upon. Evers took Nigel aside before the formal meeting and pumped him for an estimate of what the Snark was up to, where it would go. Nigel had his own ideas, but he told Evers that he hadn’t a clue.
The meeting itself proved to be a lot of talk with precious little new data. The Venus rendezvous seemed quite probable now, after detailed analysis of the Mars encounter. Why the Snark should be doing this was another matter. Since the communications satellite nets were completed in the 2010s, Earth was no longer a strong radio or TV emitter. A magnetic implosion-induced rainbow artfully produced in Saudi Arabia was transmitted to Japan by direct beaming through a satellite; no signals leaked out of the atmosphere anymore. It was conceivable that the Snark hadn’t picked up intelligible electromagnetic signals from Earth until it was near Mars. But still, why Venus? Why go there?
Nigel felt a certain wry amusement at Evers and his scientific advisors. When pressed on a point they would hedge and slip into their neutral jargon; a simple “I think” became “it is suggested that”; opinions were given in the passive voice, devoid of direct authorship.
It came to him as the meeting broke up that, compared to this slippery committee and the unreadable Evers, he probably preferred the riddle now riding toward Venus, a thing known only by its blossoming orange fusion flame.
Lubkin called. The Snark did not respond to a beamed radio signal, or to a laser pulse.
Of course not, Nigel thought. The thing isn’t naive anymore. It’s had a squint or two at daytime 3D and grown cautious. It wants time to study us before putting a toe in the water.
More news: Evers was upping the budget. New specialists were being called in, though none was given the whole picture, none knew what all this was really about. The Ichino fellow was working out well. Tracking went on. No sign of the Snark.
Nigel nodded, murmured something and went back to Alexandria.
And Alexandria was right, he saw: the two of them had been on a plateau for years. He recalled the boy at the Orange County Fall Fair. People with children had a natural benchmark. They grew, developed; you could see your effort giving into a living human being, a new element in the world’s compound. Alexandria had climbed up through a corporate anthill. Her progress was merely vertical, without human dimension. The Brazilians would buy the damned airline, that much was clear by now, and how, precisely, could that enter the sum of her life?
Nigel usually left the ExComm meetings as soon as they formally broke up. Without a firm fix on the Snark’s trajectory, there seemed little to discuss. At one of them Lubkin followed him out of the conference room and into an elevator. Nigel nodded a greeting, distracted. He absently scratched his cheek, which was shadowed by a day’s growth of beard, and the rasp sounded loudly in the elevator.
“You know,” Lubkin said abruptly, “the thing I kind of like about a thing like this, a group effort like this with not many people in on the thing, is the way it makes people fall back on each other.”
“So does gin.”
Lubkin laughed in short, sharp barks. “Man, I’m glad Evers didn’t hear you say that. He’d be angry as a toad with the warts filed off.”
“Oh? Why?”
“He, well, he wants to be sure we got a solid group.” “Then he must be having doubts about me.”
“Naw, I wouldn’t say that. We all sort of feel different about you.”
“Why?”
“Well, you know.” Lubkin looked at him earnestly, as though trying to read something in Nigel’s face. “You were there. At Icarus. You’ve seen some things that, well, nobody else in the human race ever will.”
Nigel paused. He chewed his lip.
“You’ve seen the photos I took. They—”
“It’s not the same. Hell, Nigel—what you did—going into Icarus—may have brought the Snark.”
“That radio burst, you mean?”
“Yeah. Why would a derelict send out an intense signal like that?”
Nigel shrugged, lifting his eyebrows in a faintly comical way that he hoped would break Lubkin’s mood. “Beyond me, I’m afraid.”
The elevator door slid aside. “If it’s beyond you, I’m pretty sure it’s beyond all of us, Nigel.” He shuffled his feet, as though vaguely embarrassed. “Look, I’ve got to run. Give my best to Alexandria, will you? And don’t forget the party, eh?”
