Mr. Ichino pushed on resolutely, despite his fatigue. He was aware that Nigel, nine years younger and in better physical condition, was setting a mild pace; still, he panted steadily and felt a knotting tension in his calves. They were hiking above the timberline in early June and each breath sucked in a chilled, cutting wash of air.
Nigel signaled for a stop and, wordless, they helped each other slip free of their packs. They broke out a simple lunch: cheese, nuts, sour lemonade made from a powder. They had stopped in an elliptical clearing bordered by snowpack. Above, wave upon wave of flecked rock marched skyward. Shelves of granite had been heaved and tossed and eroded into a swirl of patterns, notched here and there by blocks that had tumbled down, split off by an endless hammering, the melting and freezing of winter frost. On this raw cliff face small yellow scatterings drew Mr. Ichino’s eye: rock-hugging bushes had begun to flower.
“So you think I should do it anyway,” Nigel said abruptly.
Mr. Ichino nodded. He was glad to see this spontaneous interest from his friend; it was the first time Nigel had ever brought up the Snark on his own. “We cannot be sure what their intentions are.”
“We can guess.”
“Our judgment of Evers may be wrong.”
“Do you honestly believe so?”
“No.”
“Then, damn it—”
“We must give them some latitude. Perhaps they are right and taking precautions is absolutely necessary.”
Nigel rested back against his bulging yellow pack, sipping at his steel Sierra Club cup of lemonade. “Equipping the rendezvous craft with a nuclear weapon doesn’t strike me as a precaution. It’s an act of insanity, buggering insanity.”
“You have seen the list of reasons.”
“Right. Fear of disease. Vague mutterings about a sociometric impact they can’t predict. Even a bloody invasion, for God’s sake.”
“The last reason?” Mr. Ichino asked quietly.
“Oh yes. ‘Something unimaginable.’ A brilliant category.”
“That is why they need a man in the rendezvous module, not merely a machine.”
“Not to imagine the unimaginable. No, they want some sod to give them a play-by-play.”
“Which you can certainly do.”
“Um. You’re probably right, there. I’m a dried-up old raisin of an astronaut, but at least I’m in on the operation. I know the necessary astrophysics and computer encoding, if it comes to that.”
“You are not a security risk, either. By using you, they are not forced to expand the circle of fully-informed people.”
“Right.” Some unseen pressure seemed to go out of Nigel as Mr. Ichino watched him. He loosened; a fine cross-hatching of wrinkles in his face faded. The two men lay for a while and listened to the tinkling of water, freed from the thawing ice, as it spattered down the cliffs.
“The nub of it is …” Nigel paused. “Did you ever read any Mark Twain?”
“Yes.”
“Remember that piece where he describes getting to pilot on the Mississippi? Learning the shallows and sand-bars and currents?”
“I believe I may.”
“Well, there’s the rub. After he’d mastered the analytic knowledge needed to move on the river, he found it had lost its beauty. He couldn’t look at it any longer and see the things he’d seen before.”
Mr. Ichino smiled. “So it is with you and”—he gestured—“out there?”
“Maybe. Maybe.”
“I doubt that.”
“I feel…I don’t know. Alexandria…”
“She is gone. She would not want you to hang on to her.”
“Yes. Yes, you’re right. You’re the only other person who knows the whole thing, about me and the hiking in the desert. Maybe you understand this better than I do, now. I was too close to the center of it.”
“As Twain was? Too near to the river?” “Something’s lost, that’s all I know.”
Mr. Ichino said quietly, slowly, “I wish you the strength to let go, Nigel.”
They hiked over a saddle-shaped crescent into the next valley. The lodgepole pines, their bark crinkled and dry and brittle, thinned out as the two men reached the high point of their passage. Here the air took on a new resolving clarity. Sierra junipers clung to the exposed overhangs, gaunt whitened branches following the streamlines of the wind. The gnarled limbs seemed dead to Mr. Ichino, but at their tips a mottled green peppered the wood. He stroked a trunk in passing and felt a rough, reassuring solidity.
This early in the season there were no other parties on the gravelly trails. They set a steady pace on the downward leg; the tiered glacial lakes below them flickered as blue promises through the shadowed woods. Mr. Ichino knew he would be even more stiff and sore tonight than he was yesterday; still, he would not have missed this rare opportunity to see the remaining Sierra wilderness. Nigel’s reservations had come due and one evening, as they dined together—almost entirely in silence, as was usual with them—he had asked Mr. Ichino to accompany him. The invitation was a final cementing of their growing friendship.
In the last few months Mr. Ichino had found himself spending increasing spans of time in the company of this restless, amusing, moody astronaut. In retrospect the friendship had a certain interior logic to it, despite their differences in character. Both were alone. Both shared the Snark project as a hovering presence in their days. And now, after Mr. Ichino’s behavior at the Executive Committee meeting, they both worked under the same faint shadow of suspicion from above.
They had met accidentally a few times after Nigel returned from his “rest” in the desert. They’d worked on computer problems together, ingressing and confluing matrices for the Snark, and spoken of the usual neutral subjects: books, weather, politics. They agreed that the United States and Canada should stand firm and sell satellite data to the World Food Reserve for whatever they could get. The same for orbital manufacturing, including the precious space on the cylinder cities. They talked, drank wine, argued small points in comfortable eddies of words.
Then, gradually, Nigel began to tell him of the Snark, of Alexandria, of things inside himself…
Mr. Ichino peered down the trail at the swaying bulk of Nigel’s pack. Throughout this journey the other man had set an odd pace, moving too fast or too slow for the terrain, pressing himself unnecessarily on precarious, terraced slopes. He rested at strange times. He craned forward, chin thrust out. Always the lay of the land ahead occupied him, not what surrounded him. In their pauses he leaped from one subject to the next without a bridging thought, always speaking of something distant, some new idea unrelated to the free spaces around them. He was there, but not there. A slanting blade of sunlight that split the forest darkness would elude him even as he tramped through it, head bowed, the light striking a coppery glint from his hair. The suction of what lay ahead drew him through the present.
