Abruptly, Nigel turned.
“The orbit they’re planning—it’s a near intersection, isn’t it?” he said briskly.
“That was how Evers described it. I merely heard the summary talk, however. I know no details.”
“I should’ve gone to it.” Nigel chewed absently at his lip. “I dislike meetings, but…”
“You can still apply. Speak to Evers.”
“I don’t take it he’s a terribly big fan of mine.”
“He respects your past. Your knowledge.”
Nigel crooked his thumbs into his backpack straps where they crossed his chest. “Perhaps. If I appear docile enough…”
Mr. Ichino waited, feeling a small tension stretching thin within Nigel.
“God damn, yes. Right. They want somebody to lie in wait by the moon, good enough. I’ll go. Hunting for the Snark. Right.”
With a quick, hearty gesture he clapped Mr. Ichino on the back. Beneath the canopy of pines the sound had a swallowed, muffled quality.
Nigel took the bus into central Los Angeles and spent a morning browsing in the old shops there. He turned up a book he only vaguely remembered, The Hunting of the Snark. It was an early edition, Macmillan, 1899, subtitled an Agony, in Eight Fits, including nine illustrating prints by Henry Holiday. The grotesque figures each seemed wreathed in their own preoccupations, staring inward even as they sharpened axes, rang bells and poked at bollards. Nigel bought the book at an enormous price—having any sort of bound volume not done out in faxprint, and over a decade old, was now fashionable—and took it along to Reagan Park, where he sat beneath the graying statue of a dead politician.
He opened the book gingerly, feeling less cavalier about this ancient artifact now that it was his, and began to read. He relished the clean, stiff pages, the austere formal march of words in old type. Had he ever really done this poem through to the end? No, apparently, for whole patches he could not remember.
He had bought a large map representing the sea, Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand.
Nigel smiled, thinking of ExComm. He glanced up at the granite politician, now the spattered colleague of pigeons.
For, although common Snarks do no manner of harm, Yet I feel it my duty to say
Beware if your Snark be a Boojum! For then You will softly and suddenly vanish away.
Nigel enjoyed the crisp turning of pages, the contorted line drawings of wrinkled dwarves fretting over their hunt. Sitting here in this dry American park, he felt suddenly very mild and English.
For the Snark’s a peculiar creature, that won’t Be caught in a commonplace way.
Do all that you know, and try all that you don’t: Not a chance must be wasted to-day.
THREE
The top floor at JPL was now executive country, entirely given over to the management of the Snark problem. Several corridors branched into warrens of cramped offices. Nigel lost his way and, opening a conference room door by mistake, disturbed an earnest circle of men. They looked up and recognition of him crossed their faces, but they said nothing. The blackboard behind them was covered with indecipherable symbols. Nigel nodded, smiled and went away.
Ah, and here it was: Evers & Company. The anonymous tiled corridors changed to Mirrormaze. As he passed, the walls rippled with liquid light, responding to his body heat. A lacy pink cocoon followed him down the hallway until the walls flared out to form a reception center, dotted with bodyfit furniture. Nigel recognized the scheme and looked for the unobtrusive signature. There it was, inlaid in gold, tucked in a corner: WmR. He did Total Environments for those wealthy enough, or powerful enough, to commission him.
So Evers now had that kind of prestige. Interesting. With Snark still an official secret—and a remarkably tight one—Evers still had used it as a lever to get more attention from the government. Interesting.
“Dr. Walmsley?” a receptionist said to him.
“Mr. Walmsley.”
“Oh. Well. Mr. Evers will see you in just a moment.” Nigel stopped watching the iridescent walls and studied her. “Fine.” He turned to watch an inset 3D, ignoring the well-dressed young man who lounged in a nearby flexchair. The man flicked a casual appraising glance at Nigel and then relaxed again behind heavy-lidded eyes, thumbs hooked into his belt just above his fashionably padded crotch. Nigel guessed that he was Evers’s bodyguard, one selected more for show than protection.
Nigel thumbed the 3D control. In brown: immense, prickly pile of garbage. On the far hillside, a glowing white dot of the fusion flame. In the foreground, a commentator, stylishly bare to the waist, told of three workers—hash-slingers, she called them—who’d gotten caught in the belts that fed the recycling burner. There was no trace of them, of course, and the accident had to be reconstructed from their work schedules and approximate positions in the Wastepark. The fusion flame had ripped them down into their component atoms, and then the mass spectrometers had plucked the valuable phosphorus and calcium and iron from the everlasting plasma and formed bricks. The hydrogen and carbon and oxygen became fuel and water, final useful burial for one man and two women who—one officially presumed—were a bit slow that particular day, or a bit stupid. But the focus of the news story was that they quite obviously weren’t innocent victims. They’d hired on only weeks before. They’d been seen dangerously near the mouth of the fusion chambers, where radiation and plasma blowback were constant threats. So: a scavenger gang, rummaging the waste of decades past for durable antiques or precious metals. Wastepark workers didn’t have tote-home rights, but who checked that close to the fusion torches? How many others have sneaked into these landfill areas? the commentor asked somberly. She swiveled to face the 3D snout, seemingly oblivious of the jeweled ornaments that swung from her artificially swollen nipples. Dangling gems winked blue and red at the 3D. Systematically raking up and mining these hills, I think we uncover more than raw materials for the fusors. We find more than the opulent trash of the middle twencen. No—she paused, face clouding—we find ourselves. Our greed. Our longing for the decadent past. How many have died unknown in the automatic belts and claws? Been jammed and sucked slimmy-jimmy into the eternal flames? The camera panned across the jumbled hills.
Nigel shook his head and clicked it off.
“Mr. Walmsley?”
He went through the burnished oak door held open by the receptionist and shook hands with Evers.
“I promised I’d get back to you,” Evers said. “Sit down.” He smiled warmly and moved to a comfortable chair away from the walnut desk.
“I bucked it upstairs,” Evers said.
“To meet the Snark.”
“Yes.”
“Not merely be on the tracking team—to actually make the mission.”
“Right.”
“And?”
