“Ah. So some did.”
“Sure. I said you got mixed reviews, not uniformly bad ones.”
“After what you’ve said, I honestly wonder why.” Evers looked at him quizzically. “Do you? Really?” “Well …” Nigel murmured uncertainly. “Yes. Yes, I do.”
“You don’t have a clear idea what NASA—the people you’ve worked with—think of you?”
“Well…”
“You really don’t. You don’t know that to them you’re a, a symbol?”
“Of what?”
“Of what the program’s about. You’ve been there. You found the first alien artifact. And now, you’re on the team that discovered the second—the Snark.”
“I see.”
“It’s true. You don’t notice it, do you?”
“I don’t suppose I do.”
Evers thought for a moment, studying Nigel. “I guess you wouldn’t.”
Nigel shrugged.
“It’s my job to see things like that,” Evers said, seeming to pull himself up. “I deal in people. And you’re the person I’ve got to figure out right now.”
“How?”
“By guess and by golly, as my Dad used to say.”
“By asking me about racquetball?”
“Sure, why not? Anything to find out what makes Nigel run. And run pretty damned well, too. You’re smart, you’ve kept up on spacecraft tech, you know the plumbing and the computers, the astronomy—you’re a pro. The only thing you don’t understand is folks like me.”
“Like you?”
“Administrators.”
“Oh.”
“Guessers is a better word. Professional guessers.” “How so?” Nigel murmured, interested despite himself.
“You remember the Chinese Trigger incident?”
“I read Gottlieb’s book.”
“It’s pretty near the facts.”
“You should know. You stepped into that muck and figured out what was going to happen next.”
Evers nodded. “There were clues. The Chinese had dispatched a large infantry force by submarine. It didn’t make any sense that they’d be hitting Australia or anything reachable by more conventional methods.”
“So you estimated they were bound for a clandestine landing in California.”
“To say ‘estimated’ makes it more exact than it was. I guessed. Guessed they’d try to touch off a nuclear war with some well-placed tacticals and a commando raid to silence communications for a vital twenty minutes. Guessed.”
Nigel nodded.
“It occurred to me that you maybe don’t have a whole lot of respect for that kind of thinking.”
Nigel blinked. “How’d that pop into your head?” “You never seem very relaxed when you’re talking to your, ah, superiors.”
“You mean talking to you?”
“Among others.”
“Umm.” Nigel studied Evers and then looked aside, where a wall holo showed a glinting Eckhaus laser-carved iceberg sculpture, waves lapping at its base. Nigel breathed deeply and seemed to make a decision.
“Not really,” he said slowly, searching for the words. “There’s something poisonous in the way we do things, that’s all.”
“A strong word.”
“Appropriate. There’s a good lot here, individually fine people. But organizations have their own drives and that gets in the way.”
“In the way of what?”
“Of the truth. Of what people really want out of all this. Look, remember the first years? The Apollo landings and all. What kind of genius did it require to take hold of the greatest event in the century—and make it boring?”
