The sky splintered.
A searing ball of flame billowed out. It thinned, paled. Nigel clutched at his couch, unmoving, nostrils flared. The beep was gone. A faint burr of static returned. He hung suspended, waiting. He stared ahead.
Beyond the slowly dulling disk of flame a dab of light moved to the left. Its image wavered and then resolved, intact; a perfect sphere.
It dawned on Nigel that the chemical warhead had detonated early. The silvery ball was drifting from sight. Nigel automatically corrected his course.
The voice came deeper now, dryly modulated:
“You have changed since we walked together.”
Nigel hesitated, mind spinning soundlessly on fine threads over the abyss.
“The sword is too heavy for you,” the voice said matter-of-factly.
“I didn’t intend to carry it at all—”
“I know. You are not so hobbled and coiled.”
“I wonder.”
“Your race has a stream of tongues. You communicate with many senses—more than you know. These were difficult for me. Sometimes it was as though there were two species…I did not understand that each man is so different.”
“Why, of course.”
“I have met other beings who were not,” the voice said simply.
“How could they be? Did they follow instinctive patterns? Like our insects?”
“No. Insect… implies they were inferior or rigid. They were merely different.”
“But each member the same?” Nigel said easily, the words slipping free. He felt light, airy.
“They lived in a vast… you have no word. Interface, perhaps. Between binary stars. They were easier to fathom than your diversity. You are tensed, always moving in many directions at once. An unusual pattern. I have seldom seen such turbulence.”
“Madness.”
“And talent. I am afraid I have already risked too much to come near. My injunctions specify—”
A click, buzz, static. The voice passed from him. “Walmsley, Walmsley. Evers here. Intersection should have occurred. We just picked up a fragment of some transmission. Part of it sounded like you. What’s happened?”
“I don’t know.”
More static. Houston was probably using one of the lunar satellites to relay, skipping Hipparchus. He wondered what—
“Well, you’d damn better find out. About a minute ago we picked up a funny signal from the surface, too. We put the source near Mare Marginis. We thought maybe the Snark had altered course and landed there.”
“No. No, it’s directly in front of me.”
“Walmsley! Report! Did you get one off?”
“Yes.”
A blur of sound. “—score? Did it score?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“What?”
“It detonated before it hit. No damage.”
“And the backup? We haven’t registered any jump in radiation levels.”
“I’m not firing it. Never.” With the words a new clarity came into his world.
“Listen to me, Nigel.” A hint of urgency. “I’ve put a lot of—”
Nigel listened to it and wondered at how smoothly Evers’s voice slid from the ragged edge of anger to a silky persuasiveness; which was natural to the man? Or were they both masks?
“Good-bye, coach. No time for lectures right this minute.”
“You—” Faintly: “Let’s have the override. Okay, go on the count. Go.”
The firing button for the nuclear-tipped missile sat alone in a small bracketed section of the console. Nigel’s eyes were drawn to it because the board began flickering through a sequence of operations. He snapped the switches over to their inert positions, but the sequences continued. The board was dead. Evers had reverted control to Houston. Relay through a satellite? Nigel frantically clawed at the console, trying to find a way to stop—
The aft missile pod emptied with a roar. The thump jarred him back into his couch. Ahead, an orange ball dwindled as it knifed through blackness at the shadowy pearl beyond.
“Evers! You bastard, what are—”