“I am assuming command, as the President provided. As you can see, I have emptied the tube. Now if you would care to report the effect—”
Nigel thumbed away from that frequency.
“Snark! You reading me? Stop that missile, it’s—”
“I know.”
“Detonate it. There are sixteen megatons in that bird.” “Then I cannot.”
Something was happening to the pearl. A searing purple lance blossomed at one end.
“Good God, you must—”
“I cannot be certain of a silencing of the warhead. Detonation of such a device would kill you.”
“Kill…? NASA computed I could survive a blast from…”
“They were wrong. This close would be fatal.”
“I…”
“So I am fleeing. I will outrun it.”
Nigel peered out and found the pearl, on black velvet, the orange ball hanging in space nearby. Their relative motions were submerged by distance. From the Snark’s tail came a column of unimaginable brightness, dimming the silver glow of the Snark’s skin. The exhaust pattern was precise, carving order from the darkness that enveloped it.
“You can’t just nullify it?” Nigel said.
“Not with assurance.”
“You certainly controlled my inboard electronics well enough.”
“That was simple. The method, however, is not perfect. Apparently your technology has not realized yet the, ah, heel—”
“Achilles heel?”
“Yes. The systematic flaw in your electronics. They are unprotected.”
“Where are you going?” Nigel murmured tensely. “Outward.”
He sighted on Snark’s trajectory. The orange blossom trailed it, getting no closer. Snark’s path took it away from the moon in a steep arc. It was, he noticed, a highly energy-inefficient course. To elude the missile alone, it would have been simpler to— But then he saw that the Snark was keeping the moon always between it and Earth, so that the Deep Space Net would be at least partially blinded, and pursuit more difficult.
“You’re leaving.” It was not a question.
“I must. I exceeded my mandates when I approached so near. It was a calculated perturbation in my directives. A chance. I lost.”
“If I talked to NASA for a bit, perhaps—”
“No. I cannot err again. I have been overridden.” “You’re not free? I mean—”
“In a sense, no. And in another sense, one I could not describe to one of membrane, I am free.”
“But—damn it! You could tell us so much! You’ve been out there. Seen other stars. Tell me, please, why is it that, when we listen on the centimeter and meter bands— the radio spectrum—why don’t we hear anything? Our scientists argue that this portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is the cheapest part, considering that the sender must overcome the random emissions of stars and hydrogen gas. So we’ve been listening and—nothing.”
“Of course. They send me instead. I suspect…I am their way of learning what is nearby. If there is danger they inform each other. I have listened to their messages.”
“How? We haven’t heard anything.”
“To you the medium is… exotic. Particles you do not perceive.”
“You could teach us.”
“It is forbidden me.”
“Why?”
“I am not certain…I have been given specific directives. Why these directives and not others I…I have thought often about them. I make guesses. That you, for example, are the aim of my wanderings.”
“Then stay.”
“I only notify them of your presence. So they will know, I expect, that you may someday come.”
“Why not—”
“Come to study you? Too fraught with risk. Your kind is too precarious. I have seen thousands of ruined, gutted worlds. Wars, suicides, who can tell? To my makers you are a plague, the one percent of the galactic cultures that carry the seeds of chaos.”
“I don’t …”
“You are rare. My makers, you see, were machines such as myself.”
