“The cylinder cities are too specialized?”
“So NASA says.”
“That seems a weak argument.”
“These things aren’t relentlessly logical. It’s politics.” “The old guard.”
“Of which I am, blessedly, one.”
“You were successful?”
“Right.” Nigel beamed. “I’ve got a lot of swotting up to do on computing interfaces and that rot.”
“You know the material well.”
“Not well enough, the specialists say.”
“The specialists wish to go themselves,” Mr. Ichino murmured lightly.
“Check. Quite a round of throat-slitting going on back there, I gather. Had to be careful not to slip on the blood.”
“Yet you survived.”
“I collected on a lot of old debts.”
“The legacy of Mr. Evers.”
Nigel grinned slyly.
“I have never truly approved of that, you know,” Mr. Ichino said carefully.
“I’m not bursting with pride over it,” Nigel’s voice took on a hesitant, guarded note.
“We have all conspired, implicitly, to conceal the truth.”
“I know.” Nigel nodded with a touch of weariness. “But it was necessary.”
“To protect NASA.”
“That was the first-order effect. It’s the second-order effect I was after—keeping NASA from getting itself gored by outsiders, so they’d have a free hand and a bigger budget. Money to explore the moon.”
“And you have been proved correct.”
“Well—” Nigel shrugged. “A lot of other people felt the same way. Finding that wreck was pure accident.”
“The girl would not have been flying there had the lunar budget not been expanded.”
“Yes. Nifty syllogism, eh? Logical to the last redeeming comma.” Nigel chuckled with hollow mirth.
“You are not convinced.”
“No.”
“It has worked out well.”
“I don’t like lying. That’s what it was, that’s what it is. And you can’t ever be sure, there’s the rub. We think the politicians and the public and the New Sons and God knows who else, we think they’d be horrified to learn that Evers fired a bomb at the Snark, drove it away. And blew our chance. Hell, he could’ve been risking a war, for all he knew. And the backlash might’ve gutted NASA so that we’d never have got to search for the Marginis wreck. But we don’t know that would have happened.”
“One never does.”
“Right. Right.” Nigel fidgeted with his hands, flexed his legs into a new sitting position, stared moodily out at the knots of people lunching in the park. Mr. Ichino felt the unbalanced tensions in this man and knew Nigel had something more to say. He pointed toward the western horizon. “Look.”
A noontime entertainment. A darting flitter craft was beginning a cloud sculpture. The pilot chopped, pruned, extruded and sliced the taffy-white cumulus. A being emerged: serpentine tail, exaggerated fins, knotted balls of cotton for feet. The event was admirably timed—as the flitter shepherded the remaining puffs into place, to shape the snouted face, the eyes turned ominously dark. The eyeballs expanded and purpled and suddenly lightning forked between them, giving the alabaster dragon a surge of life. In a moment a wall of thunderheads split the beast in two, sullen clouds churning. Claps of thunder rolled over the park. Above Los Angeles a hazy rain began.
When Mr. Ichino looked again at Nigel he could perceive from his new posture that some of the tension had drained away. In its place was Nigel’s familiar pensive enthusiasm.
“You learned more?” Mr. Ichino said.
“A lot,” Nigel said absently. “Or rather, a lot of negative results.”
“About Wasco?”
“Right. The Wasco event, as it’s called. Can’t label it a bomb because nobody dropped it. It was buried about a kilometer in bedrock. Must’ve come near on thirty megatons. A pure fusion burn.”
“I heard there was little radiation.”
“Surprisingly little, yes. Cleaner than any bomb we know of.”
“Not ours.”
