Nikka looked shocked. “I hadn’t heard that. Are there a lot of New Sons here? I haven’t been paying attention to the new people.”
“I’ve noticed, being one of them.” He smiled. “I’ve nosed about a bit myself and I think quite a few of our comrades are New Sons. Not all admit it or show it like Sanges, but they are.”
Nikka sighed. “Well, I hope Valiera can keep them in line.”
“Yes, I hope he can,” Nigel said solemnly. “I certainly hope he can.”
Later he lounged alone in his box of a room, unable to sleep. The work here absorbed him but so far gave precious little back. He kept in close touch with Kardensky’s group, who were carrying on along much the same lines as Ichino had started—cross-correlations with the Snark’s conversations, systemic analysis of whatever the teams could extract from the wreck, and so on. So far it resembled, for Nigel, some awful childhood dream of swimming through mud: frantic struggles only slowed you, made you sink faster.
He shrugged. His attention seemed to focus more these days on Nikka than the gritty problems of decoding.
And why was that? he wondered. It was dimwitted, really. He made small jokes, kept up a line of patter, and afterward felt slightly ridiculous.
He drummed fingers on his knee. It was almost as though—yes. With a shock he realized that he had forgotten how to deal with women from scratch, from the beginning. Closeness with Alexandria—and yes, Shirley, for a time—had robbed him of it.
Well, he would simply have to relearn the tricks. For Nikka, the trouble might easily be worthwhile. He didn’t subscribe to the Theory of Types—that men were drawn to the same categories of physical attributes, or personality traits, again and again—because Nikka resembled Alexandria not at all; still, they shared a certain directness, an unflinching devotion to what was rather than what might be hoped. And physically, Nikka’s delicious contained energy, her implied sensuality—
He shook his head. Enough of that. He despaired of analysis; the real world was always more fine-grained than opinions about it. Life was discrete; nonlinear; a nonzero-sum game; noncommutative; clearly irreversible; and events multiplied, compressed, rather than merely adding. The past filtered the present. He saw Nikka through the lens of Alexandria—and in truth, he would have it no other way. To wish otherwise was to rob him of his past. Now, together, he and Nikka studied this wreck and the communications lines between here and Kardensky’s staff buzzed with analogies, comparisons. They studied the wreck as though the builders were vaguely, conveniently human. An illusion, certainly. And he’d sent Ichino off on a flight of fancy, really, a near-certain dead end. He missed the man; talking with him, going off on hikes, he’d felt some warming connection. Was the loss of that why—despite his being where he wanted to be, working on the only thing that mattered any more—he felt these collapsing moments of depression?
Nigel snorted, exasperated with himself, and rolled over to seek sleep.
SIX
Mr. Ichino woke with a start; he had fallen asleep sitting up.
The fire smoked and sputtered. He stirred the smoldering embers and tossed on new wood. In a few moments the cabin had lost its slight chill. He stood, massaging a sore muscle in his back, and watched the flames dance.
Graves was still unconscious, his breathing regular. The wound had stopped bleeding and the bulky compresses around it seemed secure. Mr. Ichino knew he would not quickly fall asleep again; he made himself a mixture of hot water, lemon juice, sugar and rum and turned on his radio. In the burr of static he eventually found the twenty-four-hour Portland in-depth news station.
As his rocking chair creaked rhythmically, the radio made a low murmur and the wind wailed hollowly outside. Against this calming background the news seemed discordant. The war was still going on in Africa and another country had come in on the side of the Constructionists. The government policy on DNA alterations in laboratory babies was under heavy attack by the New Sons. Most commentators agreed, though, that simple body modification was inevitable; the controversy had now shifted to the issue of intelligence and special talents. There were suspicions that a second major dieback was beginning in Pakistan. The water scarcity in Europe was getting critical.
Finally there came some news about the Mare Marginis wreck. The emergency photographic survey of the moon was complete. There was no sign of other crashed vehicles. This by itself did not mean very much, though, because the Marginis ship’s force screen had been observed to alter color three times before it was finally penetrated. Scientists guessed this was a remnant of some defense mechanism whereby the ship’s screen absorbed almost all light, making it appear dark. If the ship was in flight it would be hard to see optically against the background of space. Apparently, until men ruptured it the screen functioned most of the time and was slowly running down. If other wrecks existed on the moon, their screens might still be intact, in which case it would be very hard to see them from orbit. An extensive search for recurring dark patterns, which might formerly have been assumed to be shadows, was underway.
Mr. Ichino listened to a few more news items and then switched the radio off. The point about the screen was interesting, but he had expected more by this time. Men were inside the ship now and there should be some results. But nothing came through the news or from Nigel. Perhaps they were simply being very cautious in their exploration of the wreck. The ship’s defense system had shut on and off in an unpredictable manner; current thinking seemed to be that whatever had shot down the two survey craft had awakened recently, since otherwise it would have downed the Apollo missions long ago. With the screen penetrated, perhaps all the other defense systems were dead, too. But it would be foolish not to be cautious.
Mr. Ichino turned from the radio, checked Graves again and then looked at the man’s pack once more. He put the gray metal tube aside and began taking out the other items—dehydrated food, maps, clothing, simple tools, a writing case and some paper. At the very bottom of the pack were several rolls of microfilm and a compact viewer. Mr. Ichino felt a slight embarrassment, as though reading another’s personal mail.
Well, there was good reason to look. Graves might be a diabetic, or have some other special medical problem. Mr. Ichino put the microfilm through his own large wall viewer, made another drink and began reading.
His credit cards, passes and serial biography all attested to Peter Graves’s wealth. He had made his fortune early in land speculation, before the government regulated it, and retired. For the last ten years he had pursued a strange hobby: trapping the unusual, finding the elusive. He used his money to look for lost Inca trails, search for sea monsters, uncover Mayan cities. Graves carried a portable library about himself. Reasonable; it probably helped him with uncooperative officials. Most of the film concerned something else altogether. There were clippings and notes from as far back as the nineteenth century. Mr. Ichino studied them and pieced together a history.
Graves had become interested in the Wasco explosion because it was an immediate mystery. He never believed the murky official explanation. So, with his bias for the unusual, he carried out an extensive background study of the entire north woods. His correspondence showed that Graves had launched a terribly expensive surveillance program.
Mr. Ichino felt a prickly sensation of surprise. Graves had done precisely what Nigel wanted, and what NASA might eventually get around to once the Marginis wreck was understood. Graves had searched for whatever connection surfaced, whatever unlikely intersection of legend and fact was possible. He had employed low-flying planes with silent engines to search for anything or anyone fleeing the blast area. He had run down the tag ends of details, studied old maps, employed thinktank sessions to produce outlandish ideas.
And once he’d adopted an hypothesis, Graves hired guides and went in search of the elusive creature he suspected was a connection to the Wasco event…
The Salish Indians called it Sasquatch. The Hudson’s Bay Company report of 1864 gave evidence of hundreds of sightings. The loggers and trappers who moved into the Pacific Northwest knew it mainly by its tracks and thus it gained a new name: Bigfoot.
Men saw it throughout the north woods of the United States and Canada. In the nineteenth century over a dozen murders were attributed to it, most of them involving armed hunters. In 1890 two guards posted to watch a mining camp on the Oregon-California border were found dead; they had been crushed, slammed to the ground.
All this led nowhere until 1967, when an amateur investigator made color motion pictures of a Bigfoot at a range of less than fifty yards. It was huge. It stood seven feet tall and walked erect, moving smoothly and almost disdainfully away from the camera. It turned once to look back at the photographer, and revealed two large breasts. A thick black fur covered it everywhere except near the cleft of bones that surrounded the eyes. Scientific opinion was divided on the authenticity of the film. But a few anthropologists and biologists ventured theories…
For both social and economic reasons, the Pacific Northwest was relatively sparsely settled. Thick forests cloaking the rough western slopes of the Rockies could hide a hundred armies. Bacteria and scavengers on the forest floor digest or scatter bones or even artifacts left behind; the remains of logging projects do not last more than a decade. If Bigfoot built no homes, used no tools, he could escape detection. Even a large, shy primate would be only a melting shadow in the thick woods.
Most animals have learned to run, to hide, rather than fight—and their teacher has been man. Several times over the last million years the glaciers have retreated and advanced in a slow, ponderous cycle. As water became trapped in expanding glaciers the seas fell, exposing a great land bridge connecting Alaska and northern Asia. Across these chill wastes from Asia came mammoth, mastodons, bison and finally man himself. Man has known many forms between the apes and Neanderthal. As man himself pushed out from the cradle of Africa he drove these earlier forms before him. Peking or Java man may have been part of this outward expansion. Perhaps Bigfoot was pushed into other climates by this competition. They crossed the great land bridge during one glacial cycle, found the New World and settled there. But men followed and eventually the two came into conflict for the best land. Man, the smarter and the better armed, won out and drove the Bigfoot back into the forest. Perhaps the Sasquatch legend came from those ancient encounters.
Scientific expeditions in the 1970s and ’80s failed to find solid evidence of Bigfoot. There were indirect clues: crude shelters made of fallen branches, footprints and paths, dung which showed a diet of small rodents, insects and berries. Without a capture the cause gradually lost its believers. Population pressure opened cities in northern California and Washington until one by one the areas where Bigfoot had been seen shrank away.
Among Graves’s papers was an extensive map of southern Oregon around Drews Reservoir. It was covered with small arrows and signs in pencil detailing an erratic path northward. Mr. Ichino traced the path until it abruptly stopped about twenty kilometers from his cabin. It ended in a completely wild stretch of country, hilly and thick with pine, one of the most isolated spots still remaining in Oregon. There were other papers, a contract with two guides, some indecipherable notes.
Mr. Ichino looked up from the wall viewer, rubbing his eyes.
Something thumped against the wall of the cabin as if brushing by.
Mr. Ichino reached the window in time to see a shadow fade into the deeper black of the trees at the edge of the clearing. It was hard to see; flurries of snow obscured the distance. In the fading light it was easy to be mistaken.
Still, the sound had not been his imagination. It might have been a load of snow falling from a high pine branch, but Mr. Ichino thought not.
SEVEN
After evening meal Nigel stood in the tubeway, flipping a coin absently, wondering what to do in his few hours of free time. Study up, he thought, most probably. He flipped the coin again, glanced at it. It was a British one-pence, a lucky piece. An imperfection caught his eye. Next to the date—2012—was a flaw, a blister of metal about a tenth of a millimeter across. It appeared on the back face, which depicted the swirling spiral of the galaxy overlaid with the British lion—a passing tribute to the short-lived Euro-American space ventures. Nigel made a quick estimate: the disk of the galaxy was about 100,000 light-years in diameter, so—the result surprised him. The small blister, on the scale of the galaxy, represented a sphere one thousand light-years across. Within that speck would drift over a million stars. He stared at the tiny imperfection. He had known the numbers all along, sure enough, but to see it this way was another matter. A thousand-light-year volume around the earth was a vast expanse, well beyond the power of a man to visualize in concrete terms. To see it represented as a fleck in the galaxy suddenly filled Nigel with a sense of what the Snark must see, and what they were dealing with here. Civilizations like grains of sand. Vast corridors of space and time. He flipped the coin, his hands feeling oddly chilled.
“Ah—hello, there.”
Nigel looked around to find Sanges at his elbow. “Hello.”
“The Coordinator sent me to ask you over to his office.”
