In the Ocean of Night (11 page)

Near the entrance he did a little two-step, whistling, lifting, lilting, and then pushed out into the dimming spring sunlight.

The exit guard stopped him. She looked at his badge photograph and then back at his face.

“Can’t match up this ruined visage with that cherubic photograph?”

“Oh, sorry. I knew you worked here, sir, and I’m new, I hadn’t seen you. I saw you on Three-D when I was a girl.” She smiled prettily at him and he felt suddenly considerably older.

He trotted for the bus, snagged it and waved to the guard as he swung aboard.

Fame. Lubkin envied him for it, he knew, and that fact alone was enough to make him wince and laugh at the same time. Hell, if he’d wanted the limelight he’d have stayed in the most visible part of the program, the cylinder cities being built at the Lagrange points. Create a world, fresh and clean. (
Cylcits,
the 3D called them, a perfectly American perversion of the admittedly whorish language—almost as bad as
skyscraper,
from the last century.)

No. He’d been lucky, is all, fearsomely lucky, to get even this post.

When they pried him and Len out of the shoe-box accommodations of the
Dragon,
and then tiptoed away from the legal scuffle, Nigel had learned a lot. The attacks from The
New York Times
were mosquitoes compared to what awaited them at NASA. Still, the public experience prepared him for private infighting. Parsons, who was head of NASA at the time, had sent Nigel off as a boy, really, quick and serious, able to lower his breathing rate and slow his metabolism at will with self-hypnosis. The Icarus furor made him a man, gave him time to water the bile that built up inside him, so that some humor remained.

Admittedly, he was less than a second Lindbergh. But he slicked down his hair and when the Night of the Long Knives loomed up within NASA, he went public with the facts. He snared a retrospective interview on 3D, made some well-timed speeches, flashed his teeth. When asked about Cheshire-cat-David’s role in the mission, he invented a limerick about him that NBC cut from their early evening show, but CBS left in.

Business picked up. He appeared on a mildly intellectual talk show and revealed a better than passing acquaintance with the works of Louis Armstrong and the Jefferson Airplane, both of whom were coming back into vogue. He was interviewed during a long hike through the Sierras’ Desolation Wilderness, wearing a sweat suit and talking about meditation and respect for closed lifesystems (such as Earth). Not great material, no. But 3D execs proved to be an odd breed; anything that tickled their noses they thought was champagne.

He was inordinately lucky. Something would boil up from his subconscious and he would put it into a sentence or two, and suddenly Parsons or Cheshire Dave would be in trouble. He hit them about duplicity in the Icarus incident, about cutting the cylinder cities program (truly stupid, that; the first city was already giving birth to whole new zero-g and low-temperature industries that could save the American economy).

And in the sweet rushing fullness of time, Parsons was no longer director of NASA.

Cheshire Dave was execing somewhere in Nevada, his grin slowly coming unstuck.

A news commentator said Nigel had a talent for telling the right truth at the right time—right for Nigel—and it was doubly surprising when the faculty left him, utterly, after Parsons resigned. Some NASA execs urged him to keep it up, kick over a few more clay-footed troglodytes. But they did it in secluded corners at cocktail parties, muttering into their branch-water-and-bourbons about his maneuvering skill. He shrugged them off, and knew their feral admiration was misplaced. He had done in Parsons and Dave out of sheer personal dislike, no principle at all involved, and his subconscious knew it.

As soon as the irritants vanished, the sly Medici within him slid into slumber, the venom drained from him and Nigel returned to being a working astronaut.

Such as it was.

NASA sensed his potential power (once stung, twice paranoid) and—lo—retained him and Len on active status. Len opted for orbital maintenance work. Nigel wangled for the moon.

The older men were thoroughly married and nearing forty, reeking of oatmeal virtues. NASA was having to pay its way in economic payoffs, so they wanted the moon explored quickly, for possible industrial uses. The cylcits needed raw materials, Earth needed pollution-free manufacturing sites, and it all had to come at low rates. So into an age leached of glory came the return of gallant men, bleached hair cropped close to the skull. Into their ranks he wormed his way, for an eighteen-month sojourn at Hipparchus Base on the moon.

His rotation schedule back on Earth turned into a permanent post. The economy was reviving, men could be trained who were younger, quicker of eye, leaner and harder. He and Len still kept up their minimum capability requirements in the flight sim at Moffatt Field, and every three months flew to Houston for the full two-day primer.

Someday he might get back into zero-g work, but he doubted it. His waist thickened, the loyal sloshing of his heart now ran at a higher blood pressure and he was forty-one.

Time, everyone hinted, to move on.

To what? Administration? The synthetic experience of directing other people’s work? No; he had never learned to smile without meaning it. Or to calibrate the impact of his words. He said things spontaneously; his entire life was done in first draft.

He stared out at the carved Pasadena hills. Some other career, then? He had written a longish piece on Icarus, some years back, for
Worldview.
It had been well received and for a while he’d contemplated becoming immersed in litbiz. It would give him a vent for his odd, cartwheeling verbal tricks, his quirky puns. Perhaps it would drain the occasional souring bile that rose up in him.

No, thumbs down to that. He wanted more than the act of excreting himself onto pieces of paper.

He snorted wryly to himself. There was an old Dylan lyric that applied here: the only thing he knew how to do was to keep on keepin’ on.

Like it or not.

FIVE

“It started in on my ankles this afternoon.”

He stopped, his hand halfway raised to beckon a waiter. “What?”

“My ankles ache. Worse than my wrists.”

“You’re taking the chloroquine?”

“Of course, I’m not
stupid,
” Alexandria said irritably. “Perhaps it takes a few days to settle in. To have an effect,” he said with false lightness.

“Maybe.”

“You may feel better after you’ve had a bite. What about the birani?”

“Not in the mood for that.”

“Ah. Their curries are always sound. Why don’t we share one, medium hot?”

“Okay.” She sat back in her chair and rolled her head lazily from side to side. “I need to unwind. Order me a beer, would you?
Lacanta.
”

In the layered air, heavy with incense, she seemed to hover at a dreamy distance. Two days had passed since he’d spotted the Snark and he hadn’t told her yet. He decided this was the right moment; it would distract her from the ache in her joints.

He caught a waiter’s eye and placed their order. They were cloistered near the back of the restaurant, sheltered by a clicking curtain of glass beads, unlikely to be overheard. He spoke softly, scarcely above the buzz of casual conversation provided by the other diners.

She was excited by the news and peppered him with questions. The past two days had revealed nothing new, but he described in detail the work he’d done in organizing the systematic search for further traces of the Snark. He was partway through an involved explanation when he noticed that her interest had waned. She toyed with her food, sipped some amber beer. She glanced at diners as they entered and left.

He paused and dug away at the mountain of curry before him, added condiments, experimented with two chutneys. After a polite silence she changed the subject. “I, I’ve been thinking about something Shirley said, Nigel.”

“What’s that?”

“Dr. Hufman recommended rest as well as these pills. Shirley thinks the best rest is absence from the day-today.” She gazed at him pensively.

“A vacation, you mean?”

“Yes, and short trips here and there. Outings.”

“This Snark thing is going to snarl up my time pretty—”

“I know that. I wanted to get in my bid first.”

He smiled affecionately. “Of course. No reason we can’t nip down to Baja, take in a few things.”

“I have a lot of travel credit built up. We can fly anywhere in the world on American.”

“I’m surprised you want to give up a great deal of time, with these negotiations going on.”

“They can spare me now and again.”

As she said it the expression altered around her brown eyes, her mouth turned subtly downward and he saw suddenly into her, into a bleak and anxious center.

It was late when they left the restaurant. Some of the more stylish stores were still open. Two police in riot jackets checked their faxcodes and then passed down the street. The two women stopped most of the people they met, taking them into the orange pools beneath the well-spaced street lamps and demanding identification. One woman stood at a safe distance with stun-club drawn while the other dialed through to Central, checking the ferrite verimatrix in the faxcodes. Nigel was not looking when, a short distance away, a woman suddenly bolted away from the police and dashed into a department store. The man with her tried to run, too, but a policewoman forced him to the ground. The other policewoman drew a pistol and ran into the store. The man yelled something, protesting. The woman rapped him with her stunclub and his face whitened. He slumped forward. Muffled shots came from inside the department store.

Their bus arrived. Nigel climbed on.

Alexandria stood still, hand raised halfway to her face. The man was trying to get to his knees. He rasped out a few words. Her lips curled back in distaste and she started to say something. Nigel called her name. She hesitated. “Alexandria!”

He reached down toward her. She climbed the steps numbly, legs stiff. She sat down next to him as the bus doors wheezed shut. She breathed deeply.

“Forget it,” Nigel said. “That’s the way it is.”

The bus hummed into motion. They glided past the man on the sidewalk. The policewoman’s knee was in his back and he stared glassily at the broken paving. All the details were quite clear in the faintly orange light.

Before Lubkin could finish his drawling sentence Nigel was out of his chair, pacing.

“You’re damned right I object to it,” Nigel said. “It’s the most stupid bloody—”

“Look, Nigel, I sympathize with you completely. You and I are scientists, after all.”

Nigel thought sourly that he could quite easily marshal a good argument against that statement alone, at least in Lubkin’s case. But he let it ride.

“We don’t like this secrecy business,” Lubkin went on. He chose his words carefully. “However. At the same time. I can understand the need for tight security in this matter.”

“For how long?” Nigel said sharply.

“Long?” Lubkin hesitated. Nigel guessed that the rhythm of his prepared speech was broken. “I really don’t know,” the other man said lamely. “Perhaps for the indefinite future, although”—he speeded up, to cut off Nigel’s reaction—“we may be speaking of a mere matter of days. You understand.”

“Who says?”

“What?”

“Who has the say in this?”

“Well, the Director, of course, he was the first. He thought we should go through military channels as well as civilian.”

Nigel ceased pacing and sat down. Lubkin’s office was illuminated only around his desk, the corners gloomy. To Nigel’s mind’s eye the effect of the pooled light was to frame him and Lubkin as though in a prizefighter’s ring, two antagonists pitted across Lubkin’s oaken desk. Nigel hunched forward, elbows on knees, and stared at the other man’s puffy face.

“Why in
hell
is the goddamned Air Force—”

“They would find out about it
any
way, through channels.”

“Why?”

“We may need their deep space sensor network to track the, ah, Snark.”

“Ridiculous. That’s a near-Earth net.”

“Maybe that’s where the Snark is heading.” “A remote possibility.”

“But a nonzero one. You have to admit that. This
could
be of importance in world security, too, you know.”

Nigel thought a moment. “You mean if the Snark approaches Earth, and the nuclear monitoring system picks up its fusion flame—”

“Yes.”

“—and thinks it’s a missile, or warhead going off—” “You must admit, that is a possibility.”

Nigel balled his fists and said nothing.

“We keep this under our hats by telling no one extra,” Lubkin said smoothly. “The technicians never got the whole story. If we say nothing more they’ll forget it. You, I, the Director, perhaps a dozen or two in Washington and the UN.”

“How in hell do we
work?
I can’t oversee every flamin’ planetary monitor. We need shifts—”

“You’ll have them. But we can break the work down into piecemeal studies. So no one technician or staff engineer knows the purpose.”