In the Ocean of Night (7 page)

“Nigel…”

“Well, what good’s advice if it’s not specific? A lot of vapid generalities won’t tell you much about what stock to buy for those Brazilian fellows—if there were stocks any more, that is.”

“They want to buy
us,
that’s the point.”

“The whole airline?”

“Yep. Lock, stock and et cetera.”

“And your job—?”

“Oh, they just want to own us, not run the company.” “Ah. Well—” He glanced at his watch. “Nearly time for the Catnapper’s Souffle.”

He went into the kitchen, dealt out forks, plates and napkins and took them into the dining nook. The nook had been a spacious closet in the old house, in those days a single-family dwelling, and now featured a mitred window giving on the back yard. A jacaranda tree, showing signs of an interest in blossoming into a velvety blue-and-white, bracketed one side of the green swath of lawn.

Nigel checked his watch again, which mutely informed him that this was the thirty-first of April. Was that right, under the new calendar? He ran the old rhyme through—thirty days hath November, and, and—? He never could summon up those fiendish little aids to memory when they’d be handy. But he knew April well enough, certainly: next week would mark fifteen years since Icarus.

Fifteen. And for all the conferences and international symposia and doctoral theses, scant reward had come of the Icarus adventure. He and Len had managed to lash a fair quantity of interesting artifacts into various crannies of the
Dragon
module, and even more outside, in the superstructure. But in dealing with the totally strange, how could they possibly make the right judgments? What seemed a complex web of electronics turned out to be a series of idiot circuits; the greenish fog that permeated the vast caverns within Icarus was an organic chain molecule, probably a high-vacuum lubricant.

Interesting, yes; but not keys to a fundamental discovery. Some odd technical tricks came out of it all—an advanced substrate for microelectronics, resistant alloys, some sophisticated chemicals—but somehow the
alienness
of the thing had slipped through their fingers. None of their haul bore silent witness to Icarus’s origin. Everything in it could have been made from Earth materials, far in the past—and a fraction of the scientists who worked on the trove thought it had been. No one had come up with convincing evidence of an earlier civilization on Earth, but the sheer ordinariness of Icarus seemed to argue for it.

For Nigel and Len it had been a slowly dawning defeat, particularly following the storm of controversy that waited for them when the shuttle brought them down from Earth orbit. NASA had shielded them at first, but too many people were horrified at Nigel’s risk-taking. The Indians broke off relations, even after he and Len fired the Egg and pulverized Icarus into harmless gravel. Congressmen demanded prison sentences for the two of them. The
New York Times
ran three editorials within one month, each calling for progressively stronger measures against NASA, and Len, and especially Nigel.

He spoke a few times before largely hostile audiences, defendings his ideas and emotions, and gave up. Words weren’t actions, and never would be. Luckily, he was a civilian. His offense against the moral equilibrium fell awkwardly between statutes. A Federal prosecutor introduced a charge, based on deprivation of the civil rights of everyone in the United States, but it was thrown out; after all, it was the Indians who’d been threatened. And in the public scuffle NASA kept very quiet, stepping gingerly around the fact that Dave had been lying behind that media-measured Cheshire-cat grin of his. The whole story about Icarus skipping on the upper atmosphere, like a child’s accurately skimmed rock, was a hastily improvised song and dance.

And so it had passed.

After a year and a final receding volley from the
Times
(“Remembering the Abyss”), other worries furrowed the world’s brows. Once out of the limelight, NASA began gently easing Len and Nigel out. Oddly enough, in obscurity lay more threat. Exposure of Dave’s lie in full view would have cost NASA support on all sides. But if the facts wobbled into view before an obscure committee, years later, it would do little harm; timing was everything. The trump cards he and Len held slowly devalued, like an inflated currency. Thus the worst time came when he could finally walk into a supermarket without being harangued, insulted, treated to a garlic-breathed debate.

That, too, he had survived.

“Ready yet?” Alexandria said, bringing the jug of orange juice into the dining nook. It rattled with ice cubes.

“Right.” Nigel shook off his mood and fetched the souffle. As he served it up with a broad wooden spoon, the crust cracked and exhaled a cloud smelling of omelette. They ate quickly, both hungry. It was their policy to eat virtually no supper and a thorough breakfast; Alexandria felt the body would use the breakfast through the day, and simply turn a supper into fat.

“Shirley’s coming over after supper tonight,” Alexandria said.

“Good. You finish that novel she gave you?” Alexandria sniffed elegantly. “Nope. It was mostly the usual wallowing in postmodernist angst, with technicolor side shows.”

Nigel popped a Swebitter grape into his mouth; his lips puckered at its tartness.

Alexandria reached for a grape and winced. “Damn.” “Wrists still hurting?”

“I thought they were getting better.” She held her right wrist in the other hand and wriggled it experimentally. Her face pinched for an instant and she stopped. “Nope, it’s still there, whatever it is.”

“Perhaps you sprained it.”

“Both wrists simultaneously? Without noticing it?” “Seems unlikely.”

“Damn,” Alexandria said abruptly. “You know, I don’t believe I want those Brazilians to get our company after all.”

“Uh? I thought—”

“Yes, yes, I started it all. Made the first moves. But damn it, it’s
ours.
We could use the capital, sure …” She twisted her mouth sidewise in a familiar gesture of irritation. “… but I didn’t realize…!”

“That was part of the soft sell, though. They’d get something thoroughly American—
American
Airlines.”

“Compared to us, the way we do things, those preening dandies can’t tie their shoelaces without an instruction manual. They don’t
know.
”

“Ah.” He enjoyed watching the flush of eagerness and zest stealing the cool and proper manner from her features. Watching her this way, chattering on about indices and margins and accountable funds, suspended halfway between the soft and easy Alexandria of the night, emerging into the precise, efficient executive of the day, he knew again why he loved her.

He left for the Lab a few minutes after Alexandria, as soon as he could finish the dishes, and barely caught his bus. It meandered along Fair Oaks, three-quarters filled even this late in the morning. Nigel pulled his personal earjacks out of his pocket and plugged into the six-channel audio track. He tuned out a jingle suitable for morons, a sportscast ditto, paused at the news—psychologists were worrying about a sudden surge in infanticide—and flicked over the “classical” channel. A short trumpet voluntary ended and a soupy Brahms symphony began, heavy with strings. He switched off, pocketed his earjacks and studied the view as the bus labored up the Pasadena hills. A ruddy-brown tinge smothered the land. He slipped his nose mask on and breathed in the sweet, cloying smell. Some things never improved. He was aware that the political situation was worsening, people were jittery about imports/exports, but it seemed to him that air smelling fresh-scrubbed, as though from the night’s rain, and a bit of Beethoven on the way to work were, all in all, more important issues.

Nigel smiled to himself. In these sentiments he recognized an echo of his mother and father. They had moved back to Suffolk shortly after the Icarus business, and he had seen them regularly. Their compass had shrunk into the comfortable English countryside: clear air and string quartets. The more he rubbed against the world, the more he saw them in himself. Stubborn he was, yes, just like his father, who had refused to ever believe Nigel should have gone to Icarus or, indeed, should have stayed on in America after that. It was precisely that same stubbornness that made him remain, though. Now, when he spoke amid these flat American voices, he heard his father’s smooth vowels. Angina and emphysema had stolen those two blended figures from him, finally, but here in this sometimes alien land he felt them closer than before.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory was a jumble of rectangular blocks perched on a still-green hillside. As the bus wheezed to a stop he heard chanting and saw three New Sons handing out literature and buttonholing at the main gate. He took one of their handouts and crumpled it up after a glance. It seemed to him their promotional field work was getting worse; overtly mystical appeals wouldn’t work with JPL’s staff.

He passed through three sets of guards, grudgingly showed his badge—the Lab was a prime target for the bombers, but it was a nuisance nonetheless—and made his way down chilly, neon-bleached corridors. When he reached his office he found Kevin Lubkin, Mission Coordinator, already waiting for him. Nigel moved some issues of
Icarus,
the scholarly journal, out of a chair for Lubkin, pushed them into the heap of papers on his desk and raised the blinds of his window to let one pale blade of light lance across the opposite wall. He worked in a wing without air conditioning and it was a good idea to get some cross-ventilation going as soon as possible; the afternoon was unforgiving. Then, too, he adjusted the blinds each morning as a ritual beginning of work, and so uttered nothing more than a greeting to Lubkin until it was done.

“Something wrong?” he asked then, summoning up an artificial alertness.

Kevin Lubkin, distracted, closed a folder he had been reading. “Jupiter Monitor,” he said tersely. He was a burly, red-faced man with a smooth voice and a belly that had recently begun to bulge downward, concealing his belt buckle.

“Malfunction?”

“No. It’s being jammed.”

He flicked a blank look at Nigel, waiting.

Nigel raised an eyebrow. An odd tension had suddenly come into the room. He might still be relaxed from breakfast, but he wasn’t so slow that he could be taken in by an office sendup. He said nothing.

“Yeah, I know,” Lubkin said, sighing. “Sounds impossible. But it happened. I called you about it but—”

“What’s the trouble?”

“At two this morning we got a diagnostic report from the Jovian Monitor. The graveyard shift couldn’t figure it out, so they called me. Seemed like the onboard computer thought the main radio dish was having problems.” He took off his creamshell glasses to cradle them in his lap. “That wasn’t it, I decided. The dish is okay. But every time it tries to transmit to us, something echoes the signal back after two minutes.”

“Echoes?” Nigel tilted his chair, staring at titles on his bookshelves while he ran the circuit layout of the J-Monitor’s radio gear through his mind. “Two minutes is far too long for any feedback problem—you’re right. Unless the whole program has gone sour and the transmissions are being retaped by Monitor itself. It could get confused and think it was reading an incoming signal.”

Lubkin waved a hand impatiently. “We thought of that.”

“And?”

“The self-diagnostics say no—everything checks.”

“I give up,” Nigel said. “I can tell you’ve got a theory, though.” He spread his hands expansively. “What is it, then?”

“I think J-Monitor is getting an honest incoming signal. It’s telling us the truth.”

Nigel snorted. “How did you muddle through to that idea?”

“Well, I know—”

“Radio takes nearly an
hour
to reach us from Jupiter at this phase of the orbit. How is anyone going to send Monitor’s own messages back to it in two minutes?”

“By putting a transmitter in Jupiter orbit—just like Monitor.”

Nigel blinked. “The Sovs? But they agreed—”

“No Soviets. We checked on the fastwire. They say no, they haven’t shot anything out that way at all in a coon’s age. Our intelligence people are sure they’re leveling.”

“Chinese?”

“They aren’t playing in our league yet.”

“Who, then?”

Lubkin shrugged. The sallow sagging lines in his face told more than his words. “I was kind of thinking you might help me find out.”

There was a faint ring of defeat in the way the man said it—Nigel noted the tone because he had never heard it before. Usually Lubkin had an aspect of brittle hardness, a cool superior air. Now his face was not set in its habitual aloof expression; it seemed open, even vulnerable. Nigel guessed why the man had come in himself at 2

A.M.
, rather than delegating the job—to show his people, without having to tell them in so many words, that he could do the work himself, that he hadn’t lost the sure touch, that he understood the twists and subtleties of the machines they guided. But now Lubkin hadn’t unraveled the knot. The graveyard shift had departed into a gray dawn, so now he could safely ask for help without being obvious.

Nigel smiled wryly at himself. Always calculating, weighing the scales.

“Right,” he said. “I’ll help.”

TWO

The solar system is vast. Light requires eleven hours to cross it. Scattered debris—rock, dust, icy conglomerates, planets—circles the ordinary white star, each fragment turning one face to the incandescent center, receiving warmth, while the other faces the interstellar abyss.