Matters were a bit better in England than during their last visit several years before. There were only a few shambling beggars at the baggage checkout, and they seemed to have valid licenses. Most of the terminal was lighted, though not heated. Their helicopter to the southlands lifted free with a clatter into the chilling winds. Coal smoke blotted out the London sprawl.
They reached their destination easily: a well-preserved English inn about three hundred and fifty years old, well run and securely guarded. They spent Christmas there, snug in the battering winds. The next day they hired a guard and a limousine and visited Stonehenge.
Nigel found the experience oddly moving. In spirit he was scarcely an Englishman anymore after the welfare state had turned into the farewell state. These massive thrusting columns, though, spoke to him of a different England. The heel stone was so marvelously aligned, the celestial computer so accurate, he felt a kinship with the men who had made it. They had thrust these gray measuring fingers at a clockwork sky, to understand it. The New Sons had long since played up the pantheistic side of the Druids, popularly thought to be the builders of this stone heap, never mentioning the rest—that these were not men who followed others’ ideas senselessly.
Nigel looked out at the road where a gang of altered chimps was repairing wash damage. They cradled their special shovels and flicked mud thirty meters in one toss. Alexandria stood beside him, biting absently at a fingernail: evolutionary remnant of animal claws. He shivered and took her back to the inn.
Paris was depressing. The second day of freezing in a darkened hotel ended with a shutdown of water pressure throughout the city for the rest of the week.
The pleasure domes of the Saudis were thronged. Cloud sculptors flitted over the desert, carving erotic white giants that coiled ponderously into vast orgasms.
Over South Africa the display was more modest. At evening the swollen elders appeared, wrinkled financial barons, and enjoyed an orchestrated weatherscape as they dined. Nigel and Alexandria watched a vibrating rainbow that framed purple thunderheads, clouds moving with the stately grace of Victorian royalty.
In Brazil, in a restaurant, Alexandria pointed: “Look. That’s one of the men we’re negotiating with for the airline.”
“Which one?”
“The stocky man. Tiltlens glasses. A sway shirt. The briefcut jacket with highlighted trim. Khaki—”
“Right, I see.”
She looked back at Nigel. “Why are you smiling?” “I’ve missed that eye for clothes you have. I never see those things, really.” He reached out to take her hand. “I’ve got you back again.”
A lot of the planet they couldn’t see. In the large areas without resources or industry a white man was an automatic enemy, a child-starver, a thief; the politics of the past thirty years had seen to that. In Sri Lanka they went a block from the hotel to eat. Partway through their curry the muttering in the restaurant and a gathering tension drove them into the sinking street. A passing cab took them back, and then to the airport, and then to Australia.
They were baking on Polynesian sands when his pager buzzed. It was Lubkin. Ichino had relayed the radar search idea to him. They had a blip. It was bigger than two klicks, and spinning. It would rendezvous with Venus inside eleven days if it didn’t accelerate. Lubkin asked if Nigel would return early to run the Main Bay team. Nigel told him he would think about it.
Outside Kyoto, walking a country lane, Alexandria suddenly threw up into a ditch. A two-day biopsy showed no change in her condition from three months before. Her organic systems seemed stable.
Her pocket telltale hadn’t made a sound. Nigel checked his skull set. It was active. It beeped on command. Alexandria simply hadn’t been ill enough to trigger it.
The next day she felt better. The day after that she was eating well. They went on a hike. As she slept, afterward, Nigel called ahead and cancelled the rest of their reservations. He fluxed through to Hufman; the man’s face showed on the screen as a wobbling mask. Hufman thought Alexandria needed a rest near home.
They took the next jet to California, arcing high over the pale Pacific.
The Main Bay: a crescent of consoles, each sprinkled with input boards like a prickly frosting. Men sitting in roller chairs were stationed at each console, watching the green/yellow screens flicker with a blur of information. The Bay was sealed; only staff members directly involved in the J-27 project were present.
“Arecibo has acquisition,” Nigel said.
The knot of men around his chair buzzed with exclamations. Nigel listened to his headphones. “They say the Doppler confirms a flyby orbit.”
“You check with Arecibo?” Evers said at Nigel’s elbow.
Nigel shook his head. “Our satellite, Venus Monitor, can’t get a radar fix. This is all we have.” He tapped in programming instructions on his keyboard.
“Spectrographic reading,” Lubkin explained. A telemetered photo was being drawn on the screen line by line. At the top edge of the screen was a tiny point of light, scarcely more than a few bright dots on the picture tube.
“Spectral intensity shows it’s hot. Must be a pretty fiendish fusion torch.” Nigel looked up at the men from NASA, Defense and the UN. Most of them clearly couldn’t make sense of the wavelength plot being displayed; they scowled in the fluorescent glow of the Main Bay, looking out of place in their stylish green suits.
“If it
is
on a flyby course it will almost certainly come here next,” Evers said to the other men.
“Possibly,” Nigel said.
“It may attempt to land, bringing unknown diseases with it,” Evers went on smoothly. “The military will have to be able to stop such an eventuality.”
“How?” Nigel said, ignoring a raised finger from Lubkin that plainly told him to remain silent.
“Well, ah, perhaps a warning shot.” Evers’s expression pinched slightly. “Yes,” he said more brusquely, looking at Nigel. “I’m afraid we will have to determine that for ourselves.”
The group broke into conversation.
Lubkin tapped Evers’s arm. “I think we should try to signal again.”
Evers nodded. “Yes, there is that. The ExComm will work out the message. We have some hours left to discuss it, don’t we?” He turned to Nigel.
“Three or four at least,” Nigel said. “The men need a break. We’ve been at it over ten hours.”
“Good. Gentlemen,” he said in a booming voice, “this area is not secure for further discussions. I suggest we retire upstairs.”
The group began moving off under Evers’s direction. Lubkin beckoned Nigel to follow.
“I’ll stay here for a bit. Set up the watch schedule. And I want to go home to rest. I’m not going to be needed in your deliberations.”
“Well, Nigel, we could use your knowledge of…” Lubkin hesitated. “Ah, maybe you’re right. See you later.” He hurried to catch up to the group.
Nigel smiled. Lubkin clearly didn’t relish the prospect of a cantankerous Nigel in the ExComm meeting. Feisty subordinates do not reflect well on their superiors.
He took a JPL scooter home. The tires howled on the corners as he banked and shifted down the hillside avenues, slicing through the dry evening air. Stars glimmered dimly behind a layer of industrial haze. He piloted without goggles or helmet, wanting to feel the rush of wind. He knew handling the Snark-Venus encounter would be tricky, particularly if Evers and Lubkin and their faceless committee designed some transmission. Nigel would then have to sandwich his own in somehow before the Committee caught on. He had been working for months on the code; he’d read all the old literature on radio contact with extra-terrestrial civilizations and adapted some of their ideas. The transmission had to be simple but clearly a deliberate signal to the Snark. Otherwise the Snark would probably assume it had picked up another conventional Earthside station, and ignore it.
Or would it? Why did Snark remain mute? Couldn’t it easily pick up Earth’s local stations?
Nigel gunned the scooter, swooping down the hills. He felt a rising zest. He’d check on Alexandria, who would be home from work soon, then wait for Shirley to arrive and keep Alexandria company while he was gone. Then back to JPL and Venus and the Snark—
He coasted into the driveway, kicked back the stand and bounded to the front door. The lock snapped over and he ran up the winding staircase. At the landing he stopped to fit his key into the apartment lock and was surprised to find his ears ringing. Too much excitement. Maybe he really would need to rest; the Venus encounter would last through until morning at least.
He let himself in. The living room lights glowed a soft white.
Now only one of his ears was ringing. He was more tired than he thought.
He walked through the living room and into the arched intersection of kitchen and dining nook. His steps rang on the brown Mexican tiles, the beamed arch echoing them. The ringing in his head pitched higher. He cupped his hand to an ear.
A woman’s shoe lay on the tiles.
One shoe. It was directly under the bedroom arch. Nigel stepped forward. The ringing pierced his skull. He walked unsteadily into the bedroom. Looked to the left.
Alexandria lay still. Face down. Hands reaching out, clenched, wrists a swollen red.
The ambulance wove through darkened streets, shrieking into the night mists. Nigel sat dumbly beside Alexandria and watched the attendant check her life functions, give injections, speak in a rapid clipped voice into his headset transmitter. Lights rippled by. After some minutes Nigel remembered his telltale. It was still keening at him. Alexandria’s unit was running down, the attendant said, using most of its power to transmit diagnostics into the ambulance cassette. He showed Nigel the spot behind Nigel’s right ear where a rhythmic pressure would shut it off. Nigel thumped at it and the wailing went away. A thin beeping remained; his telltale continued to monitor Alexandria’s diagnostic telemetry. He listened, numb, to this squeaky voice from the very center of her. Her face was slack with a gray pallor. Here, now, linked by bits of microelectronics, he and she spoke to each other. The indecipherable chatter was a slim chain but he clung to it. It would not stop even if she died; still, it was her only voice now.
They swerved, rocked down a ramp, jolted to a stop under red neons. The bubble surrounding him and Alexandria burst—the ambulance tail door popped open, she was wheeled out under a white blanket, people babbled. Nigel got out awkwardly, ignored by the attendants, and followed the trotting interns through a slideway.
A nurse stopped him. Questions. Forms. He gave Hufman’s name but they already knew that. She said bland, comforting things. She led him to a carpeted waiting room, indicated some magazine faxes, a 3D, smiled, was gone.
He sat for a long time.
They brought him coffee. He listened to a distant hum of traffic.
Very carefully he thought about nothing.
When he next looked up Hufman was standing nearby, peeling away transparent gloves.
“I’m sorry to say, Mr. Walmsley, it’s as I feared.” Nigel said nothing. His face felt caked with dense wax, stiff, as though nothing could crack through.
“An incipient brain stem hemorrhage. The lupus
did
equilibrate in her organs, as I thought. She would have been all right. But it then spread into the central nervous system. There has been a breakdown in the stem.”
“And?” Nigel said woodenly.
“We’re using coagulants now. That might possibly arrest the hemorrhage.”
“What then?” a female voice said.
Hufman turned. Shirley was standing in the doorway. “I said, what then?”
“If it stabilizes… she might live. There is probably no significant brain damage yet. A spasm, though, induced by the lupus or our treatment—”
“Would kill her,” Shirley said sharply.
“Yes,” Hufman said, tilting his head back to regard her. He plainly wondered who this woman was.
Nigel made a halting introduction. Shirley nodded at Hufman, arms folded under her breasts, standing hipshot with tense energy.
“Couldn’t you have
seen
the lupus was getting worse?” she said.
“This form is very subtle. The nervous system—” “So you had to wait until she
collapsed.
”
“Her next biopsy—”
“There might not
be
a next—”
“Shirley!” Nigel said sharply.
“I must go,” Hufman said stiffly. He walked out with rigid movements.
“Now you’ve fair well muddled it,” Nigel said. “Shaken up the man whose judgment determines whether Alexandria lives.”
“Fuck
that.
I wanted to know—”
“Then
ask.
”
“—because I just got here, I didn’t talk to anybody and—”
“How did you know Alexandria collapsed?”
Nigel had thought he could gradually deflect the conversation and calm her down. He was surprised when Shirley glared at him and fell silent, nervously stretching her arms to the side. Her face was ashen. Her chin trembled slightly until she noticed the fact and tightened her jaw muscles. In the distance he could hear the staccato laboring of some machine.