He rubbed his eyes, smoothing the fretwork of crow’s feet. What he needed, after these two days with the being-behind-the-eyes, was people. The simple touch of his own kind. And he needed help to deal with NASA. But most of all, people.
2035
M
r. Ichino paused at the entrance to the Pit. The calm murmur of technicians conversing mingled with the
ding
and chatter of typewriter inputs. The Pit was dark, its air stale. Hooded consoles spread dappled pools of light where men sat monitoring, checking, editing the river of information that flowed from this room, into the dancing rhythms of electrons and then out, riding electromagnetic wings to the Snark.
He noted a wall clock; twenty minutes until the meeting. Mr. Ichino sighed, willing himself to relax and not think of what lay ahead. He clasped his hands behind him in an habitual gesture and walked slowly into the Pit, letting his eyes accustom themselves to the gloom. He paused at his personal console, froze a scrap of the transmission and read:
In the service of the Emperor he found life, and fought the barbarians, and beat them into submission. When the Emperor so commanded, he fought strange and evil fairy creatures, and these he conquered. Dragons he slew, and giants. He was willing to do battle with all enemies of the land, mortal or animal or creatures from another world. And he was always the victor.
He recognized the passage from the Japanese legend of Kintaro, even in this westernized form. The Snark had asked Mr. Ichino several days before for more of the ancient literature of the East, and he had brought in all the texts and translations he could find in his collection. They were now being transmitted when time allowed. Mr. Ichino wondered idly if this passage had been selected especially by a programmer, since it contained reference to “creatures from another world.” Such an action would be lamentably typical; most of the men here understood nothing of what the Snark wished to know.
Mr. Ichino tapped his front teeth with a finger, thinking. The square, stylized yellow tape squatted against the green of the tube, a totally unfit medium for the delicate thread of a fairy tale. He wondered how it would be read—
was
read, by now—by a thing of copper and germanium, circling Venus. All this—the quiet intensity of the Pit, the compressed minutes he had lived through for months now, the unbalanced feel of what he was doing— seemed parts of a jumbled puzzle. If he could have but a few days to sort it out, to fathom what being could see so quickly to the core of his personal experience, and extract it—
He moved on. A technician nodded, an engineer saluted silently. Word would spread that the Old Man was in the Pit for his daily visit; the men would be a trifle more alert.
Mr. Ichino came to a large graphics tank and studied the intricate work being done inside it by the computer. He recognized the print at once:
Nude in the Sunlight,
Renoir, painted 1875 or 1876; Mr. Ichino had selected the painting only two days before.
Light, filtered to a blue-green, cast streaks across the breasts and arms of the naked girl, strangely altering the illuminating red glow of the skin that was Renoir’s unmistakable signature. The girl gazed pensively downward, caught as she grasped at some ill-defined cloth. Mr. Ichino looked at her for a long moment, savoring the ambiguity of her expression with a wistful romanticism he knew as an old friend; he had been a bachelor all his life.
And what would the Snark make of it? Mr. Ichino did not venture to guess. It had responded well to
Luncheon of the Boating Party
and asked for more; perhaps it mis-took them for a sort of photograph, despite his explanation of the uses men made of painting.
He shook his head as he watched the computer carefully breaking the picture down into tiny squares of color. The Snark spoke very little; many of Mr. Ichino’s ideas about it were deductions. Still, there was something about the pattern of requests the Snark made—
“Anything you would like to see especially, sir?” a technician said at his elbow.
“No, no, everything seems to be going well,” Mr. Ichino said softly, startled out of his contemplation. He waved the man away.
Other consoles flickered as the men in the Pit transmitted data to the Snark. At the moment they were working their way through a fresh edition of an encyclopedia, he recalled. Simply radioing the material would have been simple, but the men he supervised were charged with editing each line that found its way into code. The President had accepted the recommendation of the Executive Committee that no detailed scientific or technical information be given the Snark—the Pit was quickly built to ensure it.
Most of the consoles were operating with Mr. Ichino’s own Code 4, a specially designed vocabulary and matrix of symbols that afforded high information density in each transmission to the Snark. The Executive Committee had searched Mr. Ichino out in the days following first contact, desperately trying to find a cryptologist who had enough experience with high flux signaling. Code 4 had been relatively simple to lay out, since it drew upon the codes Mr. Ichino had already developed for scrambled transmissions to Hipparchus Base on the moon. It was a simple, flexible code that seemed fairly secure from the Russians and Chinese and whoever else was listening in, but of course it had limited range. It soon became inadequate for the questions the Snark asked; past that point, only photographs and a wider vocabulary would suffice.
Because security was tight, many of the encoders and technicians were not told about the Snark; they thought they were working on something related to Hipparchus Base. So it fell to Mr. Ichino to speak to the Snark. Another cryptologist, John Williams, was brought in to ease the strain. Mr. Ichino had little contact with him, since he managed the other half of their round-the-clock schedule. The Snark never slept.
But Williams would be at the meeting, Mr. Ichino reminded himself. He stopped amid the comforting buzz of the Pit and made a quick survey of the remaining consoles. Images flickered there: a three-masted schooner in outline; stiff figures modeling sixteenth-century clothes; clouds layered over a boiling ocean. A river of information, shoveled at the Snark, to correlate as it liked.
He turned and made his way down a line of swivel chairs to the doorway, where he was passed by a guard. As he emerged into a bright corridor, he reached involuntarily for the lump in his jacket pocket and brought it out: a rubbing stone. He kneaded it with his right hand, feeling the smooth cool textures and focusing on them, calming himself by lifelong habit.
He walked. Mr. Ichino felt out of place in these garish crisp corridors, transfixed by the plastiform walls, the thin partitions, clatter of typewriters, distant whisper of air conditioning. He should be in a university by now, he thought, spending patient hours in a cloister far back in shadowed library stacks, peering into nuances of information theory. He was aging; the higher he rose, the more abrasive the men he dealt with, the more subtle their methods of combat. He was not made for this game.
But he played; he always had. For love of the crystalline mathematical puzzles he found in cryptography, for an avenue, an escape—it had, after all, brought him from an immigrant family in smalltown Oregon on to Berkeley, to Washington, and now finally to Pasadena. To meet the Snark. For that, the journey had been worth it.
He passed by another gray guard and into the conference room. No one there; he was early. He padded softly over thick carpets to the table and sat down. Mr. Ichino’s notes were in order, but he looked at them without focusing on the individual words. Secretaries came and went, placing yellow scratch pads and pens before each chair. An urn of coffee was wheeled in and set in a corner. A slight hollow pop disturbed Mr. Ichino’s muzzy meditations; it was a test of the pickup microphones inlaid at regular spacings around the conference table.
A secretary gave him the agenda and he studied it. There was only a list of attendees, no hint of the meeting’s purpose. Mr. Ichino pursed his lips as he read the names; there would be men here whom he knew only as distant figures in the news magazines.
All because of a vessel many millions of kilometers away. It seemed mildly ironic, considering the immediate and serious problems of the administration in Washington. But Mr. Ichino did not dwell on politics. His father had learned a stringent lesson of noninvolvement in Japan and made sure his son followed his example. From his earliest days of adolescence Mr. Ichino remembered his reluctance to join the poetry and language clubs in high school, because he felt the sharing of the tenuous emotions these things brought him, the nuances they called up, could not be a public thing. To write about them, perhaps—that was possible. But how to describe haiku except with another poem? To use anything more—slabs of words, sentences of explanation without grace or lightness of touch—was to crush the butterfly beneath a muddy boot.
He did finally summon up the sheer bravery to join the poetry club—though not French Studies, the other possibility—and found in it nothing to fear. Girls read their own stilted lines in high, nervous voices and sat down to beamed approval, followed by mild criticism from the teacher/sponsor. There were only three boys in the club but he could not remember them at all, and the girls now seemed to have merged into one composite: thin, willowy, eternally cold even in her cashmeres, her nostrils a pinched pale blue.
There was no clash of wills there, so the club marked a transition for him: he learned to speak before a group in his halting English, to define and explain and finally to disagree.
That was before mathematics, before the long years of concentration at university, before Washington and the dozens upon dozens of machine codes he devised, the monographs on cryptography that consumed his days and nights. The thin girls became—he looked up—secretaries in fashionably short skirts, coffee-bearers. And what had he become, that shy Japanese-American boy? Fifty-one years old, well paid, responsible, a bachelor consumed by work and hobbies. All clear, precise measures, but beyond that he was not sure.
“Mr. Ichino, I’m George Evers,” a deep voice said. Mr. Ichino stood up quickly with a sudden release of unexpected nervous energy, murmured words of greeting and shook the man’s hand.
Evers smiled thinly and regarded him with distant assessment. “I hope we aren’t taking too much of your time today. You and Mr. Williams”—he nodded as Williams appeared and walked to the coffee urn, long legs scissoring awkwardly—“are our experts on the day-to-day behavior of the Snark and we thought we should hear what you have to say before proceeding with the rest of the meeting.”
“I see,” Mr. Ichino said, surprised to find his voice almost a whisper. “The letter I received yesterday gave me no details, so—”
“On purpose,” Evers said jovially, hitching thumbs into his belt. “We merely want to get an informal idea of what you think that thing is up to. The committee here— the Executive Committee, actually, that’s the President’s title—is faced with a deadline and I’m afraid we’re going to have to come to a decision right away, sooner than we thought.”
“Why?” Mr. Ichino said, alarmed. “I was under the impression that there was no hurry.”
Mr. Evers paused and turned to wave to other men entering the long room and Mr. Ichino had the sudden impression of a man impatient to be off, to have the waiting finished, as though Evers knew the decision ahead and wanted to get beyond that dead moment to the action that followed. He noticed that Evers’s left hand, casually resting on the back of a chair, had a slight tremor.
“That machine isn’t willing to wait any more,” Evers said, turning back. “It gave us the word two days ago.”
Before he could reply Evers nodded and moved way, clasping hands with men in suits and pastel sports jackets who were filling the room. Williams, seated directly across the table, sent him a questioning glance.
Mr. Ichino shrugged elaborately in reply, glad that he was able to appear so casual. He looked around. Some of the faces he recognized. None were as important as Evers, who bore the ambiguous title of Presidential Advisor. Evers moved to the head of the table, still talking to the men nearest him, and sat down. Others who had been standing took their places and the secretaries left the coffee urn to fend for itself.
“Gentlemen,” Evers said, calling them to order. “We will have to hurry things along, as you know, in order to meet the President’s new deadline. I spoke with him this morning. He is very concerned, and looks forward to reviewing the recommendations of this committee.”
Evers sat with his arms folded on the table before him, letting his eyes rove up and down the two lines of men.
“You have all seen—excuse me, all but Mr. Williams and Mr. Ichino here—seen the messages received from the Snark requesting a change of venue.” He paused for the ripple of polite laughter. “We are here to go into possible scenarios that could be initiated by the Snark’s arrival in near-Earth orbit.”
He gestured toward Mr. Ichino. “These two gentlemen are guests of the Committee today and are here solely to bring us up to date on the nonessential information the Division has been sending the Snark. They are not, of course, members of the Executive Committee itself.” In the bleached light his skin took on a high glaze as he focused on the aligned ranks of men, yellow pads scattered at random before them. A few were already taking notes.