Mr. Ichino put his lunch bag aside and lay down on the tufted grass that grew in patches here. He cocked his hands behind his head and peered up into the canopy made by the massive pepper tree that rustled softly in a light midday wind. Yellow dabs of sunlight speckled him and shifted and danced. Mr. Ichino felt an inner calm that came from having made a decision and put it behind him for good. He suspected Nigel’s telephone call from Houston was designed to stop him from reaching that final point and tendering his resignation. But if that were so, Nigel was too late. Mr. Ichino’s letter was now worming its way through channels, and in a month he would be free of the stretching tensions he felt in his work; and he could then walk a bit more lightly through the years that remained to him. Precisely how many years that might be was a minor issue, though the incidence of pollutive diseases these days did not seem reassuring. He had never smoked and had watched carefully what he ate, so that—
“Sorry I’m late,” Nigel’s voice came from above him. Mr. Ichino blinked lazily and drifted up from his reflections. He nodded. Nigel sat beside him.
“Had a devil of a time getting in from the airport.”
“I see.”
“Snagged a bite on the way,” Nigel said, indicating Mr. Ichino’s paper bag. “Go ahead and eat.”
He sat up and carefully unfolded the wrapping papers for his sandwich and vegetables. “Then you did not truly intend to have lunch here.”
“No.” Nigel glanced at him sheepishly. “When I called I had to have some reason to get you away from JPL. I didn’t want to be overheard or have anyone wondering what we were talking about.”
“And why is that?”
“Well, first off, your prediction was dead on.”
“How?”
“NASA’s going to keep the Marginis operation as in-house as possible. They’ll use retreads like me—they have to. There aren’t that many younger types who’re trained for a variety of jobs.”
“The cylinder cities are too specialized?”
“So NASA says.”
“That seems a weak argument.”
“These things aren’t relentlessly logical. It’s politics.” “The old guard.”
“Of which I am, blessedly, one.”
“You were successful?”
“Right.” Nigel beamed. “I’ve got a lot of swotting up to do on computing interfaces and that rot.”
“You know the material well.”
“Not well enough, the specialists say.”
“The specialists wish to go themselves,” Mr. Ichino murmured lightly.
“Check. Quite a round of throat-slitting going on back there, I gather. Had to be careful not to slip on the blood.”
“Yet you survived.”
“I collected on a lot of old debts.”
“The legacy of Mr. Evers.”
Nigel grinned slyly.
“I have never truly approved of that, you know,” Mr. Ichino said carefully.
“I’m not bursting with pride over it,” Nigel’s voice took on a hesitant, guarded note.
“We have all conspired, implicitly, to conceal the truth.”
“I know.” Nigel nodded with a touch of weariness. “But it was necessary.”
“To protect NASA.”
“That was the first-order effect. It’s the second-order effect I was after—keeping NASA from getting itself gored by outsiders, so they’d have a free hand and a bigger budget. Money to explore the moon.”
“And you have been proved correct.”
“Well—” Nigel shrugged. “A lot of other people felt the same way. Finding that wreck was pure accident.”
“The girl would not have been flying there had the lunar budget not been expanded.”
“Yes. Nifty syllogism, eh? Logical to the last redeeming comma.” Nigel chuckled with hollow mirth.
“You are not convinced.”
“No.”
“It has worked out well.”
“I don’t like lying. That’s what it was, that’s what it is. And you can’t ever be sure, there’s the rub. We think the politicians and the public and the New Sons and God knows who else, we think they’d be horrified to learn that Evers fired a bomb at the Snark, drove it away. And blew our chance. Hell, he could’ve been risking a war, for all he knew. And the backlash might’ve gutted NASA so that we’d never have got to search for the Marginis wreck. But we don’t know that would have happened.”
“One never does.”
“Right. Right.” Nigel fidgeted with his hands, flexed his legs into a new sitting position, stared moodily out at the knots of people lunching in the park. Mr. Ichino felt the unbalanced tensions in this man and knew Nigel had something more to say. He pointed toward the western horizon. “Look.”
A noontime entertainment. A darting flitter craft was beginning a cloud sculpture. The pilot chopped, pruned, extruded and sliced the taffy-white cumulus. A being emerged: serpentine tail, exaggerated fins, knotted balls of cotton for feet. The event was admirably timed—as the flitter shepherded the remaining puffs into place, to shape the snouted face, the eyes turned ominously dark. The eyeballs expanded and purpled and suddenly lightning forked between them, giving the alabaster dragon a surge of life. In a moment a wall of thunderheads split the beast in two, sullen clouds churning. Claps of thunder rolled over the park. Above Los Angeles a hazy rain began.
When Mr. Ichino looked again at Nigel he could perceive from his new posture that some of the tension had drained away. In its place was Nigel’s familiar pensive enthusiasm.
“You learned more?” Mr. Ichino said.
“A lot,” Nigel said absently. “Or rather, a lot of negative results.”
“About Wasco?”
“Right. The Wasco event, as it’s called. Can’t label it a bomb because nobody dropped it. It was buried about a kilometer in bedrock. Must’ve come near on thirty megatons. A pure fusion burn.”
“I heard there was little radiation.”
“Surprisingly little, yes. Cleaner than any bomb we know of.”
“Not ours.”
“No, certainly not ours. The cover story is that a lot of experts think it was a human accident, but I never met anybody who buys that. No, it was alien. Triggered by the Marginis wreck at the same time that survey craft one oh five was getting snuffed.”
“But why? If the wreck thought it was being attacked…”
“Don’t look for order in any of this. It’s a malfunctioning ship, period. It nearly got that girl, then plugged one oh five and some standing order inside it made it touch off the Wasco explosion. The fusion device was there, probably stored in an arsenal or a base—look, it’s all a balls-up, a pack of guesses. We don’t know much for dead certain.”
“Aren’t the men working at the wreck in danger if they know so little of what caused this?”
“I suppose. Though the wreck has a blind side—the hill it’s on masks most of the sky in that direction. That’s how those three fellows got to the girl in time. They took a shuttle across Mare Crisium at low altitude, landed on the other face of the hill and simply walked around it. The wreck doesn’t fire at anything on the ground, apparently. So they carried her out, in shock but repairable.”
“They did not try to penetrate the invisible screen?” “No point. Leastwise, not then. Some physicists have taken a knock at it since—they say it’s high-frequency electromagnetic, with an incredible energy density—but they failed.”
“Ah.”
Nigel cast him a sidelong glance. Mr. Ichino smiled. Wind rippled the pepper tree and murmured through the park and brushed by them. “And where are you leading, Nigel?”
“That obvious, eh?” he said dryly.
“You know I am retiring. I cannot work on this riddle any longer.”
“I know, but—”
“You do not think you can talk me out of it, I hope?” “No, I wouldn’t be that thick. But you’re wrong about not taking part in all this.”
Mr. Ichino wrinkled his brow. “How?”
Nigel hunched forward eagerly. “I read the prelim study on the Wasco crater. It’s a mammoth hole and the land’s scraped clean in a seventy-five-kilometer radius. But there’s where the detective work ends. Whatever housed the fusion device is obliterated.”
“Of course. There is nothing to be learned there. The only possible research must be done on the moon.”
“Perhaps, perhaps,” Nigel said lightly. “But suppose there was something stored at Wasco. Why? Easier to salt stuff away on the moon.”
“Unless you were working on Earth.”
“Exactly. Now, we haven’t a clue how old that wreck is. It probably had some sort of camouflage going earlier so nobody picked it up on the Marginis search. But if the wreck has been there a longish time, there might have been ancient operations on Earth.”
“And you wish to look for traces of that.”
“Ah… yes.”
“Interesting.”
“It’s simply a matter of where you retire.”
Mr. Ichino gave a puzzled glance.
“Well, say you spend some time this winter in the north woods.” Nigel spread his hands and shrugged, his offhanded-and-reasonable gesture. “See if there is any history of unusual activities there.”
“It sounds outlandish.” “This is outlandish.”
“Do you honestly think this has any reasonable probability of success?”
“No. But we aren’t being reasonable. We’re guessing what’s near on to unguessable.”
“Nigel.” Mr. Ichino leaned forward from his position and touched Nigel’s wrist. The other man’s eyes were earnest, excited. There was something in this dynamic tension Mr. Ichino recognized in himself, as he had been decades before. Nigel was, after all, nine years his junior. “Nigel, I want to end with this. I do not feel at peace here.”
“If you tried you might get to work on the Marginis wreck.”
“No. Age, inexperience—no.”
“Right then, granted. But you can make a contribution by running down this nagging bit—there may be something to be learned up there. Some trace, a fragment—I don’t know.”
“NASA will uncover it.”
“Of that I’m by no means sure. And even if they did— can we trust them to pass it on? With the New Sons so powerful now?”
“I see.” Mr. Ichino’s face became absentmindedly blank, concentrated. He licked his lips. He gazed around the tranquil park where in the distance the air rippled with summer heat. He noticed that Nigel was wisely giving him time to let the words and arguments sink in. Still, Mr. Ichino fretted uncertainly. He studied the people lounging and eating around them, dotted on the emerald lawn at the intervals decreed by privacy. Office workers, newspaper readers, derelicts, welfare stringers, the elderly, students, the dying, all sopping up the forgiving sun. Down the flagstone path came businessmen, always in pairs, always talking, earnestly not here and earnestly going someplace else. Commonplace. Ordinary. It felt so odd to speak of the alien in the midst of this relentlessly average world. He wondered if Nigel was more subtle than he seemed; something in this atmosphere made it possible for Mr. Ichino to change his mind.
“Very well,” he said. “I will do it.”
Nigel smiled and at the corners of his upturned mouth there seeped out a boundless, childlike glee; a seasoned anticipation; a regained momentum.