“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.