Nigel put his chopping knife aside. He was breathing in quick little gasps, he noted, and wondered why. “I… I simply can’t throw it all over—”

Shirley’s eyes moistened and her face seemed to draw downward. “Nigel… you think all this space research is so important, I know that. I’ve never said anything until now. But now your obsession can hurt Alexandria, damage her terribly in ways you may never even see.”

He shook his head dumbly, blinking.

“If the work was so vastly important, I wouldn’t say anything. But it isn’t. The real problems are here on Earth—”

“Buggering nonsense.”

“They are. You slave away at this business, after all they’ve done to you, and act as though it’s somehow crucial.”

“Better that, than a job handing out the daily dole.” “Is that what you think I do?” she said, voice teetering between acid and genuine curiosity.

“Well…”

“No backing and filling. Is it?”

“Not quite. I do know it’s not my sort of thing.” “With your intelligence, Nigel, you could make real contributions to—”

“Human problems, as you call them, are seldom accessible to intelligence alone. It takes patience. A warm touch, all that. You’ve got it. I don’t.”

“I think you’re very warm. Below that surface, I mean.”

“Uh,” he said wryly.

“No. You are. I, I know you are in some ways, or else you and I and Alexandria wouldn’t be possible, it couldn’t work.”

“Does it work?”

“I think so,” she said in almost a whisper.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean that. Just lashing out.”

“We need people in the project at Alta Dena, in Farensca. It’s not easy, creating a sense of community after all that’s happened. Those sociometricians—”

“Haven’t a clue about making it work, I know. Good for diagnostics and precious little else.”

“Yes.” Her fine-boned face took on a bleak, introspective look.

“I think you should stay over tonight.”

“Yes, of course.”

The front door clicked open then, Alexandria returning with lean cuts of flank steak. The mere presence of so much meat implied that the occasion was festive, and Nigel resumed chopping, silent, pondering the details of whether to open a bottle of red wine before the cooking began. Without having time to absorb the meaning of what Shirley had said, he slipped into the routine and ritual of evening.

Each time with Shirley he found some new depth, some unexplored flavoring, a sea change. The revelation always came at that place where all parts of her converged; his head cradled between her thighs, the salt musk aswarm in his nostrils. Alexandria’s presence was a warm O sliding on him. He was an arched segment of their ring. His hands stretched toward where Shirley and Alexandria intersected, Shirley’s black hair mingling with Alexandria’s pubic brown. His arms made an unsuccessful chord to the circle, too short; he turned his hands and felt the puckering of Shirley’s nipple. His tongue worked. Shirley was moist and cool under his massaging hand. The equilibrium between the three shifted and resolved: Alexandria’s tongue fluttered him to new heat; Shirley drew down Alexandria’s breasts, cupping them and rolling the perked nipples between her long fingernails, like marbles. Here they were at their best, he knew. Here the machinery of their bodies spoke what words could not or would not. He felt Shirley’s edgy tension in her hip which trembled with concealed energy. He sank into Alexandria’s encased calm, her mouth fluid and impossibly deep. He felt his own knotted confusion focus in a thrusting jerk, battering against her slick throat. Yes, here was their center. Loving, they hauled each other’s bodies as though they were sacks of sand, stacking them against the waters that surrounded Alexandria, and thus now enveloped all three of them. Shirley moved. Her legs released him and her hand caressed the back of his neck where two rigid bands of muscle formed a valley between. She smiled in the dusky light. Their bodies moved to a new geometry.

Since having an auto available was an unusual treat, Nigel took Alexandria to work the next morning. Shirley had waved away the invitation to drop her in Alta Dena; it would be wasteful, and anyway she had her motorbike with her. She coasted down the street for a block, started the engine with a preliminary rattle, rounded a corner and was gone.

Alexandria was intent on the Brazilians, getting ready for the second day of negotiations. The employees’ committee was divided on the terms American Airlines should ask, afraid that control would slip out of the country and into hands they didn’t understand. Alexandria’s job was to soothe their fears without endangering the course of the bargaining. She still didn’t know whether she agreed with the deal or not.

Nigel took his time driving up the gentle sloping hills. He took a route shaded by long stands of eucalyptus, and rolled down the window to breathe the fresh, minty smell. To his surprise he found that the subject of Alexandria and lupus did not float unbidden to the surface of his mind, again and again. Somehow the night had washed him free of it, for the moment.

This area was unfamiliar; he passed by several blocks of gutted ruins. Only the blackened corners of buildings remained, jagged spires thrusting from a sea of lush weeds. He slowed to study them, to determine whether they were remnants of the earthquake, or the result of one of the “incidents” that had raged over the last two decades. The quake, he guessed; there were no obvious, yawning craters, and the flaking walls were unpocked by heavy-caliber fire.

By the time the craft entered the system it knew the planetary population. Of the nine planets, four held promise. All but the farthest inward could be resolved into a disk now. There was a completely clouded world near the star. Next outward came the smaller radio-emitter; it showed sharp oxygen lines and an occasional blue glint hinted at oceans. A smaller world came next, dry and cold, with odd markings.

But for now the craft’s attention focused on the fourth possibility, the huge banded giant. Its radio emissions were broad, covering much of the spectrum, as though the source were natural. But they seemed keyed to an amplitude pattern that repeated nearly identically, at a constant period.

The pinkish-brown world seemed an unlikely site for a technological society. Other considerations entered here, however: time and energy. The craft’s engines worked inefficiently at these low speeds. Yet it needed to alter momentum and flatten its trajectory into the plane of the ecliptic. A flyby of the large planet could save engine strain and time. Looping through its gravitational field, picking up momentum from the vectoring forces, would allow a detailed study while the ship was launched sun-ward along a more desirable course.

Its higher functions debated.

With a mild rumble it altered the timbre of its engines. Gas giant or no, the radio pattern could not be ignored. It swung smoothly toward the waiting world.

“The aft camera nailed it,” Nigel said.

“What? You found the trouble?” Lubkin got up with surprising agility and walked around his desk.

“No malfunction. Those echoes were real, the engineers pegged it right. We’ve got a Snark.”

Nigel tossed a shelf of fax sheets on the desk. They were shiny even in the muted office light, yellow squiggles on green stripping.

“Snark?”

“Mythical English creature.”

“Something’s really out there?”

“These are optical and spectroscopic analyses. Telemetry errors already corrected and numerically smoothed.” He pulled one sheet from the pile and pointed at several lines.

“What is it?”

“Our Snark gives off all the lines of a fusion torch burning pretty bright. Nearly a billion degrees.”