“Come on.” Lubkin gave him a skeptical look, eyes screwed up behind his pale glasses.

“I checked it with Knapp.”

“Damn,” Lubkin said. He shook his head. “Funny.” “J-Monitor got one clear look at it before Callisto came into the way again. Couldn’t avoid that, even with the new orbit we put it into.”

He slid a glossy optical photograph out of the stack. “Not much to see,” Lubkin said.

Near one corner was a tiny orange splotch against a dead black background. Lubkin shook his head again. “And this was through the small-angle telescope? Must be pretty far away.”

“It was. Almost all the way diagonally across the Callisto orbit. I don’t think we’ll be able to spot it again on the next pass.”

“Any radio contact?”

“None. No time. I tried when I first came in this morning, registered something—didn’t know what, right away—couldn’t get a good enough fix on it, with that photo. The narrow radio beam that Monitor’s main dish puts out needs a better fix.”

“Try again.”

“I did. Callisto got in the way, then Jupiter itself.” “Shit.”

Both men stood, hands on hips, staring down at the fax sheets. Their eyes traced through the matted patterns, noting details, neither of them moving.

“This is going to be pretty big news, Nigel.”

“I expect.”

“I think we ought to sit on it for a while. Until I get a chance to speak to the Director.”

“Ummm. Suppose so.”

Lubkin looked at him steadily.

“There’s not much question about what this thing is.” “Not one of ours,” Nigel said. “Dead on about that.” “Funny, you discovering it. You and McCauley are the only men who’ve ever seen anything alien.”

Nigel glanced up at Lubkin, surprised. “That’s why I stayed in the program. I thought you knew. I wanted to be where things were happening.”

“You guessed something would?” Lubkin seemed genuinely startled.

“No. I was gambling.”

“Some people are still pretty hot about Icarus, you know.”

“I’ve heard.”

“They might not like your being—”

“Up theirs.” Nigel’s face hardened. He had answered Lubkin’s questions about Icarus years before and saw no reason to reopen the past now.

“Well, I was only… I’ll be seeing the Director—”

“I found it. I want in on it. Remember that,” he finished savagely.

“The military is going to remember last time.” Lubkin spread his palms open in a conciliatory gesture.

“And?”

“Icarus was dangerous. Maybe this thing is, too.” Nigel scowled. Politics. Committees. Jesus.

“Bugger all,” he said. “Hadn’t we best figure where it’s going? Before fretting about what to do if it gets here?”

The gas giant had been a disappointment. The nonrandom radio emissions were natural in origin, keyed to the orbital period of its reddish inner moon. Methodically, the craft analyzed the larger moons and found only ice fields and gray rock.

As it whipped by the giant planet on an artful parabola, it decided to focus on the water world. The signals from there were clearly artificial. But as it did so, a brief radio burst caught its attention. The signal showed high correlations, but not enough to rule out a natural origin; there were many well-ordered phenomena in nature. Incredibly, the source was nearby.

Following standing orders, the ship retransmitted the same electromagnetic signal back at the source. This happened several times, quite quickly, but with no sign from the source that the ship’s transmission had been received. Then, abruptly, the signal stopped. Nothing spiked up from the wash of static.

The ship pondered. The signal might well have had a natural cause, particularly in the intense magnetic fields surrounding the gas giant planet. Without further investigation there was no way to decide.

The source seemed to be the fifth moon, a cold and barren world. The ship was aware that this moon was tidelocked to the gas giant, keeping the same side eternally facing inward. Its revolution with respect to the ship was therefore rather slow. It seemed unlikely, then, that the source of the radiation would have slipped below the visible edge so quickly.

As well, the signal strength was low, but not so weak that the ship could not have detected it before. Perhaps it was another radiation pattern from the belts of trapped electrons around the planet, triggered by the fifth moon rather than the first.

The ship thought and decided. The hypothesis of natural origin seemed far more likely. It would cost fuel and time to check further, and the region near the gas giant was dangerous. Far wiser, then, to continue accelerating.

It moved sunward, toward the warming glow.

Nigel worked late on a search-and-survey program to pick up the Snark’s trail. He hadn’t much hope of it working because Jupiter Monitor wasn’t designed for the task, and the Snark’s departing velocity would carry it out of range soon. But there was a lift to his steps as he left and he hummed an old song in the darkened corridors. As a boy he’d watched the old film cassettes and had an ambition to be John Lennon, to strut and clown and warble and become immortal, launch himself into history with his vocal cords. It had been years since he’d remembered that obsession. The period lasted for a year or so: gathering memorabilia, hiring a guitar by the week, rummaging through a song or two, posing in profile for the mirror (backlighting himself in blue, sporting a cap, fluffing out his hair), learning the surprisingly undated slang. The dream faded when he learned he couldn’t sing.

Near the entrance he did a little two-step, whistling, lifting, lilting, and then pushed out into the dimming spring sunlight.

The exit guard stopped him. She looked at his badge photograph and then back at his face.

“Can’t match up this ruined visage with that cherubic photograph?”

“Oh, sorry. I knew you worked here, sir, and I’m new, I hadn’t seen you. I saw you on Three-D when I was a girl.” She smiled prettily at him and he felt suddenly considerably older.

He trotted for the bus, snagged it and waved to the guard as he swung aboard.

Fame. Lubkin envied him for it, he knew, and that fact alone was enough to make him wince and laugh at the same time. Hell, if he’d wanted the limelight he’d have stayed in the most visible part of the program, the cylinder cities being built at the Lagrange points. Create a world, fresh and clean. (Cylcits, the 3D called them, a perfectly American perversion of the admittedly whorish language—almost as bad as skyscraper, from the last century.)

No. He’d been lucky, is all, fearsomely lucky, to get even this post.

When they pried him and Len out of the shoe-box accommodations of the Dragon, and then tiptoed away from the legal scuffle, Nigel had learned a lot. The attacks from The New York Times were mosquitoes compared to what awaited them at NASA. Still, the public experience prepared him for private infighting. Parsons, who was head of NASA at the time, had sent Nigel off as a boy, really, quick and serious, able to lower his breathing rate and slow his metabolism at will with self-hypnosis. The Icarus furor made him a man, gave him time to water the bile that built up inside him, so that some humor remained.

Admittedly, he was less than a second Lindbergh. But he slicked down his hair and when the Night of the Long Knives loomed up within NASA, he went public with the facts. He snared a retrospective interview on 3D, made some well-timed speeches, flashed his teeth. When asked about Cheshire-cat-David’s role in the mission, he invented a limerick about him that NBC cut from their early evening show, but CBS left in.

Business picked up. He appeared on a mildly intellectual talk show and revealed a better than passing acquaintance with the works of Louis Armstrong and the Jefferson Airplane, both of whom were coming back into vogue. He was interviewed during a long hike through the Sierras’ Desolation Wilderness, wearing a sweat suit and talking about meditation and respect for closed lifesystems (such as Earth). Not great material, no. But 3D execs proved to be an odd breed; anything that tickled their noses they thought was champagne.