Before Lubkin could finish his drawling sentence Nigel was out of his chair, pacing.

“You’re damned right I object to it,” Nigel said. “It’s the most stupid bloody—”

“Look, Nigel, I sympathize with you completely. You and I are scientists, after all.”

Nigel thought sourly that he could quite easily marshal a good argument against that statement alone, at least in Lubkin’s case. But he let it ride.

“We don’t like this secrecy business,” Lubkin went on. He chose his words carefully. “However. At the same time. I can understand the need for tight security in this matter.”

“For how long?” Nigel said sharply.

“Long?” Lubkin hesitated. Nigel guessed that the rhythm of his prepared speech was broken. “I really don’t know,” the other man said lamely. “Perhaps for the indefinite future, although”—he speeded up, to cut off Nigel’s reaction—“we may be speaking of a mere matter of days. You understand.”

“Who says?”

“What?”

“Who has the say in this?”

“Well, the Director, of course, he was the first. He thought we should go through military channels as well as civilian.”

Nigel ceased pacing and sat down. Lubkin’s office was illuminated only around his desk, the corners gloomy. To Nigel’s mind’s eye the effect of the pooled light was to frame him and Lubkin as though in a prizefighter’s ring, two antagonists pitted across Lubkin’s oaken desk. Nigel hunched forward, elbows on knees, and stared at the other man’s puffy face.

“Why in hell is the goddamned Air Force—”

“They would find out about it anyway, through channels.”

“Why?”

“We may need their deep space sensor network to track the, ah, Snark.”

“Ridiculous. That’s a near-Earth net.”

“Maybe that’s where the Snark is heading.” “A remote possibility.”

“But a nonzero one. You have to admit that. This could be of importance in world security, too, you know.”

Nigel thought a moment. “You mean if the Snark approaches Earth, and the nuclear monitoring system picks up its fusion flame—”

“Yes.”

“—and thinks it’s a missile, or warhead going off—” “You must admit, that is a possibility.”

Nigel balled his fists and said nothing.

“We keep this under our hats by telling no one extra,” Lubkin said smoothly. “The technicians never got the whole story. If we say nothing more they’ll forget it. You, I, the Director, perhaps a dozen or two in Washington and the UN.”

“How in hell do we work? I can’t oversee every flamin’ planetary monitor. We need shifts—”

“You’ll have them. But we can break the work down into piecemeal studies. So no one technician or staff engineer knows the purpose.”

“That’s inefficient as hell. We’ve got a whole solar system to search.”

Lubkin’s voice became hard and flat. “That’s the way it’s going to be, Nigel. And if you want to work on this program …” He did not finish the sentence.

She shook him gently in the night, and then more roughly and finally he awoke, eyes gummy and mind still drifting in fog.

“Nigel, I’m afraid.”

“What? I…”

“I don’t know, I just woke up and I was terrified.”

He sat up and cradled her in his arms. She burrowed her face into his chest and shivered as though she were cold. “Was there a dream?”

“No. No, I just…my heart was pounding so loud I thought you must have heard it and my legs were so cramped… They still hurt.”

“You had a dream. You simply don’t remember it.” “You think so?”

“Certainly.”

“I wonder what it was about?”

“Some beastly bit from the subconscious, that’s always what it is. Settling the accounts.”

She said in a weak, high voice, “Well, I wish I could get rid of this one.”

“No, the subconscious is like the commercial bits on Three-D. Without them sandwiched in, you’d get none of the good programming.”

“What’s that sound?”

“Rain. Sounds like it’s pissing down quite heavily.” “Oh. Good. Good, we need it.”

“We always need it.”

“Yes.”

He sat that way the remainder of the night, finally falling asleep long after she did.

At the Los Angeles County Museum:

Alexandria leaned over to study the descriptive card beneath the black and gray sculpture. “Devadasi performing a gymnastic sexual act with a pair of soldiers who engage in sword-play at the same time. This scene records a motif for a spectacle. South India. Seventeenth Century.” She arched her back in imitation of the Devadasi, getting about halfway over.

“Looks difficult,” he said.

“Impossible. And the angle for the fellow in front is basically wrong.”

“They were gymnasts.”

Reflectively: “I liked the big one back there better. The one who carried men off in the night for ‘sexual purposes’—remember?”

“Yes. Delicate phrasing.”

“Why did she have a touch-hole in her vulva?” “Religious significance.”

“Ha!”

“Maintenance purposes, then. It probably short-circuited the occasional desire to carve one’s initials in her.”

“Unlikely,” she said. “Ummm. ‘The eternal dance of the Yogini and the lingam,’ it says, on this next one. Eternal.” She gazed at it for a long moment, and then turned quickly away. Her mouth sagged. She wobbled uncertainly on the glossy tiles. Nigel took her arm and held her as she limped toward a row of chairs. He noticed that the gallery was oddly hushed. She sat down heavily, air wheezing out in a rush. She swayed and stared straight ahead. Her forehead beaded with sudden perspiration. Nigel glanced up. Everyone in the gallery had stopped moving and stood, watching Alexandria.

“She ought to quit that damned job now,” Shirley said adamantly.

“She likes it.”

Nigel sipped at his coffee. It was oily and thick, but still probably better than what he could get at work. He told himself that he should get up and clear away the breakfast dishes, now that Alexandria had left for her meeting, but Shirley’s cold, deliberate anger pinned him to the dining nook.

“She’s holding on, just barely holding on. Can’t you see that?” Her eyes flashed at him, their glitter punctuated by the high, arching black eyebrows.

“She wants to have a hand in this Brazilian thing.” “God damn it! She’s frightened. I was gone—how long? five minutes?—and when I came back she was still sitting there in that gallery, white as a sheet and you patting her arm. That’s not healthy, that’s not the Alexandria we know.”

Nigel nodded. “But I talked to her. She—”

“—is afraid to bring it up, to show how worried she is. She feels guilty about it, Nigel. That’s a common reaction. The people I work with, they’re guilty over being poor, or old, or sick. It’s up to you and me to force them out of that. Make them see themselves as…”

Her voice trickled away. “I’m not reaching you, am I?”

“No, no, you are.”

“I think you ought to at least persuade her to stay home and rest.”

“I will.”

“When she’s feeling better we’ll take a trip,” Shirley said quickly, consolidating her gains.

“Right. A trip.” He stood up and began stacking plates, their ceramic edges scraping, the silverware clattering. “I’m afraid I haven’t noticed. My work—”

“Yes, yes,” Shirley said fiercely, “I know about your damned work.”

He awoke in a swamp of wrinkled, sticky sheets. July’s heat was trapped in the upper rooms of this old house, lying in wait for the night, clinging in the airless corners. He rolled slowly out of bed, so that Alexandria rocked peacefully in the slow swells of the water’s motion. She made a foggy murmur deep in her throat and fell silent again.

The cold snap of night air startled him. The room was not close and stifling after all. The sweat that tingled, drying, had come from some inner fire, a vaguely remembered dream. He sucked in the cool, dry air and shivered.

Then he remembered.