Nigel slammed the New Revelations shut on this mean-minded God, rose and padded quietly into the bedroom. Alexandria lay sleeping, head tilted back and mouth open.

He had never seen her sleep this way before. The thrust of her body seemed to belie the fact of rest. Tense yet vulnerable. He had a sudden perception of death: a small thing moving in from the distance, winging slowly in the night air as she slept. Searching out the house. Through a window. Into the shadowed bedroom. Silent, slow. Fluttering. Fluttering into her sagging mouth.

Lubkin called frequently. Nigel listened but volunteered little; nothing more had been learned about the Snark, so there seemed no purpose in speculating. Lubkin was all atremble over the President’s appointment of an Executive Committee, headed by a man named Evers, to monitor the situation. ExComm, Lubkin called it. The Committee was meeting at JPL in a week; would Nigel come?

He did, begrudgingly. Evers proved to be a deeply tanned, athletic-looking sort, well groomed and noncommittal. He carried the air of one who had been in charge of things for so long that his leadership was assumed, a fact hardly worth remarking upon. Evers took Nigel aside before the formal meeting and pumped him for an estimate of what the Snark was up to, where it would go. Nigel had his own ideas, but he told Evers that he hadn’t a clue.

The meeting itself proved to be a lot of talk with precious little new data. The Venus rendezvous seemed quite probable now, after detailed analysis of the Mars encounter. Why the Snark should be doing this was another matter. Since the communications satellite nets were completed in the 2010s, Earth was no longer a strong radio or TV emitter. A magnetic implosion-induced rainbow artfully produced in Saudi Arabia was transmitted to Japan by direct beaming through a satellite; no signals leaked out of the atmosphere anymore. It was conceivable that the Snark hadn’t picked up intelligible electromagnetic signals from Earth until it was near Mars. But still, why Venus? Why go there?

Nigel felt a certain wry amusement at Evers and his scientific advisors. When pressed on a point they would hedge and slip into their neutral jargon; a simple “I think” became “it is suggested that”; opinions were given in the passive voice, devoid of direct authorship.

It came to him as the meeting broke up that, compared to this slippery committee and the unreadable Evers, he probably preferred the riddle now riding toward Venus, a thing known only by its blossoming orange fusion flame.

Lubkin called. The Snark did not respond to a beamed radio signal, or to a laser pulse.

Of course not, Nigel thought. The thing isn’t naive anymore. It’s had a squint or two at daytime 3D and grown cautious. It wants time to study us before putting a toe in the water.

More news: Evers was upping the budget. New specialists were being called in, though none was given the whole picture, none knew what all this was really about. The Ichino fellow was working out well. Tracking went on. No sign of the Snark.

Nigel nodded, murmured something and went back to Alexandria.

And Alexandria was right, he saw: the two of them had been on a plateau for years. He recalled the boy at the Orange County Fall Fair. People with children had a natural benchmark. They grew, developed; you could see your effort giving into a living human being, a new element in the world’s compound. Alexandria had climbed up through a corporate anthill. Her progress was merely vertical, without human dimension. The Brazilians would buy the damned airline, that much was clear by now, and how, precisely, could that enter the sum of her life?

Nigel usually left the ExComm meetings as soon as they formally broke up. Without a firm fix on the Snark’s trajectory, there seemed little to discuss. At one of them Lubkin followed him out of the conference room and into an elevator. Nigel nodded a greeting, distracted. He absently scratched his cheek, which was shadowed by a day’s growth of beard, and the rasp sounded loudly in the elevator.

“You know,” Lubkin said abruptly, “the thing I kind of like about a thing like this, a group effort like this with not many people in on the thing, is the way it makes people fall back on each other.”

“So does gin.”

Lubkin laughed in short, sharp barks. “Man, I’m glad Evers didn’t hear you say that. He’d be angry as a toad with the warts filed off.”

“Oh? Why?”

“He, well, he wants to be sure we got a solid group.” “Then he must be having doubts about me.”

“Naw, I wouldn’t say that. We all sort of feel different about you.”

“Why?”

“Well, you know.” Lubkin looked at him earnestly, as though trying to read something in Nigel’s face. “You were there. At Icarus. You’ve seen some things that, well, nobody else in the human race ever will.”

Nigel paused. He chewed his lip.

“You’ve seen the photos I took. They—”

“It’s not the same. Hell, Nigel—what you did—going into Icarus—may have brought the Snark.”

“That radio burst, you mean?”

“Yeah. Why would a derelict send out an intense signal like that?”

Nigel shrugged, lifting his eyebrows in a faintly comical way that he hoped would break Lubkin’s mood. “Beyond me, I’m afraid.”

The elevator door slid aside. “If it’s beyond you, I’m pretty sure it’s beyond all of us, Nigel.” He shuffled his feet, as though vaguely embarrassed. “Look, I’ve got to run. Give my best to Alexandria, will you? And don’t forget the party, eh?”

“Certainly.”

As Nigel left the building he felt good to be getting away from Lubkin, a man he basically found difficult to like, but who had somehow touched him for a moment in that brief conversation. The look on Lubkin’s face reminded him of other people at NASA who had spoken to him in the past, sometimes buttonholing him in lunch-rooms or corridors, total strangers, really, some of them. They wanted to know an odd point or two about Icarus, or ask a technical question that hadn’t been adequately covered in the reports; or so they said. Some were dry and businesslike, others would leave phrases hanging for long moments as if, acutely conscious of Nigel (who was balancing a tray of food, or waiting to go into a meeting, and still did not want to seem rude), they nonetheless could not let him go. Some would mumble for a moment and then beat a retreat, while others, after a moody phrase or two about a detail, would suddenly boom out jovial phrases, wring his hand and be gone before he could reply. And from those encounters would come the same phrases: you were there … you’ve seen some things that… the pictures, not the same… not what it was really like… you were there …

Lubkin and the rest truly did respect him and hold him apart, he saw. Nigel could deduce that people felt some aura around him. He ignored it pretty successfully. Now and then the thought would crop up that this must have happened to the early astronauts. He’d gone and read the books from that era; they didn’t teach him much. He retained a vision of Buzz Aldrin withdrawing into depressive-alcoholic binges, divorcing his wife, living alone, securing the doors and windows of his apartment, unplugging the telephone, and drinking, for days at a time, simply drinking and thinking and drinking. Had his own personality picked up a tinge of whatever demon stalked Aldrin? From the subtle weight of expectations people had? … you’ve been there … touched it … Well, so he had. And perhaps been changed by it. And changed by what people thought of it.

Some days later Nigel’s home console sigmaed a reminding nudge for him, from its memorex. CATEGORY: ASTRONOMY, Ib (Planetary); periodic events, as requested. A partial eclipse of the sun by the moon would be visible from the southern California coast, 2:46 P.M. Pacific Coast Zone Time, two days in the future. So they delayed lunch and made an elaborate picnic on the back lawn. A casserole of beans, onions, chunky beef and spices; cheese, pale yellow; tomatoes, sliced cucumbers; gazpacho; artichoke frittatas with lime sauce; a sound Pinot Noir; finally, macadamia-nut ice cream. Alexandria ate with gusto. She forked the frittatas between her teeth in precise, squarely cut wafers, leaning back on one stiffened arm, an extended hand buried to the wrist in fresh grass. Her red skirt slid off her raised knees and down, exposing thighs of parallel whiteness to the sun’s sting, a sun already bitten at its edge. This lazy motion, laying bare the ashy white inside of her thighs as though they were a new and secret place, caught at something in his throat. Above them, the moon devoured the sun. She lay back on the grass with a sigh and motioned to him to put on the filmed glasses they’d bought. Nigel rested his head against the firm and rounding earth, feeling it curve away beneath him and roll off toward the horizon. He realized for a moment that he was, indeed, pinned by Mr. Newton to what was in fact a ball, a sphere, and not the misleading flatland men thought themselves to inhabit (and reminded himself that a savage, according to Dr. Johnson, was a person who saw ghosts, but not the law of gravity). Some of the earliest observations of eclipses, he recalled from the memorex, were made from the intellectual fulcrum of ancient Alexandria. There, in Ptolemaic times and after, the great library blending Greece and Rome had stood—until, in some minor scramble of a war, it had burned. He blinked. Darkness gnawed at the sun. Alexandria beside him asked questions and he answered, his words slurred by the Pinot Noir and the muzzy haze of afternoon sunlight. But the warmth ebbed. A chill came across the lawn. The eating above continued, an abiding darkness chewing the center from the sun. It was a partial eclipse. Slowly a curtain drew across the dead but furious matter above, carving the star into a crescent, Nigel saw suddenly, an incomplete circle with horns that yawned open and unconnected, its tips burning bright with mad energy. Something in him turned, I am dying, Egypt, dying, it squeezed his throat, and he blinked, blinked to see the chewing everlasting pit that hung above them.