Mr. Ichino frowned. The Joint Chiefs? he thought. He tried to understand the implications and lost track of Evers’s words until:

“—we’ll hear first from Mr. Ichino, who has shared the encoding and selection of information for the Snark. Mr. Ichino?”

His thoughts were a scramble. He said very carefully, “There is so much the Snark wants to know. I have only begun to tell it about us. I am not by any means the best qualified—”

Mr. Ichino stopped. He looked down at the table at them. He had always had to hold himself in check before people like this, he realized, men of closed faces. And he could not speak to them, let the soft things within him come out.

“I have found,” he said haltingly, mind filled with fleeting impulses and images, “… found something I never expected.” He gazed at their blank eyes and set faces. They were silent.

“I began with a simple code, based on arithmetical analogies to words. The machine picked it up at once. We began a conversation. I learned nothing about it—that was not my assignment. I gather no one else has, either.

“But—what struck me …” Words, he could not find the words. “… was the nimble aspect it has. We spoke of elementary mathematics, physics, number theory. It gave me what I believe to be a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Its mind leaps from one subject to another and is perfectly at home. When it spoke of mathematics it was cool and efficient, never wasting a word. Then it asked for poetry.”

The man in tweeds was watching Mr. Ichino intently and sucking on his pipe, which had gone out.

“I do not know how it discovered poetry. Perhaps from commercial radio. I told it what I knew and gave it examples. It seems to understand. What is more, the Snark began to ask for art. It was interested in everything from oils to sculpture. I undertook the encoding problems involved, even to the point of fixing for it the right portion of the electromagnetic spectrum for viewing the pictures we sent.”

He spread his hands and spoke more rapidly. “It is like sitting in a room and speaking to someone you cannot see. One inevitably assigns a personality to the other. Each day I speak to the Snark. He wants to know everything. And when we spoke of varying subjects, there was a feeling of differentness, as, as…”

Mr. Ichino saw the distilling eyes of Evans and hurried on, stumbling over his words.

“… as if I was speaking to different personalities each time. A mathematician, a poet—he even wrote sonnets one day, good ones—and scientist and artist…He is so large, I…”

Mr. Ichino paused, for he felt the air tightening around him, the men at the table drawing back. He was saying things beyond his competence, he was only a cryptographer, not qualified—

The lips of the man in tweeds compressed and turned up slightly in a thin, deprecating smile of condescension.

Across the table from Mr. Ichino, Williams stared into the space between them, distracted, and said slowly, “I see, I see, yes. That is what it is like. I had never thought of it that way before, but…”

Williams put both hands flat on the table, as though to push himself up, and glanced with sudden energy up and down the table. “He’s right, the Snark is like that. It’s many personalities, operating almost independently.”

Mr. Ichino gazed at this man who shared his labor and for the first time saw that Williams, too, had been changed by contact with the Snark. The thought lifted his spirits.

“Independently,” Mr. Ichino said. “That is it. I sense many aspects to his personality, each a separate facet, and behind them there is something… greater. Something that I cannot visualize—”

“It’s bigger,” Williams broke in. “We’re seeing parts of the Snark, that’s all.” Both men stared at each other, unable to put into words the immensity they sensed.

Evers spoke.

“I really think you gentlemen have strayed from the subject at hand. I asked you to describe the range of input the Snark requested, not your own metaphysical reactions to it.”

There were a few nervous chuckles. Around the long table Mr. Ichino saw minds sitting a sheltered inch back from narrowed eyes, judging, weighing, refusing to feel.

“But this is important—” Williams began. Evers raised a hand to cut him off. Mr. Ichino saw in the gesture the final proof of why Evers was a Presidential Advisor and he was not.

“I will thank you, Mr. Williams, to leave to the Executive Committee the determination of what is or is not important.”

Williams’s face went rigid. He looked across the table. Mr. Ichino took a deep, calming breath and struggled up out of his confusion.

“You have already decided, haven’t you?” he said to Evers. He peered at the man’s face, the white shirt bleaching out its shadows, and thought he saw something shift deep behind the eyes. “This is a sham,” he said with certainty.

“I don’t know what you think you’re—”

“That may be true, Mr. Evers, you do not know. Perhaps you have not admitted it to yourself yet. But you plan something monstrous, Mr. Evers, or else you would listen to us.”

“Listen—”

“You do not want to know what we say.”

There was an uncomfortable rustle in the room. Mr. Ichino held Evers with his eyes, refusing to let the man go. The silence lengthened. Evers blinked, looked away, too casually brought a hand up to touch his chin and hide his mouth.

“I think you two had better go,” Evers said in an oddly calm voice.

There was no other sound. Mr. Ichino, hands clasped tightly to the notes before him, felt a sudden strange intimacy with Evers, a recognition. In the lines around the man’s mouth he read an expression he had seen before: the quick-witted executive, intelligent, who knew with a sure instinct that he carried the necessary toughness to decide when others could not. Evers loved the balancing of one case against another, the talk of options and probabilities and plans. He lived for the making of hard choices.

Mr. Ichino stood up. For such men it was impossible to do nothing, even when that was best. Power demanded action. Action gave drama, and drama… was glory.

Now it is out of my hands, he thought.

Williams followed him out of that room, but Mr. Ichino did not wait to speak to him. For the moment he wanted only to leave the building, to escape the ominous weight he felt.

There are storms that are felt before they can be seen. He doubted that he would be allowed back in the Pit to talk to the Snark again; he was now a risk. The thought troubled him but he put it aside. He signed out at the nearest exit and pushed out through the glass-paneled door, into the thin spring air of Pasadena. It was almost noon.

He still carried the yellow pad and his notes, pages crumpled in his fist. Butterflies beneath the boot. Going down the steps he felt a welling tide and, dropping the pages, dropping it all, he ran. Ran.

Mr. Ichino pushed on resolutely, despite his fatigue. He was aware that Nigel, nine years younger and in better physical condition, was setting a mild pace; still, he panted steadily and felt a knotting tension in his calves. They were hiking above the timberline in early June and each breath sucked in a chilled, cutting wash of air.

Nigel signaled for a stop and, wordless, they helped each other slip free of their packs. They broke out a simple lunch: cheese, nuts, sour lemonade made from a powder. They had stopped in an elliptical clearing bordered by snowpack. Above, wave upon wave of flecked rock marched skyward. Shelves of granite had been heaved and tossed and eroded into a swirl of patterns, notched here and there by blocks that had tumbled down, split off by an endless hammering, the melting and freezing of winter frost. On this raw cliff face small yellow scatterings drew Mr. Ichino’s eye: rock-hugging bushes had begun to flower.