“Ah. So some did.”

“Sure. I said you got mixed reviews, not uniformly bad ones.”

“After what you’ve said, I honestly wonder why.” Evers looked at him quizzically. “Do you? Really?” “Well …” Nigel murmured uncertainly. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

“You don’t have a clear idea what NASA—the people you’ve worked with—think of you?”

“Well…”

“You really don’t. You don’t know that to them you’re a, a symbol?”

“Of what?”

“Of what the program’s about. You’ve been there. You found the first alien artifact. And now, you’re on the team that discovered the second—the Snark.”

“I see.”

“It’s true. You don’t notice it, do you?”

“I don’t suppose I do.”

Evers thought for a moment, studying Nigel. “I guess you wouldn’t.”

Nigel shrugged.

“It’s my job to see things like that,” Evers said, seeming to pull himself up. “I deal in people. And you’re the person I’ve got to figure out right now.”

“How?”

“By guess and by golly, as my Dad used to say.”

“By asking me about racquetball?”

“Sure, why not? Anything to find out what makes Nigel run. And run pretty damned well, too. You’re smart, you’ve kept up on spacecraft tech, you know the plumbing and the computers, the astronomy—you’re a pro. The only thing you don’t understand is folks like me.”

“Like you?”

“Administrators.”

“Oh.”

“Guessers is a better word. Professional guessers.” “How so?” Nigel murmured, interested despite himself.

“You remember the Chinese Trigger incident?”

“I read Gottlieb’s book.”

“It’s pretty near the facts.”

“You should know. You stepped into that muck and figured out what was going to happen next.”

Evers nodded. “There were clues. The Chinese had dispatched a large infantry force by submarine. It didn’t make any sense that they’d be hitting Australia or anything reachable by more conventional methods.”

“So you estimated they were bound for a clandestine landing in California.”

“To say ‘estimated’ makes it more exact than it was. I guessed. Guessed they’d try to touch off a nuclear war with some well-placed tacticals and a commando raid to silence communications for a vital twenty minutes. Guessed.”

Nigel nodded.

“It occurred to me that you maybe don’t have a whole lot of respect for that kind of thinking.”

Nigel blinked. “How’d that pop into your head?” “You never seem very relaxed when you’re talking to your, ah, superiors.”

“You mean talking to you?”

“Among others.”

“Umm.” Nigel studied Evers and then looked aside, where a wall holo showed a glinting Eckhaus laser-carved iceberg sculpture, waves lapping at its base. Nigel breathed deeply and seemed to make a decision.

“Not really,” he said slowly, searching for the words. “There’s something poisonous in the way we do things, that’s all.”

“A strong word.”

“Appropriate. There’s a good lot here, individually fine people. But organizations have their own drives and that gets in the way.”

“In the way of what?”

“Of the truth. Of what people really want out of all this. Look, remember the first years? The Apollo landings and all. What kind of genius did it require to take hold of the greatest event in the century—and make it boring?”

“Okay, so NASA wasn’t and isn’t perfect.”

“No, it isn’t just NASA. It’s, it’s whenever people deny their own interior visions. Or don’t communicate them correctly.”

“Organization is impossible without compromise,” Evers said, the webbing around his eyes crinkling with amusement.

“Granted,” Nigel said judiciously. “But I seem to’ve run smack into situations where I couldn’t see the motivation—”

“You mean NASA has screwed up the Snark business.”

“You were going to. Your message to the Snark was a balls-up.”

“Probably. But that was because we didn’t have your input.”

“You weren’t in the mood, it seemed to me.” “You’ve got to understand where I’m coming from here, Nigel,” Evers murmured, hunching forward.

“How so?”

“I’m the kind of guy I am because of what I’ve done. I had a pretty bumpy career until the Chinese Trigger. I took a look at the intelligence estimates, sure, everybody did. Hell, I’ll bet lots of guys had it cross their minds that the slants might have a joker in the deck. It’s one thing to guess, it’s another to act.”

“Surely we agree on that.”

“Check. You did, too, at Icarus.”

“With middling results.”

“Sure, but you followed your nose ’cause you had to. I respect that. I went out on a limb and depth-bombed those subs and I was right.”

“So Commander Sturrock could become a national hero.”

“Yeah. Well, you know …” A shrug. “Gottlieb got it straight, though.”

“You’ve done pretty well in the government.” “So-so. That little venture when I was undersecretary—you know, in ’17, breaking the back of that metals cartel—bought me more enemies than I thought it would.” He paused and seemed to pull himself out of a private mood, straightening up as his flexchair moved to accommodate him. “But I’m back on my way again. Moving up. And I’m kind of a renegade myself, Nigel, I guess that’s what I’m saying.”

“I can see that. I never said I didn’t respect you.”

“No, you didn’t. But then”—he chuckled—“I never asked.”

“I suppose,” Nigel murmured carefully, “we simply have different feelings about how organizations should be used.”

“Check. Down where I come from, Nigel, near Mobile, there’s an old story. Back in the days when the South was down, way down, there was a lot of trouble, over race, y’know. Somebody from the North, down to help straighten things out, asked a relative of mine if he didn’t have to watch what he said in favor of black people, living down there, and considering the attitude of the police and so on.”

“Yes.”

“So my relative thought a minute and said, ‘Why no, we don’t have to watch what we say. We just have to watch what we think.’”

Nigel burst into laughter. “I take the point,” he said, smiling.

“I can tell you’ve got your head screwed on right. All I’m sayin’ to you is that getting along with NASA is going to be a tradeoff—but you don’t have to watch what you think, not if you’re careful. Things aren’t that bad.” He squinted at Nigel warmly. “I made my way so far by defending the West, Nigel, and that’s the way I see this mission. Hell, only we may be defending the whole damned planet this time.”

“Umm.”

“Okay, I could be wrong.” He waved a hand. “We won’t argue. I’ve kind of let down my hair today so I could see what sort of guy you were, and it’s settled my mind. You’re a classy sort of astronaut, Nigel, the best and the oldest we’ve got. That British thing you’ve got going for you—it’s a big help with Americans, y’know. A big help. It’ll come in handy when I push this thing through.”

“So you’re going to back me.”

“Sure.” Evers relaxed. “I just decided. I want a guy out there I understand. I have a hunch the Snark isn’t going to give us a lot of warning when it decides to come Earth-side—probably on purpose, to be sure we can’t set up elaborate defenses. So we’ll be in a damned rush and there won’t be time for a lot of talk amongst ourselves. I don’t ask that you agree with me, but I have to understand you in order to know for sure what you’re saying, when your voice comes over a squawk box.”

Nigel nodded. Evers came to his feet and held out a hand, beaming. “Glad we had this talk, Nigel.”

He let a secret smile crease his face as he made his way back through the fluxing Mirrormaze hallway. It had gone quite well, all things considered, and his prior careful rummaging into Evers’s past now made sense. Nigel didn’t for a moment believe he’d seen the core of Evers, but there had been another layer, certainly, deeper than the no-nonsense bureaucratic sheen. Evers very probably thought the down home, good-ole-boy persona was the real Evers; if you spend time developing a role, you become it. But Nigel sensed something further. Inside every hard-edged executive there seemed to lie a shadow of the ambitious boy, and beneath that lurked whatever made the boy step on the first rung. Glad we had this talk, Nigel. A clear signal that Evers now thought of him as an ally, a team player, cheerfully backing Evers for his next leap upward. I want a guy out there I understand. Glad we had this talk. But Evers had done very nearly all the talking himself.