Each switch had ten separate positions available; she altered several, glancing at the notebook at her elbow. A swirl of color formed and suddenly condensed into a pattern of symbols; curls, flashes, marks tantalizingly close to something like Persian script. In the middle of the display was a diagram involving triangles locked together in a confusing pattern.

“This was the first readout we ever got. Most sequences available don’t seem to give any image at all. Maybe they are vacant or the readout goes to some other console. This picture by itself is useless, because we don’t know what the writing means.”

“Is there much of it?”

“No, and I don’t think we could decipher very much even if we had a lot of printed symbols. The first Egyptologists couldn’t unravel a human language even though they had thousands of tablets, until the Rosetta Stone was discovered. That’s why we’re concentrating on the pictures, not the script. Eventually maybe Team Three can make some sense out of the words, but for the moment we are stuck with looking at pictures and figuring out what they mean.”

Nikka touched some of the switches and another image formed on the screen. This was also familiar. It showed two circles overlapping and a line bisecting the chord of one. An apparent caption ran down the side. “Lewis has tentatively identified one of those captioned squiggles as the word line. He compared with six or seven other figures in this sequence and so far that’s the only guess he’s been able to make. It’s a painful process.”

She ran quickly through a number of other punching sequences and stopped to admire the last. It was a magnificent shot of Earth as seen from somewhere further out from the sun. A thin crescent moon peeked around it; whorls and streaks of cloud obscured most of the dark land.

“The colors are wrong,” Sanges said. “It’s too red.” “It wasn’t made for human eyes,” Nikka said. “Nigel, I’m trying a new sequence. Alter 707B to 707C.”

She said casually to Sanges, “If this setting is in some way fatal, if it fries me to this chair, at least somebody will know which sequence to avoid next time.”

Sanges looked at her in surprise. She punched the sequence and got a few lines of symbols. “No help. Log, Nigel.” The next was an array of dots. Then came a slightly altered array. As they watched, the groupings changed smoothly, rotating clockwise.

“Nigel, measure this. How fast is the rotation?” There was a pause. “I make it a little over seven hours.”

Nikka nodded. “Half the 14.3 hours that the lights in the Bowl Room take to cycle. Put that on special log.”

Sanges made notes. Nikka showed him a color-coded array of dots which one of the astrophysicists had identified as a chart of the stars within thirty-three light years of the sun. The apparent size seemed to be related to their absolute magnitude. If the correspondence was exact, it meant a slight alteration in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram and gave some support to one of the newer theories of stellar evolution. Sanges nodded without saying anything.

She tried some new sequences. More dots, then some lines of squiggles. A drawing of two intersecting spheres, no captions. Dots. Then what appeared to be a photograph of a machined tool, with captions. “Log, Nigel. What does it look like to you?”

“Abstract sculpture? A particularly sophisticated screwdriver? I don’t know.”

The next sequence showed the same tool from a different angle. Next, more dots, then—Nikka jerked back.

Feral dark eyes glared out at them. Something like a large rat with scales stood in the foreground, erect on hind legs. Pink sand stretched to the horizon. Its forepaws held something, perhaps food, in long nails.

“My,” Nigel said. “Doesn’t look at all friendly.”

“No caption,” Nikka said. “But it’s the first life form we’ve ever gotten. Better put this through to Kardensky.”

“It is an evil-looking thing,” Sanges said intensely. “I do not know why God would make such a creature.”

“Value judgment, tsk tsk,” Nigel said. “Perhaps God wasn’t consulted, Mr. Sanges.”

Nikka thumbed another sequence.

Mr. Ichino stood at the small sink and slowly washed the dishes after supper. The taste of the canned chili lingered in his mouth. It was the real thing, no soybeans, and the only luxury he allowed himself these days. He had never quite got accustomed to handing someone a dollar bill when buying a newspaper and not getting any change in return. Even so, he would pay almost any amount to have an occasional meal with real meat in it. It wasn’t as though he had any true objection to vegetarianism, though he had never understood why it was better to kill plants than animals. It was just that he liked the taste of meat.

The day’s long twilight had begun to settle. He could no longer make out the ridgeline several miles away. Dense white clouds drifted in from oceanward; it would probably snow tonight.

A flicker of motion caught his eye. The window over the sink was partly fogged and he reached up to rub a clear spot. A man came staggering out of the forest a hundred meters away. He took a few agonized steps and collapsed into a drift of snow.

Mr. Ichino wiped his hands and rushed to the door. He slipped on his heavy lumber jacket as he went out the door and blinked as the sudden cold reached his unprotected face. The man was barely visible in the snow. Mr. Ichino cleared the distance in a loping stride, puffing only slightly. The work he had done around the cabin had cut away pounds and sharpened his muscle tone. When Mr. Ichino reached the man it was clear why he had fallen. There was a burn in his side. It passed through layers of parka, a shirt and extra insulation. An area a foot wide was matted and blood-soaked. The man’s ruddy face was clenched and tight. When Mr. Ichino touched near the wound the man groaned weakly and flinched.

It was obvious that nothing could be done until the man was inside. Mr. Ichino was surprised at how heavy he seemed, but got the arms over his own shoulder in a carry position and managed to stagger the distance back to the cabin without stumbling or pitching the body into the snow. He laid the man out on the floor and began to undress him. Stripping away the clothes was difficult because the harness of a backpack had knotted itself around the wound. Mr. Ichino used a knife to cut away the shirt and undershirt.

Cleaning, treating and bandaging the wound took more than an hour. Dirt and pine needles were caught among the blackened, flaky skin and as the heat of the cabin reached it the capillaries opened and began to bleed.

He lifted the man again and got him into the cabin’s second bed. The man had never awakened. Mr. Ichino stood regarding the face, now relaxed, for long moments. He could not understand how anyone had sustained such an injury out here in the middle of unoccupied forest. What was more, why would anyone be here in the first place? Mr. Ichino’s first thought was to try for the emergency call station fifteen kilometers away. The nearest fire road was only four kilometers and the Rangers might have it clear of snow by now. Mr. Ichino kept a small jeep there.

He began to dress for the walk. The going was mostly uphill and it would probably take several hours. As he made himself a thermos of coffee he glanced out the window and noticed that snow was falling again, this time in a hard swift wind that bowed the tops of the pines. A gust howled at the corners of the cabin.

At his age such a march was too great a risk. He hesitated for a moment and then decided to stay. Instead of making coffee he prepared beef broth for his patient and got the man to sip a few spoonfuls. Then he waited. He mused over the strange nature of the wound, almost like a cut in its clean outline. But it was a burn, undeniably, and a bad one. Perhaps a burning timber had fallen on him.