“The Coordinator sent me to ask you over to his office.”

“Right. Well, just a minute. Got to shake hands with the wife’s best friend.”

“Ah…I didn’t know you were married.”

“I’m not. Means I’ve got to piss.”

“Oh. That’s amusing.”

Sanges was waiting when Nigel came out of the men’s room, which struck him as odd: why did he need an escort to find Valiera’s office?

“Did you see the new directives on staff?” Sanges said conversationally as they strode along.

“Wouldn’t take the time to blow my nose on ’em.” “You should. I mean, you should read them. It looks as if we aren’t going to get any additional staff.”

Nigel stopped, looked at Sanges in surprise, then continued walking. “Bloody stupid.”

“Probably so, but we have to live with it.”

“The news doesn’t seem to bother you very much.” Sanges smiled. “No, it doesn’t. I think we should go very slowly in our work. Care will be repaid.”

Nigel glanced at him and said nothing. They reached Valiera’s office and Sanges gestured him in, while remaining outside himself. Valiera was waiting for him and began with a series of good-humored questions about Nigel’s accommodations, the work routine, scheduling and the quality of food. Nigel was grateful that the moon, with no atmosphere, afforded Valiera no chance to go on about the weather. Then, abruptly, Valiera smiled warmly and murmured, “But the hardest aspect of my job, Nigel, is going to be you.”

Nigel raised his eyebrows. “Me?” he said innocently. “You’re revered. And you seem to have a special talent for surviving, even when the men above you in the organization do not. It will be difficult for me to administer with a famous man under me.”

“Then don’t.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Let events develop. Don’t manage them.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Why?”

“I’m sure you understand.”

“ ’Fraid not.”

“I am under pressure,” Valiera said carefully. “Others want this job. If I don’t get results—”

“Yes, yes, I fathom all that.” Nigel hunched forward. “Everybody wants results, like cans coming off the end of a production line. The Achilles heel of treating research like that is that you can’t program it from the top down.”

“There are some parameters—”

“Sucks to parameters. We haven’t a clue what this caved-in pile of litter is yet.”

“Granted. I’m here to be sure we find out.”

“Only that’s not the way to do it. Look, I know how governments run. Promise them a timetable and they’re yours. They don’t want it right, they want it Friday.”

Valiera clasped his hands together and nodded sagely. “There’s nothing wrong with schedules, though.”

“I’m not at all bloody sure.”

“Why not?”

“Because”—he threw up his hands, exasperated—“if you want it done by the weekend, that already assumes there will be a weekend, in those terms—that there’ll still be business as usual. But if you’re after something that really alters things, then it doesn’t just explain and clarify, it changes the world.”

“I see.”

“And that’s what you can’t program, you see.”

“Yes.”

Nigel realized that he was breathing a bit quickly and Valiera was staring at him oddly, head tilted to the side.

“You speak like a visionary, Nigel. Not a scientist.”

“Well. I suppose.” Nigel rummaged about for words, embarrassed. “Never been one for definitions, myself,” he said softly as he rose to go.

Nigel squinted at the screen before him and said into his throat microphone, “Afraid I don’t understand it either. Looks like another one of those meaningless arrays of dots to me.”

“Meaningless to us, yes.” Nikka’s voice blossomed in his ear, tinny and distant.

“All right then, I’ll put it in passive log.” Nigel punched a few command buttons. “While you were cycling that, I got a reply from Kardensky’s group. Remember the rat? Well, it’s not a rat or any other kind of rodent we know of, it’s apparently not standing on Earth and it’s probably at least a meter tall, judging from the apparent bone structure in its ankles.”

“Oh! Then it’s our first picture of extraterrestrial life,” Nikka said, excited.

“Quite so. Kardensky has forwarded it on to the special committee of the NSF for publication.”

“Shouldn’t we go through Coordinator Valiera?” There was a note of concern in her voice.

“Needn’t worry about that, luv. I’m sure the New Sons have a tight rein on what comes out of the NSF. They needn’t rely on Valiera.”

“Valiera isn’t a New Son,” Nikka said testily. “I’m sure he’s impartial.”

“I didn’t say he was a New Son, but on the other hand I don’t think it’s wise to assume he isn’t. ‘I frame no hypotheses,’ as Newton said. Anyway, look, we should be getting on with it.”

Nigel shifted uncomfortably in his chair and turned down the illumination above his console. The small, cramped room was about five degrees colder than he liked. Site Seven had been thrown up rather quickly and some of the niceties, such as adequate insulation and a good air circulating system, had been neglected.

He studied his notes for several moments. “Right, then, let’s try sequence 8COOE.” He made a notation. The difficulty of prospecting for information in a totally unfamiliar computer bank was that you had no way of knowing how the information was catalogued. Intuition told him that the first few settings on the alien console should be more general than later settings, just as if it were a number setting in ordinary Arabic notation. The rub there was that even in terrestrial languages the logical left-to-right sequence was no more common than a right-to-left sequence or up-to-down or any other frame one could imagine. The aliens might not even have used a positional notation at all.

So far they had been reasonably lucky. Occasionally, similar settings on the console yielded images on the screen that had some relationship. There were the common arrays of dots, including those that moved. The sequences which called these forth had some of the same prefixes. Perhaps this indicated a positional notation, and perhaps it was merely lucky chance. So far he had asked Nikka to use only a portion of the switches available on the console. Some of them certainly would not be simple catalogue numbers for information retrieval. Some must represent command modes. The third switch from the right in the eighteenth tier, for example, had two fixed positions. Did one mean “off” and the other “on”? Was one “file this data” or “destroy it”? If he and Nikka kept to a small area of the board, perhaps they would not encounter too many command modes before they got some information straight. They didn’t want to run the risk of turning off the computer entirely by proceeding at random through all the switches.

Nigel studied the screen for a moment. An image flickered on. It seemed to show a dark red image of a passageway in the ship. There was a bend in the corridor visible and as he watched some of the Persian-like script appeared on the screen, pulsed from yellow to blue and then disappeared. He waited and the pattern repeated.

“Mysterious,” he said.

“I don’t believe I’ve seen that passageway,” Nikka said.

“This must be something like the three photos Team One reported from the last shift. They are from unrecognizable parts of the ship.”

“We should check with the engineers,” Nikka said. “But my guess would be that all these show part of the ship that was pulverized on landing.”

Nigel pursed his lips. “You know, it just occurred to me that we can deduce something from the fact that this script goes on and off with a period of several seconds. Our friends the aliens must have been able to resolve time patterns faster than a second or so, if they could read this.”

“Any animal can do that.”

“Just so. But whoever built this ship might not be just any animal. For example, the little switches on the console imply something finger-sized to manipulate them. True enough, we know animals must be able to see things moving faster than on a one-second time scale, or else they’ll be overrun and gobbled up pretty quickly. It’s interesting to note the aliens were similar to us in at least that way. Anyway, let’s go on. I’ll log that”—he punched a few buttons—“for Team One to check.”