“Yes, yes,” Nigel said, looking at her curiously. He guessed that she was a bit uneasy at visiting him in his digs. She was a naturally physical sort of person, so anxiety would probably show up as increased activity; thus the gymnastics.

“Sit down here, I’ve got some things to show you.” He handed her a color photograph of Earth taken from orbit. “That’s the same picture we got on the console awhile back. Kardensky had it shifted into approximately our color scale, so it doesn’t look red to us.”

“I see. What part of Earth is it?”

“South America, the southern tip, Tierra Del Fuego.” Nigel tapped a fingernail on the slick surface. “This is the Estrecho de Magellanes, a narrow strait that connects the Atlantic and Pacific.”

Nikka studied the photo. “That’s no strait. It’s sealed up at four or five spots.”

“Right. Now look at this.” He snapped down another print of the same area, dealing as though he were playing cards. “Kardensky got this by request from Geological Survey, taken last year.”

“It’s open,” Nikka said. “It is a strait.”

“That spot has always been clear, ever since Europeans reached the New World. This picture we got from the wreck’s memory bank must be how it looked before erosion cleared the strait.”

Nikka said quickly, “This gives us another way of direct dating, then.”

“Precisely. Rates of erosion aren’t known all that well, but Kardensky says this picture is at least three-quarters of a million years old. It ties in pretty well with the radiation damage estimates. But that’s not all.” Nigel collected notes, photographs and a few books which were lying about his bed. “Somebody in Cambridge has identified those lattice-works we found.”

“What are they?”

“Sectioned views, from different angles, of physostig-mine.”

“Isn’t that …”

“Right. I’m a bit rusty at all this but I checked with Kardensky and my memory from the news media is right—that’s the stuff they use as an RNA trigger. That, and a few other long chain molecules, are what the NSF is trying to get legislation about.”

Nikka studied the prints he handed her. To her untrained eye the complex matrix made no sense at all.

“Doesn’t it have something to do with sleep learning in the subcortical region?”

Nigel nodded. “That seems to be one of its functions. You give it to someone and they are able to learn faster, soak up information without effort. But it acts on the RNA as well. The RNA replicates itself through the DNA—there’s some amino acid stuff in there I don’t quite follow—so that there is a possibility, at least, of passing on the knowledge to the next generation.”

“And that’s why it’s illegal? The New Sons don’t want it used, I’ve heard.”

Nigel leaned back against the wall and rested his feet on the narrow bunk. “There’s one point where our friends from the Church of the Unwarranted Assumption may have a point. This is dangerous stuff to fool about with. Biochemists started out decades ago using it on flatworms and the like. But a man isn’t a worm and it will take a bloody long series of experiments to convince me using it on humans is a wise move.”

He paused and then said softly, “What I’d like to know is why this molecule is represented in an alien computer memory almost a million years old.”

Nikka held out her glass. “Could you give me a drop of that canniforene in fruit juice? I’m beginning to see it might have a use.”

“Quite so,” Nigel said dryly.

“There are some other points too. That long black line against the mottled background we found, that’s a DNA molecule entering a—let me look it up—pneumococcus. A simple step in the replication process, Kardensky tells me.” He put aside his papers and carefully mixed her a drink. “That’s what I was having off on, hallucinating about, I suppose, when you knocked.”

Nikka drank quickly and then smiled, shaking her head. “Interesting taste. They mix it with something, don’t they? But explain what you mean, I don’t see where all this points.”

Nigel chuckled and turned thumbs up. “Great. I’m hoping the fellows who peeked inside the packages from Kardensky won’t see it either.”

“What do you mean? They were opened?”

“Sure. All the seals were off. The canniforene was disguised, so it got through. The rest was just books, papers, photos and a tape. I don’t know what the censors—New Sons I’d imagine—thought of it all.”

“Incredible,” Nikka said, shaking her head in disbelief. “You’d hardly believe this was a scientific expedition at all. It seems more like—”

“A political road show, yes. Makes one wonder why our schedule has been so frequently interrupted.”

Nikka looked puzzled. “Our shed-yool?”

“Yes, you say sked-jule, don’t you? What I mean is that we seem to get interrupted on our shift a great deal, more than the other teams. We lost several hours today from that electric high tension, for example—”

“High tension?”

“In American that’s, uh, high voltage.” “You’ve never lost your Englishisms.” “We invented the language.”

“Say, could I have some more of that…” “So soon?”

“It has some aspects…”

“So it does. Think I’ll indulge in a nip.”

“Exotic slang. Old World charm.”

Nigel collected the papers and piled them on the floor, feeling his heels lift and float beneath him. The room was so cramped there wasn’t space for a desk.

When he lofted back to his bunk he was surprised to find Nikka there. She kissed him.

Nigel made a formal gesture, not totally explicit, currently fashionable throughout Europe. Nikka raised an eyebrow in reply. She came to him as an eddy of warmth.

“You’re enough to stiffen a priest,” he said admiringly. “Haven’t tried.”

She unfastened the brass buckle at her side. Forthright, he thought. Direct.

She hovered over him and her small, elegantly peaked breasts swayed slowly. The period of oscillation, he thought distantly, depended on the square root of the acceleration of gravity. An interesting fact. Something stirred within him and he saw her diffused in the mellow cabin light, a new continent in the air. His clothes had evaporated. She knelt and his stomach muscles convulsed as a warm wave enclosed his penis. He blinked, blinked and merged into billowing yellow cloudbanks of philosophy.

They went for hikes outside, laboring up the hillsides, slipping in the powdery dust. Nigel wanted to see Earth and he had not realized until he arrived here that Mare Marginis was aptly named, for it appeared from Earth on the very margin of the moon, only a third of it visible. To see the Earth they had to scale a steep hill. Nikka was concerned that the exercise might overtax him, but she had not allowed for his training; he panted continuously but did not slow until near the summit.

“Beautiful,” he said, stopping with hands on hips. His voice rasped over the suit radio.

“Yes. I can see home.”

“Where?”

“Yokohama. There.”

“Right. And there’s the western United States.” “Clouds over California.”

“But not Oregon.”

“Where your Mr. Ichino is?”

“Right. I wonder why I haven’t heard anything from him.”

“Ummm. Even that enormous blast crater is invisible from here. Funny. But, look, isn’t it too soon to expect results?”

“Probably. He may be snowed in, too.”

“After all, he hasn’t gotten a peep out of you, either.” “True. We’ve been so damned busy.”

“And censored.”

“Dead on,” he said with a dry chuckle.

“No way around it.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“Oh? How?”

“I’m thinking of getting an unbreakable channel through to Kardensky.”

“That will be difficult.”

“But not impossible. Maybe we can route it through someplace else.”

“On Earth?”

“No, here. The moon. How about Hipparchus Base?” “It’s only an outpost. When they struck the ice lode at Alphonsus, Hipparchus became a backwater.”