Waiting in this soft stirring of air, Mr. Ichino recalled the misted valley in Osaka Park, where the larks fluttered free and poised, warbling. In his mind’s eye they blended with the twisted beggars who ate parched soybeans and sang chiri-gan in pressing, littered streets. All brushed aside by the earnest business of the world; all vulnerable and vanishing.

Despite the legends of the Bigfoot, Mr. Ichino did not feel any tingling fear. He looked about him, moving slowly and calmly taking in the scene. They had human genitalia and to the right he could see a female with heavy breasts. They stopped ten meters from him and waited. Even slightly hunched over, there was dignity in their bearing.

He held the weapon out at arm’s length and stepped forward. They did not move. He placed it gently, slowly, on the snow and stepped back

Let them have it. Without hard, factual proof Graves’s story would be dismissed, or at least matters could be delayed.

Otherwise, the fanaticisms afoot in the land would fix on these battered fossils for an Answer, a Way. A spotlight of any kind would be fatal to these creatures. They would be hunted down, once Graves reached civilization with that tube.

This weapon was the final argument. It linked the Big-foot unquestionably with the aliens.

Mr. Ichino gestured for them to pick it up.

Take it. You’re just as alone as I am. Neither of us has any use for the madness of man.

One came forward hesitantly. He stooped and smoothly swept it into his arms, cradling the tube.

He looked at Mr. Ichino with eyes that flashed in the orange cabin light. He performed a bobbing, nodding motion.

Behind the Bigfoot the others made a high chittering noise that rose and fell. They sang for a moment and made the bobbing motion again. Then they turned and padded gracefully away. In a moment they were lost in the trees.

Mr. Ichino looked up. Clouds were scudding across the stars. Between two of them he could see the white starkness of the moon.

There had been someone up there who had seen it too, perhaps, buried in cold electrical memory. Did he sense that these children-ancestors were as much a part of nature as the trees, the wind?

Let them go. Nature had nearly finished its grinding work, nearly snuffed them out. But at least they could go with grace, alone, unwatched. Any wild thing could ask that much of the world.

After a long time Mr. Ichino went back inside, leaving the silence to itself.

They arrived in time for breakfast.

The snowmobile barked and sputtered to a stop and Mr. Ichino came to the doorway of the cabin, surprised, blinking back a shroud of sleep, for he had expected them much later in the day. They unloaded gifts from the hauling sled and brought them inside, carrying a cloud of busy activity with them that seemed to open the cabin and admit the sheen of morning.

They ate around the narrow table. Beef, well marbled; crisp toast; juice. Mr. Ichino was interested in the reports of rapid progress at Marginis, and they described the decoding of the star map, the now orderly dating sequence that pinned the age of the wreck, the unfolding of astronomical data that was going on. Yet for all this activity they had elected to take a brief Earthside holiday and descend into the waning of winter.

Nikka lingered over coffee. Nigel collected the plates and scraped them and returned to the table, thirsty, and stirred the orange juice, thinking.

He whipped the wooden spoon around several times, rattling it against the sides, and watched a pit form itself in the juice, a parabolic hole at the center. He withdrew the spoon. The smooth pit blunted, began to fill in. He thought of angular momentum passing fluidly from the juice, through friction, into the walls of the urn, then spreading into the hardwood table beneath, seeping outward and downward, descending into the earth itself. The yellow pit rippled and slowed. Flecks of rind whirled in the eddies. Down in the tip of it, in the center of the orbiting juice, a white scum formed. The shiny parabola and the angular momentum died together, dynamical twins. A frothy scum spread into a shallow disc.

We may sometimes see ghosts, Nigel thought, but we never see the angular momentum. Or the past.

“I’m afraid it is a bit nippy in here,” Mr. Ichino said. “Um.” Nikka nodded, sipping coffee. She had not removed her jacket.

“I used the last of my wood last night, and the fire didn’t survive until I got up. I’ll go out and chop some more.”

“No.” Nigel waved him to sit down. “I’ll do it. Need the exercise.”

“You’re sure?” Nikka studied him earnestly. “Certain,” Nigel drawled. “Where is it?” “Around on the south face. Under the trees.” “Think I’ll take a few whacks, then.”

When the door thumped shut behind him Mr. Ichino paused a long moment and then said, “Your message was terse.”

“Sorry,” Nikka said. She turned and watched Nigel through the window until he moved out of sight into the enveloping line of trees.

She settled both elbows on the table and looked at Mr. Ichino. “They still won’t let us transmit classified information. Data, that is. But they can’t very well stop Nigel talking, or me, about what happened. Not now, when we’re Earthside.”

“What did happen? Your telegram—”

“I know, I’m sorry. Nigel asked me to send it. I suppose he thought that was all he could get away with. He was probably right, too.”

“I realize you have never met me before, so you may have some reluctance…”

“Oh, it’s not that. I’m sorry, you think I’m holding back, don’t you?”

“If you cannot—”

“Oh, I can talk. But I can’t tell you very much because I don’t really know. No one does. Except Nigel.”

“Know what?”

“What the alien, well, programming was.” “Programming? Or new data?”

“Well, I call it that. Nigel says that’s not the best way to view it. Any more than mountains are trying to program you into seeing the sky, he says.”

“But your note… you read what I wrote to Nigel about Bigfoot?” Mr. Ichino leaned forward, his gaze centered on her and trying to read her precise mood.

“Yes. The business with that fellow Graves is over?” “I hope so.” He grimaced wryly.

“His men came, you said.”

“Yes. There was nothing to find.”

“They threatened you.”

“Of course.” Mr. Ichino lifted his hands lightly, palms cupped to the ceiling. “They had to. But they went away then.”

“Graves may come back.”

“He may.”

“Helicopters and infrared, sonics—Graves can track the Bigfoot down again.”

“It is possible.”

“You don’t think he will.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“He has lost something. His recovery in the hospital took a long time. He is aging. The burn drained him of his false bravado. Still, there remains…”

“You think he’s afraid of Bigfoot now?”

“He knows they have that same weapon.”

“And they’ll be skittish and cautious.”

“I have confronted him only once since. There was that feeling to him. If he’d kept all that evidence, fine— but to face them again? No.”

There was a muffled thumping at the foot of the door. Nikka leaped up like a coiled wire and flung it open. Nigel paused in midkick, balanced on one foot and with an armload of chopped wood. He clomped into the room, tilted slightly back to take the weight of his load.

“Good job you laid that tarp over the woodpile,” he grunted. “Some snow’s starting to melt. Would be a pity to muck this old wood up—it’s bone dry.”

“I took it from the shacks in the woods around here,” Mr. Ichino said. “This was a retreat during the crisis years.”

“Ah.”

Nigel dumped the wood into its hopper and brushed his sleeves free of fragments of bark. Nikka looked at him questioningly and then turned back to the table, where she spread open the map of the area they had used to find the cabin. She took out a pencil and studied the territory that stretched northward toward Wasco. “You believe they came into this valley because it was a natural route away from the blast?” she said to Mr. Ichino, who nodded.