Against Infinity by Gregory Benford Read Free Book Online Page B

they’ll process it.”
    “Uh-huh.” He went to get more coffee. When he came back, his father had unpacked a locker from the equipment room and was laying out some rifle antennas on a mess table.
    “You had this all ready.”
    “ Por cierto . Brought it out from Sidon.”
    “I’m that easy to read, huh?”
    “At times.”
    “Goddamn, I can’t do a single thing without—”
    “Son, you talked of little else these months. I do not want you to think you must sneak off and do it. And your mother, she is very concerned.” He patted Manuel on the shoulder gingerly, defusing the tension between them with the gesture, reminding them both of the short time ago when they had wrestled on the living-room carpet, when physical contact between them had none of the edge it carried now. He smiled, his lush black moustache catching the light. “Every boy knows he is immortal, but his parents, they are not so sure.”
    Manuel nodded. His irritation at sharing this dissipated. He listened carefully to the description of how the directional antennas worked, how you had to keep the impedance matched when you took them from the warm cabin into the cold of the plains, how the induction coils could freeze up on you if you kept them on the shaded side of your body for a while. Petrovich volunteered some advice, and some other men picked up the antennas idly, as if remembering something they had felt and done long ago, and then put them back down and returned to their card games or arguments or simply to drinking their throat-searing ration around the heater, staring at the blue-white filaments that glowed like the center of a star.
    He went out with the gear the next day, and the next He ranged to the south, where he surprised a flock of mutant crawlies and got most of them before they could scatter. The antennas worked all right, and Satellite Relay gave him two-second response. But he detected nothing moving under the wrinkled hills. He was learning the small tricks and lore of stalking, absorbing it without thinking. He could tell now at a great distance if a small, skittering form was a mutant, or if a blur of tracks made by passing rockjaws was an hour old or a week, or whether something was hiding in the lee of a rock outcropping, where the ruddy snow gathered. His suit made little noise, and so he became used to the eternal silence of the moon’s rawness, marred only by the thin whisper of winds that were slowly claiming the land. A week passed. He returned to camp later and later, knowing the men were watching him with a certain nostalgic affection, seeing him shuffle in each time with a report of how many scooters or crawlies sighted, how many slam, all for the Bio update, though knowing that the central fact would go unmentioned because there was nothing to say about failure. Decades of research had shown that the Aleph might come to a hunting zone because of the increased activity, but it was a weak correlation and many doubted it. The boy might go the rest of his life without his luck turning.
    One late afternoon he came in early for the first time, toting the antennas listlessly, and passed by a walker where Old Matt was replacing a blowoff valve. Manuel waved to him silently and had turned away when the man said quietly, “I don’t think that’s the way.”
    Manuel whirled, something unleashed inside him, and said, “How come? Just the looking can’t change what it does.”
    “Maybe so. I’m not so sure.”
    “Well, my father says he picked it up three times this way, when he was trying. Three times.”
    “And saw it, too.”
    “ Sí ,” Manuel said, his conclusion stolen.
    “Those antennas, they’ve got resonant frequencies themselves, you know. Something wants to find out if they’re around, it can send out a little signal. If your circuit starts to ring, that’s a giveaway.”
    “Why’d it do that?”
    “Why isn’t the right question. No point in asking that. Maybe it got used to those scientists