A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge Page A

down the craw of the General Staff often enough. But now we're really going to do it. Think what that means. Over the last few generations, we military types have done our little desecrations around the edges of the Dark. But Unnerby's team will see the center of the Deepest Dark. What can that really be like? Yes, we think we know: the frozen air, the vacuum. But that's all guesses. I'm not religious, Colonel Smith, but...I wonder at what they may find."
    Religious or not, all the ancient superstitions of snow-trolls and earth-angels seemed to hover just behind the general's words. Even the most rational quailed before the thought of a Dark so intense that in a sense the world did not exist. With an effort, Victory ignored the emotions that Greenval's words conjured. "Yes, sir, there could be surprises. And I'd rate this scheme as a likely failure, except for one thing: Sherkaner Underhill."
    "Our pet screwball."
    "Yes, a screwball of a most extraordinary sort. I've known him for seven years—ever since that afternoon he showed up with a car full of half-made prototypes and a head full of crazy schemes. Lucky for us I was having a slow afternoon. I had time to listen and be amused. The average academic type comes up with maybe twenty ideas in a lifetime. Underhill has twenty an hour; it's almost like a palsy with him. But I've known people almost as extreme in Intelligence school. The difference is that Underhill's ideas are feasible about one percent of the time—and he can tell the good ones from the bad with some accuracy. Maybe someone else would have thought of using swamp sludge to breed the exotherms. Certainly someone else could have had his ideas about airsuits. But he has the ideas and he brings them together, and they work.
    "But that's only part of it. Without Sherkaner, we could not have come close to implementing all we have in these last seven years. He has the magic ability to rope bright people into his schemes." She remembered Hrunkner Unnerby's angry contempt that first afternoon, how it had changed over a period of days until Hrunkner's engineering imagination was totally swept up by the ideas Sherkaner was spewing at him. "In a sense, Underhill has no patience for details, but that doesn't matter. He generates an entourage whichdoes. He's just...remarkable."
    This was all old news to both of them; Greenval had argued similarly to his own bosses over the years. But it was the best reassurance Victory could give the old cobber now. Greenval smiled and his look was strange. "So why didn't you marry him, Colonel?"
    Smith hadn't meant that to come up, but hell, they were alone, and at the end of the world: "I intend to, sir. But there's a war on, and you know I'm...not much for tradition; we'll marry after the Dark." It had taken Victory Smith just one afternoon to realize that Underhill was the strangest person she had ever met. It had taken her another couple of days to realize he was a genius who could be used like a dynamo, could be used to literally change the course of a world war. Within fifty days she had had Strut Greenval convinced of the same, and Underhill was tucked away in his own lab, with labs growing up around him to handle the peripheral needs of the project. Between her own missions, Victory had schemed on how she might claim the Underhill phenomenon—that was how she thought of him, how the Intelligence Staff thought of him—as her permanent advantage. Marriage was the obvious move. A traditional Marriage-in-the-Waning would have suited her career path. It all would have been perfect, except for Sherkaner Underhill himself. Sherk was a person with his own plans. Ultimately he had become her best friend, as much someone to scheme with as to scheme about. Sherk had plans for after the Dark, things that Victory had never repeated to anyone. Her few other friends—even Hrunkner Unnerby—liked her despite her being out-of-phase. Sherkaner Underhill actually liked the idea of out-of-phase