Richard H. Noonan

Richard H. Noonan is the supervisor of electronic-equipment supplies for the Harmont branch of the International Institute for Extraterrestrial Cultures (IIEC), and a covert investigator of the Zone’s smuggling economy. His significance lies in the split between his official position and his private work: a practiced, deferential functionary, he is also trying to catch Redrick Schuhart, and his encounter with Schuhart Senior’s moulage exposes how badly the Zone has unsettled the ordinary categories on which his work depends.

Identity and Official Position

Noonan’s institutional title places him among the administrators responsible for equipment and supplies at the IIEC’s Harmont branch. The title suggests the routine machinery of a research organization, but the plot attaches it to a more dangerous responsibility: understanding the flow of material taken illegally from the Zone. His official role gives him access to the institutional world in which such activity is reported and investigated, even as the subject draws him toward Redrick Schuhart and the human consequences of the Zone.

His manner at his study desk is an accomplished performance of attention. Noonan doodles on a legal-size pad while smiling sympathetically and nodding his bald head at a visitor, but he is not listening. He is waiting for a telephone call. The small physical details make his politeness feel less like engagement than a screen: the visitor receives the signs of sympathy while Noonan’s attention remains fixed elsewhere. His professional composure depends on managing appearances, though the private thoughts revealed in later scenes show how little ease that composure affords him.

Report and Anticipated Reprimand

When an interlocutor tells him that his report made an extremely favorable impression upstairs, Noonan answers only with a subdued murmur. Internally, he anticipates bad news. The praise does not reassure him; it sounds like the prelude to a familiar institutional maneuver, and he braces for what he thinks is coming. His response makes the gap between official language and private expectation sharply visible: approval reaches him as a warning because he is already waiting to be blamed.

That expectation shapes the next exchange. Noonan silently urges the speaker to stop delaying and deliver the reprimand, while trying to work out where the coming attack will land. The scene gives the reader access to his anxious calculation without making him the narrator: the institutional conversation proceeds outwardly, while his private consciousness supplies its tense, impatient counterpoint. His suspicion that an accusation is imminent is not confirmed in the supplied episode; what is established is how thoroughly he anticipates it, even in the face of praise.

Investigation of Redrick Schuhart

Noonan’s pursuit of Redrick is practical and tactical. He parks outside the house where Redrick lives and sits in his car planning an opening gambit. He removes the so-so, the long-lasting battery, before getting out; only then does he notice that the house looks uninhabited. The sequence turns preparation into hesitation. Noonan has equipped himself for the encounter, but the empty-looking home changes the situation before he can put his plan into action.

This approach places him in direct opposition to Redrick, though the evidence here does not show what Noonan’s intended trap is or what he ultimately does at the house. His language about finding the best way to trap Redrick conveys the investigative pursuit, while the scene’s concrete steps—parking, planning, removing the battery, discovering the house’s appearance—keep the conflict grounded in procedure rather than an abstract contest between investigator and stalker. The planned opening gambit meets an immediate uncertainty: Redrick’s home offers no clear sign that its occupant is there.

The Moulage and the Limits of Professional Control

Noonan’s most revealing encounter comes when he is introduced to Schuhart Senior’s moulage. The introduction identifies the figure as Redrick’s father, but Noonan’s mind has curled into an “impenetrable ball.” He grins broadly, waves, and addresses the moulage as though it were a person he had just met, asking after its well-being and implying that they have met before. His greeting is not a knowing joke: it is an effort to sustain ordinary social behavior in a situation that has made ordinary recognition impossible.

The moment brings together Noonan’s defining habits and their limits. He can perform sympathy for a visitor, rehearse a strategy in a parked car, and anticipate the hidden logic of an official conversation; faced with a dead man’s likeness treated as a presence, he falls back on the same outward fluency. The grin and greeting preserve the form of civility while betraying a mind unable, or unwilling, to take in what it is seeing. The moulage is not merely a strange object in his path. It makes the Zone’s disruption of the human and the inanimate impossible to keep at a professional distance.

Narrative Role

Noonan’s scenes are built around a contrast between visible behavior and inward attention. At his desk he appears to listen but is waiting for a call; during the review of his report he hears praise but expects blame; at Redrick’s home he arrives prepared to act but discovers a house that seems empty; before the moulage he offers a greeting whose social form has outlasted its ordinary meaning. Each reversal lets the reader see more than Noonan shows to the people around him, without resolving everything he fears or plans.

As an investigator of Zone-related smuggling, Noonan connects the institutional response to the intimate life of Redrick Schuhart. Yet his encounters do not make him a detached observer: his calculations, apprehensions, and strained performances reveal a man working inside a system whose phenomena resist ordinary administrative understanding. The comedy of his polite greeting to a moulage is consequently edged with unease. Noonan keeps speaking as if the familiar rules still hold, at precisely the point when the world before him has made those rules uncertain.