Timothy Zahn - Spinneret

"Hello, Carmen. May I come in?"

Her smile winked out. "Cris," she said, with a cold formality she hoped covered up her surprise. "As a matter of fact, I'm expecting someone else at the moment.

So if you'll just—"

"Ah—Dr. Hafner, I presume," Perez nodded. "Don't worry, this will take only a minute." He moved forward … and somehow he was past her, strolling by the table settings with an appreciative nod.

Gritting her teeth, Carmen closed the door and stalked after him. "Contrary to popular opinion, I'm not on twenty-seven-hour duty here," she said icily. "So if you'd kindly restrict your calls to business hours—"

"Somewhere in the computer library is a copy of the Scientific Directory," he interrupted, turning to face her. "For reasons I won't go into it's been classified and hidden behind some security password. I'd like you to get me access to it."

Carmen took a deep breath. "In the first place, I'm not about to give you classified material without specific orders to the contrary. In the second place, you have an incredible gall to burst in on me without any better reason than that. I could have told you no over the phone."

He waited her out, and then lifted a finger. "In the first place, as you put it, there's absolutely nothing remotely classifiable in the Directory. Not only is it in half the libraries in North America and Europe, but I know for a fact it was accessible here a month ago. And in the second place—" He hesitated. "I don't want Meredith to know I talked to you."

She arched her eyebrows. "My, we are getting paranoid, aren't we? What makes you think the colonel would want to record your calls, let alone is actually doing so?"

He smiled tightly. "Come on, Carmen, you know better than that. I'm the thorn in Meredith's flesh, the major obstacle to his dream of making Astra America's fiftysecond state. He's going to suggest to the Astran scientists that a number of American experts be invited to help us decipher the Spinneret controls, and the only reason he's hidden the Directory is to keep me from counterproposing a more international group."

She thought about that for a moment. Perez was probably the last person in the world she was interested in doing favors for— he'd proved time and again to be a master pain to everyone around him. And yet … it did make sense to get the best people possible. The sooner they learned how to operate the Spinneret the better; and given the current situation in the Spinner cavern, there was precious little chance of any foreigner sneaking off on their own and stealing something. As for Meredith—well, if Perez had something devious in mind, the colonel had already proved he could take Perez's best attacks and use them to his own advantage.

And Peter was due at any minute.

"All right," she sighed. "Tomorrow morning I'll try to find your Directory. If I can get to it in ten minutes or less I'll copy it under 'Cris' on the general-access list.

But I'm not going to waste any more time on it than that. Clear?"

"I'm very grateful," Perez smiled, inclining his head toward her as he headed for the door. "If you'll excuse me now, I must get back to Crosse; I'm on earlymorning duty tomorrow. Good night, and thank you."

"Good night."

Closing the door firmly behind him, she leaned against it for a moment, working the irritation out of her system. Then, glancing at her watch, she headed to the kitchen to check on dinner.

She'd half expected Hafner to arrive as Perez was leaving, a confrontation that would probably have left a distinct damper on the evening. It was therefore with an odd sense of relief—odd, at least, for her—that she had to wait nearly ten minutes for Hafner's knock to finally come!

"Hi, Carmen," he greeted her with a tired-looking smile as she let him in. "Sorry I'm late."

"No problem," she assured him. "The lasagna just needs a twenty-second final heating and it'll be ready."

"Lasagna, eh? Pretty extravagant meal for a poor civil servant—getting this private apartment must have really gone to your head. The mozzarella alone probably cost a fortune in favors." He sat down at the table and peered admiringly at the folded napkin.

"Actually, it didn't, though I am anticipating things a bit." She set the micro and went to drain the vegetables. "The Rooshrike are going to start regular goods shipments from Earth as of Thursday, and I've made sure every other food package is heavy on these so-called luxury items."

"That'll be nice—I know it'll raise my morale a lot. You going to distribute it through normal military channels or set up special stores?"

"I don't know." The micro pinged and she carefully carried the steaming dish to the table. "I'd like to start moving toward a normal economic system, but Colonel Meredith thinks things are still too unstable for that. Anyway, I'm not sure a luxury food store is the way to start. It smacks too much of the foreign-currencyonly places in Moscow."

"Yeah." Almost reluctantly, she thought, he unfolded his napkin. "I wish I'd had a bottle of wine to bring, but I don't have friends in high places like you do."

"Except Gorgon's Heads."

He smiled wryly. "And with friends like them—" Shaking his head, he dug into his food.

"Rough day, I gather?" Carmen asked, pouring them each some water.

"More just dead-dull boring," he shrugged. "I'm not even doing anything aside from sitting there keeping the Gorgon's Heads quiet—it's everybody else that's photographing the control labels and computer-coding everything in sight. I never before realized how tiring it gets sitting around doing nothing."

"You can leave other people alone once they're in the tower, though, can't you?"

"Everywhere except the main control room. The top floor, I should say; we haven't actually proved it's the control room yet." He waved his fork. "But even in the other rooms no one can get to the stairs or elevators without one of us five escorting them. And heaven help anyone who tries leaving the tower itself.

Davidson tried it once and nearly got strangled by one of those tentacles."

"Ouch. I don't suppose there's any way to persuade that guard circle to go patrol the village or something."

"I'm sure there is—just as I'm sure there's a way to induct more people into the Grand Order of Den Mothers, as Al Nichols calls it. We just haven't found it yet."

"Mm." Carmen shook her head. "I still don't understand exactly why you five were able to get special status but nobody else can. It seems—well, sort of capricious."

"Not really." Hafner finished off his lasagna and helped himself to another spatulaful. "Actually, if Perez's theory is right, the Gorgon's Head system is being quite self-consistent. The five of us had made it to the control room without being challenged by either one of their own units or by anything else, so as far as the Gorgon's Heads were concerned we must have been supervisors and had to be recorded as such. But now that they've set up a cordon around the tower nobody else can get up there alone, and so no one else gets to be a supervisor."

"Leaving you five as rotating tour guides." The entire setup still seemed pretty bizarre, but if she worked hard at it she could believe it made sense. The Spinners were aliens, after all, she reminded herself.

"Actually, we're more like three to three and a half," he said. 'Colonel Meredith hardly ever comes by, and Perez and Major Barner together don't pull much more than a single shift. It almost makes me wish I hadn't supported the whole Council idea way back when—at least then Perez wouldn't always be pulling 'official business' on us and ducking out."

"If there weren't any Council, Perez wouldn't have been there in the first place,"

Carmen pointed out. "It would've just been the other four of you."