Pohl, Frederik - The Siege of Eternity

There was a quick, breathy sound of surprise from the group clustered around one screen. They had heard something.

Half the Comm Center immediately dropped what they were doing to see what it was they had heard. "It was a blip," one of the technicians was saying excitedly. "No, nothing more. Just one quick pulse, but it definitely came from Starlab. Direct? No, I guess they're somewhere out of sight in their orbit; it was relayed from Goldstone, but it was positively-Hey! There's another one!"

It wasn't one. It was two. Everyone heard them this time, and the screen showed them moving slowly across the field, two brightly jagged spikes. So Dannerman was communicating again, more or less.

That was enough for Hilda Morrisey.

She stood up, stretched, yawned and walked out of the Communications Center.

She knew what had happened, because it was what she would have done in the same case. What the closeted big brass had been doing was trying to figure some way of arranging a two-way conversation that the rest of the world couldn't hear. Apparently Starlab wasn't rigged for narrowcasting-well, it wouldn't matter if it were. Reporters weren't stupid, and they had resources of their own; undoubtedly there were forests of mobile antennae deployed all over Arlington, and probably all around Goldstone and the station on Wake and every other place where the Bureau might receive a signal. So they had worked out a simple code. The Bureau could ask a question, and Dannerman could answer by blipping his transmitter-something like one blip yes and two blips no-and maybe three blips for How the hell do you expect me to do THAT? But you had no hope of deciphering what the answers meant unless you knew what the questions had been.

She glanced at her watch. 0544. It would be daybreak in an hour or two, and she hadn't had sleep, shower or a change of clothing since she got out of the bed in her New York City apartment nearly twenty-four hours ago. The lack of sleep wasn't a big problem; the Bureau's standard-issue wakeup pills took care of it. The problem was something else. Surreptitiously she bent her head for a quick sniff at her armpit, envious of the crisp cleanliness of everyone around her. She knew why that was. They had all been able to take enough time off to get cleaned and changed. That was the way it was when you were headquarters-based, you kept spares of everything on hand in case of emergency. If she were to give up the struggle and let them hand her that damned promotion—

But that was out of the question. Hilda Morrisey didn't belong in this place. She was a field manager. She could make herself at home wherever the job took her, San Diego or New York, Berlin or Karachi. In those places she was the boss, and as long as her teams produced results nobody got in her thinning but still bravely blond hair. Here she was just one of a mob of fifty or sixty people of equivalent rank, with the top-heavy Bureau executive staff over them all.

Here, as a matter of fact, if anything she was in the way. But she couldn't leave. Not only was this whole business a puzzle that Hilda Morrisey didn't trust anyone but herself to solve, but it was her own agent who was at the core of it.

If she couldn't leave, sleep or bathe, the next best thing was to eat. She sought out the field-grade mess, sat at a table in a corner, swallowed another wakeup pill and thought.

The mess was usually deserted this time of night-or morning. Not this one. There were half a dozen others at the tables, and the graveyard mess shift, looking aggrieved at their unusual workload, was clearing up the tables that still others had left. While she was waiting for someone to take her order she popped up the table's screen and coded for the news summaries.

When a waiter approached Hilda dumped the screen and turned to give her order, but what he said was, "Excuse me, Colonel, but there's a junior officer asking to speak to you."

Hilda turned; the person waiting at the door was the interrogator, the junior agent, Merla Tepp. "Send her in," she said. And then, when the woman had come to the table, "Sit down, Tepp. I didn't expect to see you here for another couple of hours."

"I came in early, Colonel. Colonel? I'm sorry to interrupt your meal but I wanted to apologize. I wouldn't have given Agent Dannerman those crackers, except I didn't know he was scheduled for surgery."

"No, you didn't," Hilda agreed. "In fact, you don't know it now. You especially don't want to say anything about it to Agent Dannerman."

"No, ma'am. Ma'am? I'm pretty sure he suspected it."

Hilda surveyed the woman. "I'm damn sure he did; Dannerman's a fine agent. Just don't confirm it for him." She was silent for a moment, studying Junior Agent Tepp while her fingers were absentmindedly playing with the screen keys. After a moment, she said, "Actually, I would have done just what you did. Have you eaten?"

Tepp looked surprised. "No, but, Colonel, this dining room is for-"

Hilda overrode her. "What this dining room is for is for people like me and our guests. Waiter! We'll have a couple of sandwiches and salads-if it's that fruity dressing, put the dressing on the side." She waved him away and told the girl, "That stuff is too damn sweet. You might prefer to eat the salad plain. I forgot to ask if you had any special dietary needs?"

No, ma am.

"Because God knows what the sandwiches will be." She leaned back, studying the girl. Although she knew she had never seen Junior Agent Tepp before, there was something vaguely familiar about her. She couldn't place the thought and abandoned it. "Actually," she said, "apart from giving them the damn crackers, that wasn't a bad move, putting the two of them together."

Tepp looked rueful. "I was hoping that if they got to talking, they might say something useful."

"Did they?"

"Not really, Colonel. I have the recordings-"

Hilda waved away the notion of looking at the recordings. "I didn't think they would. Danno's too smart for that, but it was worth a try. Means you were using a little initiative. I see by your file that you've only been with the Bureau for a little over a year."

Merla Tepp did not show any surprise at finding that the colonel had called her file up on the table screen. "That's right, ma'am. Mostly in the field in New Mexico, after I finished training."

"Checking into the religious nut groups." Hilda nodded. "I get the impression that you've been pretty interested in religion all your life."

Tepp hesitated. "You could say I was a seeker, Colonel. I was born Pentecostal, then when that didn't seem to be giving me what I wanted I tried Catholic. Then I went to shul for a year-I guess that's why you asked about dietary requirements? Then I tried Buddhism-"

The American radical religious right came in five main flavors. There were the fundamentalists, who believe in the "verbal inerrancy" of the Christian Bible; the born-agains, who claim a personal experience with Christ; the evangelicals, who are either of the above plus a drive to convert others; the pentecostals, who are any of the above plus public demonstrations of ecstasy; and the charismatics, who differ from the others only in that they retain communion in a conventional Protestant or Catholic denomination. Generally speaking, what the fundamentalists thought the government ought to do about the possible space aliens who might have occupied Starlab was, if possible, to kill them, because they were probably the Antichrist. While most of the others thought they were probably angels of some kind and what the government should be doing was arranging for them to be worshipped. What they all agreed on was that everything the government actually was doing was wholly and unforgivably wrong.

She broke off as the sandwiches and salads arrived. Colonel Hilda waved to her to eat, doing so herself. She hadn't realized quite how hungry she was. With her mouth full, she paused long enough to ask: "And now?"