“Gregg wants you in on the meeting up here,” she told him without preamble. “Can you get up right away?”
Hunt sensed that she was pushed for time. “Give me two minutes.” He cut the connection without further ado, consigned Livermore to the uncharted depths of the Navcomms databank, told Ginny to consult Duncan if anything desperate developed during the rest of the day, and left the office at a brisk pace.
chapter three
From the web of communications links interconnecting UNSA’s manned and unmanned space vehicles with orbiting and surface bases all over the solar system, to the engineering and research establishments at places such as Houston, responsibility for the whole gamut of Navcomms activities ultimately resided in Caldwell’s office at the top of the Headquarters Building. It was a spacious and opulently furnished room with one wall completely of glass, looking down over the lesser skyscrapers of the city and the ant colony of the pedestrian precincts far below. The wall opposite Caldwell’s huge curved desk, which faced inward from a corner by the window, was composed almost totally of a battery of display screens that gave the place more the appearance of a control room than of an office. The remaining walls carried a display of color pictures showing some of the more spectacular UNSA projects of recent years, including a seven-mile-long photon-drive star probe being designed in California and an electromagnetic catapult being constructed across twenty miles of Tranquilitatis to hurl lunar-manufactured structural components into orbit for spacecraft assembly.
Caidwell was behind his desk and two other people were sitting with Lyn at the table set at a T to the desk’s front edge when a secretary ushered Hunt in from the outer office. One of them was a woman in her mid- to late forties, wearing a high-necked navy dress that hinted of a firm and well-preserved figure, and over it a wide-collared jacket of white-and-navy check. Her hair was a carefully styled frozen sea of auburn that stopped short of her shoulders, and the lines of her face, which was not unattractive in a natural kind of way beneath her sparse makeup, were clear and assertive. She was sitting erect and seemed composed and fully in command of herself. Hunt had the feeling that he had seen her somewhere before.
Her companion, a man, was smartly attired in a charcoal threepiece suit with a white shirt and two-tone gray tie. He had a fresh,
clean-shaven look about him and jet-black hair cut short and brushed flat in college-boy fashion, although Hunt put him at not far off his own age. His eyes, dark and constantly mobile, gave the impression of serving an alert and quick-thinking mind.
Lyn flashed Hunt a quick smile from the side of the table opposite the two visitors. She had changed into a crisp two-piece edged with pale orange and was wearing her hair high. She looked distinctly un-“groped.”
“Vie,” Caldwell announced in his gravelly bass-baritone voice, “I’d like you to meet Karen Heller from the State Department in Washington, and Norman Pacey, who’s a presidential advisor on foreign relations.” He made a resigned gesture in Hunt’s direction. “This is Dr. Vie Hunt. We send him to Jupiter to look into a few relics of some extinct aliens, and he comes back with a shipful of live ones.”
They exchanged formalities. Both visitors knew about Hunt’s exploits, which had been well publicized. In fact Vie had met Karen Heller once very briefly at a reception given for some Ganymeans in Zurich about six months earlier. Of course! Hadn’t she been the U.S. Ambassador to-France, wasn’t it, at the time? Yes. She was representing the U.S. at the UN now, though. Norman Pacey had met some Ganymeans too, it turned out-in Washington
-but Hunt hadn’t been present on that occasion.
Hunt took the empty chair at the end of the table, facing along the length of it toward Caldwell’s desk, and watched the head of wiry, gray, crose-cropped hair while Caldwell frowned down at his hands for a few seconds and drummed the top of his desk with his fingers. Then he raised his craggy, heavily browed face to look directly at Hunt, who knew better than to expect much in the way of preliminaries. “Something’s happened that I wanted to tell you about earlier but couldn’t,” Caldwell said. “Signals from the Giants’ Star started coming in again about three weeks ago.”