“Well, that’s where I have this problem. She wanted me to get some data for her, and I said I’d already done it. Actually I hadn’t. And now I can’t remember the specs for what she wanted, and I can’t ask her, because I’d have to admit I lied about doing it already, and I can’t look them up because they’re in her secure file. So what I wanted to ask you, Dr. Papathanassiou-“
The old man held up his hand. “Permit me to guess,” he said. He didn’t seem angry or surprised, only sorrowful. “I imagine what you want is for me to give you the access code for the secure file. Simply so you can carry out Dr. Adcock’s orders, of course. And then, I imagine, you will no longer feel it necessary to tell her about this other matter.”
“Well. . . yes. That’s about it,” Dannerman agreed, and did not enjoy the expression on the astronomer’s face.
It was a long subway ride to Coney Island, and at rush hour the trains were packed. It hadn’t taken long, after Papathanassiou left-without saying good-bye, Dannerman remembered-to access the secure file and dump it all into a coded transmission for the National Bureau of Investigation office. But it hadn’t left time for anything like a leisurely dinner-at least, not if he wanted to get to the theater early. The best Dannerman could do was to pick up some falafel and a juice box, figuring he could stave off starvation on the way, and then there just wasn’t enough elbow room in the standing-room-only subway car to eat them. They were at lower Manhattan before he was able to squirm his way to the corner of the car. He managed to eat his dinner there on the long stretch under the East River, doing his best to avoid spilling hummus on the luckier seated passengers around him, but he took no pleasure in it. For one thing, all that congested body heat had caused all the high-tech micropores in the garments of his fellow passengers to open, and the collective odor was not appetizing. More than that, there was the depressing business with Christo Papathanassiou. Dannerman could not help empathizing with what the old man must be feeling. Hilda was right about one thing anyway, Dannerman admitted to himself. He had the bad habit of letting himself feel what his victims went through. In a way, it was an asset for a professional spook. It had certainly made it easier for him to get along with, for instance, Use of the Mad King Ludwigs, not to mention even the Carpezzios. But sometimes it made him feel, well, guilty.
By the time the train had come out of the ground and begun to run on the old elevated tracks, Dannerman even found a seat. He took advantage of the time to run through his messages, none of which mattered to him, and then did what most of his fellow passengers were doing: stared blankly into space, or watched the advertisements as they circled around the display panels just under the ceiling of the car. What caught his eye was a commercial for a soft drink with a mild tetrahydrocannabinol content-the obligatory surgeon general’s warning ran in inconspicuous type under the prancing cartoon figures, along with the legend “Not to be sold to anyone under 14.” The figures, comically struggling with each other for the soda, were the seven aliens: the Sleepy with its red-shot eyes and pursy little three-cornered mouth, the Happy with its ominous shark-toothed grin, the Bashful, the Doc-all of them, in their sanitized and anthropomorphized Disney-like forms. As cartoons, the creatures were funny and not at all threatening. But suppose, Dannerman thought, suppose the real creatures were somewhere not far away, possibly as close as Starcophagus. Suppose the messages from space had in fact been warnings. Suppose the creatures were actually a clear and present danger that the world really needed to be warned about. Dannerman remembered the little song the taxi driver’s Grumpy doll had sung-“Hi-ho, hi-ho, to conquer Earth we go, we’ll steal your pearls and all your girls, hi-ho, hi-ho.” But it might not be a joking matter.
Dannerman dismissed the notion; it was simply too fanciful, and, besides, he had nearer concerns. He leaned back, closed his eyes, and thought about just what it was that he was going to say to Anita Berman.
There were a million ways of breaking off a relationship. The trouble was that they all started from the same point: you had to want the relationship to be broken off, and Dannerman was a long way from being certain of that. It was the job that mandated the break, not his personal wishes. Although the life of an NBI agent was surely full of interesting incidents, there was a part of Dan Dannerman that sometimes thought wistfully about what it would be like to live a more settled existence. To have , a home of his own, for instance. In something like a four-room apartment somewhere in the outer suburbs, with a regular job that didn’t require him to move somewhere else on short no-i ice. A home that he could share with someone else on a more or less permanent basis. With someone, for example, who was , a lot like Anita Berman. . . .
That wasn’t a useful speculation, either. He wasn’t going to resign from the Bureau, for what else would he do with his time? By the time he got to the stop for Theater Aristophanes Two he had managed to bury that line of thought along with imaginings about the aliens and the memory of his conversation with Christo Papathanassiou, and was only looking forward to an evening that was all his own.
The people who got out with him were a mixed lot; Coney Island wasn’t the worst neighborhood in Brooklyn, but it wasn’t the best either. It was not what you would consider a natural place for a theater, but the old Ukrainian Orthodox church they had converted into Theater Aristophanes Two had one great advantage. It was cheap. It was a sound building, too, because the Ukrainians had done their best to make the area livable-built a church, tore down the worst of the burned-out tenements, turned some of the vacant lots into vegetable gardens. But when the Ukrainians moved out and the immigrating Palestinians, Biafrans and Kurds moved in, the neighborhood went sour again. The new people apparently didn’t go in for farming-maybe there weren’t any farms in Palestine or Iraq? Anyway, now there was little behind the chain-link fences but burdock and trash, and the church had lost its congregation. The theater group had been able to pick it up for a nominal rental and a lot of sweat equity-it needed the sweat work, because it had been looted twice and flooded three times in Atlantic hurricanes. On warm evenings it still smelled a little like low tide at the beach. It wasn’t very big, either. Maximum seating capacity was not quite two hundred. That had its good aspects; it was easier to fill than a bigger house, and most of all it kept the theatrical unions from bothering the group… even though it also meant that Theater Aristophanes Two had no chance at all of ever turning a profit.
But that, of course, wasn’t what they were there for. The members of the group were there because theater was in their blood-or because it was what they were trained for and nothing better offered itself.
Dannerman arrived early. The lobby doors were locked; but when he knocked the “manager,” Timmi Trout, peered out of the ticket window and came out to let him in. “Dan,” she said, pleased, “hey, we thought we’d lost you. I should’ve known you’d be here for the opening, anyway. They’re still rehearsing- it’s a mess, because we open in an hour, and that idiot Bucky Korngold’s out of the cast because he got himself arrested yesterday on some damn drug charge. Can you imagine?”
Dannerman could imagine very easily. Practically everybody in the group had a day job, of course. Bucky Korngold’s had been dealing drugs; he was one of the people Dannerman had been investigating in the Carpezzio matter. He said, “Mind if I go in and watch?”
“Of course not.” She hesitated. “Anita’s going to be real glad to see you, you know. She’s been kind of worried about you . . . hut, hey, you’ll talk to her yourself. Go on in.”
He did, and took his seat in a back row as inconspicuously as possible. The cast wasn’t so much rehearsing as shouting at each other for missing cues and stepping on each other’s lines-normal enough for a final rehearsal at Aristophanes Two-and he saw Anita Berman at once. For one thing, she was the prettiest woman on the stage: slim, tall, red-haired, with a deep, carrying voice that was perfect for unmiked theater (and of no use at all in the heavily enhanced productions on Broadway).