“Are you going to tell me what that is?”
“I’ll show you, as much as we know. Horace? Will you start the simulation now, please?”
The sergeant touched one button, and the inside of the truck body went dark; touched another, and the simulation tank at the front of the body lit up with a picture of Starlab, sailing along in its perpetual fall toward Earth, with its ruff of solar panels soaking up photovoltaic power to run the instruments that were no longer responding, and its huge collector eyes staring un-seeingly out at the universe.
“As you can see,” Hilda instructed, “it’s big. That’s because it was designed to let astronomers live there for weeks at-“
“I’ve seen all this, Hilda. It’s no secret. Christ, they’ve got a model of the thing in the observatory waiting room.”
“Don’t rush me, Danno. We’re coming to what you haven’t seen. This is stuff we got from your cousin’s observatory records. She had this whole segment deleted from the public bank-decided to keep it a secret, I guess-but once our technicians knew what to look for they had no trouble retrieving it. This is enhanced imaging, otherwise you couldn’t see anything at all. Watch that little thing coming in from the upper right.”
“I see it.” It was a nearly featureless lump, by comparison with the huge Starlab no bigger than a football. It slipped past the great solar vanes and gently caressed the sheathing of the main body of the satellite. It didn’t bounce away. It stuck where it touched. Then, while Dannerman watched, the object draped itself to the curvature of the shell. In a moment it was almost invisible again, except as a nearly imperceptible swelling of the hull.
“So what the hell is it?” Dannerman demanded. “Space junk?”
“Did that look like junk? It didn’t crash into the satellite, did it? Looks to me like it docked with the son of a bitch.”
“What then?” As the idea struck him: “Does it have any connection with the CLO?”
“Good question,” she said approvingly. “I ran that past the experts as soon as they dug out the clip on the object. They said no. They said this thing was way too small to be taken for a comet, although they couldn’t turn up any later observations of the object; lost it somewhere, I guess. But they didn’t exclude the possibility that this thing had come in on the CLO and been dropped off.”
“Like a probe?”
“I guess. Anyway, they’re pretty sure it is some kind of an artifact.”
“Well,” he said reasonably, “if it’s an artifact somebody would have to put it in orbit. Who’s been launching spacecraft lately?”
“Nobody. Not openly, anyway.”
“Some terrorist bunch?”
“God, I hope not. If there’s some kind of technology that can launch an artifact without anybody detecting it we need to know about it. If terrorists got hold of it. . . well, can you imagine what it would mean if the Mads or the Irish or the goddam Basques could put up their own satellites?” She shrugged expressively, then added, “But maybe that would be better than the other possibility, at that. Your cousin seems to think it’s extraterrestrial.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense, Hilda! If she thought that, why would she keep it a secret?”
“Money,” she said shortly.
“From what, damn it?”
“Oh, Danno,” she sighed, “you know what your trouble is? You just don’t think like a normal human being. You aren’t greedy enough. Think about it: some kind of technology that can produce synchrotron radiation where there isn’t supposed to be any. The brains tell me that it can’t be done without a big particle accelerator-those things that run out of subway-tunnel kind of things, fifteen or twenty miles long. So that means there has to be some pretty hot hardware up there. If it’s alien, it’s worth money to whoever finds it. For us, on the other hand, it doesn’t matter whether it’s from some weirdo ET or somebody on Earth; we want it.”
“So let the Bureau send a mission up to get it,” Dannerman said reasonably.
She shook her head. “That’s one option, sure. But maybe we can’t. It’s tricky. Starlab’s private property; your uncle paid for it out of his own pocket. Maybe we could get around that- that’s what we’ve got lawyers for, for God’s sake-but then there’s the other problem. We don’t want to alert other people to what’s going on. The goddam Europeans might send up a mission of their own if they knew we were after something; they can move faster than NASA, and you know there’s no security there. And anyway the goddam Floridians still control the launch facilities.”
“So?”
“So-probably-the final decision hasn’t been made, because too many of the top people are all tied up with the press-secretary thing-so probably we want to let her go ahead, but send one of our own along to make sure we get first crack at whatever’s there.”
“Ah,” said Dannerman glumly. “Like me, you mean.”
“Exactly like you, Danno, so you have to take Jarvas’s place. I’ve got an idea about that. Sergeant? Kill the display and let’s have some light again while we brief Agent Dannerman on what he’s going to do for us.”
As she turned to get something out of a locker, Dannerman tardily remembered the other thing that had been on his mind. He sneaked a look at his watch.
It was late. The play would be long over before he got away from the colonel. And so he wouldn’t be keeping his promise to meet Anita backstage; which meant that probably that particular problem had already settled itself.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Dan
When Danny Dannerman was eight years old, spaceflight was still a going business. Young Danny was a pretty normal American kid, too, so naturally he did a lot of daydreaming, picturing his grown-up self as one of those grand spacefaring adventurers with sharp uniforms, rows of ribbons, the look of eagles on their faces and all. But that was then. Then he was a child. As he was growing to become a man, the space program was dwindling at almost the same rate of speed-few human heroes but a lot of machines; then, as money began to run short, fewer machines, too. Even instrument launches got rarer and rarer, and the dream dried up.
Until now.
Now it had become not only real but personal, and Dannerman had never reckoned on anything like this. When he joined the National Bureau of Investigation he knew, as every rookie knew, that the work could take you anywhere in the world; but it had never occurred to him that it might someday take him right out of it. All the way home from Coney Island, in the subway train sparsely occupied by drunks and sleeping homeless people, he thought about what he had let himself in for. Climb into a giant kind of sardine can and let them lock it shut behind you. Lie there, strapped in and helpless, while a few dozen exploding tons of fireworks blasted you, hard as a hammer blow, right off the surface of the Earth. Oh, the idea was exciting, all right; but it kept him awake for an hour after, very late, he finally got to his narrow bed in Rita’s condo, and then he dreamed all night of spaceships and hideous, sharp-toothed aliens and a long, terrifying fall out of orbit. He didn’t know what final smashup he was falling to. The dreams never got that far. But all night long he was falling, falling; and when the speaker clock woke him at 6:45 (the only time he could expect to beat his neighbors to the shower) he was edgy and unrested.
And then, as he was getting ready to leave, Hilda called. “You’re awake. Good. You’ve got a busy day ahead of you, Danno. I should’ve told you there wasn’t much time. Now there’s no time at all.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about your cousin, what do you think? She got all her papers signed last night. She’s planning to launch tomorrow.”
The news beat Dannerman to the office. By the time he arrived, half the observatory staff was clustered in the reception room, all chattering. “What’s going on?” he demanded, as Janice DuPage checked his sidearm. “Where’s Jarvas?”
“In Dr. Adcock’s office. So’re Dr. Artzybachova and Commander Lin. They’re going up to the orbiter, Dan!”
“Up to the Starcophagus?” he asked, hoping to learn more than the colonel had been able to tell him.
Even in the excitement of the morning she took time to give him a reproving look. “To the Starlab, right. We don’t use that other word, remember? Anyway,” she went on, the spirit of the morning taking over again, “she’s going to make an announcement as soon as everyone’s here-that’ll be any minute now- hut that’s what it is, all right. I saw the documents myself when they came in. Isn’t that wonderful, Dr. Papathanassiou?” she added, as the old man came up to hand her his ancient Uzi.