There was an undertone here that Pat couldn’t identify. She wasn’t enjoying it. “What’s going on here, Jimmy?” she demanded.
He jerked a thumb at Dannerman. “Ask him.”
“Hell,” she said, and marched over to Dannerman’s side. “Dan, what’s Jimmy talking about.”
He stood up and popped a cup of wine before he answered. “How do I know?”
“I think you do know. Why does he call you a spook?”
Dannerman shrugged. “Maybe because I was in protsy in college-you know, the Police Reserve Officers Training Corps.”
“Not good enough, Dan. That was a long time ago. What about now?”
He took a long pull of the beer before he answered. Then he sighed. “All right, Pat. I don’t suppose it matters anymore, and it’s the truth. I work for the National Bureau of Investigation.”
It was no more than she had guessed, but she felt adrenaline shock flood through her body. “You’re a spy!”
“I’m an agent of the Bureau, yes. I was ordered to find out what was going on with you and Starlab-“
“Dan!”
He looked remorseful-no, not remorseful; stubborn and sullen. “Well, Jesus, Pat, what did you expect? This was major stuff. As soon as the rumors got out, the Bureau had to find out what you were doing.”
“Bastard!” she said, scandalized. “I wouldn’t have believed it of you! You come to me with a hard-luck story about needing a job, and all the time you’re a goddam spy. Honestly, Dan, what did I ever do to you? Are you still pissed off because you didn’t get your share of Uncle Cubby’s money?”
“It wasn’t a personal matter. I had orders.”
“Orders to do what? To steal whatever there was on Starlab for the damn Feds?”
He said uncomfortably, “Well, I suppose that’s one way you could put it.”
“Is there some other way? So tell me, just how far were you prepared to go for the good old Bureau, Dan? Liquidating me if necessary, for instance?”
“Oh, hell, no, Pat. What kind of a person do you think I am? I’ve only, uh, shot two people in my life, and I couldn’t help that; both of them were doing their best to kill me at the time. Nobody ordered you liquidated.”
“And if they had?”
“They wouldn’t,” he said stubbornly, and that was all he would say.
When Pat curled up on the floor with her face to the wall and her eyes shut tight, she didn’t go to sleep. She wasn’t planning to. She just wanted to be alone for a bit, as alone as you could get in this place. The National Bureau of Investigation! Everybody knew what that was all about- cloak-and-dagger stuff, with all too much emphasis on the dagger. Now her own cousin turned out to be one of them.
It wasn’t just Dan Dannerman, she told herself, feeling abused. Every last one of her comrades had in some way betrayed her trust-Delasquez and Jimmy Lin trying to hijack the goodies on Starlab for another country, even Rosaleen Artzybachova hitting her up for a bigger share of the pie. If Pat Adcock had been a weeping woman she would have allowed herself a few tears of self-pity. As she wasn’t, she simply went to sleep.
When raised voices woke her, nothing had improved. She lay with her back to the room, unwilling to turn around and join the others, while Martin and Jimmy Lin were arguing about the food. “But it is nothing but party leftovers,” Jimmy Lin was complaining. “It’s the stuff nobody wants to eat. What kind of people would have ordered all this stuff?”
Then there was Rosaleen’s voice, patiently trying to keep the peace: “There were astronomers from a dozen different countries on Starlab in the early days. I imagine each chose the sort of menu they preferred.”
“And ate all the good stuff, and left the remainders for us.”
Then Martin’s voice, deeper but equally irritated: “I am tired of breaking my teeth on bricks of filthy, uncooked Russian stew.”
Rosaleen offered, “I’ve told you, if you do what I do and soak it for an hour or so it gets softer. A little.”
“And then it is cold grease.”
She didn’t try to deny it. “Try the fruit compote, at least.”
“I’ve had enough of the fruit compote,” Jimmy Lin said. “Who knows how long this stuff has been in storage, anyway?” Pat turned away from the familiar bitch session. She had her own feelings about the dehydrated beef (or was it goat?) Stroganoff. She found herself thinking wistfully of a fried-egg sandwich, perhaps with a couple strips of crisp bacon, on whole-grain toast. Or a fresh salad, lettuce with the dew still on it, perhaps some slices of avocado, maybe even a few curls of green pepper. . . .
There wasn’t any help for it. She got up and headed for the food, ignoring her companions. That wasn’t hard to do. Rosaleen had begun quietly exercising, off by herself, and Martin and Jimmy had moved away to whisper together over the water tank. Only Dannerman was by the larder, and he looked apologetically at her but didn’t speak.
Neither did she. She was not yet ready to talk to the duplic-itous spy, Dan Dannerman. Ignoring him, she took her time studying the available choices, reading labels, peering at the foods that were visible through glass or plastic. None of them looked attractive, but there were many she hadn’t yet tried. She settled on a packet of irradiated chili; at least it would not require soaking to be chewable.
Martin had been right; cold, it was fairly nasty. She had turned her back on Dannerman as she ate, but was not surprised to hear his voice. “Are you still mad?”
She didn’t answer. “Because,” he said, “I’ll apologize if you want me to.”
She didn’t answer that, either, and apparently he gave up. When she finally peeped around he was over with Rosaleen, doing his best to learn some of her exercises. That was another annoyance for Pat. It had been on her mind to do the same thing, because she could feel herself gaining fat on their preposterously unbalanced diet, but how could she do that while he was there?
The worst part was that it seemed all four of them had decided that Pat was in a bad mood and better left alone. As long as they were ignoring her how could she effectively shun them? She went back to the larder, for lack of anything better to do . . . and was glad when, while she had almost decided to try some more of the damned fruit compote, the patch on the wall suddenly fuzzed and bulged and Dopey came in, oddly without Docs. He was pushing ahead of him a thing that looked like a portable top-loading washing machine. It moved easily on spherical bearings. “This device is to heat your food, as you wish,” he said. “If you put things into it they will become hot. This is not the device from your Starlab, however. That object was far too primitive to be of any use here.”
They all clustered around while he demonstrated the use of the cooker. Pat hadn’t forgotten that she wasn’t speaking to any of the others, but put that matter on hold for a while. Operating the cooker looked simple enough. You put things in from the top and left them for a while, and in a minute or two they were hot. When Rosaleen reached to take the container of spaghetti and meatballs out Dopey stopped her. “No, be careful! You will do yourself harm if you put a part of your body into the device. Use these.” He plucked a pair of sticks from under one arm and showed them how to lift the packets out without putting their hands in the cooker. Rosaleen eagerly popped the packet open and sniffed the steam that was coming out of it. “I think it’s actually too hot to eat!” she said happily.
“It will cool if you wait for a moment,” Dopey informed her. “In any case, this instrument will be useful when you have renewable food supplies in the next phase.”
Dannerman was suddenly alert. “What next phase? What’s going to happen?” Silence. “Well, when will it happen?”
Dopey looked evasive-or simply uncertain; how could you tell with a kitten-faced chicken? “That is unclear. That sequencing is not my decision to make. There are also-“ He hesitated. “-some technical problems which have hampered communications.”
Pat asked the question for all of them. “What technical problems are you talking about?”
Dopey turned his large kitten eyes on her, then did again the thing with the muff: jammed his hands into it, gazed vacantly into space for a moment, then said, “There are bad people who would harm our project. I may not say more at this time.”
“What kind of bad people?” No answer; only that continued stare. Pat bit her lip. The alien was at least answering some questions now, but she was running out of the right questions to ask and Dopey was volunteering little. Nor was she getting much help from her fellow prisoners. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed that Delasquez and Jimmy Lin, though they seemed to be listening intently, were strolling slowly around behind the alien. It crossed her mind that they were up to something.