Before Dannerman unlocked the door to his own room he checked the telltales. They were clear. No one had entered while he was out; his stock of collectibles was still intact, and so were the more important items concealed among them. He locked the door behind him and began his evening chores.
After Rita finished partitioning the condo for lodgers, her original eight rooms had become fourteen. Dan Dannerman had a windowless chamber that had once been a kind of dressing room to the condo’s master bedroom, now occupied by the Halverson family of four. His part got the huge marble fireplace, but it was the Halversons who got the direct entrance to the bath; when Dan wanted to use it he had to go down the hall.
All in all, Dannerman would gladly have traded with the Halversons. He couldn’t use the fireplace, because of pollution regulations, so it was just an annoyance that took up wall space he could have used for his personal stock of inflation hedges.
Those were the goods that people with jobs bought from the pitiful sidewalk vendors, the fixed-income people or the noincome people who were reduced to selling off their possessions to stay alive. It didn’t matter what you bought. With daily inflation running at two or three per cent, sometimes more, anything you bought was bound to be worth more than you paid for it if you just held it for a while. It was part of Dannerman’s cover to be just like everybody else who had a little spare cash, but not enough to put it into the good inflation hedges like option futures. He spent his surplus on collectibles as fast as he could. In Dannerman’s personal store he had glass paperweights, small items of furniture-all he had room for in the tiny chamber-a Barbie doll from the 1988 issue in nearly mint condition, old flatscreen computers, bits of costume jewelry, CDs, optical disks and even magnetic tapes of music of all kinds. Of course, the stock in his room didn’t represent all of his real capital, but since he couldn’t admit what his real capital was he couldn’t draw on it; the Bureau would hand it over to him, fully inflated with whatever the then-current cost-of-living adjustment might be, when he retired. Meanwhile, in times of unemployment Dannerman, too, had had to protect his cover by setting up a booth along Broadway and selling ofif goods.
He checked his watch and noted that it was time to take care of his last bit of business with the Carpezzios. He dialed the number, let it ring once; dialed again for two rings; then dialed again and waited for an answer. “Nobody’s here but me,” said the voice of their main shooter and watchman, Gene Martin.
“Shit,” Dannerman said. He wasn’t particularly disappointed, and not at all surprised-he had timed it for when none of the bosses would be in-but that was just the way you started most sentences around Carpezzio & Sons Flavors and Fragrances. “So take a message. I can’t come in, I have to go to the dentist, but tell Wally he’ll have to do the meet tonight himself.”
“He’ll be pissed,” sighed Martin. “You got a toothache?” “No, I just like to go to the dentist. See you later.” And he would see him later, Dannerman thought, but not until it was time to testify at their arraignment, and they wouldn’t be very sociable then.
That taken care of, he had chores to do. From behind a print-book set of Lee s Lieutenants-not a very good investment, really, but one of these days he intended actually to read the books-he pulled out his rods and cloths, turned on his room screen and switched his pocket phone over to the screen to check the day’s messages while he cleaned his guns.
The messages were almost all junk, of course. That was what he expected; his pocket phone was set to record everything that came in as voicemail except for the ones from Hilda. He reminded himself to add calls from the observatory to the priority list, now that he had a job, and set himself to review the day’s garbage accumulation. People wanted to cast his horoscope or sell him weapons. A men’s-clothing store was inviting him to a private advance sale of the season’s newest sportswear and impact-resistant undergarments. A real-estate office had forced-sale condos in Uptown to offer. A couple of news services urged him to subscribe; a finance company offered to lend him money at just one per cent over the COLA; in short, the usual. There were just two real calls. One was from the theater group in Brooklyn, and, although the caller didn’t give a name, he recognized the voice: Anita Berman. The other was from the lawyer, Mr. Dixler. Both wanted him to return their calls, but he thought for a moment and decided against it. Dixler could wait. And Anita Berman-
Well, Anita was a separate problem, and Dannerman wasn’t quite ready to deal with it. Thoughtfully he left the phone live, while he began cleaning his twenty-shot, considering the case of Anita Berman. She was a sweet lady; there was no doubt of that. She liked him very well, and that was for sure, too. But Hilda thought she was a security risk, and now with the new job Hilda was bound to think Anita was excess baggage.
That was going to be a pain, he thought, and then remembered that he still had homework to do. He put the cleaning materials back, coded the room screen for library access and, automatically wiping the sales messages as they came in in their little window at the corner of the screen, cued in the search he had begun in the taxi for data on astronomy, orbital instruments.
It took him only a moment to access once more the entries for the Dannerman Observatory’s wholly owned satellite, Star-lab.
There was a lot about Starlab that Dannerman had no need to retrieve from the databanks, because he clearly remembered when it had been launched. He had been only nine at the time, but his mother had taken him to Uncle Cubby’s grand compound on the Jersey shore for the launch party. The whole family was there to watch the launch on television, Cousin Pat and her parents included, as well as a dozen famous astronomers and politicians, but while the astronomers and the politicians were thoroughly enjoying the party, Dannerman’s mother had been a lot less thrilled. It was Uncle Cubby’s fortune that paid for the satellite, as it was also Uncle Cubby’s fortune that endowed the Dannerman Astrophysical Observatory a little later; and, while Starlab and the observatory were undoubtedly great contributions to astronomical science, what they represented to Uncle Cubby’s heirs was a considerable depletion of the remaining fortunes they might someday expect to inherit.
Still, there was no doubt that Starlab had done great things for astronomy in its time. When it was built there was still money around to spend on pure science. It was designed to house a few actual living astronomers for weeks at a time as they took their spectra and their shift measurements. That part had been abandoned early, when it became too expensive to ship human beings up to orbit; the last of the visiting astronomers had died up there, and was still there. No one had been willing to spend the money to reclaim his body. But Starlab’s instruments had gone on working for more than twenty years-
Until, three years earlier, they stopped. Just stopped. The transmissions ceased in the middle of a Cepheid count, and the satellite did not respond to commands from its surface controllers.
Dannerman put the screen on hold and got up to get a beer of his own from his private cooler. It all seemed pretty straightforward: satellites went out of commission every day, and the money to fix them got scarcer. Why was this one particularly interesting?
He meditated over that for a moment, sipping the beer and wiping the new messages as they arrived-until one came in, voice only but definitely the voice of a female, that said flirtatiously, “Hey, Danno! I hear you got a new job. Give me a call and let’s see if we want to celebrate.”
There wasn’t any name on that one, either, but there didn’t need to be. No one called him by the code name “Danno” but Colonel Hilda Morrisey.
A call from the colonel was not one he could answer on the open lines. Dannerman pulled down an old flatscreen converter from its place on his shelf and jacked it into his modem. Then he dialed the number he knew by heart. His screen instantly showed a bewildering fractal pattern of wedges and wriggling lines, until he cut in the 300-digit-prime synchronized-chaos decoder.
Then Colonel Hilda Morrisey was looking out at him, plump, dark, bright-eyed-just like always.