“Screw that stuff, Danno. That’s not what you’re there for. What about the gamma-ray item?”
“Nobody brought it up, so I didn’t either. You told me-“
“I know what I told you. Have you at least made contact with Mick Jarvas and the Chink astronaut?”
“I haven’t seen Commander Lin yet at all. He’s been out of the office; they say he’s in Houston, doing something about getting ready for the repair flight.”
“I’ve got one other name for you. Christo Papa-Papathana-“
“The Greek fellow, right. From Cyprus.”
“Well, there’s a file on him, only I haven’t accessed it yet. It’s been crazy here.” She hesitated, then said, “The thing is, they found the President’s press secretary, only he was dead.”
Dannerman was scandalized. “Dead? Gripes, Hilda! That was supposed to be a strictly commercial snatch!”
“So something went sour. The word isn’t out yet; the President’s going to announce it at a news conference in the morning. Meanwhile, everything’s pretty screwed up, so it’ll be a while before I can get more. And keep after Jarvas.”
“He isn’t exactly a sociable type.”
“Make him sociable, Danno. Didn’t I tell you this assignment is priority? Do I have to teach you all over again how to do your job? And, look, see if you can get into some of the technical part of the work there. You’re not going to find much out while you’re running the coffee machine.”
Dannerman followed orders as best he could. He didn’t achieve much with Cousin Pat’s bodyguard, though he tried getting Jarvas to go with him for lunch or a beer. He got a frosty turndown. Jarvas didn’t socialize outside the office. At lunchtime he went out only with Dr. Pat Adcock, and on the rare occasions when she lunched on sandwiches in her office he preferred to go out and eat alone.
Dannerman did better with the other instruction. It occurred to him that the databanks for astrophysics were reached in just about the same ways as the ones for critical studies on American playwrights. When he pointed out to Pat Adcock that he could be more use in research than fixing squeaky drawers, she reluctantly agreed to allow him to do an occasional literature search.
That was useful. It gave him a good reason to talk shop with his coworkers, and, when Harry Chesweiler found out he spoke good German and at least halting French, the planetary astronomer was delighted. “Hell, boy,” he boomed, his mouth full of a bagel, “you can do something for me right now. Pat’s been after me to check out some little CLO she’s interested in-“
“A what?”
“A CLO. A comet-like object. I don’t know why she’s getting interested in it now-it came through a couple years ago- hut it does have some unusual characteristics. She wants to know its orbital elements for some reason, and I’ve got all this Ganymede stuff to work up. We don’t have any data for the sectors and times she’s interested in, so you’ll need to check some of the other observatories. Use my screen if you want to; I’d like to get out early for lunch, anyway.”
The good part of checking up on the CLO was that it was more interesting than making coffee, and it didn’t really require any knowledge of astronomy. With the information Chesweiler left for him Dan Dannerman began calling up other observatories to beg for copies of any plates they might have.
The main sources, Chesweiler had explained, were out of the country: the German Max-Planck Institut fur Extraterristrische Physik, which had both an optical and a gamma-ray observatory still more or less functioning in orbit-gamma rays!-and Cerro Toledo in South America, which had one that observed in the extreme ultraviolet. The woman at Cerro Toledo refused his attempts at French-he knew no more of her own language than the taxi-driver Spanish any American needed-but had good enough English to make clear that, while she was perfectly willing to transmit the plates he asked for, she wanted to be paid; Dannerman took a chance and agreed to the price she asked.
The man at Max-Planck was a cheerful youngster named Gerd Hausewitz. He was considerably more cooperative, especially because Dannerman’s German was what he’d acquired in his four years in the Democratische Neuereich. Hausewitz was about to go home for the day, he mentioned-it was nearly six o’clock in Europe-but he promised to get the plates, and Dannerman, feeling cheerful, went back to replacing the wilting flowers on the desk of Janice DuPage.
Talking German again had reminded him of the good times in Europe-of the parts of those times that were good, anyway: the cakes with mountains of schlag on the ring boulevards of Vienna, the beer in Frankfurt, the girl named Use who had invited him into her bed and then into the secret society called the Mad King Ludwig. It was the Mads he had been working on, but Use was a definitely valuable fringe benefit. Undoubtedly she was a terrorist, and almost certainly she had been involved in the group that had tried to spread cholera in the drinking water of the UN in New York, but she was also about the most beautiful woman he’d ever shared a mattress with.
Dannerman took a short lunch hour, and when he came back it was Janice DuPage, the receptionist, who checked his carry gun for him.
“How come?” he asked.
“Checking weapons is my job when Mick’s out body guarding Pat Adcock.”
“Huh. What does she need a bodyguard for, anyway?”
Janice looked at him unbelievingly. “Daniel, what galaxy do you come from? Pat’s a good-looking woman. She needs some kind of muscle to protect her from rapists and kidnappers and general scum-not counting sometimes she likes to wear some pretty high-priced rocks when she goes out. Why do you carry a gun?”
He shrugged. “Everybody does.”
“And everybody knows why.”
He persisted, “So why does she hire a retired kick-boxer who never won ,\ fight that wasn’t fixed?”
“Ask him yourself. And some Kraut’s been calling you, it’s in your voicemail.”
Gerd Hausewitz was as good as his word, but before he transmitted the plates he wanted to talk to Dannerman again. “Anything wrong?” Dannerman asked.
I lie broad face on the screen looked troubled. “Just that it’s a hinny thing, Dr. Dannerman. You said you were looking for a comet-like object, both in EUV and our gammas? But comets do not radiate in such frequencies.”
“I guess that’s what makes it only comet-like, “ Dannerman said equably.
“To be sure, yes. But my superiors were interested that you should ask, and interested also in your Starlab satellite. We understand there is to be a flight to repair it, is that correct?”
Dannerman’s expression didn’t change, but he was suddenly more interested. “Yes?”
“That would be splendid, naturally. It is a fine instrument. However, we have found nothing in the literature to describe the plans for repair. Could you perhaps send us a copy of the mission plan, if it is not too much trouble?”
“I’ll have to ask the boss.”
“Of course. But please do. We would greatly appreciate. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
Dannerman hesitated, then took the plunge. “Your gamma-ray observer-“
“Yes?”
“I was just wondering, have there been any unusual gamma observations lately? In the last couple of years, that is?”
The German looked puzzled. “Unusual? There are of course the bursters, but those occur all the time. Nothing unusual, however. Why do you ask?”
Dannerman backtracked swiftly. “It was just something someone said. It’s not important. Anyway, thanks for the plates.
After Dannerman passed the plates on to Harry Chesweiler, the German’s question stuck in his mind. He wished he knew a little more about astronomy. Did this CLO have anything to do with Starlab? Did the fact that it wasn’t a normal comet mean anything? Why was the man from Max-Planck asking about the satellite in the first place?
Colonel Hilda would want the answer to that, too, so Dannerman got into conversations on the subject as much as he could manage. He didn’t get much. No one seemed to have access to the Starlab flight plan; Dr. Adcock was handling that directly with Commander Jimmy Peng-tsu Lin. No one really knew just what had happened to Starlab, not even Dr. Artzybachova, though she gave him a frosty look when he asked.
At the end of working hours, when all the employees were lining up at Janice DuPage’s desk to collect their day’s pay before inflation knocked another two or three per cent off it, he dawdled to ask more questions, with little more success. It wasn’t that the people in line with him were unwilling to talk, but what they wanted to talk about was their own special programs-black holes, galaxy counts, red-giant stars, red-shift measurements.
When Dannerman got the conversation onto the prospective repair mission for Starlab they were happy to discuss that, too, or at least to discuss what a newly functioning Starlab would mean to their hunt for organic molecules in interstellar gas clouds, or for the “missing mass” that seemed to concern some of them. Whatever that was. By the time the line carried Dannerman to Janice DuPage’s desk he decided he didn’t even know what questions to ask until he got more information from Colonel Hilda.