She gestured toward the screen, which still displayed her report. “All I know is what it says there. I think somebody once mentioned Tipler and his idea in one of my seminars, but nobody took it very seriously, and I don’t remember anything else about it.”
“And you gave the report to the D.D.? What’d he say?”
She grinned. “He was asleep. I woke him up when I came in and what he said was, ‘Shit.’ That was all. Then he waved at me to get out, but I didn’t go.”
“You didn’t?”
“Well, I had some questions I wanted answered-like what I was doing on this plane. So I asked him. I said I knew they wanted you along to confront this other Dannerman, but what did they want from me?”
Dannerman, who had been wondering the same thing, asked, “So why did they?”
“He didn’t exactly say. He just said he’d rather I saw for myself.”
“Saw what?”
She shrugged. “He didn’t say that, either. Then when I stopped for coffee on the way back the stew told me that we were going to start coming down for a landing pretty soon, so we better strap ourselves in. Oh,” she added, fumbling for her seat belt, “there was one other thing. You want to know where we’re going? It’s Canada. They ordered the escape vehicle from Starlab to come down at someplace called Calgary.”
Calgary turned out to be really cold, and when Dannerman left the warm plane for the freezing dark outside an unexpected memory struck him. He had been there before. It had been a summer when the girl he was involved with at the time had made up her mind to go off on a fossil dig in the Alberta bone beds. Somewhere or other among his scattered possessions-most likely in one of the Bureau’s warehouses for storing the things an agent couldn’t carry around with him-he probably still had a souvenir of her. It was a pair of neckbones of some terrier-sized hundred-million-year-old dinosaur. She had had them made into cufflinks for him, just before she told him she was marrying her paleontology professor.
Dannerman didn’t remember Calgary very well, but something he had been told about its airport had stuck in his mind. It possessed a hellish long runway, because at one time it had been designated as an alternate emergency landing site for the old Space Shuttle.
Which, of course, was just what was needed for Starlab’s Assured Crew Return Vehicle.
Another plane was coming in, also a big one. It looked to Dannerman like a troop transport. He strolled over to where Colonel Morrisey was watching it land, close enough to the deputy director so he could find her if he had orders for her, far enough away not to intrude. “Okay, Hilda,” Dannerman said, keeping his voice down, “explain something to me. I understand the return ship from Starlab probably needs a lot of landing strip, but why in Canada, for God’s sake?”
She didn’t look at him. “Security, what do you think? Everybody in the world is watching Starlab now, and they’ve seen the ACRV detach itself to come down. There’ll be people waiting at every possible airport in the States.” She gave him a sidelong glance, almost affectionate. “Don’t worry. It’s all worked out with the Canadians; the President himself flew to Ottawa to make a deal with the Prime Minister. Where’s your cuz?”
“Pat went into the terminal to get warm.” Actually Dannerman was thinking of doing the same thing. There was a freezing wind coming across the bare space of the airport; he’d been lucky enough to have the anorak he was taken to the headquarters in, but even so his face was hurting from the cold. Pat hadn’t been that fortunate. When she was arrested they picked her up indoors and she hadn’t been out in the open air ever since. At the last minute one of the stews had found her a spare jacket that belonged to one of the pilots, but it was meters too big and did nothing for her bare legs.
What kept Dannerman out in the cold was the spectacle overhead. There were more stars than he had seen in years, and what looked like a handsome aurora borealis display off toward the horizon. But when he pointed it out to Hilda she said mildly, “Asshole, that’s the Sun getting ready to rise.” She paused to listen to the button in her ear, and then said, “They’ve got through reentry all right. They say ETA in thirty-five minutes.”
Dannerman felt a sudden chill of a different kind. He was that close to seeing this person who claimed to be himself. He tried not to speculate-some bizarre alien creature that had duplicated his voice as a disguise?-but it was a queasy, unpleasant feeling all the same.
Hilda was squinting at the horizon. “It ought to be broad daylight by then, and that’s what they wanted-they didn’t want to risk a night landing, but they wanted them to get down as fast as possible. But I dunno. I hope this Chinaman knows what he’s doing. Isn’t he going to be landing right into the Sun?”
“That’s not how it works,” Dannerman said, out of the superior experience of somebody who had actually once made a return flight from orbit. “They swing around to land from the east-it’s to take advantage of Earth’s rotation.” He looked to see if she was impressed. She wasn’t. “I think I’ll go use the men’s room while I can.”
When he was inside the warmth of the terminal seduced him into lingering. He spotted Pat, wanly hunched over a cup of coffee by one of the vast glass windows with her junior-agent minder alertly sitting just behind. He located the place where the coffee was coming from and, supplied, sat down next to her; she glanced up at him, fretfully curious. “What are all the soldiers for?”
Looking out at the floodlit runway, he could see what she was talking about. The troop transport had nosed up to the hardstand next to the terminal. Its clamshell bow had opened and three personnel carriers, each filled with armed infantrymen, eased themselves down the ramp, followed by a company or more of commandos on foot. The newcomers were all in U.S. combat uniforms, but a pair of RCMPs were glumly watching the spectacle. “I guess the Mounties don’t want anybody interfering,” he said.
The minder cleared her throat to attract his attention. “Can I get you anything, Agent Dannerman?”
When he took a closer look at her he recognized the woman: Merla Tepp, the one who had interrogated him. “Since when are you a stewardess?”
“Since I volunteered for the flight, sir. You know how it is. You want to be promoted, you stay where the big brass can see you.”
“You’ll go a long way,” Dannerman said absently, glancing toward the huge window. Something was moving. As it rushed past he identified it as another plane dropping toward the runway, and turned to the minder. “Hey, is that-“
She shook her head. “No, sir, it isn’t the Starlab ACRV. That plane’s from Ottawa; it’s expected.”
“Maybe I should get back outside.”
Junior Agent Tepp touched her right ear, the one with the communications button. “They’ll let me know when it’s time,” she offered. “If you want to stay in the warm, there’ll be a while yet.”
“Thanks,” he said gratefully, and then realized that it wasn’t all generosity on her part. As long as he and Pat stayed inside she could, too. He yawned and sat down, suddenly aware that the warmth had made him sleepy. Drowsily he watched as the new plane slowed, turned off the landing strip and trundled toward the terminal; it had a familiar look to Dannerman, though he couldn’t see its markings.
Airport crews were already rolling a flight of steps toward it, and the door was opening almost before the plane stopped. Three or four people got out and hustled toward the group with the deputy director. At least one of them also looked vaguely familiar to Dannerman, but he couldn’t make out the face. He yawned and closed his eyes….
He didn’t realize he had fallen asleep until he felt Merla Tepp shaking his shoulder.
“Show time, sir,” she was saying. “They want us out there now.”
It was full daylight now, though not a whit less cold. But at least the bosses weren’t standing out in the freezing winds anymore; someone had got smart enough to collect an airport bus, and they were all inside it, its heater going full blast, at the end of the runway. A squad of the commandos was deployed around it in full winter gear; all of them carrying weapons; but the soldiers waved them in when they saw the uniformed minder.
That was when Dannerman saw who it was who had just come from Ottawa. It was the Bureau director herself. The Cabinet officer. The woman whose pictures showed her always superbly coiffed, wearing what the latest fashion decreed, and perpetually busy on the highest of high-level affairs. Dannerman had not been physically in the director’s presence since she addressed his graduating class.