When the American Congress got tired of passing laws that instructed their successors of a few generations later- but not themselves-to balance the damn budget once and for all, they took a different tack. They simply decided not to bother anymore. It was simpler just to borrow more money. Of course, that led to the problem of paying the interest on the money they borrowed. That was a cost of government they could not escape, nor could they avoid paying for more and more police. So everything else had to be cut- notably the space program.
Ad Astro.
He could hear only fragments of what the director and the D.D. were talking about. “Yes, Marcus,” the director was saying to her deputy, now suddenly deferential, “the Prez squared it all. I wrote the Prime Minister’s order to the Calgary people myself.” An unheard question from Marcus Pell, then an answer from the director almost as hard to hear, because she looked around and lowered her voice. She seemed to be saying that they’d promised something to the Canadians. Probably a share of whatever they got out of Starlab, Dannerman speculated, and amused himself by thinking about how much the Canadians would ever collect on that promise. If he knew the director, not a great deal.
“Here it comes,” somebody said.
Dannerman caught a glint of metal over the mountains to the west. As predicted, the ACVR sailed past them, far overhead but descending as it banked and turned. It grew larger, settling down toward the ground, wobbling slightly . . . and then it was touching down at the far end of the runway. Plumes of smoke erupted from its tires as they squealed against the runway. Then suddenly the thing was screeching past them, still going a hundred kilometers an hour or better on its stilty landing gear. Behind it ground vehicles began to give chase: two of the personnel carriers filled with troops, a fire truck, an ambulance. “Get this thing moving!” the deputy director roared, and the bus driver obeyed.
The spacecraft was well ahead of them, still speeding. For a moment Dannerman feared that even the endless Calgary runway wasn’t going to be long enough for this job. But it was-barely. By the time they reached the end of the runway the clumsy old antique was sitting there, its ancient ceramic tiles cracked and smoking, and two squads of riflemen had surrounded it-to protect it from any of those expected interlopers, Dannerman assumed, until he noticed that the ring of soldiers was facing in.
As they all piled out of the bus he could hear cracking sounds coming from it as it began to cool. “Get those people out of that thing,” the director snapped.
One of the men with him cleared his throat. “It’s risky,” he said.
“The lander’s still too hot to touch; we have to wait a minute-“
“So cool it off!”
The airport fire chief rubbed his chin. “We could foam it, I guess,” he said, “but I don’t know if that would make much difference. And of course we can’t use water.”
“Why can’t you use water?”
The fireman looked surprised. “It would crack the tiles. It might ruin the vehicle permanently.”
“Now, what difference do you think that would make? Listen, half the radars in the world have followed that thing down. We’re going to have visitors in the next hour. Ruin the son of a bitch!”
When the pumpers started to pour water on the spacecraft everybody jumped back. Even so, they were splashed. The water from the hoses flashed into steam as soon as it touched the skin of the spaceship. Droplets of boiling hot water that almost instantly turned into icy cold water flew in all directions, and the ceramic tiles snapped and popped loudly.
But it worked. Within no more than a minute or two the pumpers stopped, and the airport crews trundled the wheeled steps up to the cabin door.
It opened.
The first person out of it was a real surprise to Dannerman and a far greater one to Pat Adcock. It was another Pat Adcock, grimy, worn, hunching one arm around her chest against the cold as she cautiously made her way down the steps.
The second person was a greater surprise still, because it was yet an additional Pat Adcock; with her arm around the frail and limping figure of a new Rosaleen Artzybachova. Who was alive! Dannerman had gone to Artzybachova’s memorial service himself, after she died on the way back from their trip to Starlab. But here she was, suddenly possessing a new life.
The third figure was still another Pat Adcock. That made three of them to go with the fourth Pat Adcock who was standing beside Dannerman, who moaned to herself, “Oh, Jesus! What is happening here?”
Then a chunkier, male figure appeared. It had an unfamiliar skimpy beard, but it was definitely Jimmy Lin, the Chinese pilot, sulkily staring around him and shivering in the chill. He was almost immediately followed by someone who-though also bearded, and definitely somewhat beat-up and exhausted-looked exactly like Dan Dannerman.
It was Dan Dannerman. The watching Dannerman couldn’t doubt it any longer. That was the face he had seen in his shaving mirror- less bearded then, of course-every morning of his life.
How that was possible he could not imagine; but that it was real was no longer in doubt. Those clear memories of what had happened in his trip to Starlab? They had somehow been falsified. His head had been implanted with that damn gadget the X rays showed, and his mind had been tampered with. And he hadn’t been aware of a thing.
He shook himself and turned back to the gangplank. That had been six persons; but the Dannerman on the radio had spoken of a party of nine. Who were the other three? More Dannermans? A couple of Martin Delasquezes, the Floridian copilot on the expedition? Maybe even some more Pats?
It wasn’t any of those. It was something a good deal more strange. The figure that appeared in the doorway was huge, pale, and not in any way human. It looked to Dannerman like a multiarmed golem, and it carried another creature stranger still-a dwarfish being that looked like a turkey with a cat’s head, incongruously wearing a gold-mesh belly bag.
But he had seen those things before, Dannerman realized. Drawings of them, at least; they were two of the weird aliens whose pictures had appeared in the mysterious messages from space, long before.
As that first alien made his way down the steps a second of the same species appeared. By then the ring of soldiers had instinctively dropped to their knees, their rifles zeroed in on the aliens. “Don’t shoot!” wailed a thin, high voice Dannerman had never heard before; and it was only one more surprise to realize that it came from the kitten-faced turkey that was cradled in the first golem’s arms.
CHAPTER SEVEN
For once in her life Hilda Morrisey wasn’t sorry to be in the presence of the Bureaus highest brass. There were decisions now to be made that had never come up in any field operation. The procession of improbables that had come out of the old spacecraft had simply paralyzed her decision-making faculties.
Fortunately for the people who had to make those decisions, some of the problems solved themselves. What to do about the old lady from Ukraine? The first medics to arrive took one look at her and didn’t wait for orders. In half a minute they had her on a wheeled stretcher and one of the medics was pushing it toward the open ambulance door while the other two palped and poked her from alongside.
The other human beings were all lightly dressed and clearly freezing in the cutting Canadian prairie wind-like Hilda herself. The director and her D.D. were softly debating high policy considerations, frowning, pausing to make hurried calls on their coded carryphones. They seemed impervious to cold. Hilda wasn’t. She caught the eye of one of the Mounties, the one that looked to be the most senior officer around. “Any reason we can’t get back in that bus?”
U.S. President Reported in Ottawa Airport.
Police sources confirm that the President of the United States arrived at the Ottawa airport early this morning for a top-secret meeting with the Prime Minister. The meeting is said to be related to the broadcast from the U.S. astronomical satellite, Starlab. No further information available at this time.
Toronto Star
“Reckon not,” he said, then took matters into his own hands. He hustled everyone into the bus-the Pat who had flown up from the Bureau’s flight strip plus three (Hilda counted) additional Pat Ad-cocks, Dannerman and the bearded second Dannerman (apart from the beard quite indistinguishable to Hilda’s eyes; if he was not the very Agent James Daniel Dannerman she had run in a dozen operations over the years, he was certainly so close that she couldn’t tell the difference); the hired pilot from China named James Peng-tsu Lin, looking grouchy and, for some reason, upset. . . .