“Hey!” he said. “Those people are in the wrong place, aren’t they? But how’d they even know about the safe house?”
“I wish I could tell you,” she said grimly, out of the side of her mouth, and that was all she did say. She was driving fast and silent, with the car on manual so she could exceed the speed limit, and she wasn’t talking. Dannerman squirmed around in the bucket seat to look at her face. It wasn’t telling much; she was driving manually, and concentrating on it. He tried his luck. “Do you want to tell me what Pell wants with me?”
She obviously didn’t. She didn’t even look at him. “Come on, Hilda. This is a Bureau car, isn’t it? So nobody’s listening in. Is it about the damn European launch?”
She gave him a sidelong look. “He’ll have to tell you himself.”
“Well, if it’s a job, don’t you think I ought to get a little time off first? I want to go to New York!”
She didn’t respond to that, either. He was silent for a moment, watching her. Her eyes were on the road and her face told nothing. Which told Dannerman a lot. She knew exactly what the deputy director wanted him for, and she didn’t think he would like it.
Pacific States Ready to Share Defense Burden.
At an emergency meeting of SOPACTO heads in Papeete, Tahiti, all the states of the Pacific region reiterated their demand for complete sharing of all information received from the Starlab orbiter, and urged that the flight take place as soon as possible. Prime Minister Gribforth declared, “Australia will place all of its scientific and technical facilities at the disposal of the United Nations in the analysis of Scarecrow technology, but it must not be a European-American monopoly. The states of the Pacific region will not be excluded from this venture.” ________________-The Bulletin, Sydney, Australia
He decided that it had to be the European space launch. He tried a different tack. “What I don’t understand,” he said chattily, “is how the French have the balls to try to take Starlab when they know we’ve got muscle up there. Do they think we’re bluffing?”
Hilda sighed. “We just might be,” she said moodily. “The D.D. checked it out. The Pentagon guys admitted that their best estimate for any of our military satellites was that it had a ten percent chance of still being operational. And we only have two that can be maneuvered into position.”
“Hell,” Dannerman said, startled.
“Exactly, Danno. That’s not all of it, either. Ours aren’t the only birds up there. The Russians have two. So do the Chinese. And NASA thinks theirs may be a little more reliable.”
“Hell and damnation! What are you telling me, Hilda? Did those people build better war satellites than we did?”
“Better, no,” she said judiciously. “The way I understand it, ours were a lot more sophisticated. They could deal with four or five more targets at once, and do it a lot faster. But that made them a lot more complicated, and those crude old Soviet jobs just had fewer things to go wrong with them as they aged.”
She slowed down at the entrance to the Bureau’s complex. While the guard was checking their vehicle for possible explosives someone might have planted in it, she said, “So we’re trying a different tack. We’re trying to get the UN in on the embargo; that would mean getting the Russians and the Chinese to join in.”
She waved to the guard, who was signaling the all clear. As she started up again, Dannerman asked: “Are they doing it?”
“Well,” she said, “not really. They’re bargaining.”
“So what you really need is time. Like having someone go to Kourou and kind of slow them down,” he guessed. “Maybe someone like me?”
She didn’t answer that. Unless a faint smile was an answer; but in Dannerman’s opinion it was all the answer he needed.
But it turned out to be the wrong answer. When the deputy director at last saw Dannerman-half an hour after Hilda had gone in ahead, leaving Dannerman to sit in a tiny conference room to think about how he might handle the problem in Kourou-he discovered that Pell wasn’t at all interested in discussing the French threat. “The Eurospace launch? No, that’s being handled, Dannerman. You’re not involved. What I want to talk to you about is Rosaleen Artzybachova.”
Dannerman was actually startled. “But she’s no problem, is she?” “I’m afraid she is.” Pell paused, looking at his screen, making a few changes. “I understand you want some time off, but that’s all right. It’ll take a day or two to get our ducks in order. Hilda will brief you, and then, Dannerman,” he said, smiling pleasantly, “that’s where you come in. You’re going to Ukraine.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Back in her own familiar environment, and especially with that hideous spidery thing out of the base of her skull, the recently debugged Pat Adcock felt kilograms lighter and kilometers happier. If there was any little fly in the ointment, it was simply that there were too many of her.
That was a major management problem for the Dannerman Astrophysical Observatory. When the four of them finally presented themselves to the staff Pat expected an exciting time. The whole situation was totally bizarre even to herself, and at least she had had the time to try to get used to it. What the innocents at the Observatory might make of it she could not imagine, but certainly they would be baffled and confused and excited and-
They weren’t. Well, they’d been glued to their screens, like everybody else in the world, and they knew all about how the bunch of them had been abducted to some galactically distant penal colony and what happened there. When Pat explained the dress code that they could use to tell them apart Janice, the receptionist, giggled. (“It’s just that I never thought yellow was your color, uh, Patrice,” she explained.) And Pete Schneyman, who had been in charge of the Observatory during her enforced absence, asked stiffly, “Which one is going to be the director?”
All four of them opened their mouths, but Pat was the first to speak. “We all are,” she said. “We’re going to take turns being physically present here, but there’ll only be one of us at a time. We drew lots, and Pat One will go first.”
“It sounds like a pretty lousy arrangement to me,” the ex-temporary director observed.
It sounded that way to Pat, too. She thought about it all the way home-alone, for a change; Pat Five had an appointment with her doctor, and Patrice with a beauty parlor. Then, when she arrived in front of her apartment house and got out of her Bureau-supplied limo with its Bureau-supplied armed driver and its Bureau-supplied personal guard, she found two men waiting on the sidewalk, bundled up against the snow.
They didn’t look to her as though they were there by accident. They didn’t look that way to the bodyguard, either. “Wait a minute, please,” the bodyguard said to her, even before the men moved toward the car.
The driver leaped out to join her, his hands on his gun. For a moment Pat thought there was going to be a firefight right before her eyes, but the shorter of the men was holding up some sort of document. The two Bureau agents studied it, asked a few questions and muttered among themselves. Then the bodyguard turned to Pat. “He’s a diplomat,” she said. “From China. He says he just needs to talk to you for a minute.”
Pat hesitated, but the two Bureau operatives had their guns in their hands now, and the waiting men showed no signs of hostility. Indeed, they had no violent intentions. “Dr. Patrice Adcock?” the smaller one said. “My associate has a summons for you. Thank you. That’s all.”
They turned and walked away, leaving Pat holding a thick sheaf of folded paper. The man was a simple process server. And when Pat looked at the paper she discovered that she had been served with a suit. Commander James Peng-tsu Lin, plaintiff, was demanding of Dr. Patrice Adcock, defendant, that she proceed forthwith to the People’s Republic of China so that the child she was carrying could be born as a citizen of his father’s country.
She thought of telling them they had served the wrong, i.e., the nonpregnant, Dr. Pat Adcock, but what was the point? She sighed. “Thank you,” she said politely to the Chinese. And to her bodyguards, “It’s all right. Let’s go upstairs.”
There were too many of her for the apartment on the upper East Side, too. It had been comfortably roomy for Dr. Patrice Adcock, but with four Dr. Patrice Adcocks living there it was pretty damn cramped.
The Pats had done the best they could to resolve the difficulties. They’d drawn lots for sleeping quarters, and Pat considered she had done well on that draw. She hadn’t got her “own” bedroom, no. That was the one with the canopied bed and the hot tub, and it had gone to Pat Five as a courtesy to approaching motherhood. The two guest rooms had gone to Patrice and Pat One. Pat herself had the never-used maid’s room. Small, yes; remote from the rest of the apartment, sure; but the maid’s room not only had its own private little bath, it had a full-function screen monitor. The original purpose of that, Pat supposed, was so that the maid could do her meal planning and record-keeping without interfering with her employers.