She looked up at Pell as he finished. “So now we all knew each oilier, and I’d like to thank all of you from outside the Bureau for volunteering your time to-I beg your pardon, Dr. Evergood?”
Morning Report
To all National Bureau of Investigation units
Subject: Current terrorist alerts
Welsh Nationalist Dawid ap Llewellyn, sought in connection with the British Museum firebombing, has been reported in Mexico City, presumed en route to a United States destination. Scotland Yard requests Bureau assistance in apprehending this fugitive.
The Rocky Mountain Militia Command deadline for amnesty for convicted assassins in federal custody expired at midnight. The threatened release of anthrax agents in the Missoula, Montana, water supply has not occurred, but emergency measures are still in force.
All standing alerts remain in effect.
The surgeon had raised her hand. “I said, ‘Who volunteered?’ It was put to me as an order.”
“Which makes us even more grateful to you, Dr. Evergood,” the deputy director said, smiling tolerantly. “What we’re here for is a matter that urgently affects the national interest. You probably know some of the background, but I’m going to ask Vice Deputy Fennell to fill in some of the details. Daisy?”
The vice deputy didn’t miss a beat. “You all remember the messages from space that came in two years ago. Many people thought they were a hoax. A few did not. One of those was an astronomer named Dr. Patrice Adcock, head of the Dannerman Observatory in New York City, who believed they came from an abandoned astronomical satellite called Starlab. Dr. Adcock, by the way, is on the premises and you will be seeing her later.”
Hilda suppressed a grin as she translated for herself: what “on the premises” meant, of course, was “in one of our confinement cells.” Daisy Fennel was as slick as the deputy director himself; she had come a long way since she was Hilda’s own field manager, back when Hilda was a junior agent and the quarry of the moment was the man who had placed a bomb in the Smithsonian. And Daisy hadn’t aged very much in the process. She hadn’t gained a gram, and, Hilda observed, hadn’t touched her sandwiches, either.
“Dr. Adcock,” the V.D. was going on, “discovered some astronomical evidence that an unidentified object had entered our solar system and conjectured that it had dropped a probe which attached itself to the Starlab satellite.” She glanced at the man from the Naval Observatory. “Dr. Hou?”
The astronomer stirred himself. “Yes. At Mr. Pell’s request I made a study of that comet-like object. The data are sparse but consistent with what you just described, although I saw no probe being dropped.”
“Neither did Dr. Adcock,” Daisy agreed, “but she came to believe that one had been, and that there might be some sort of extraterrestrial technology on Starlab. So she asked the space agency to provide her with a spacecraft to visit the satellite, ostensibly with the purpose of repairing it and putting it back in service; she believed she had the right, under the original contract when Starlab was launched. The space agency was unable to grant her request-“
The translation of that, Hilda knew, was we leaned on them to slow her down until we found out what the hell she was up to.
“-because, among other reasons, no American space pilots were available. However, Dr. Adcock recruited two other pilots: one was a Floridian, General Martin Delasquez, the other a Chinese national, Commander James Peng-tsu Lin. She obtained a court order requiring the agency to provide a Clipper spacecraft to carry out the mission. In addition to herself and the two pilots, she had obtained the services of a Ukrainian national, Dr. Rosaleen Artzybachova, an instrument specialist who had helped design Starlab in the first place; Dr. Artzybachova was to go along to study Starlab’s present instrumentation.”
The V.D. paused. “At this point,” she said, “the Bureau had become aware that Dr. Adcock’s purpose was not to repair the satellite, but to see if there was indeed some alien technology now present on It, which she conjectured might be worth a lot of money.”
Marcus Pell held up his hand; now that they were coming to the good part he was taking over. “Which it damn well would be, of course. As well as being of great national interest to this country. So we took a hand. We arranged for one of our agents, James Daniel Dannerman, to go with her. This is not public information, and I caution you all not to discuss it with anyone outside this team. Go on, Daisy.”
“So,” she said, “the five of them-Adcock, the two pilots, Artzybachova and our agent-launched to the orbiter and came back. They reported that nothing had changed-no alien technology-and the satellite was not repairable. And that seemed to be the end of it.”
She looked inquiringly at the deputy director, who nodded. “That’s when it got hairy,” he said. “Dr. Artzybachova was ill when they landed, I guess because of the stress of the trip-she was, actually, a very old lady. She returned to her home, near the city of Kiev, Ukraine, and died shortly thereafter.”
He paused to look around the table. “I caution you again that what you are about to hear is highly classified, and not under any circumstances to be discussed except within this team.
Starlab, one of the largest and best of the world’s astronomical satellites, was the property of the T. Cuthbert Dannerman Astrophysical Observatory. It was designed to house visiting astronomers for weeks or months at a time, in the days when passenger launches to Low Earth Orbit were merely very expensive, not preposterous. Then it was called the Dannerman Orbiting Astrolab-the DOA for short- until the last scientist to use the place, a condensed-matter physicist named Manfred Lefrik, had the bad judgment to die there. By the time the automatic monitors reported to Earth what had happened it was far too late to save his life and, in view of the declining interest in space exploration, not worth the trouble to send up a ship to rescue his body. What the Observatory did, however, was to rename the satellite “Starlab,” because they thought “DOA” sounded too apt. Still, some people preferred to call it the Starcophagus.
“There is an organization of Ukrainian nationalists who think Ukraine should be ruling Russia, the way it used to like a thousand years ago, instead of the other way around, the way they claim it is now-I don’t know enough about Russian-Ukrainian history to get the details straight. And don’t want to, actually. Anyway, this group wants to take over Russia, and they’re willing to use terrorist tactics to make it happen.
“Of course, that’s a local matter. Normally the Bureau wouldn’t consider it an American concern. But, like a lot of these cockamamie terrorist groups, they’ve got cells here and they get a lot of their financing from Ukrainian-Americans. So the Russians asked us to lend a hand. And one of our assets in place in the Chicago cell passed on a report that the Ukrainians had autopsied the old lady… and found something weird.
“Take a look at your screens.”
It wasn’t necessary to do anything to comply. The pop-up screens were rising again at every place, and what they displayed was a sort of X ray of a human skull. Where skull joined spine there was a fuzzy object the size of a hazelnut.
“This is a slice of a PET scan,” Pell said. “It shows the thing the Ukrainians found in Dr. Artzybachova’s head. And this other one”- click-“comes from the head of our agent, Dan Dannerman. There’s one just like it in Dr. Patrice Adcock’s head-and, we think, though we can’t get at them to check, in the heads of Commander Lin and General Delasquez as well. Nothing like it has ever been found in the heads of anybody else we’ve examined, just in the people that went to Starlab and came back.”
He paused there, gazing amiably around the table, until Senator Piombero couldn’t contain herself any longer. “Well, what is it, Marcus? Some kind of a tumor?”
The D.D. shook his head. “No, it’s not a tumor. We have a copy of the Ukrainian report on the object they took from Dr. Artzybachova’s body. It’s metal. It does not resemble any human artifact. It appears to have been implanted in them while they were on the orbiter.” He paused, giving the group a sort of half smile-not so much a smile as the grimace of somebody who had bitten into something really foul. “Now we come to Operation Ananias. There seems to be a lot of lying going on. Both Dannerman and Dr. Adcock deny that anything of the sort happened. The Floridians haven’t been very cooperative, but we’ve established that General Delasquez denies it, too; we haven’t been able to get much out of the Chinese about Commander Lin.