To Dannerman’s surprise, he saw the deputy director just leaving the room as they arrived. Hilda Morrisey was inside, looking strangely thoughtful.
“Is something wrong?” Dannerman asked.
She considered the question. “Wrong? No. The Security Council has taken a vote, though, so what you guys were doing in the G.A. doesn’t matter much anymore. They’ve okayed the Eurospace launch, only it’s a UN thing now and one American and one Chinese is going along. So I’ll be seeing you people at your Observatory.”
“Why?” Pat demanded, suddenly suspicious.
“Why? So you can give me a crash course on what Starlab is like. See, I’m going to be the American.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
While Pat was trying to get dressed for work the next morning the atmosphere in the apartment was grouchy. Patrice was complaining about the wasted hours at the UN and Pat Five was grousing about, well, everything: she hadn’t slept well, she didn’t feel well, she wished the damn kids would get themselves born and get it over with . . . and, she added, the smell of the damn bowl of chili Rosaleen was placidly spooning into herself in the kitchen was making her physically ill. Rosaleen was apologetic. “I’m afraid I got a taste for the stuff while we were captives. Do you know, there isn’t a decent bowl of chili to be had anywhere in Ukraine. I won’t do it again.”
“Oh, it’s not just that,” Pat Five said, cross but repentant. “It was the smell of the Docs yesterday that started me off, probably. Or just being so damn pregnant and miserable.” She looked it, too; Pat and Patrice exchanged glances. “Anyway, I think I’m going to stay home today, if it’s all right with everybody.”
“I’ll stay with you for a while,” Patrice decided. “You two go on ahead; I can work from my screen here.”
On the way downtown Pat and Rosaleen took a cab-paid for by their Bureau guards, because they didn’t want to risk their charges in the subway. For that much Pat was grateful; money was an increasingly urgent problem, with four Pat Adcocks to share what really hadn’t been quite enough capital for one. Something was going to have to be done about that.
Then, as they arrived at the midtown office building that housed the Dannerman Astrophysical Observatory, she saw Dan Danner-man strolling toward them, arm in arm with a tall, redheaded woman, and inspiration struck. Abruptly Pat knew what that “something” might be. Suddenly more cheerful, she sent Rosaleen up ahead of her and waited for them at the door.
Dannerman saw her, nodded amiably and paused to whisper to the woman. She giggled, kissed him, waved to Pat and turned away. Dannerman joined Pat. “Am I late again, boss lady?” he asked cheerfully.
Full of her new idea, she shrugged the remark off. “Dan, you know a lot of lawyers, don’t you?”
His expression sobered. “Have you got a problem, Pat?”
“You bet I have. A lot of them, but the one I’m thinking about is money. Starlab belongs to us! Well, to the Observatory, but that’s close enough. We should have some claim to whatever the UN flight finds there, shouldn’t we? So I need to talk to a lawyer. I don’t want to use Dixler-“
“Right,” Dannerman said immediately; they both knew the old family lawyer who had handled Uncle Cubby’s estate.
“-and the Observatory’s lawyer is real good on leases and employment contracts, but I think I need somebody with a little more shark blood in his veins for this.”
Dannerman pondered for a moment. “Let me see what I can do,” he said at last. “I’ll make a couple of calls.”
Upstairs, Brigadier Hilda Morrisey was already closeted with Rosaleen Artzybachova, studying the blueprints of the Starlab orbiter. She wasn’t in sight, but her mere presence had made a change in the climate of the Observatory. The Bureau agents were sitting up straighter and moving faster, and they had infected everyone else. Pete Schneyman was demanding Pat’s attention to the previous day’s harvest of observations, Janice DuPage, sulky because she had had to cancel out on the vacation cruise she had planned, was snapping at Dan Dannerman for preempting a corner of the waiting room as his command post. Even mild old Christo Papathanassiou waylaid Pat on her way in, bristling. “I do not protest sharing my office with the policewoman, Merla Tepp. I understand the urgency of the situation. But must she use my terminal so very much of the time?” By the time Pat had run that gauntlet she was glad to retire to her own office and close the door.
In a physical sense, the only thing that had changed in Pat Adcock’s office was the pictures on her wall. In the old days, before the Scarecrows and the Horch, what the wall pictures usually displayed was the familiar Horse head Nebula, or Saturn’s rings or even the looming shape of Starlab. She kept such pictures on the wall because they were pretty to look at, and even for a more practical reason. They were a reminder of the glamour of astronomy. When prospective donors visited the Observatory the pictures helped get them in the right mood to endow some particular search, or even to kick in with a handsome gift or legacy that would help pay the Observatory’s bills.
Those bills still had to be paid, no matter what. Figuring out how to do it was still part of the director’s job-the boring part, but what could you do? She settled down to it but, as she worked over the numbers on her desk screen she couldn’t help looking up from time to time at the wall display. The pretty pictures were gone; what the wall showed now was all alphanumeric, the constantly changing, always growing, list of new discoveries from the world’s telescopes. Each time a new dot was discovered-they were coming less than a minute apart now-its coordinates flashed on the screen. As one of the great telescopes accepted the task of checking it out, the name of the instrument appeared. When the same dot was found nearby in that instrument’s search, the coordinates changed color. If there was a third sighting the computers took over; and then, with luck, the first approximation of its orbital elements were displayed in their turn.
Then the object went on the waiting list for instruments operating in other frequencies: gamma rays, infrared, ultraviolet, radio telescopes-even the ancient pair of orbital X-ray telescopes that were still, sometimes, creakily operational. What all those instruments were looking for was the chemical and physical composition of that point of light. The ones that showed a coma of gases, however tenuous, were dropped from the screen. They were nothing but ordinary comets. Their elements went into the cometary databank for any future astronomer who might take an interest, but they were of no importance in the present search. . . .
And, for that matter, dawdling over the search wasn’t getting the bills paid. She gritted her teeth and worked doggedly away until hunger reminded her she hadn’t had any breakfast.
On her way to an early lunch Dannerman stopped her. He looked amused. “I think I’ve got a lawyer for you,” he said. “He’s a shark, all right. He worked for the Carpezzios-they were big druggers; I was working on them before, uh-“
“Before you decided to come and spy on us,” Pat said helpfully.
“Well, yes. The only thing is, he’s expensive. First thing he said was that he wanted a fifty-thousand-current-dollar retainer before he’d even talk to you.”
“I haven’t got fifty thousand-“ Pat began, but Dannerman was shaking his head.
“Wait a minute. When I told him what it was all about he said he’d waive the retainer, only he wanted half of whatever he collected for you.
Pat was scandalized. “That might be millions!”
“More than that. So we went round and round for a while, and he finally came down to twenty-five percent. You’re not going to do any better, Pat.”
“I’m not?” She thought for a moment, then sighed. “He’s really good?” she asked.
“He’s really bad. He got the Carpezzios off with two years in a country-club jail, when I figured they’d be away for life. And he’s handled big suits against the government before. Anyway, he’ll be here this afternoon.”
At the elevator Rosaleen Artzybachova came hurrying out of her office. “Take me along,” she pleaded. “I have to get away from that truly exhausting woman for a while.”
In the elevator Rosaleen described her morning with the Bureau brigadier. Hilda Morrisey had all but sucked Rosaleen’s brains out to get the data she wanted, which amounted to a complete plan of the Starlab orbiter as it had been abandoned, with every bit of equipment marked and identified, and then the whole thing compared with the sketches the instrument-Doc had been ceaselessly turning out at Camp Smolley. “I left her transmitting the plans to the Doc back at the biowar plant, so he could mark the positions of all the Beloved Leaders material-oh, sorry. I mean the Scarecrow material, of course; it’s just that we called them Beloved Leaders for so long, I got in the habit. But, Pat, do you have any idea how much stuff is there? God knows what it will do to our lives when we get it sorted out. If indeed we ever can do that. It’s like-it’s like giving some Renaissance genius like Leonardo da Vinci a brand-new pocket screen to play with. Or a fusion bomb. Or like all of current technology, all at once, to see what he could make of it. And we’re not Leonardos.”