In the restaurant Pat toyed with her Caesar salad while the old lady devoured a huge platter of fajitas, washing it down with a bottle of Mexican beer, talking the whole time. It had been an active morning for Rosaleen, with Brigadier Morrisey setting an unflagging pace-“She’s trying to get it all in today because she’s leaving for the Eurospace base at Kourou tomorrow morning. And I don’t think she’d had any sleep last night, either.” She chewed in faintly envious silence for a moment. “Makes me wish I was fifty again.”
But those labors had been productive. From the Doc’s sketches they had identified four separate power generators of different types-though without a clue as to how any of them worked-plus the gadget that transported people across galactic distances faster than light-plus several dozen other bits of equipment which did God knew what, and God knew how.
Pat glanced at their Bureau guard, alertly nursing a cup of coffee two tables away, and wondered if she would try to stop Rosaleen’s chatter if she knew what the woman was saying in this very public place. But of course there wasn’t any real hope of secrecy anymore, anyway. Once the UN mission came back with whatever samples of Scarecrow technology they could carry the whole world would be looking on and it would all be common property. . . .
But not if she and this lawyer could prevent it. “Come on,” she said, signaling for the check. “Let’s get back to work.”
As soon as she was at her desk she turned on the screen and instituted a search for all the morning’s transmissions from Rosaleen Artzybachova’s terminal. Most of what she found was gibberish-the damn woman had encoded all the traffic to Camp Smolley-but among the remaining messages there were the twenty or thirty of the Doc’s admirably precise sketches that could be salvaged.
What the sketches might represent, Pat could not say, but they certainly looked potentially valuable. When the lawyer arrived she had a display of them ready for him. He glanced at it, then frowned and said, “Turn off that machine, please. Let’s just talk for a bit.”
His name was T. Lawrence Hecksher, and he didn’t look like Pat’s idea of a mob mouthpiece. Hecksher didn’t look like a hotshot, jury-befuddling lawyer from some video serial, either. What he looked like more than anything else was somebody’s grandfather-white, muttonchop whiskers, twinkly sky-blue eyes under feather white eyebrows, apple red cheeks. He would have made a fine department-store Santa Claus, Pat thought, if his talents hadn’t been more in demand for helping tax evaders and mob assassins stay out jail.
He acted grandfatherly, too. When he had settled himself across from the desk the first thing he said was, “If you have recording systems going, my dear, please turn them off.” He had no recorders of his own, either. As Pat began to describe what she hoped he could do for her he made notes. With a pen. On paper.
“Why can’t we use the screens?” Pat asked suspiciously.
He waggled his head at her. “Records we don’t have can’t be subpoenaed. I don’t want to have anything on the record that can be construed as any sort of admission, or anything that represents privileged information we aren’t supposed to have. That’s why I didn’t want to look at your screen. Don’t forget, this is not a small matter. In order to protect your interests we will need to prevail against some of the best lawyers in the world. All over the world.”
Pat gave him a dismayed look, but he smiled reassuringly. “Don’t worry. I have dealt with government attorneys for many years. I’ll eat them alive. And I’ll get all the information we need in disclosures, but I’ll do it legally. Now. The first thing I’m going to want from you is documents. …”
And so, documents he got: documents, documents and more documents. By the time T. Lawrence Hecksher left the office he had the registry numbers of every document that could have any bearing on the case: Uncle Cubby’s will and the probate records; the instrument creating the trust for the T. Cuthbert Dannerman Astrophysical Observatory; the records of the building of Starlab and all the disbursements made from Uncle Cubby’s estate to pay for it; Pat’s own contract of employment, to show that she had authority to institute a suit on the Observatory’s behalf-“We’ll need all your, ah, sisters to sign the complaint as well, of course.” When Pat suggested that most of this could be obtained with less trouble from Dixler, the lawyer for Uncle Cubby’s estate, or from the Observatory’s own attorney, he gave her a forgiving smile. “I don’t think we’ll trouble them, my dear. I find I work best when I don’t involve any other attorneys if I can help it. I’ll have the complaints and summonses ready to sign and serve by tomorrow morning. Serve on whom? Why, on everybody, Dr. Adcock: the President of the United States, the secretary general of the United Nations, the director of the National Bureau of Intelligence-that’s because they have custody of the aliens. For that matter, on the aliens themselves, but I’ll have to do a little research on that. Trial? My dear Dr. Adcock, there won’t be any trial. All we want is money, and they’ll throw that at us to get rid of us. What you have to do is decide how much you want. I’m thinking of, let’s see, giving them a quit claim for whatever the cost of manufacturing, outfitting and launching Starlab was when it was built, adjusted for inflation, with interest, and perhaps a one hundred percent penalty . . . yes, quite a large sum, I think. But we can discuss all those details later. Good afternoon.”
When he was gone Pat spent a few dizzying minutes calculating just how many hundreds of millions of inflation-adjusted dollars all that might come to. It would definitely be a lot. It was certainly enough to relieve all four Pats from financial worries forever, and for Pat Five’s unborn triplets and all their descendants as well.
She leaned back, studying the numbers on the wall to take her mind off these giddy visions of prosperity. A flash of color showed that another object had been identified and an orbit plotted, but the flashing red showed that this one was special. The funny thing about it was that it seemed to be heading in the general direction of the Earth.
That explained the flashing signal. It also caused Pat a moment’s shock, but when she checked its orbital elements she relaxed a bit; its trajectory seemed to bring it within a couple hundred thousand kilometers of the planet, but that was not particularly worrisome. Every few years an object was detected at ranges like that, some of them coming closer than Earth’s Moon. It would bear watching, of course. But-
Her phone rang. Annoyed, Pat touched the screen control. “What is it?” she demanded, expecting to see Janice DuPage with some new urgency to make demands on her time.
But the face wasn’t Janice’s. It was her own face-well, Patrice’s face, at least-and she looked scared. “Pat? It’s Pat Five. She’s hemorrhaging. I’ve got the medics here and they’re taking her to the hospital. You’d better come.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Hilda Morrisey got a few hours sleep on the plane to Guyana, needing it. The night with Wilbur Carmichael had been really pleasant, but it might have been a mistake. Was she getting too fond of the man? Should she have promised to see him again as soon as she got back? It had certainly cost her sleep that she could have used. But it was a mistake she would have been glad to repeat, because Wilbur had been fine.
She woke at dawn, just as the aircraft was circling the town of Kourou. All she could see from the air was the giant new Holiday Inn between the lights of the Pizza Hut and the all-night casino, but with the dark solid green of the jungle just outside the town limits. The plane swooped out to sea to come in for a landing from the east, and there, a kilometer or so from the town itself, was the starkly floodlighted launch area, ancient gantries still standing in spite of rust and time, the liquid fuel plants steaming away, the hideous barracks blocks where most of the base’s personnel lived.
When she got out of the aircraft the heat hit her. Kourou was hot and wet, and there were bugs. The zappers electrocuted a few thousand of them every hour, but there were always thousands more coming up out of the rain forest, thirsty for Hilda Morrisey’s blood.
It was not, it seemed, going to be a comfortable assignment. Hilda wondered if it was going to be a safe one; she had never signed on to be an astronaut. It wasn’t just that people got killed in space. She had long come to terms with the possibility of early death, because in Hilda’s line of work people got killed from time to time just about everywhere she’d ever been. The hard part was the thought that in a few days she would be climbing into that ancient and ugly-looking LuftBuran space vehicle that was squatting on its hardstand at die end of the runway and then she would be departing in it from the planet she belonged on. When was the last time the damn Europeans had fired one of the things? Would it still work? Her skin crawled in ways she had never experienced before as she thought about all the questions.