From the direction of the gambling area, a loud and excited murmur was beginning to arise. As if someone was beginning to win big.
“Freddie!” boomed the voice out of the blue clouds. “Tell Andy to get moving on that press release!”
All the numbers Jerry tried to dial seemed out of service. He suddenly remembered that the phones involved had been close to the Krim pyramid. He turned toward Flanders and started to speak. “How much has that thing grown since we were snatched?”
Flanders didn’t answer the question directly. “Forget the phone! You’re about to go on national TV. Everybody’ll get your message.”
Sure enough. A TV news crew was hustling forward through the mob in the casino, their way being cleared for them by security guards and policemen.
51
Not hiring or taking applications.
Miggy Tremelo sat at his desk staring at the pages of Henri’s “diary of events,” desperately trying to find something that could convince the Powers That Be to cancel the use of the tactical nuke which was scheduled to take place in—
He glanced at his watch. Nine hours. The scowl on Miggy’s face deepened. They’d have to evacuate the area themselves before much longer. Granted, the bomb was the nuclear equivalent of a shaped charge. Nor did Miggy doubt the claims of the nuclear technicians that the device would create minimal destruction everywhere except the target. “Minimal,” at least, by nuke standards.
But he was even more certain that the effect on the alien intruder would be catastrophic. Every time energy had been applied to the black pyramid in the hopes of destroying it, the thing had simply grown—and in direct proportion to the energy involved. Tremelo saw no reason to assume that the tac nuke would cross some magic threshold. He expected the pyramid to expand enormously, which, among other things, would engulf his own office in the snatch radius. He wasn’t worried about that from his own point of view, but there was no way he was going to risk Marie being snatched. With Lamont already gone, the Jackson kids would be orphans.
“Idiots!” he hissed.
* * *
One of Miggy’s technicians burst into Tremelo’s office without stopping to knock. He hardly stopped to open the door. “The alien object has just reduced in size!” he squeaked. “Registered on all our instruments!”
Tremelo’s eyes narrowed. “I wonder if someone just got away . . . ”
* * *
Marie burst into the cluttered office through another door. “They’re back! It just came on the news!”
* * *
A moment later, Miggy and Marie were part of the small crowd standing in front of the little television in the nearby lunch room. The man being interviewed on the screen bore a startling resemblance to Indiana Jones. Except he seemed smaller, dirtier, more disheveled, and a lot smarter.
” . . . not try to attack the thing,” he was saying. “I repeat—DO NOT launch any kind of attack on the Krim device. The material element involved in its construction is minute and essentially impervious to damage. The Krim device is a probe, essentially. I don’t know how it works, because the science involved is way beyond our knowledge. But I do know that the thing survived passage through an interstellar wormhole. Check with any reputable astrophysicist and I’m sure they’ll tell you that the energies and stresses involved in such a wormhole passage far exceed anything we’re capable of creating.”
“Get Milliken on the phone,” growled Tremelo to Marie. “No—to hell with Milliken! Get me the damned President!”
Marie nodded, but made no move to comply. Her face seemed almost pale with strain. Belatedly, Miggy realized that the man on the TV screen—Professor Lukacs, obviously, even if he didn’t look much like his photographs—had so far said nothing about the survivors.
“Not right now, Marie,” he murmured, putting a comforting arm around her shoulders. “It’ll keep for a while.”
Lukacs was blithering on about the Krim device. For all his own desperate desire to learn as much as he could, Tremelo felt a sudden flash of anger at the mythologist. Damn all absent-minded professors, anyway! What about Marie’s husband? Is he still alive, you—you jerk!
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