Eschaton 2 - THE SIEGE OF ETERNITY

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

He was waiting for Hilda in her office when she got back from her five minutes with the deputy director: Lt. Col. Priam Makalanos, fifty-five years old but looking no more than mid-thirties, tall, solid, reliable, pulled in from a dirty job in Hanford, Washington, (but one he had been doing well) to become Hilda's new chief at Camp Smolley. Makalanos hadn't been in the top three of the candidates Personnel had offered her, but he had one big advantage over the others. As a brand-new agent he had been part of the team that Hilda had run in El Paso, cleaning up some smugglers of fake antibiotics.

Although Makalanos had had no more sleep than you could catch on a red-eye across the continent, he had already been out to Smolley on his own initiative and was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as he sat across from her. He'd done more than just visit, too. He'd brought back some samples. "I understand there's a team meeting this morning," he said, "so I thought you might like to show these around." He opened a duffel bag on the floor and pulled out a purplish metal object, hexagonal, the size of a hatbox, to put on Hilda's desk.

"It's one of the food containers," she said.

"Yes, ma'am. This one's empty, and it's been cleaned and sterilized. And these are some of the drawings the Doc made. The things that are on the Starlab orbiter," he added, pulling out a sheaf of papers.

Well, damn the man, Hilda thought, half-annoyed, half-proud of her choice; there was such a thing as almost too much initiative. But as she glanced through the papers pride won out over annoyance. They were wonderfully clear sketches of objects she didn't recognize but were clearly strange. "Do we know what the things are?" she asked.

"Sort of, yes. I had the Dopey identify them, as much as he could."

"Well-done," she said. "Now you'll need to familiarize yourself with the situation. When you get a chance, pull up the backgrounders on Camp Smolley and the whole Starlab business-" "Already did, ma'am. I played them over on the flight." "Well," she said, "good for you. All right. The team people should

be getting together already, so you can take this stuff up there. I'll be there in a minute."

Medical report

Food supplies of extraterrestrials

Classified

The food supplies consist of four items: a leafy vegetable, greenish yellow in color; a compressed bar, dark gray in appearance and with a high water content, apparently manufactured; another bar, greenish in color, circular in cross section and gelatinous in texture, also apparently manufactured; and a small quantity of brown powdery substance, perhaps used as a condiment. The two species of extraterrestrials apparently eat the same foods, though the "Docs" are not observed to consume the brown powdery substance and only infrequently the gelatinous bar.

Biochemical assays are under way, but are hampered by the fact that we have received only a gram or smaller quantities of each. Preliminary examination, following indications from the "Doc," show that the leafy vegetable and the gelatinous bar do contain several sugars, including small amounts of sucrose. More detailed analysis awaits further study. Elemental ash content of each substance, derived from mass-spectrometer analysis, is attached. This does not provide information as to the compounds contained, nor, of course, to the biochemistry. Data on these will be provided as available.

She gazed after him thoughtfully as he left. Makalanos was definitely a good man. A good man, as a matter of fact; and what a pity it was that he was working for her and thus off-limits for any other kind of relationship. She wondered absently what Wilbur was doing these days-would he maybe like to fly down to Washington one of these evenings?-and then turned to her screen. What she wanted those few minutes for was to try to check up on Danno's progress in Ukraine. There wasn't much to hear: contact had been made, there was no subsequent report.

And then, as she got up to leave, there was an annoying phone call. "Hilda? This is Wretched. I was wondering if you were doing anything for dinner tonight."

It took a while for her to realize that "Wretched" was just the man's Virginia Shore way of pronouncing Richard, and a while longer for her to figure out how he got her number at headquarters (Daisy. Had to be.), and even longer for her to get rid of the man without either making a date or hurting his feelings. So she was five minutes late for the meeting she herself had called.

But no one complained, because they were passing around the food container Makalanos had brought. They hardly even noticed her entrance. Senator Alicia Piombero was there in person today. She had the thing in her hand, and she was asking Makalanos, "What holds the lid on, magnets?"

"That's what I would have thought myself, ma'am, but it isn't. The two rims are so precisely flat that they stick to each other; you can't open it without pressing that little tab on the side. Now if you'll just look at your screens-"

And one by one he fed the Doc's sketches into the scanner, identifying them as he did. A stark white pillar-six-sided again-with vents like a fish's gills along the side: "According to Dopey that one's an environment modifier-like an air conditioner." An oddly shaped coppery object: "He says that has something to do with maintaining the orbiter's orientation in space; he didn't seem to know how. Maybe there's a kind of gyroscope inside?" Multichannel radio receivers, used for monitoring Earth's broadcasts. A different kind of receiver for the bugs they had implanted in the crew that was sent back to Earth. A large object with a door like a refrigerator. "Dopey says this is the transit terminal. Of course, this is the way it looks when it's in working condition. As I understand it, the actual one on Starlab was destroyed by Agent Dannerman as a precautionary measure. We do have some fragments from it in the lab, pieces that were knocked off."

"I've seen the pictures," Senator Piombero said testily. "Pieces of junk, a crowbar, two or three things we're told are recording devices, but we don't know how to make them work-and, what was it, twenty-three cans of food. How come we didn't get anything like the stuff you're showing us now?"

Makalanos glanced at Hilda Morrisey, throwing the ball to her. Alicia Piombero wasn't one of the senators Hilda actively disliked, like Eric Wintczak from Illinois, your damn archetypal liberal, not to mention old Tom Dixon from New Jersey and half a dozen others who were always a lot too curious about just what the Bureau was doing. All the same Hilda took her time to answer. "We got what we got, Senator. They tell me it was Dopey who picked the items to take back. I suppose he was naturally more interested in food for himself." She looked around the room. "I'm sure Colonel Makalanos wants to get back to Camp Smolley. Any more questions for him before he goes?"

"The question I have," the Senator said testily, "is when we're going to go up there and get those things."

"For that," Hilda said gratefully, "we need to hear from Delegate Krieg's associate here, Mr. Downey."

And while the staffer from the American delegation to the United Nations was telling them what complications the UN was giving them she nodded to Makalanos, who quietly departed. She'd have to get out to the biowar camp herself and see what he was doing, she told herself; maybe after lunch? Provided she could get this damn meeting over with.

It was about time, Hilda thought, that she got some personal help.

She thought about the person who had volunteered for the job, Merla Tepp. Would she do? While the speaker was droning on Hilda furtively accessed Tepp's file.