Eschaton 2 - THE SIEGE OF ETERNITY

CHAPTER FOUR

Colonel Hilda Morrisey liked orders that gave her some slack for interpretation, but this time she could have wished for a little less of it. The deputy director's parting order had been no more than, "Take care of those two and stick around." That was it. Nothing more specific. Especially nothing more informative, and then he was gone.

So when Dannerman demanded to know what was going on Hilda could only say, "I don't know any more than you do," wishing she did. She did turn on the screen in the van so he and Pat Adcock could hear the Bureau's recording of what the world had just heard. There was no secret about that! It had been a voice-only transmission, so the only picture on the screen was the legend Transmission received from Starlab astronomical satellite, 2041 hours, 9 December. Then the voice spoke, tinny, fuzzy, but definitely familiar:

"This is James Daniel Dannerman calling my associates in Arlington from orbit. Pat Adcock was right, except that it's a lot bigger than she thought. I'll try to bring some samples of the stuff we were talking about with me when I come back. That will be very soon, assuming Jimmy Lin can get this Assured Crew Return Vehicle thing working. And assuming that we can all fit in, because there are nine, ah"-the voice hesitated for a moment-"nine persons here, and we don't want to leave anybody aboard. Please acknowledge on this frequency."

That was it. Broadcast in clear, so every son of a bitch with a radio, all over the world, could have been listening in. And a lot of them had been. "Is that me?" Dannerman demanded, looking from Hilda to Pat; and, when they only shrugged, "Well, what does he-I-what do they mean, nine people? Only five of us went up there!"

"How would I know?" Hilda asked reasonably. "Maybe your friend Artzy-what's-her-name had quadruplets."

"Space Voice" May Belong to U.S. Intelligence Agent.

A retired member of the U.S. intelligence community has identified the "voice from space" as belonging to National Bureau of Investigation agent James Daniel Dannerman. Although the source declines to be identified, he states there "is no damn doubt at all" of the identification, adding that until recently Dannerman was reported to be under house arrest on unspecified charges. Officials of the NBI decline to comment on the report.

– The New York Times

He gave her a dangerous look, but all he said was, "Play it again!"

So they played it again, and again, and then they switched to a news channel to hear all the things everybody had to say about this astounding report. Hilda gave that five minutes. Then she squirmed ahead to the front seat, phoning ahead to make arrangements at the headquarters. Then she just sat there, the dead phone to her ear, because she had nothing to say to either Pat or Dan and didn't want to hear any more of their questions. There was one good thing, she thought. There was at least a temporary hold to the D.D.'s little plan to anesthetize Dannerman and Adcock and then blandly hand Dr. Evergood the impeccably best "signed" release the skilled forgers of Documents could produce. Maybe that hold would be permanent. Maybe even this baffling new development was going to confirm what Hilda had always known in her heart. Her own Dan Dannerman simply could not possibly have been turned or subverted. Oh, "\ sure, the evidence had looked pretty bad, but that just meant the evidence had to be wrong. There had to be some other explanation.

Now it appeared that there was one-well, sort of an explanation, anyway-but who was going to explain this wholly incomprehensible explanation?

At the headquarters she wasted no time. She hustled the two of them into an elevator, down to the accommodations she had arranged for them. "You can watch the news," she said, "or you can go to bed or you can do anything you like-except leave here. I'll see you in the morning."

"Have a heart, Hilda!" Dannerman begged. "I want to know what's happening!"

"So do I. Get some sleep. I've got work to do."

I he truth, though, was that she didn't.

Everyone else did. Every other person she saw in the Bureau's underground fortress seemed not only to have something to do, but to be about thirty minutes late in getting it done and desperately trying to make up lost time, but not Hilda Morrisey. The last time she had seen the joint jumping like this had been when the President's press secretary got himself kidnapped and murdered-no, she corrected herself, not even then. That was just an ordinary kill; the only reason the Bureau got involved in it at all was because the President demanded it. What was going on now was-was-well, what was it, exactly? Weirdness, that's what it was. Unthinkably preposterous weirdness. But it happened to be real.

She couldn't find Marcus Pell or the director herself. She couldn't even find Daisy Fennell. They were certainly somewhere, on some level of the subterranean headquarters. No one seemed to know just where. More likely, Hilda thought bitterly, the ones who did know simply weren't telling. The topmost of the top brass were holed up somewhere, dealing with this new crisis as best they could, and they didn't want to be bothered with peons who would only get in the way.

Hilda Morrisey did not like being one of the peons.

The obvious place for them to be was the Communications Center. That was the first place Hilda looked, but when she had looked in every other place she could think of she went back there. At least there she could get some idea of what was happening, although what was happening seemed to be only that half the population of the planet Earth was asking questions that nobody here could answer. There were plaintive coded queries from the Bureau's field managers by the score. There were begging-or pleading, or sometimes demanding-transmissions from fifty or sixty of the friendlies, the other national intelligence agencies with which the Bureau maintained some sort of cooperative relationship. Then there were the heavy hitters, the question from the Senate and the House, from State and Defense, from the White House itself… not to mention the endless flurry of concerned citizens who somehow had learned the Bureau's least classified call codes and wanted to be informed. These last were the least bothersome. The only answers they got didn't come from a human being; they were computer-generated and all they said was, Regret have no further information at this time. Please watch your local newscasts. The other queries could not be brushed off so lightly. They took personal responses from some human being. Tending to them was what a large fraction of the Bureau personnel on duty were doing with their time, but though the responses were more elaborate, the information they contained was about the same.

But the little that was different about them was interesting. Hilda gleaned a fact here and a hint there and slowly pieced together a picture. Why had there been no further transmissions from this other Dan Dannerman? Because the Comm officer on duty had been bright enough and quick enough to send an instant narrow-beam order to this Dannerman on the satellite, telling him to shut up, do nothing, just wait there for further instructions. And a lucky thing that, for once, this other Dannerman had done exactly what he was told…

There was a quick, breathy sound of surprise from the group clustered around one screen. They had heard something.

Half the Comm Center immediately dropped what they were doing to see what it was they had heard. "It was a blip," one of the technicians was saying excitedly. "No, nothing more. Just one quick pulse, but it definitely came from Starlab. Direct? No, I guess they're somewhere out of sight in their orbit; it was relayed from Goldstone, but it was positively- Hey! There's another one!"

It wasn't one. It was two. Everyone heard them this time, and the screen showed them moving slowly across the field, two brightly jagged spikes. So Dannerman was communicating again, more or less.

That was enough for Hilda Morrisey.

She stood up, stretched, yawned and walked out of the Communications Center.

She knew what had happened, because it was what she would have done in the same case. What the closeted big brass had been doing was trying to figure some way of arranging a two-way conversation that the rest of the world couldn't hear. Apparently Starlab wasn't rigged for narrowcasting-well, it wouldn't matter if it were. Reporters weren't stupid, and they had resources of their own; undoubtedly there were forests of mobile antennae deployed all over Arlington, and probably all around Goldstone and the station on Wake and every other place where the Bureau might receive a signal. So they had worked out a simple code. The Bureau could ask a question, and Dannerman could answer by blipping his transmitter- something like one blip yes and two blips no-and maybe three blips for How the hell do you expect me to do THAT? But you had no hope of deciphering what the answers meant unless you knew what the questions had been.

She glanced at her watch. 0544. It would be daybreak in an hour or two, and she hadn't had sleep, shower or a change of clothing since she got out of the bed in her New York City apartment nearly twenty-four hours ago. The lack of sleep wasn't a big problem; the Bureau's standard-issue wakeup pills took care of it. The problem was something else. Surreptitiously she bent her head for a quick sniff at her armpit, envious of the crisp cleanliness of everyone around her. She knew why that was. They had all been able to take enough time off to get cleaned and changed. That was the way it was when you were headquarters-based, you kept spares of everything on hand in case of emergency. If she were to give up the struggle and let them hand her that damned promotion-

But that was out of the question. Hilda Morrisey didn't belong in this place. She was a field manager. She could make herself at home wherever the job took her, San Diego or New York, Berlin or Karachi. In those places she was the boss, and as long as her teams produced results nobody got in her thinning but still bravely blond hair. Here she was just one of a mob of fifty or sixty people of equivalent rank, with the top-heavy Bureau executive staff over them all.

Here, as a matter of fact, if anything she was in the way. But she couldn't leave. Not only was this whole business a puzzle that Hilda Morrisey didn't trust anyone but herself to solve, but it was her own agent who was at the core of it.

If she couldn't leave, sleep or bathe, the next best thing was to eat. She sought out the field-grade mess, sat at a table in a corner, swallowed another wakeup pill and thought.

The mess was usually deserted this time of night-or morning. Not this one. There were half a dozen others at the tables, and the graveyard mess shift, looking aggrieved at their unusual workload, was clearing up the tables that still others had left. While she was waiting for someone to take her order she popped up the table's screen and coded for the news summaries.

When a waiter approached Hilda dumped the screen and turned to give her order, but what he said was, "Excuse me, Colonel, but there's a junior officer asking to speak to you."

Hilda turned; the person waiting at the door was the interrogator, the junior agent, Merla Tepp. "Send her in," she said. And then, when the woman had come to the table, "Sit down, Tepp. I didn't expect to see you here for another couple of hours."

"I came in early, Colonel. Colonel? I'm sorry to interrupt your meal but I wanted to apologize. I wouldn't have given Agent Dannerman those crackers, except I didn't know he was scheduled for surgery."

"No, you didn't," Hilda agreed. "In fact, you don't know it now. You especially don't want to say anything about it to Agent Danner-man."

"No, ma'am. Ma'am? I'm pretty sure he suspected it."

Hilda surveyed the woman. "I'm damn sure he did; Dannerman's a fine agent. Just don't confirm it for him." She was silent for a moment, studying Junior Agent Tepp while her fingers were absent-mindedly playing with the screen keys. After a moment, she said, "Actually, I would have done just what you did. Have you eaten?"

Tepp looked surprised. "No, but, Colonel, this dining room is for-"

Hilda overrode her. "What this dining room is for is for people like me and our guests. Waiter! We'll have a couple of sandwiches and salads-if it's that fruity dressing, put the dressing on the side." She waved him away and told the girl, "That stuff is too damn sweet. You might prefer to eat the salad plain. I forgot to ask if you had any special dietary needs?"

No, ma am.

"Because God knows what the sandwiches will be." She leaned back, studying the girl. Although she knew she had never seen Junior Agent Tepp before, there was something vaguely familiar about her. She couldn't place the thought and abandoned it. "Actually," she said, "apart from giving them the damn crackers, that wasn't a bad move, putting the two of them together."

Tepp looked rueful. "I was hoping that if they got to talking, they might say something useful."

"Did they?"

"Not really, Colonel. I have the recordings-"

Hilda waved away the notion of looking at the recordings. "I didn't think they would. Danno's too smart for that, but it was worth a try. Means you were using a little initiative. I see by your file that you've only been with the Bureau for a little over a year."

Merla Tepp did not show any surprise at finding that the colonel had called her file up on the table screen. "That's right, ma'am. Mostly in the field in New Mexico, after I finished training."

"Checking into the religious nut groups." Hilda nodded. "I get the impression that you've been pretty interested in religion all your life."

Tepp hesitated. "You could say I was a seeker, Colonel. I was born Pentecostal, then when that didn't seem to be giving me what I wanted I tried Catholic. Then I went to shul for a year-I guess that's why you asked about dietary requirements? Then I tried Buddhism-"

The American radical religious right came in five main flavors. There were the fundamentalists, who believe in the "verbal inerrancy" of the Christian Bible; the born-agains, who claim a personal experience with Christ; the evangelicals, who are either of the above plus a drive to convert others; the pentecostals, who are any of the above plus public demonstrations of ecstasy; and the charismatics, who differ from the others only in that they retain communion in a conventional Protestant or Catholic denomination. Generally speaking, what the fundamentalists thought the government ought to do about the possible space aliens who might have occupied Starlab was, if possible, to kill them, because they were probably the Antichrist. While most of the others thought they were probably angels of some kind and what the government should be doing was arranging for them to be worshipped. What they all agreed on was that everything the government actually was doing was wholly and unforgivably wrong.

She broke off as the sandwiches and salads arrived. Colonel Hilda waved to her to eat, doing so herself. She hadn't realized quite how hungry she was. With her mouth full, she paused long enough to ask: "And now?"

The girl grinned. "I guess you'd say the Bureau's my religion now, ma'am."

Hilda nodded. It was a good answer. It was the kind of answer she might have given herself, and, as a matter of fact, she suddenly real-i/.ed what that puzzling familiarity was all about. Agent Tepp was just about her height, just about her weight, just about her general build; taken all in all, she was not far from a copy of what Colonel Morrisey had been, long before she became a colonel.

She had nothing more to talk about, so she switched the screen over to repeats of the news digests and watched them as she ate her meal. Another good thing about Agent Tepp was that she took the hint and didn't speak, either. When the waiter brought their coffee, she said, "Thanks for keeping me company, Agent Tepp, but I imagine you have duties here-"

Agent Tepp touched a napkin to her lips. "Yes, ma'am. Can I ask you something? If you're going to be on permanent duty here, you'll probably need an aide-"

Hilda didn't let her finish. "What's that about permanent duty? Have you been hearing latrine talk?"

"No, ma'am. It's just logical, I thought. But if I was wrong-"

"I hope to God you were wrong." Hilda thought for a moment. "Still," she said, "I wouldn't mind thinking about having you in my command if you wanted to come to New York."

Tepp looked disappointed. "Thank you, ma'am, but I'd really like to stay at HQ for a while."

"Fine. Now if you'll excuse- Wait a minute."

It was the deputy director on her screen. "Hilda, we need that Ad-cock woman. Get her down to the pit galleries."

So that was where he'd been holed up! Pell didn't wait for an answer. Hilda started to get up just as Agent Tepp was doing the same, saying regretfully, "Thank you for the meal, ma'am. It was a pleasure to talk to you."

Hilda put her hand on the woman's arm. "Maybe you can do me a favor. You look like you're about my size. Do you keep a change of clothes here? Fine, then lend me some clean underwear and find me a shower I can use."