The Siege of Eternity e-2

by Pohl Frederik

  "Again, that depends on where it is. Those weapons were meant to be used primarily against other-nation assets and ground-launched missiles, not for targets that can be millions of kilometers away." The general coughed. "Excuse me, but I have to ask you this. Are you sure you're going to want us to fire on this extraterrestrial vessel?"

  "That decision will be made when we have to make it; what I want now is to know what our options are." Pell checked the notes on his popup. "Let's talk about security," he said. "We assume the Scarecrows are monitoring all our broadcasts again, so we want to make sure nothing goes out to the public about using the orbital weaponry. God knows what kinds of armaments these people might have, so if it does come to pulling the trigger, we want to shoot first and we don't want them warned in advance." He paused, looking at Hilda, who had her hand up.

  "It's the bugs, Deputy Director," she said. "I've been talking to Colonel Makalanos. There's another security problem there. Remember what the returned people told us? They said they knew everything the people on Earth wearing bugs knew."

  The D.D. turned to the electronics man. He was calm. "We haven't detected any transmissions from them. Besides which, what would they be going to transmit anyway? The bugs don't have a chance to pick up much information while they're on a shelf in the lab."

  "Then make damn sure nobody accidentally gives them any," the deputy director ordered. "No conversation inside the lab, especially gossiping about what goes on here. Is that what you wanted, Hilda?"

  The Siege of Eternity 197

  "Up to a point, sir. Colonel Makalanos called my attention to another possible problem. The one they call Dopey may be bugged, too-so as to communicate with the ones that don't talk, if nothing else."

  "Ah," said Deputy Director Pell, sinking back in his chair. "Now, that's a problem." He looked around the table. "Recommendations?"

  "Yank the damn things out of 'em," growled the man from the Pentagon.

  Hilda spoke up. "I think not. If we did that, then Dopey couldn't communicate with the other two things. Besides, who would take the bug out of the one who knows how? If we have to make sure he isn't transmitting, it would be easier to kill him outright."

  Pell stared at her. "Is that your recommendation?"

  "No, sir! Only to take precautions. We can just keep them ignorant. But there are two bugs still in place-General Martin Delasquez in Florida and Commander James Lin in China."

  The man from the State Department came alive. "Right! Can I pass this along to their embassies?"

  "Just the fact that they may be broadcasting to the Scarecrows, yes. Make them an offer: if they bring the subjects here we'll have the bugs taken out; if not, they should at least take maximum precautions to keep either of them from knowing anything that might be useful to the Scarecrows."

  The man from State made a note, and then looked up. "One other thing. Your agent in Ukraine has caused us a bit of trouble by-"

  "I know what our agent in Ukraine did," Pell said irritably. "Can't we just apologize?"

  "We already have, of course. They may want more."

  "More what?"

  The man from State looked ill at ease. "Well, they've suggested informally that we return him and the woman to Kiev for possible trial. . . ."

  Hilda caught her breath, but before she could speak, Pell answered for her. "Not a chance."

  "Well," said the man from State, "we may want to keep that option open, you know. There's all this trouble from the little countries in the UN. They're even talking about conducting hearings in the General Assembly."

  "Since when do we give a damn what they do in the UN?" Hilda demanded, but the deputy director shook his head.

  "Since we want them to support an exclusively American flight to Starlab," he said. "He's right. Let's keep our options open."

  Turning her own agent over to some hanging judge in Kiev was not an option Brigadier Hilda Morrisey intended to keep open. If Dannerman had screwed up, he would get his lumps. But those lumps would be delivered by Hilda herself, not by some damn Ukrainian.

  What she needed to do was to talk to him herself before anyone else did. Which meant she would have to arrange to see him first. She needed to find out when and where he would be arriving, and the place to do that was in her office. When she got there she found Lieutenant Colonel Makalanos waiting, and Merla Tepp sitting at a desk in the anteroom. "About those people from Kiev-" Hilda began, and Tepp nodded.

  "Yes, ma'am. I checked. They'll be arriving in New York in two hours," she said. "I assumed you would want to interview Agent Dannerman, so I've booked you a place on the courier flight at 1400 hours."

  "Hmm," Hilda said, eyeing her. Apart from her difficulties with the extraterrestrials, the woman wasn't bad at her job. Which reminded her to ask the question that had been on her mind. "Did you report what happened last night?"

  "Yes, ma'am. As required by regulations. I-ah-I mentioned that the reason you and I were there was that we were looking into the question of electronic security leaks."

  Was that a little presumptuous? But it wasn't a bad way to handle the present problem, so Hilda just said, "Fine. Get me a car to the courier plane, and send Colonel Makalanos in."

  A doctor showed up uninvited to check her over again, and she allowed him to do it while she talked to the colonel. "Dopey's all right," he reassured her, pulling a sheaf of papers out of his bag. "When that message from space came in I didn't know if you'd want Dopey to know about it. So I told the people at Smolley to keep it under their hats until they got further orders from you."

  Well. She hadn't lost her touch at picking good staff. She didn't comment, only asked, "What have you got there?"

  "More of the Doc's drawings. According to Dopey, he's now given us pictures of everything on Starlab."

  She nodded. "Give them to Tepp, tell her to make one copy for me and pass the others on to the deputy director. I'll look them over on the plane."

  And she rose to shake his hand as he got up to leave. Priam Makalanos had a nice, firm grip, and a nice male aroma. What's more, he was damn good at his job. As she turned to collect her messages she reflected what a pity it was that he wasn't eligible for anything more personal.

  A Father's Rights

  Everyone is familiar with the high-handed actions of the Americans in the case of Commander J. P. Lin of the People's Republic of China and his solicitude for the welfare of his unborn child or children. The Delegate of the Mongolian People's Republic should support the demand of the People's Republic for the custody of this infant or infants, as well as the PRC's rights, and our own, to share in whatever benefits these space persons may bring.

  -Steppes Times, Ulaanbaatar, MPR.

  But the first message on her screen was a note from the Maryland police, and it took her mind off Makalanos.

  They had interrogated the survivor of the two who had attacked her. Apparently they had been told that she had been carrying big bucks, in cash, of all things. Why? Because she was planning to run off with somebody. Who had told them this crock of crap? The vindictive wife of the man she was supposed to be planning to run off with. But the only description they had of this woman was that she was kind of elderly and pleasant-faced, and how many thousand women like that were there in the District?

  Hilda scowled at the screen. Was it remotely possible, she wondered, that maybe Wilbur's ex-wife had suddenly taken an interest in who her former husband was seeing, and decided to do something about it?

  No. Not possible at all. The whole thing was nonsense. There was no ex-wife, only somebody who had wanted to get Hilda herself attacked or maimed. Very possibly somebody she had put away, sometime in the long course of her work for the Bureau.

  So who was this individual who had gone to so much trouble to get her attacked? Hilda didn't know. She didn't care, either. She only cared that, regretfully, she would have to be somewhat more cautious next time she went to a singles bar.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  All
the way from Vienna across the Atlantic, Pat Adcock was glued to the plane's passenger screen, trying to understand just what the message from space meant. She didn't get much satisfaction. From wherever on Earth the broadcasts came they were all the same: hysteria, everyone startled and frightened, everyone demanding reassurance and action. But there wasn't much of either to be had. News of any kind from the Scarecrows could not be good news. She was glad when the aircraft was settling down toward the airport in New York City and she could get back to the complications of her own personal life.

  Which wasn't all that much better. The last thing Pat wanted was to be back in the clutches of the National Bureau of Investigation, but she wasn't given the choice. There they were, three of them. Two of the men had stunsticks in their hands; the other, standing by their waiting van, was an officer with a carbine slung over his shoulder. And that was not counting the two agents who had accompanied them across the Atlantic, now hustling them toward the exit.

  Their jet hadn't gone to one of the passenger terminals. It had rolled to a stop on a bypass, far from the public parts of the airport, and there weren't even any steps for them to get down to the ground on. Instead someone had brought up one of the extensible gadgets ground crews used to lift the racks of packaged meals to the stewards' galley, accordion struts raising a wobbly platform up to the aircraft door. "Go," said one of the guards behind them, and Pat, Dannerman and Rosaleen Artzybachova stepped cautiously out onto the shuddery flat.

  It was cold and wet outside, though nothing like the chill of Ukraine, and the interior of the van that was waiting for them was overheated. "Sit down, please," the officer said, the "please" contrasting with the hostile tone of his voice.

  That was all he said. When Pat asked where he was taking them he didn't reply. She looked at Dannerman for support, but he was tugging absently at his false beard, his expression weary but resigned. Rosaleen Artzybachova, who had slept placidly through most of the flight, patted her arm.

  "They're policemen," she explained. "It is their nature. Pay no attention. You did nothing wrong."

  That was true enough, in Pat's own opinion, but whether the police were seeing it that way was an unresolved question. The van stopped in front of a doorway marked AIRPORT SECURITY, which did not seem like a good sign. As they were getting out another car raced up and parked a few meters away. Pat recognized the woman who got out of it: Hilda Morrisey, the Bureau agent who was Dannerman's boss. She was looking almost as tired as Pat herself was, and the dress she was wearing seemed to have been borrowed, for the way it failed to fit her.

  Morrisey took charge. She shepherded the three of them into a conference room, vacated for her by the airport security people, and sat them down. "The Ukrainian government," she said, looking at Rosaleen Artzybachova, "is raising hell about all this, so I have to ask you a formal question. Do you want to go back to Kiev, Dr. Artzybachova?"

  Rosaleen shrugged. "Not particularly, but I'd like to get out of this room. Am I under arrest?"

  Hilda shook her head. "Of course not. Once you are debriefed you're free to go anywhere you like. You too, Dr. Adcock."

  Dannerman spoke up. "And me?"

  Hilda gave him a chilly look. "You know better than that, Dannerman. The deputy director wants to talk to you himself."

  "Well," Dannerman said in a placating tone, "I kind of thought he would. But there's someone I'd like to see here in New York, so how about if I come down tomorrow?"

  "Not tomorrow. You'll go to Arlington with me on the return flight."

  "Why?" Dannerman asked reasonably. "I did my mission; here's Dr. Artzybachova, where the Ukrainian terrorists can't get at her. I think I'm entitled-"

  "No. Today. That's an order."

  "But Hilda-" Dannerman began, his tone no longer reasonable; but Rosaleen interrupted him. She was smiling.

  "Speaking of orders, I have a question. Do you know what I think? I think that the reporters will be after Pat and me to ask questions. Would you like to give me an idea of what we ought to tell them?"

  Hilda transferred her chill gaze to Rosaleen. "Tell them nothing at all."

  "But I don't think that would be possible," Rosaleen said reasonably. "They already know I was, ah, rescued-I do not use the word 'kidnapped,' as I believe my government does. So tell me what I should say about Dan's orders. Should I say that you instructed him to save my life? Or should I mention-as my friends told me-that that was only a secondary option, and in fact you authorized him to kill me to keep me from giving information to those foolish children?"

  "Artzybachova," Hilda said harshly, "you're screwing around in places where you can get punished."

  "Punished? But why do you speak of punishment, when we are all friends here? Friends do not say things that can cause their friends embarrassment. Just," she added, "as friends would not deny a friend a harmless few hours on his own. Would they?"

  Hilda eyed her for a long, cold moment. Then she spoke to Dannerman. "First thing tomorrow morning, in my office, or your ass is chopped meat. Now. Let's start talking about just what happened in Ukraine."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Pat didn't mind the joyous clamor with which Pat Five and Patrice welcomed Rosaleen. Well, didn't really mind it. After all, the three of them had shared a whole harrowing existence as captives of the Scarecrows that she herself had missed. She didn't even mind that Patrice hospitably insisted that Rosaleen come and live with them -"There's plenty of room, now that Pat One isn't here, and I'm afraid the place where you used to live must be long gone by now." That was the first Pat heard that Pat One had been drafted to Camp Smolley to keep Dopey company, along with her own personal Dannerman. There wasn't really what you would call plenty of room, either. In fact, Pat gave up her own little bedroom to Rosaleen; old bones needed a real bed, and so Pat found that she would be sharing a bed with Patrice.

  That wasn't the end of the housing problem. There also were the guards. When this Brigadier Morrissey said they would be set free she hadn't mentioned that they would have a Bureau agent keeping them company, three shifts of agents for each of the Pats and for Rosaleen as well, night and day. The agents did their best to stay out of the way, slept each night on futons in the dining room. But there were so many of them.

  "On the other hand," Pat Five said, looking at the bright side, "now we don't have to pay a personal bodyguard anymore, do we?"

  "Besides," Patrice added, "they're pretty good about lending a hand for the scut work in the Observatory. And we can use all the help we can get."

  Pat blinked at her. "For what?"

  "For the search for the Scarecrow ship, of course."

  "But," Pat said reasonably, "now they know where it is, don't they? I mean, they got a line on it from the transmission, so that's not our job anymore. The need is real telescopes and we don't have any-"

  Patrice looked at Pat Five, then shook her head. "Oh, you don't know, do you? There's nothing there. The Scarecrows must've used some kind of relay to send their message, maybe a little drone too small to be picked up. The ship itself is somewhere else, so we're back to square one."

  So, like every other observatory in the world, the Dannerman was officially commandeered for the Scarecrow hunt. The whole staff was put to work searching old plates-every plate every telescope in the world had taken, ever since that first observation of the comet-like object that was surely no comet, but the ship that had brought the Scarecrows to Earth's solar system.

  Not all of the staff was happy about the new assignments. Gwen Morisaki didn't want to be taken off her Cepheid count, Christo Papathanassiou was, he said, on the very point of a breakthrough in his quanta! approach to cosmology, and he absolutely must have computer time now. Pete Schneyman was worse. He was already glum about Pat coming back-about so many Pats coming back-and reducing him once more to second-in-command (or fifth!), which was probably why he was so irritable when he complained that checking stock images for some serendipitous observation of possible comet-like
objects was the kind of thing you turned over to a machine, or, if you didn't want to waste valuable machine time on it, then to some two-for-a-nickel postdoc. The only one who didn't seem to mind was their planetary astronomer, Harry Chesweiler. The solar system was his turf anyway; his only request was that he be allowed to confine his own searching to the plane of the ecliptic, where he might get some useful data for his own studies. Even Janice DuPage, the receptionist, was drawing lines in the sand. She was willing to do what the Pats told her to, especially because it was what the government wanted, but she warned that it better not last longer than a week or so because her vacation was coming up and she wasn't going to miss out on her cruise to the Amazon and Rio de Janeiro . . . not to mention that it didn't make any sense to treat her like some irreplaceable astronomical expert when, geez, Dr. Adcock, she wasn't really any kind of a real scientist anyway, was she?

  To all of them the Pats turned a deaf ear. There would be no exceptions. Everybody, and every computer, was to be totally immersed in the hunt for the Scarecrow scout ship. They even impressed into service the Bureau agents, because even an untrained cop could lend a hand now and then.

  In principle, the hunt was simple enough. You looked at a recent picture of a section of the sky-recent being defined as anything in the past couple of years, since the Scarecrow scout had dropped its probe off to leech onto Starlab. You compared it with an older frame of the same area, and what you looked for was to see if there was a dot in the new frame that hadn't been there before. There was nothing to it. ...

  Notes and Comment

  Since the time of the Babylonians at least, probably since the days of the Neanderthals, human beings have scanned the night skies for points of light unaccountably moving among the fixed stars. The first of the wanderers-they were called "planeten," in Greek-were the naked-eye planets, from Mercury to Saturn, as well as the brightest "hairy stars" or comets. With the invention of the telescope the number of wanderers multiplied beyond counting: new planets, from Uranus to Pluto; the myriad smaller rocks of the asteroid belt; comets by the thousand that never reached naked-eye brightness. The tally of bits and pieces of rock and snow that swing though space as part of the Sun's gravitational domain grew so huge that professional astronomers hardly bothered to count them anymore, much less give them names ... until it became a matter of urgency to find the one faint dot among the anonymous millions that was neither asteroid nor comet, but something quite different, and far more worrying.