He reached for the control for the wall screen, and Use moaned. "Oh, my God, you are not going to turn that on again? It is not of any importance to us."
"It's just interesting," he said apologetically.
"Interesting! We have no room in our lives for what is only 'interesting'! Walter, Walter. Sometimes I think you are not a true revolutionary at all."
Of course, she did not know then just how right she was about that, and by the time she found out much had happened. For one thing, the second message from space had arrived. That was the one that showed the furry, Hallowe'en-grinning scarecrow creature with the twelve sharp talons on each fist crushing the Big Crunch in his paw, and, one after another, the seven other aliens, picture-in-picture like little cameos surrounding a central figure, that went with it.
No one knew quite what to make of it, though there were plenty of speculations. In their nightclub routines the world's standup comics had a wonderful time with this brand-new material. It was one of them who christened the seven peripheral aliens the "Seven Dwarfs," and another who claimed that the whole message was either an alien political broadcast or part of some ET children's horror animation film, inadvertently transmitted to all the billions of nonpaying viewers on Earth. The more easily frightened scientists-plus every buck-hustling guru of every bizarre religious cult in the world-thought it was more likely to be some kind of a warning.
They didn't know just how astonishingly right they were, either.
For all of the persons involved, by that time a great deal had changed in their personal lives as well. Dan Dannerman, having finished his assignment with the Mad King Ludwigs, was busily infiltrating a dope ring in New York City. And Use, glumly marching around the exercise yard of the maximum-security prison at Darmstadt, was cursing the day she'd ever met the man.
CHAPTER ONE
Dan
When Jim Daniel Dannerman heard the WHEEP-wawp of the police sirens, he was on the way from his family lawyer's office to his cousin's observatory to beg for a job. The sirens gave him a moment's confusion, so that for the blink of an eye he could not remember which one he was going to see, the autocratic career woman who was the head of the Dannerman Astrophysical Observatory or the five-year-old girl who had peed her pants in the tree house on his uncle's estate. He was also already en route to the eschaton, though, to be sure, with a weary long way still to go. He didn't know that was true yet, of course. He had never heard of the eschaton then, and after the first moment he didn't pay much attention to the sirens, either. City people didn't. Cop chases were a normal part of the urban acoustic environment, and anyway Dannerman was busy accessing information that might come in handy on his new assignment. He had been listening to the specs of the Starcophagus, the abandoned astronomical satellite that had suddenly seemed to become important to the Bureau, when the shriek of the stop-all-traffic alarm drowned everything else out. Every light turned red, and he was thrown forward as the taxi driver slammed on the brakes.
Every other vehicle at that intersection was doing the same thing, because the ugly stop-all enforcer spikes were already thrusting up out of the roadway. In the front of the cab his driver cursed and pounded the wheel. "Goddam cops! Goddam spikes! Listen, they blow one more set of tires on me and I swear to God I'm gonna get rid of this crappy little peashooter I been carrying and get me a real gun. And then I'm gonna take that gun and-"
Dannerman stopped listening before she got to the ways in which she was going to take the city's police system on single-handed. He was watching the drama being played out at the intersection. The car that was being pursued had tried to make it through the intersection in spite of the spikes, and naturally every tire had been stabbed flat; the three youths inside had spilled out and tried to get away on foot, dodging among the jam of stalled vehicles. They weren't going to make it, though. Police were coming at them on foot from all directions. The running cops were weighed down by radio, sting-stick, crowd-control tear-gas gun, assault gun and body armor, but there were too many of them for the criminals. The police had the kids well surrounded. Dannerman watched the fugitives being captured with mild professional interest-after all, he was in the law-enforcement business himself, sort of.
His driver perked up a little. "Looks like they got 'em. Listen, mister, I'm sorry about the delay, but they'll have the spikes down again any minute now-"
Dannerman said, "No problem. I've got time before my appointment."
It didn't placate her. "Sure, you've got time, but what about me? I'm stuck trying to make a goddam living in this goddam town-"
The thing was, she had one of those Seven Stupid Alien figures hanging from her rearview mirror and it was singing out of its picochip the whole time she was talking, a shrill obbligato behind her hoarse complaints. That wasn't particularly odd. There were pictures of the aliens all over the place. On the kids being arrested, belly-down on the pavement: the backs of their jackets displayed little cartoon figures of the alien they called Sneezy-gang colors, those were; but even his lawyer's secretary had had a coffee mug in the shape of another on her desk. The taxi driver's singing good-luck piece was the fat one named Sleepy, for its half-closed eyes-well, there were three of the eyes, actually, on a head that was maned like a lion's. It wasn't much like the ancient Disney original, but then neither were the secretary's Doc or the gangbangers' Sneezy.
It was an odd thing, when you thought about it, that the hideous space aliens had become children's toys and everybody's knickknacks. Colonel Hilda had had an explanation for it. It was like the dinosaurs of a generation or two earlier, she told him on the phone: something so horrible and dangerous that people had to translate it into something cuddly, because otherwise it was too frightening. Then she had gone on to tell him that the space message might, or might not, be relevant to his new assignment, but it wasn't his job to ask questions about it, it was his job only to close out his assignment to the Carpezzios' drug ring and get cracking on the new job.
It wasn't the first time she'd explained all that to him, either, because that was the way it was in the NBI.
That, of course, Dannerman didn't need to be told. After thirteen years in the National Bureau of Investigation, he knew the drill.
The funny thing was that Dannerman had never set out to be a spook. When the college freshman Jim Daniel Dannerman signed up for the Police Reserve Officers Training Corps he was nineteen years old, and the last thing in his mind was the choice of a career. What he was after was a couple of easy credit hours, while he went about the business of preparing himself for a career in live theater. He hadn't read the fine print. All the way through his undergraduate program and even in graduate school it had meant nothing but a couple of hours a week in his reserve uniform, plus a few weekends; By the time he did read it-very carefully, this time-it was his last day of graduate school, and he had just received his orders to report for active duty.
By then, of course, it was a lot too late to change his mind. But it hadn't been a bad life. When you worked for the Bureau you went to interesting places and you got to meet a lot of interesting people. The downside was that sometimes you had a pretty good chance of getting killed by some of those interesting people, but so far he'd been lucky about that.
The other downside was that when you had to go under cover there was always the problem of remembering all the lies about who you were and where you'd been all your life. That was one of the things that made the new assignment look pretty good. As the colonel had explained, the only identity he had to assume was his own. Indeed, the fact that he was a sort of relative of the person under investigation was what made him the best choice for the job.