That was going to be a pain, he thought, and then remembered that he still had homework to do. He put the cleaning materials back, coded the room screen for library access and, automatically wiping the sales messages as they came in in their little window at the corner of the screen, cued in the search he had begun in the taxi for data on astronomy, orbital instruments.
It took him only a moment to access once more the entries for the Dannerman Observatory's wholly owned satellite, Star-lab.
There was a lot about Starlab that Dannerman had no need to retrieve from the databanks, because he clearly remembered when it had been launched. He had been only nine at the time, but his mother had taken him to Uncle Cubby's grand compound on the Jersey shore for the launch party. The whole family was there to watch the launch on television, Cousin Pat and her parents included, as well as a dozen famous astronomers and politicians, but while the astronomers and the politicians were thoroughly enjoying the party, Dannerman's mother had been a lot less thrilled. It was Uncle Cubby's fortune that paid for the satellite, as it was also Uncle Cubby's fortune that endowed the Dannerman Astrophysical Observatory a little later; and, while Starlab and the observatory were undoubtedly great contributions to astronomical science, what they represented to Uncle Cubby's heirs was a considerable depletion of the remaining fortunes they might someday expect to inherit.
Still, there was no doubt that Starlab had done great things for astronomy in its time. When it was built there was still money around to spend on pure science. It was designed to house a few actual living astronomers for weeks at a time as they took their spectra and their shift measurements. That part had been abandoned early, when it became too expensive to ship human beings up to orbit; the last of the visiting astronomers had died up there, and was still there. No one had been willing to spend the money to reclaim his body. But Starlab's instruments had gone on working for more than twenty years-
Until, three years earlier, they stopped. Just stopped. The transmissions ceased in the middle of a Cepheid count, and the satellite did not respond to commands from its surface controllers.
Dannerman put the screen on hold and got up to get a beer of his own from his private cooler. It all seemed pretty straightforward: satellites went out of commission every day, and the money to fix them got scarcer. Why was this one particularly interesting?
He meditated over that for a moment, sipping the beer and wiping the new messages as they arrived-until one came in, voice only but definitely the voice of a female, that said flirtatiously, "Hey, Danno! I hear you got a new job. Give me a call and let's see if we want to celebrate."
There wasn't any name on that one, either, but there didn't need to be. No one called him by the code name "Danno" but Colonel Hilda Morrisey.
A call from the colonel was not one he could answer on the open lines. Dannerman pulled down an old flatscreen converter from its place on his shelf and jacked it into his modem. Then he dialed the number he knew by heart. His screen instantly showed a bewildering fractal pattern of wedges and wriggling lines, until he cut in the 300-digit-prime synchronized-chaos decoder.
Then Colonel Hilda Morrisey was looking out at him, plump, dark, bright-eyed-just like always.
"Evening, Colonel honey," he said.
She didn't acknowledge the greeting. She didn't waste time on congratulating him on getting the job, either. "All right," she said, "cut the crap. Have you done your homework?"
"I sure have, Colonel honey, all you gave me, anyway. Star-lab went out a few years ago so the observatory applied for a repair mission to fix it. Naturally nothing happened. The red tape-"
"Don't tell me about the red tape."
"Anyway, the application wasn't moving. There's no public support for space missions. Let's see, I think the latest polls show about seventy-four percent opposed to spending another dollar on it anywhere. How much of that is Bureau dirty tricks, do you suppose?"
"Never mind."
"Anyway, now, all of a sudden, my cousin Pat got hot. She took the government to court, and she won, but it still don't move. So now she's doing a lot of wheeling and dealing on her own."
"And spending serious money, right. Okay, look. I had hoped to have background checks for you on the people you'll be working with but, right now, with this President's press secretary thing, it's hard to get any action out of Washington. So far it looks like two of them are dirty-not counting your cousin. One's a bruiser named Mick Jarvas-"
"I've met the man."
"He's a doper; that might be useful. He used to be a professional kick-boxer, now he's your cousin's bodyguard; he stays with her wherever she goes, so he knows what she does outside the office. The other one's a Chink named Jimmy Peng-tsu Lin. He's an astronaut, or was until the People's Republic privatized its space program and he went freelance. He got in some political trouble in the People's Republic, too, but I don't know exactly what yet. That's all I've got so far. Any questions?"
"Matter of fact I do have one, Hilda. Mind if I ask how the Carpezzio case is going?"
"You're not on the Carpezzio case anymore, Dannerman. That's just a routine drug bust and we'll handle that."
"You shouldn't do it yet," he said, as he'd said before-knowing that it was useless. "If you'd just wait two weeks till the major guys from Winnipeg and Saginaw get in-"
"Can't do it. You're needed on this one."
"But you'll just be getting low-level dummies-"
"Danno," she sighed, "are you empathizing again? You damn near blew the Mad King Ludwig operation because you didn't want to get your girlfriend Use in trouble."
"She wasn't my girlfriend," he protested. "Exactly. I just thought she was basically a decent human being." And, for that matter, the Carpezzios weren't that awful, either; sure, they sold drugs, but they were loyal to their people and he was going to miss some of those all-night parties in the loft with its constant aroma of room freshener and oregano that they hoped would keep any stray police dog from detecting the more interesting scents from their merchandise.
"Your kind heart does you credit, but forget it. What you're on now is a number-one priority from the director himself. Don't screw around with anything else, you hear? Check it out; see what you can get. And I want you to report in every night about this time."
"You're not making it easy for me. Do you want to tell me what I'm looking for, exactly?"
"XT "
No.
"Come on, Colonel! How the hell can I do my job?" She hesitated. "You might see if you can find out anything about gamma-ray emissions from the Starlab," she said reluctantly.
"Gamma rays?"
"That's what I said. Don't use that term unless someone else uses it first."
"Aw, Colonel, you don't give me much to go on." "I give you all I can. Tell you what, I'll see if they want to give me permission to tell you more. Now, get some sleep. You want to be fresh and pretty for your cousin tomorrow-and that reminds me, have you ditched that actress from Brooklyn yet? Well, do it. Your cousin likes men, and we want you concentrating on making her like you."
CHAPTER FIVE
Dan
With Starlab out of action the Dannerman Astrophysical Observatory didn't have a telescope of its own anymore; what it had was people. A lot of people. More than a hundred full-time scientific and clerical people worked there, with another twenty or thirty visiting astronomers, postdocs and slave-labor graduate students on and off the premises. That was good, for Danner-man's purposes; tradecraft said that the first thing you did in a new assignment was to let yourself be seen by as many people as possible so that they would get used to you, think of you as part of the furniture and accordingly pay no attention to you. On his first day in the new job he covered all the floors the observatory occupied, and was pleased to be generally ignored.